Myths and Dreams

As the myths about earth-bearers prevail in the regions of earthquakes, so do those about subterranean beings in the neighbourhood of volcanoes. The superstitions which mountainous countries especially foster are intensified when the mountains themselves cast forth their awful and devastating progeny, “red ruin” and the other children born of them. Man in his dread, “caring in no wise for the external world, except as it influenced his own destiny; honouring the lightning because it could strike him, the sea because it could drown him,”[15] could do naught else than people them with maleficent beings, and conceive of their sulphur-exhaling mouths as the jaws of a bottomless pit.

(d.) Storm and Lightning, etc.

If in freeing ourselves from the tyranny of the “solar” theory we shackled ourselves with some other, we should certainly prefer that which is known as the “meteorological,” and which, in the person of Kuhn and other supporters, finds a more rational and persistent source of myth in phenomena which are fitful and startling, such as hurricane and tempest, earthquake and volcanic outburst. Sunrises and sunsets happen with a regularity which failed to excite any strong emotion or stimulate curiosity, and the remotest ancestor of the primitive Aryan soon shook off the habit—if, indeed, he ever acquired it—of going to bed in fear and trembling lest the sun should not come back again. Nature, in her softer aspects and her gracious bounties, in the spring-time with its promise, the summer with its glory, the autumn with its gifts, has moved the heart of man to song and festival and procession; as, by contrast, the frosts that nipped the early buds and the fierce heat that withered the approaching harvest gave occasion for plaintive ditty and sombre ceremony. It is in the fierce play and passionate outbursts of the elements, in the storm, the lightning, and the thunder, that the feelings are aroused and that the terror-stricken fancy sees the strife of wrathful deities, or depicts their dire work amongst men. Hence, all the world over, the storm-god and the wind-god have played a mighty part.

To the savage, the wind, blowing as it listeth, its whence and whither unknown, itself invisible, yet the sweep and force of its power manifest and felt, must have ranked amongst the most striking phenomena. And, as will be seen hereafter, the correspondences between wind and breath, and the connection between breath and life, added their quota of mystery in man’s effort to account for the impalpable element. Of this personification of the elements the following Ojibway folk-tale, cited by Dorman, gives poetic illustration:—“There were spirits from all parts of the country. Some came with crashing steps and roaring voice, who directed the whirlwinds which were in the habit of raging about the neighbouring country. Then glided in gently a sweet little spirit, which blew the summer gale. Then came in the old sand-spirit, who blew the sand-squalls in the sand-buttes toward the west. He was a great speech-maker, and shook the lodge with his deep-throated voice, as he addressed the spirits of the cataracts and waterfalls, and those of the islands who wore beautiful green blankets.”

In the legends of the Quiches, the mysterious creative power is Hurakan (whence hurricane), among the Choctaws the original word for Deity is Hushtoli, the storm-wind, and in Peru to kiss the air was the commonest and simplest sign of adoration of the collective divinities. The Guayacuans of South America, when a storm arose and there was much thunder or wind, all went out in troops, as it were to battle, shaking their clubs in the air, shooting flights of arrows in that direction whence the storm came.[16]

The Araucanians thought that gales and thunderstorms were the battles fought between the spirits of the dead and their foes.

Turning to the literatures of higher races, we find in the prose Edda, when Gangler asks whence comes the wind, that Ha answers him: “Thou must know that at the northernmost point in the heavens sits a giant,

“In the guise of an eagle;
And the winds, it is said,
Rush down on the earth
From his outspreading pinions.”

In Finnish myth the north wind Pulmri, father of the frost, is sometimes imaged as an eagle.

“The Indians believe in a great bird called by them Wochowsen or Wuchowsen, meaning Wind-Blow or the Wind-Blower, who lives far to the north, and sits upon a great rock at the end of the sky. And it is because whenever he moves his wings the wind blows they of old times called him that.” And in another Algonquin myth: “Ga-oh is the Spirit of the Winds. He moves the winds, but he is chained to a rock. The winds trouble him, and he tries very hard to get free. When he struggles the winds are forced away from him, and they blow upon the earth. Sometimes he suffers terrible pain, and then his struggles are violent. This makes the winds wild, and they do damage on the earth. Then he feels better and goes to sleep, and the winds become quiet also.”[17]

In the Veda the Maruts or Storm-gods, to whom many of the hymns are addressed, “make the rocks to tremble and tear asunder the kings of the forest,” like Hermes in his violence and like Boreas in his rage. Whether or no they become in Scandinavian legend the grim and fearful Ogres swiftly sailing in their cloud-ships, we may see in them the “crushers” and “grinders,”[18] as their name imports, the types of northern deities like Odin, long degraded into the Wild Huntsman and his phantom crew, whose uncouth yells the peasant hears in the midnight air.[19] Among the Aztecs Cuculkan, the bird-serpent, was a personification of the wind, especially of the east wind, as bringer of the rain. It was at one of his shrines, to which pilgrimages were made from great distances, that the Spaniards first saw to their surprise a cross surmounting the temple of this god of the wind, whence arose a legend that the Apostle Thomas had evangelised America. But, in fact, the pagan cross of Central America and Mexico was the symbol of the four cardinal points.

In his valuable book on the Myths of the Red Race Dr. Brinton has brought together a mass of evidence in support of a theory that the sanctity in which the number four is held by the American races is due to the adoration of the cardinal points, which are identified with the four winds, who in hero-myths are the four ancestors of the human race. The illustrations with which the argument is supported are numerous and valuable, but the argument itself is made to rest too strongly on an assumed primitive symbolism, whereas it suffices to show how the early notion of the flat world, as also square, would lead to the myth of the four winds blowing from the four corners, a myth often illustrated in ancient maps with an angel at each corner from whose mouth the wind issues. The official title of the Incas was “Lord of the four quarters of the earth,” and the number appears in all sorts of combinations, but the theory may be pushed to extremes in compelling every fact to square with it.[20] As the illustrations given above show, we are some steps nearer to the primitive myth when we find the wind conceived of as a mighty bird, which indeed is in both old and new world mythology a common symbol of thunder and lightning also. On this matter Dr. Brinton’s remarks bear quoting.

