But we may pass from this and such-like tales of the ancients to the grim realities of the belief in mediæval times.
If wolves abounded, much more did the werewolf abound. According to Olaus Magnus, the sufferings which the inhabitants of Prussia and neighbouring nations endured from wolves were trivial compared with the ravages wrought by men turned into wolves. On the feast of the Nativity, these monsters were said to assemble and then disperse in companies to kill and plunder. Attacking lonely houses, they devoured all the human beings and every other animal found therein. “They burst into the beer-cellars and there they empty the tuns of beer or mead, and pile up the empty casks one above another in the middle of the cellar, thus showing their difference from natural wolves.” In Scandinavia it was believed that some men had a second skin out of which they could slip and appear in the shape of a beast. Perhaps the phrase “to jump out of one’s skin” is a relic of this notion. The Romans believed that the werewolf simply effected the change by turning his skin inside out, hence the term “versipellis,” or “skin-changer.” So in mediæval times it was said that the wolf’s skin was under the human, and the unhappy suspects were hacked and tortured for signs of such hairy growth. Sometimes the change was induced, it is said, by putting on a girdle of human skin round the waist; sometimes by the use of magical ointment. Whatever the animal whose shape a man took could do, that he could do, plus such power as he possessed in virtue of his manhood or acquired by sorcery, his eyes remaining as the only features by which he could be recognised. If he was not changed himself, some charm was wrought on the eyes of onlookers whereby they could see him only in the shape which he was supposed to assume. The genuine monomaniacs aided such an illusion. The poor demented one who conceived himself a dog or a wolf, who barked, and snapped, and foamed at the mouth, and bit savagely at the flesh of others, was soon clothed by a terror-stricken fancy in the skin of either brute, and believed to have the canine or lupine appetite in addition to his human cunning. The imagination thus projects in visible form the spectres of its creation; the eye in this, as in so much else, sees the thing for which it looks. Some solid foundation for the belief would, however, exist in the custom among warriors of dressing themselves in the skins of beasts to add to their ferocious appearance. And it was amidst such that the remarkable form of mania in Northern Europe known as the Berserkr rage (“bear-sark” or “bear-skin” wearer) arose. Working themselves by the aid of strong drink or drugs and contagious excitement into a frenzy, these freebooters of the Northland sallied forth to break the backbones and cleave the skulls of quiet folk and unwary travellers. As with flashing eyes and foaming mouth they yelled and danced, seemingly endowed with magic power to resist assault by sword or club, they aroused in the hysterically disposed a like madness, which led to terrible crimes, and which died away only as the killing of one’s fellows became less the business of life. History supplies many examples of strange mental epidemics which sped through towns and provinces in mediæval times. They were induced by religious enthusiasm and other extreme and harmful forms of mental stimulation, the most notorious being the great St. Vitus’ dance, and the procession of Flagellants, to which in their mad orgies the hysterical ceremonies of barbarous tribes correspond. Of that tendency towards imitation which these freaks of erratic and unbalanced minds foster Dr. Carpenter[38] quotes an illustration from Zimmerman. A nun in a large convent in France began to mew like a cat, and shortly afterwards other nuns also mewed. At last all the nuns mewed every day at a given time and for several hours together. And this cat’s concert was only stopped by the military arriving and threatening to whip the nuns.
During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the belief in men-beasts reached its maximum, and met with no tender treatment at the hands of a church whose founder had manifested such soothing pity towards the “possessed” of Galilee and Judæa. That church had a cut-and-dried explanation of the whole thing, and applied a sharp and pitiless remedy. If the devil, with countless myrmidons at his command, was “going to and fro in the earth, and walking up and down in it,” what limit could