Estimates differ much as to the size of the Thunder-Bird. In one tradition an Indian found its nest, and secured a feather which was above two hundred feet long, while in another tradition the bird is said to be no bigger than one’s little finger. But among the Western Indians he is an immense eagle. “When this aërial monster flaps his wings loud peals of thunder roll over the prairie; when he winks his eye it lightens; when he wags his tail the waters of the lake which he carries on his back overflow and produce rain.” Mixcoatl, the Mexican Cloud-Serpent, as well as Jove, carries his bundle of arrows or thunderbolts, which in the hand of Thor are represented by his mighty club or hammer. The old and universal belief that stones were hurled by the Thunder-God is not so far-fetched as we, in our pride of science, might think, for the flints which are mistaken for thunderbolts, and which become objects of adoration as well as charms, produce a flash when struck by the lightning. In the lightning flash man would see the descent of fire from heaven for his needs. That he should regard it, like water, as a living creature, with power to hurt or help him, is in keeping with attribution of life to all that moved. Its apparent connection with the great source of heat would foster the feeling which expressed itself in fire-worship, with its curious survivals to modern times. No element was more calculated to excite awe in its seeming unrelation to the objects which produced it. Once secured, to guard it from extinction or theft was a serious duty, and everything from which it issued, trees as its hiding-place, since it came from the wood when rubbed, stones also, since sparks shot from them when struck, were held sacred. In the manifold myths about its origin one feature is common, that its seed was stolen, the chief agents (probably as the messengers between earth and sky) being birds, or men assuming the form of birds. The Sioux Indians say that their first ancestor procured his fire from the sparks which a panther struck from the rocks as he bounded up a hill. But of examples from the lower culture, forerunners of the Zeus-defying Prometheus, Mr. Gill’s Myths of the South Pacific supplies one which may be taken as a sample of the rest. Maui, a famous South Sea hero, finding some cooked food in a basket brought by Buataranga from the nether world, and relishing it more than raw food, determines to steal the fire, and flying to the Buataranga’s realm frightens the fire-god by threats and blows into revealing the secret. Then wresting the fire-sticks from him he sets the under-world in flames, and returns with his prize to the upper-world; thenceforth “all the dwellers there used fire-sticks, and enjoyed the luxuries of light and of cooked food.”

(e.) Light and Darkness.

As in the conflict raging in the sky during gale or tempest, when the light and the darkness alternately prevail, the barbaric mind sees war waged between the heroes of the spirit-land who have carried their unsettled blood feuds thither, so in many myths the lightning is no comrade of the thunder, but its foe, the battle of bird with serpent. The resemblance of the lightning flash to the sharp, sudden, zigzag movements of the serpent, a creature so mysterious to barbaric man in its unlikeness to the beasts of the field, accounts for a myth the influence of which as a terrorising agent on human conduct is in course of rapid decay. Its importance in the history of belief in the supernatural is too far-reaching to be passed over, and in tracing its course it is necessary to show its connection with the group of storm-myths and sun-myths of the Aryan race in the battles between Indra and Vritra, Ormuzd and Ahriman, Thor and Midgard, Hercules and Cacus, Apollo and Pythôn, and St. George and the Dragon.

All the Aryan nations have among their legends, often exalted into epic themes, the story of a battle between a hero and a monster. In each case the hero conquers, and releases treasures, or in some way renders succour to man, through his victory. In Hindu myth this battle is fought between Indra and Vritra.

Indra, one of the Vedic gods, comes, according to Professor Max Müller, from the same root as the Sanskrit indu, drop, sap, but the etymology is doubtful. What is not doubtful is that he is the god of the bright sky, and although, like the other gods invoked in the hymns of the Rig-Veda, a departmental or tribal deity, he is a sort of primus inter pares, of whose many titles, Vritrahan or “Vritra-slayer” is the pre-eminent one. The benefits showered by him upon mortals caused the attribution of moral qualities to him, and he was adored as “lord of the virtues,” while the juice of the sacred soma plant was offered in his honour, for which reason he is also called Somapâ or “soma-drinker.” It is his struggle with Vritra which is a constant theme of the Vedic hymns, the burden of which remind us of the praises offered in the Psalms to Yahweh as a man of war, as mighty in battle. “The gods do not reach thee, nor men, thou overcomest all creatures in strength.... Thou thunderer, hast shattered with thy bolt the broad and massive cloud into fragments, and has sent down the waters that were confined in it to flow at will; verily thou alone possessest all power.” The primitive physical meaning of the myth is clear. Indra is the sun-god, armed with spears and arrows, for such did the solar rays sometimes appear to barbaric fancy. The rain-clouds are imprisoned in dungeons or caverns by Vritra, the “enveloper,” the thief, serpent, wolf, wild boar, as he is severally styled in the Rig-Veda. Indra attacks him, hurls his darts at him, they pierce the cloud-caverns, the waters are released, and drop upon the earth as rain.

This explanation, which has many parallels in savage myth, is self-consistent as fitting into crude philosophy of personal life and volition in sun and cloud, and is fraught with deep truth of meaning in regions like the Punjaub, where drought brought famine in its train.

The Aryans were a pastoral people, their wealth being in flocks and herds.[21] The cow yielded milk for the household; her dung fertilised the soil; her young multiplied the wealth of the family at an ever-increasing rate, and she naturally became the symbol of fruitfulness and prosperity, ultimately an object of veneration; while, for the functions which the bull performed, he was the type of strength. The Aryan’s enemy was he who stole or injured the cattle; the Aryan’s friend was he who saved them from the robber’s clutch.

Intellectually, the Aryan tribes were, speaking broadly, in the mythopœic stage, and the personification of phenomena was rife among them. Their barbaric fancy, as kindred myths all the world over testify, would find ample play in the fleeting and varied scenery of the cloud-flecked heavens, suggestive, as this would be, of bodies celestial and bodies terrestrial. To these children of the plain the heavens were a vast, wide expanse, over which roamed supra-mundane beasts, the two most prominent figures in their mythical zoology being the cow and the bull. The sun, giver of blessed light, was the bull of majesty and strength; the white clouds were cows, from whose swelling udders dropped the milk of heaven—the blessed rain. But there were dark clouds also, clouds of night and clouds of storm, and within these lurked the monster-robber; into them he lured the herds, and withheld both light and rain from the children of men. To the sun-god, therefore, who smote the thief-dragon, Vritra, with his shaft, and set free the imprisoned cows, went up the shout of praise, the song of gratitude. This myth survives in many legends of the Aryan race, and their family likeness is unmistakable. In its Latin guise it appears as Hercules[22] and Cacus, although the preciseness of detail narrated by Virgil, Livy, and other writers, has given it quasi-historical rank. Hercules, after his victory over Geryon, stops to rest by the Tiber, and while he is sleeping the three-headed monster, Cacus, steals some of his cattle, dragging them by their tails into his cavern in Mons Avertinus. Their bellowing awakens Hercules, who attacks the cavern, from the mouth of which Cacus vomits flames, and roars as in thunder. But the hero slays him and frees the cattle, a victory which the earlier Romans celebrated with solemn rites at the Ara Maxima. In Greek myth the most familiar examples are the struggles between the sun-god, Apollo, and the storm-dragon, Pythôn, and the deliverance of the Princess Andromeda by Perseus from the sea-monster sent by Poseidôn to ravage the land. In the northern group we have the battle of Siegfried with the Niflungs, or Niblungs, and of Sigurd with the dragon Fafnir, who guards golden treasures; while, in the Edda, Thor goes fishing with the giant Hymir, and catches the demon Loki, whose foul brood are Hell, the wolf Fenri, and the Earth-girdling Serpent. Amongst ourselves, Beowulf, hero of the poem of that name, attacks the dragon or fire-drake Grendel, who, with his troll-mother, haunts a gloomy marsh-land. Thence he stole forth at night to seize sleeping champions, taking them to his dwelling-place to devour them, and this in such numbers that scarce a man was left. One pale night, Beowulf awaited the coming of the monster, and, gripping him tightly, snapped his limbs asunder, so that he died.

These brief illustrations would hardly be complete without some reference to our national saint. Opinions differ as to his merits, Gibbon stigmatising him as a fraudulent army contractor,[23] while the researches of M. Ganneau seek to establish his relation to the Egyptian Horus and Typhon. Be this as it may, the stirring old legend tells how George of Cappadocia delivered the city of Silene from a dragon dwelling in a lake hard by. Nothing that the people could give him satisfied his insatiate maw, and in their despair they cast lots who among their dearest ones should be flung to the dread beast. The lot fell to the king’s daughter, and she went unflinchingly, like Jephthah’s daughter, to her fate. But on the road the hero learns her sad errand, and bidding her fear not, he, making sign of the cross, brandishes his lance, attacks and transfixes the dragon, and leading him into Silene, beheads him in sight of all the people, who, with their king, are baptized to the glory of Him who made St. George the victor.[24]

(f.) The Devil.

While, however, the myth of Indra and Vritra has in its western variants remained for the most part a battle between heroes and dragons, the moral element rarely obscuring the physical features, it gave rise among the Iranians or ancient Persians to a definite theology, the strange fortunes of which have, as remarked above, profoundly affected Christendom.

Although in the Vedic hymns the features of the primitive nature-myth reappear again and again, Indra himself boasting, “I slew Vritra, O Maruts, with might, having grown strong with my own vigour; I who hold the thunderbolt in my arms, I have made these all-brilliant waters to flow freely for man,” we find an approach in them to some conception of that spiritual conflict of which the physical conflict was so complete a symbol. Indra as victor, is an object of adoration and invested with purity and goodness; Vritra, as the enemy of men, is an object of dread, and invested with malice and evil.

But while in the Zend-Avesta, the Scriptures of the old Iranian religion, the struggle between Thraetaôna and the three-headed serpent Azhi-Dahâka (in which names are recognisable the Traitana and Ahi of the Veda and the Feridun and Zohak of Persian epic) is narrated, the moral idea is dominant throughout. The theme is not the attack of the sun-god to recover stolen milch cows from the dragon’s cave, but the battle between Ormuzd, the Spirit of Light, and Ahriman, the Spirit of Darkness. The one seeks to mar the earth which the other has made. Into the fair paradise, Airayana-Vaêjô, “a delightful spot,” as the Avesta calls it, “with good waters and trees,” and into other smiling lands which Ormuzd has blessed, Ahriman sends “a mighty serpent ... strong, deadly frost ... buzzing insects, and poisonous plants ... toil and poverty,” and, worse than all, “the curse of unbelief.”[25] Between these two spiritual powers and their armies of good and bad angels the battle rages for supremacy in the universe, for possession of the citadel of Mansoul.

Early in the history of the Asiatic Aryan tribes there had arisen a quarrel between the Brahmanic and Iranian divisions. The latter had become a quiet-loving, agricultural people, while the former remained marauding nomads, attacking and harassing their neighbours. In their plundering inroads they invoked the aid of spells and sacrifices, offering the sacred soma-juice to their gods, and nerving themselves for the fray by deep draughts of the intoxicating stuff. Not only they, but their gods as well, thereby became objects of hatred to the peaceful Iranians, who foreswore all worship of freebooter’s deities, and transformed these devas of the old religion into demons. That religion, as common to the Indo-European race, was polytheistic, a worship of deities each ruling over some department of nature, but a worship exalting now one, now another god, be it Indra, or Varuna, or Agni, according to the indications of the deity’s supremacy, or according to the mood of the worshipper. As remarked by Jacob Grimm, “the idea of the devil is foreign to all primitive religions,” obviously because in all primitive thought evil and good are alike regarded as the work of deities. In the Old Testament, Yahweh is spoken of as the author of both;[26] the angels, whether charged with weal or woe, are his messengers. In the Iliad Zeus dispenses both:—

“Two urns by Jove’s high throne have ever stood,
The source of evil one, the other good;
From thence the cup of mortal man he fills,
Blessings to these, to those distribute ills,
To most, he mingles both,”[27]

and ’tis a far cry from this to the loftier conception of Euripides: “If the gods do evil, then are they no gods.” So there was a monotheistic—or, as Professor Max Müller terms it, a henotheistic—element in the Vedic religion which in the Iranian religion, and this mainly through the teaching of the great thinker and reformer Zarathushtra (Zoroaster), was largely diffused. In his endeavour to solve the old problem of reconciling sin and misery with omnipotent goodness, he supposes “two primeval causes,” one of which produced the “reality,” or good mind; the other the “non-reality,” or evil mind. Behind these was developed belief in a philosophical abstraction, “uncreate time,” of which each was the product; but such doctrines were too subtle for the popular grasp, and, wrapped in the old mythological garb, they appeared in concrete form as dualism. Vritra survived in Ahriman, who, like him, is represented as a serpent; and in Ormuzd we have the phonetic descendant of Ahura-mazda.

Now, it was with this dualism, this transformed survival of the sun and cloud myth, that the Jews came into association during their memorable exile in Babylon. Prior to that time their theology, as hinted above, had no devil in it. But in that belief in spirits which they held in common with all semi-civilised races, as a heritage from barbarous ancestors, there were the elements out of which such a personality might be readily evolved. Their satan, or “accuser,” as that word means, is no prince of the demons, like the Beelzebul of later times; no dragon or old serpent, as of the Apocalypse, defying Omnipotence and deceiving the whole world; but a kind of detective who, by direction of Yahweh, has his eye on suspects, and who is sent to test their fidelity. In all his missions he acts as the intelligent and loyal servant of Yahweh. But although therefore not regarded as bad himself, the character and functions with which he was credited made easy the transition from such theories about him to theories of him as inherently evil, as the enemy of goodness, and, therefore, of God. He who, like Vritra, was an object of dread, came to be regarded as the incarnation of evil, the author and abettor of things harmful to man. Persian dualism gave concrete form to this conception, and from the time of the Exile we find Satan as the Jewish Ahriman, the antagonist of God. Not he alone, for “the angels that kept not their first estate” were the ministers of his evil designs, creatures so numerous that every one has 10,000 at his right hand and 1000 at his left hand, and because they rule chiefly at night no man should greet another lest he salute a demon. They haunt lonely spots, often assume the shape of beasts, and it is their presence in the bodies of men and women which is the cause of madness and other diseases.[28]

From the period when the Apocryphal books, especially those having traces of Persian influence, were written,[29] this doctrine of an arch-fiend with his army of demons received increasing impetus. It passed on without check into the Christian religion, and wherever this spread the heathen gods, like the devas of Brahmanism among the Iranians, were degraded into demons, and swelled the vast crowd of evil spirits let loose to torment and ruin mankind.

This doctrine of demonology, it should be remembered, was but the elaborated form of ancestral belief in spirits referred to above. In the Christian system it was associated with that belief in magic which has its roots in fetishism, and from the two arose belief in witchcraft. The universal belief in demons in early and mediæval times supplied an easy explanation of disasters and diseases; the sorcerers and charm-workers, the wizards and enchanters, had passed into the service of the devil. For power to work their spite and malevolence they had bartered their souls to him, and sealed the bargain with their blood. It was enough for the ignorant and frightened sufferers to accuse some poor, misshapen, squinting old woman of casting on them the evil eye, or of appearing in the form of a cat, to secure her trial by torture and her condemnation to an unpitied death. The spread of popular terror led to the issue of Papal bulls and to the passing of statutes in England and in other countries against witchcraft, and it was not until late in the eighteenth century that the laws against that imaginary crime were repealed.

There is no sadder chapter in the annals of this tearful world than this ghastly story of witch-finding and witch-burning. Sprenger computes that during the Christian epoch no less than nine millions of persons, mostly women of the poorer classes, were burned; victims of the survival into relatively civilised times of an illusion which had its source in primitive thought. It was an illusion which had the authority of Scripture on its side;[30] the Church had no hesitation concerning it; such men as Luther, Sir Thomas Browne, and Wesley never doubted it; the evidence of the bewitched was supported by honest witnesses; and judges disposed to mercy and humanity had no qualms in passing the dread sentence of the law on the condemned.[31]

And although it exists not to-day, save in by-places where gross darkness lurks, it was not destroyed by argument, by disproof, by direct assault, but only through the quiet growth and diffusion of the scientific spirit, before which it has dispersed. It could not live in an atmosphere thus purified, an atmosphere charged with belief in unchanging causation and in a definite order unbroken by caprice or fitfulness, whether in the sweep of a planet or the pulsations of a human heart.

Of course the antecedents of the arch-fiend himself could not fail to be the subject of curious inquiry in the time when his existence was no matter of doubt. The old theologians scraped together enough material about him from the sacred books of the Jews and Christians to construct an elaborate biography of him; but in this they would seem to have explained too much in certain directions and not enough in others, thus provoking a reaction which ultimately discredited their painful research. Their genealogy of him was carried farther back than they intended or desired, for the popular notions credited him with both a mother and grandmother. Their theory of his fall from heaven gave rise to the droll conception of his lameness and to the legends of which the “devil on two sticks” is a type. Their infusion of foreign element into his nature aided his pictorial presentment in motley form and garb, as seen in the old miracle-plays. To Vedic descriptions of Vritra’s darkness may perchance be traced his murkiness and blackness; to Greek satyr and German forest-sprite his goat-like body, his horns, his cloven hoofs, his tail; to Thor his red beard; to dwarfs and goblins his red cloak and nodding plume; to theories of transformation of men and spirits into animals his manifold metamorphoses, as black cat, wolf, hellhound, and the like.

But his description was his doom; it was by a natural sequence that the legends of mediæval times present him, not, with the Scotch theologians, as a scholar and a swindler, disguising himself as a parson, but as gullible and stupid, as over-reaching himself and as befooled by mortals. And, like the Trolls of Scandinavian folk-lore who burst at sunrise, it needed only the full light thrown upon his origin and development by the researches of comparative mythologists to dissipate this creation of man’s fears and fancies into the vaporous atmosphere where he had his birth.

§ IV.

THE SOLAR THEORY OF MYTH.

The cogency of the evidence concerning the development of belief in Satan out of light-and-darkness myths is generally admitted, but it is of a kind that must not be pushed too far. For the phases of Nature are manifold; manifold also is the life of man; and we must not lend a too willing ear to theories which refer the crude explanations of an unscientific age, when the whole universe is Wonderland, to one source. Cave hominem unius libri, says the adage, and we may apply it, not only to the man of one book, but also to the man of one idea, in whom the sense of proportion is lacking, and who sees only that for which he looks. Here such caution is introduced as needful of exercise against the comparative mythologists who, not content with showing—as abundant evidence warrants—that myth has its germs in the investment of the powers of nature with personal life and consciousness, contend that the great epics of our own and kindred races are, from their broadest features to minutest detail, but nature-myths obscured and transformed.

Certain scholars, notably Professor Max Müller, Sir G. W. Cox, and Professor de Gubernatis, as interpreters of the myths of the Indo-European peoples, and Dr. Goldziher, as an interpreter of Hebrew myth and cognate forms, maintain that the names given in the mythopœic age to the sun, the moon, and the changing scenery of the heaven as the fleeting forms and myriad shades passed over its face, lost their original signification wholly or partially, and came to be regarded as the names of veritable deities and men, whose actions and adventures are the disguised descriptions of the sweep of the thunder-charged clouds and of the victory of the hero-god over their light-engulfing forces. But it is better to state the theory in the words of its exponents, and for that purpose a couple of extracts from Sir George Cox’s Mythology of the Aryan Nations will suffice.

Such is the “solar myth” theory. “We can hardly,” as Mr. Matthew Arnold says, “now look up at the sun without having the sensations of a moth,” and if occasion has not been given to the adversary to blaspheme, he has been supplied with ample material for banter and ridicule. Some of the happiest illustrations of this are made by Mr. Foster in his amusing and really informing essay on “Nature Myths in Nursery Rhymes,” reprinted in Leisure Readings,[32] an essay which it seems the immaculate critics took au sérieux! With a little exercise of one’s invention, given also ability to parody, it will be found that many noted events, as well as the lives of the chief actors in them, yield results comforting to the solar mythologists. Not only the Volsungs and the Iliad, but the story of the Crusades and of the conquest of Mexico; not only Arthur and Baldr, but Cæsar and Bonaparte, may be readily resolved, as Professor Tyndall says we all shall be, “like streaks of morning cloud, into the infinite azure of the past.” Dupuis, in his researches into the connection between astronomy and mythology, had suggested that Jesus was the sun, and the twelve apostles the zodiacal signs; and Goldziher, analysing the records of a remote period, maintains the same concerning Jacob and his twelve sons. M. Senart has satisfied himself that Gotama, the Buddha, is a sun-myth. Archbishop Whately, to confound the sceptics, ingeniously disproved the existence of Bonaparte; and a French ecclesiastic has, by witty etymological analogies, shown that Napoleon is cognate with Apollo, the sun, and his mother Letitia identical with Leto, the mother of Apollo; that his personnel of twelve marshals were the signs of the zodiac; that his retreat from Moscow was a fiery setting, and that his emergence from Elba, to rule for twelve months, and then be banished to St. Helena, is the sun rising out of the eastern waters to set in the western ocean after twelve hours’ reign in the sky. But upon this solar theory let us cite what Dr. Tylor, whose soberness of judgment renders him a valuable guide along the zigzag path of human progress, says: “The close and deep analogies between the life of nature and the life of man have been for ages dwelt upon by poets and philosophers, who, in simile or in argument, have told of light and darkness, of calm and tempest, of birth, growth, change, decay, dissolution, renewal. But no one-sided interpretation can be permitted to absorb into a single theory such endless many-sided correspondences as these. Rash inferences which, on the strength of mere resemblance, derive episodes of myth from episodes of nature, must be regarded with utter mistrust, for the student who has no more stringent criterion than this for his myths of sun and sky and dawn, will find them wherever it pleases him to seek them.”

The investigations of comparative mythologists, more particularly in this country and Germany, have thrown such valuable light on the history of ideas, that it will be instructive to learn what excited the inquiry. The researches of Niebuhr and his school into the credibility of early history made manifest that the only authority on which the chroniclers relied was tradition. To them—children of an uncritical age—that tradition was venerable with the lapse of time, and binding as a revelation from the gods. To us the charm and interest of it lie in detecting within it the ancient deposit of a mythopœic period, and in deciphering from it what manner of men they must have been among whom such explanation of the beginnings had credence. And in such an inquiry nothing can be “common or unclean,” nothing too trivial or puerile for analysis; for where the most grotesque and impossible are found, there we are nearer to the conditions of which we would know more.

The serious endeavour to get at the fact underlying the fabulous was extended to the great body of mythology which had not been incorporated into history, and the interpretations of which satisfied only those who suggested them. As hinted already, the Greeks had sought out the meaning of their myths, with here and there a glimpse of the truth gained; but this was confined to the philosophers and poets. Euhêmeros degraded them into dull chronicle, making Heraklês a thief who carried off a crop of oranges; Jove a king crushing rebellion; Atlas an astronomer; Pythôn a freebooter; Æolus a weather-wise seaman, and so on. Plutarch tried to “restore” them, but only defaced them, and after centuries of neglect they were discovered by Lord Bacon to be allegories with a moral. Then Banier and Lemprière emptied out of them what little life Euhêmeros had left, and the believers in Hebrew as the original speech of mankind saw in them the fragments of a universal primitive revelation! Even Professor Max Müller is so upset by the many loathsome and revolting stories in a mythology current in the land of Lykurgos and Solon, such as the marriage of his mother Jocasta by Œdipus, and the swallowing of his own children by Cronus, that he inquires (as if he half believed it possible) whether there was not “a period of temporary insanity through which the human mind had to pass,” and a degradation from lovely metaphor to coarse fact which only a “disease of language,” or the confusion arising from the forgotten meanings of words, explains. There is no need, however, for assumptions of this or of any other kind. This is best shown by a summary of facts which led, more or less directly, to the formulation of the solar theory.

Some fifty years ago a good many idle speculations, products of a reverent and uncurbed fancy concerning Hebrew as the primitive speech of mankind, were laid to rest when the sober guess of Schlegel as to the connection of the leading languages of Europe and those of India and Persia, was converted into certainty by Bopp, Jacob Grimm, Schleicher, and later scholars.

By the application of the comparative method to philology, i.e. the interpretation of any set of facts by comparison with corresponding facts, due allowance being made for differences which Grimm’s law (see infra) explains, the relation of Greek, Latin, Slavonic, Teutonic, and Keltic to one another and to Indian and Persian, and their consequent descent from a common parent language, was proved. To this group the term Aryan (from a Sanskrit word cognate with the root ar, our English word ear, to plough), is given, a term which ancient records show was applied by the Asiatic Aryans to themselves as the lords of the soil, the dominant race. The names Indo-Germanic, and, more appropriately as roughly defining the peoples included thereunder, Indo-European, have been suggested in its stead, but Aryan, as the more convenient term, has come into general use.

The survival of grammatical forms common to the Aryan ancestors, and the likeness between words necessary for daily use, evidenced to one parent primitive speech, and, passing from words to the ideas and things which they connoted, philologists were able to infer what manner of men these Aryans were, and under what conditions they dwelt. In the enthusiasm excited by so brilliant a discovery the soberest scholars were apt to over-colour their accurately-outlined picture of old Aryan life; to read modern meanings into the ancient words. But, making good allowance for this, the sketch which was presented in Max Müller’s famous paper on Comparative Mythology[33] remains a credit to scholarship in its vivid generalisations from immaterial data.

Professor Max Müller, in agreement with Pictet and others, placed the original settlement of the Aryans as probably in the region between the Hindu Kush Mountains and the Caspian Sea. But the opinion of later scholars of cooler judgment leans to Europe rather than to Asia as the primitive home of the Aryan tribes. The scanty hints which survive point to a larger acquaintance with European flora and fauna than with Asiatic; to a southward course, whilst silent about westward migration; the movement of races inclines from less genial to more genial zones; the traditions of certain branches, as the Greeks, tell of them as autochthones, or born on the soil where they are found; and the judgment of experts is decisive as to the greater nearness of the European languages to the original speech as contrasted with Sanskrit and Iranian. These are the principal reasons adduced in support of the theory of a European origin. Benfey places the old Aryan home in the neighbourhood of the Black Sea, Schrader and Geiger in Middle Germany, Karl Penka in Scandinavia. But in speculating on the exact habitation of congeries of tribes requiring vast tracts of country for support, no rigid boundaries can be fixed, and there is room for the play of both theories, the more so as theories they must remain.[34]

At the back of this unsettled question lies the interesting subject of the civilisation of pre-Aryan races on the European-Asiatic Continent. In the Newer Stone Age this continent was inhabited by races of short stature, with long and narrow skulls, and probably dark complexions, races whom the Aryans, a tall, round-skulled, fair-complexioned race, conquered, and with whom they so largely intermingled that the varieties of fair and dark people in Europe at this day, speaking an Aryan language, are past finding out. Indeed, there are probably no unmixed races throughout Europe and Asia; the conquering race imposed its language on the conquered, and thus is explained the community of speech without community of race which must be recognised in the composite European peoples.

With this qualification the kinship of the Aryan-language-speaking peoples is demonstrated, and the like kind of evidence by which this is proved has been applied to establish the identity of their mythologies, legends, and folk-tales. The meaning of the proper names of these once determined, the key to the meaning of the myth or tale was clear; because, it is contended, the names contain the germs or oldest surviving part. This is to make the last first; but the result, as already shown in the Aryan light-and-darkness myths, has been to bring out a few striking correspondences in Greek and Vedic names, although by no means so intimate and frequent as the solar mythologists assume. The uniform behaviour of the untutored mind before like phenomena to which barbaric myth witnesses prepares us for general correspondences, but not in such details as we find in the Aryan group. On what theory these, notably in the case of the folk-tales, are to be accounted for, it is not easy to say, for the mode of their diffusion from India to Iceland is obscure. But the fact abides that nursery stories told in Norway and Tyrol, in Scotland and the Deccan, are identical. After allowing for local colouring and for changes incident to the lapse of time, they are the variants of stories presumably related in the Aryan fatherland at a period historically remote, and, moreover, are told in words which are phonetically akin. Their resemblances in minor incident and detail are not easily explained by theories of borrowing, for apparently no trace of intercourse between the Asiatic Aryans and the Aryans of extreme Western Europe occurs until after the domiciling of the stories where we find them. Nor did they with such close resemblances as appear between the German Faithful John and the Hindu Rama and Luxman; between our own Cinderella, the German Aschenpüttel and the Hindu Sodewa Bai, spring native from their respective soils.[35] And there is just that unlikeness in certain details which might be expected from the different positions and products of the several Aryan lands. They explain, for example, the absence from Scandinavian folk-tale of creatures like the elephant, the giant, ape, and turtle, which figure in the Brahmanic.

When we turn to the great Aryan epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey; the Volsungs; the Nibelungs; King Arthur and his Round Table; the Ramâyanâ and the Mahâ Bhâratâ; the Shah Nameh, and so forth, we find similarities of incident and episode which point to a common derivation from old Aryan myth. That common synonyms occur in cognate languages is to be expected, but so far as the names and the characteristics of the heroes and heroines are concerned, the phonetic identity is proven in a far less number of cases than the solar mythologists, working on their too exclusive method, argue. The key which for them unlocks the meaning of every Aryan myth is Sanskrit. In tracing the history of the Indo-European family of speech, it served as the starting-point, because it has more than any other member preserved the roots and suffixes, if not in their oldest, still in their most accessible form. And in tracing the course of Indo-European mythology, it is in the Vedic texts, chiefly the most ancient, the Rig-Veda, that we find the materials for comparative study, since in these venerable hymns of a Bible older than our own are preserved the earliest recorded forms of that mythology. That is to say, we have not in any European branch of Aryan speech any documentary relic of the age of the Rig-Veda, otherwise we might find ourselves in possession of more ancient relics of that speech. So that although the value of Sanskrit as the guide without which knowledge of the Aryan mother-tongue would have remained vague, indeed have been beyond reach, cannot be over-estimated, we must not accept as of universal worth what is local and special in it.[36]

The phonetic kinship and actual identity which comparative philologists have sought to establish between the proper names of gods and heroes of the Greek and Vedic mythologies (for the inquiry has been chiefly restricted to these two), is based on the collection of rules by which we can at once tell what sounds in one language correspond to those of its kindred tongues, called, after its discoverer, “Grimm’s Law.” This law gave the quietus to theories of common origin and variation of words based on specious resemblances (theories satirised by Dean Swift in his derivation of ostler from oatstealer), and introduced a scientific method into etymological study.

The varying pronunciation of certain words among the Aryan-speaking peoples which were common to them was discovered by Grimm to be constant; for example, a Greek th answers to an English d, and, vice versâ, a German s or z to an English t, and so forth, so that by comparing these altered forms the common form from which they spring is reached.

At what fluent period in the history of the Aryan languages these changes of one sound into another were induced is unknown, nor are their precise causes easy of ascertainment, being referable to physical influences, climatal and local, which in the course of time brought about changes in the organs of speech, such, for example, as make our th so difficult of pronunciation to a German, in whose language d takes its place, as drei for three, durstig for thirsty, dein for thine, etc. We may note tendencies to variation in children of the same household, their prattle often affording striking illustration of Grimm’s law, and it is easy to see that among semi-civilised and isolated tribes, where no check upon the variations is imposed, they would tend to become fixed and give rise to new dialects.

Tracing the operation of that law in the changes in proper names in Greek and Vedic mythology, their correlation is proved in a few important instances. The Greek Zeus, the Latin Deus (whence French Dieu and our deity, and also deuce), the Lithuanian Diewas, and the Sanskrit Dyaus all come from an old Aryan root, div or dyu, meaning “to shine.” The Sanskrit dyu, as a noun means “sky” or “day,” and in the Veda Dyaus is the bright sky or heaven. Varuna, the noblest figure in the Vedic religion, the “enveloper” or all-surrounding heaven, is cognate with the Greek Ouranos or Uranus, the common root being var, “to veil” or “cover.” Agni, the fire-god, to whom the larger number of hymns occur in the Veda, is related to the Latin ignis, fire, and so forth.

The heavens and the earth and all that in them is are the raw material on which man works, and the comparative philologists have established exactly what might have been predicated, the nature-origin of the Greek, Vedic, and other Aryan myths. They might well have rested content with this confirmation which their method gives to results arrived at by other methods, and not weakened or discredited it by applying it all round to every leading name in Aryan myth. For this has only revealed the fundamental differences among themselves as to the etymologies and meanings of such names. But not satisfied with the demonstration that the majestic epics have their germs in the phenomena of the natural world, and the course of the day and year, they strain the evidence by contending that “there is absolutely nothing left for further analysis in the stories;” that their “resemblances in detail defy the influences of climate and scenery;”[37] that every incident has its birth in the journey of the sun, the death of the dawn, the theft of the twilight by the powers of darkness, evidence which, in Sir George Cox’s words, “not long hence will probably be regarded as excessive.”

They are nature-myths; but, and in this is the secret of their enduring life, they are much more than that. The impetus that has shaped them as we now know them came from other forces than clouds and storms.

Without such caution as these remarks are designed to supply, any reader of the Mythology of the Aryan Nations would conclude that the philological method had proved the meteorological origin of every epic and folk-tale among the Indo-European peoples. He would learn that, in a way rudely analogous to the supernatural guidance of the Christian Church, the several Aryan tribes had received from the fathers of the race an unvarying canon of interpretation of the primitive myths, a canon seemingly preserved with the jealous veneration with which the Jew regarded the Thorah, and the Brahman the Veda. He would also learn that the details of Norse and classic myth can be traced to the Veda, that these details, not of incident alone, but of thought and expression, survived unimpaired by time and untouched by circumstance, whilst, strange to say, the more prominent names and the leading characters became obscured in their meaning. Strange indeed, and not true. For what are the facts?

Long before the hymns of the Rig-Veda existed as we know them (and they have remained an inviolate sacred text since 600 B.C., when every verse, word, and syllable were counted) the Aryan tribes had swarmed from their parent hive across boundless steppes and over winding mountain passes, some to the westward limits of Europe, others southward into Hindustan. Among the slender intellectual capital of which they stood possessed was the common mythology of their savage ancestors, in which, as we have seen, sun and moon, storm and thunder-cloud, and all other natural phenomena, were credited with personal life and will. But that mythology had certainly advanced beyond the crude primitive form and entered the heroic stage, wherein the powers of nature were half human, half divine. Their language had passed into the inflective or highest stage, and had undergone such changes that the relationship between its several groups and their origin from one mother-tongue was obscured, and remained so until laid bare in our day. In short, the Aryan tribes had attained no mean state of civilisation, some being more advanced than the others, according as external circumstances helped or hindered, and one by one they passed from the condition of semi-civilised nomads to become fathers and founders of nations that abide to this day.

These being the facts to which language itself bears witness, how was it possible for their mythologies, i.e. their stock of notions about things, to remain unaffected and secure of transmission without organic change? The myths, unfixed in literary form, yielded themselves with ease as vehicles of new ideas; their ancient meaning, already faded, paled before the all-absorbing significance of present facts. These were more potent realities than the kisses of the dawn; the human and the personal, in its struggles, of mightier interest than the battle of rosy morn or purple eve with the sons of thunder; and Homer’s music would long since have died away were Achilles’ “baneful wrath” but a passively-told tale of the sun’s grief for the loss of the morning.

In brief, the complex and varying influences which have transformed the primitive myth are the important factors which the solar theorists have omitted in their attempted solution of the problem. They have forgotten the part which, to borrow a term from astronomy, “personal equation” has played. They have not examined myth in the light of the long history of the race; and the new elements which it took into itself, while never wholly ridding itself of the old, have escaped them. They have secured a mechanical unity, whereas, by combination of the historical with their own method, they might have secured a vital unity.

To all which classic myth itself bears record. The Greeks were of Aryan stock, but the time of their settlement is unknown. The period between this and the Homeric age was, however, long enough to admit of their advance to the state of a nation rejoicing in the fulness of intellectual life. They remembered not from what rock they were hewn, from what pit they were digged. The nature-gods of their remote ancestors had long since changed their meteorological character, and appeared in the likeness of men, or, at least, played very human pranks on Olympus. In the Veda the primitive nature-myth, although exalted and purified, is persistent; under one name or another it is still the ceaseless battle between the darkness and the light; Dyaus was still the bright sky, the cattle of Siva were still the clouds. But the Greek of Homer’s time, and his congener in the far north, had forgotten all that; the war in heaven was transferred to the strife of gods and men on the shores of the Hellespont and by the bleak seaboard of the Baltic. Their gods and goddesses, improved by age and experience, put off their physical and put on the ethical; the heaven-father became king of gods and men, source of order, law, and justice; the sun and the dawn, Apollo and Athênê, became wisdom, skill, and guardianship incarnate. And the story of human vicissitudes found in solar myth that “pattern of things in the heavens” which conformed to its design.

Thus Homer, in whose day the old nature-myth had become confused with the vague traditions of veritable deeds of kings and heroes but dimly remembered, touched it as with heavenly fire unquenchable. The siege of Troy, so say the solar mythologists, “is a repetition of the daily siege of the east by the solar powers that every evening are robbed of their highest treasures in the west.” It is surely a truer instinct which, recognising the physical framework of the great epics, feels that the vitality which inheres in them is due to whatever of human experience, joy, and sorrow is the burden of their immortal song. As to the repulsive features of Greek myth, one can neither share the distress of the solar theorists nor feel their difficulties. Both are self-created, and are aggravated by suggestions, serious or otherwise, of “periods of temporary insanity through which the human mind had to pass,” as the rude health of childhood is checked by whooping-cough and measles. They are explained by the persistence with which the lower out of which man has emerged asserts itself, as primary rocks pierce through and overlap later strata.

The ancestors of the Aryans were savages in the remote past, and the “old Adam” was never entirely cast out; indeed it is with us still. There are superstitions and credulities in our midst, in drawing-rooms as well as gipsy camps, quite as gross in nature, if less coarse in guise, as those extant among the Greeks. The future historian of our time, as he turns over the piles of our newspapers, will find contrasts of ignorance and culture as startling as any existing in the land of Homer, of Archimedes, and Aristotle. Spirit-rapping and belief in the “evil eye” have their cult among us, although Professor Huxley’s Hume can be bought for two shillings, and knowledge has free course. And it certainly accords best with all that we have learnt as to the mode of human progress to believe that the old lived into the new, than that the old had been cast out, but had gained re-entry, making the last state of the Greeks to be worse than the first.

In this matter the Vedic hymns do not help us much. The conditions under which they took the form that insured their transmission are ipso facto as of yesterday, compared with the period during which man’s endeavour was made to get at that meaning of his surroundings wherein is found the germ of myth throughout the world. They are the products of a relatively highly-civilised time; the conception of sky and dawn as living persons has passed out of its primitive simplicity; these heavenly powers have become complex deities; there is much confounding of persons, the same god called by one or many names. The thought is that of an age when moral problems have presented themselves for solution, and the references to social matters indicate a settled state of things far removed from the fisher and the hunter stage. Nevertheless there lurk within these sacred writings survivals of the lower culture, traces of coarse rites, bloody sacrifices, of repulsive myths of the gods, and of cosmogonies familiar to the student of barbaric myth and legend.

Enough has been said to show that the extreme and one-sided interpretations of the solar mythologists are due to a one-sided method. The philological has yielded splendid results; this the solar theorists have done; the historical yields results equally rich and fertile; this they have left undone. Language has given us the key to the kinship between the several members of the great body of Aryan myths; the study of the historical evolution of myths, the comparison of these, without regard to affinity of speech, will give us the key to the kinship between savage interpretation of phenomena all the world over. The mythology of Greek and Bushman, of Kaffir and Scandinavian, of the Red man and the Hindu, springs from the like mental condition. It is the uniform and necessary product of the human mind in the childhood of the race.

§ V.

BELIEF IN METAMORPHOSIS INTO ANIMALS.

The belief that human beings could change themselves into animals has been already alluded to, but in view of its large place in the history of illusions, some further reference is needful.

Superstitions which now excite a smile, or which seem beneath notice, were no sudden phenomena, appearing now and again at the beck and call of wilful deceivers of their kind. That they survive at all, like organisms, atrophied or degenerate, which have seen “better days,” is evidence of remote antiquity and persistence. Every seeming vagary of the mind had serious importance, and answered to some real need of man as a sober attempt to read the riddle of the earth, and get at its inmost secret.

So with this belief. It is the outcome of that early thought of man which conceived a common nature and fellowship between himself and brutes, a conception based on rude analogies between his own and other forms of life, as also between himself and things without life, but having motion, be they waterspouts or rivers, trees or clouds, especially these last, when the wind, in violent surging and with howling voice, drove them across the sky. Where he blindly, timidly groped, we walk as in the light, and with love that casts out fear. Where rough resemblances suggested to him like mental states and actions in man and brute, the science of our time has, under the comparative method, converted the guess into a certainty; not to the confirmation of his conclusions, but to the proof of identity of structure and function, to the demonstrating of a common origin, however now impassable the chasm that separates us from the lower animals.

The belief in man’s power to change his form and nature is obviously nearly connected with the widespread doctrine of metempsychosis, or the passing of the soul at death into one or a series of animals, generally types of the dead man’s character, as where the timid enter the body of a hare, the gluttonous that of a swine or vulture.

“Fills with fresh energy another form,
And towers an elephant or glides a worm;
Swims as an eagle in the eye of noon,
Or wails a screech-owl to the deaf, cold moon,
Or haunts the brakes where serpents hiss and glare,
Or hums, a glittering insect, in the air.”

But while in transmigration the soul returns not to the body which it had left, transformation was only for a time, occurring at stated periods, and effected by the will of the transformed, or by the aid of sorcery or magic, or sometimes imposed by the gods as a punishment for impious defiance and sin.

Other causes, less remote, aided the spread of a belief to which the mind was already inclined. Among these were the hallucinations of men who believed themselves changed into beasts, and who, retreating to caves and forests, issued thence howling and foaming, ravening for blood and slaughter; hallucinations which afflicted not only single persons, as in the case of Nebuchadnezzar, whose milder monomania (he, himself, saying in the famous prize poem:—

“As he ate the unwonted food,
‘It may be wholesome, but it is not good’”),

rather resembled that of the daughters of Prætus, who believed themselves cows, but which also spread as virulent epidemic among whole classes. It is related that, in 1600, multitudes were attacked by the disease known as lycanthropy, or wolf-madness (from Greek, lukos, a wolf, and anthropos, a man), and that they herded and hunted in packs, destroying and eating children, and keeping in their mountain fastnesses a cannibal or devil’s sabbath, like the nocturnal meetings of witches and demons known as the Witches’ Sabbath. Hundreds of them were executed on their own confession, but some time elapsed before the frightful epidemic, and the panic which it caused, passed away. Besides such delusions, history down to our own time records instances where a morbid innate craving for blood, leading sometimes to cannibalism, has shown itself. Mr. Baring-Gould, in his Book of Werewolves, cites a case from Gall of a Dutch priest who had such a desire to kill and to see killed that he became chaplain to a regiment for the sake of witnessing the slaughter in battle. But still more ghastly are the notorious cases of Elizabeth, a Hungarian lady of title, who inveigled girls into her castle and murdered them, that she might bathe her body in human blood to enhance her beauty; and of the Maréchal de Retz who, cursed with the abnormal desire to murder children, allured them with promises of dainties into his kitchen, and killed them, inhaling the odour of their blood with delight, and then burned their bodies in the huge fireplace in the room devoted to these horrors. When the deed was done the Maréchal would lie prostrate with grief, “would toss weeping and praying on a bed, or recite fervent prayers and litanies on his knees, only to rise with irresistible craving to repeat the crime.”

Such instances as the foregoing, whether of delusion or morbid desire to destroy, are among secondary causes; they may contribute, but they do not create, being inadequate to account for the world-wide existence of transformation myths. The animals which are the supposed subject of these vary with the habitat, but are always those which have inspired most dread from their ferocity. In Abyssinia we find the man-hyæna; in South Africa, the man-lion; in India, the man-tiger; in Northern Europe, the man-bear; and in other parts of Europe the man-wolf, or werewolf (from A.-S. wer, a man).

Among the many survivals of primitive thought in the Greek mythology, which are the only key to its coarser features, this of belief in transformation occurs, and, indeed, along the whole line of human development it appears and re-appears in forms more or less vivid and tragic. The gods of the south, as of the north, came down in the likeness of beasts and birds, as well as of men, and among the references to these myths in classic writers, Ovid, in the Metamorphoses, tells the story of Zeus visiting Lykaon, king of Arcadia, who placed a dish of human flesh before the god to test thereby his omniscience. Zeus detected the trick, and punished the king by changing him into a wolf, so that his desire might be towards the food which he had impiously offered to his god.

“In vain he attempted to speak; from that very instant
His jaws were bespluttered with foam, and only he thirsted
For blood, as he raged amongst flocks and panted for slaughter.
His vesture was changed into hair, his limbs became crooked.
A wolf—he retains yet large traces of his ancient expression,
Hoary he is as afore, his countenance rabid,
His eyes glitter savagely still, the picture of fury.”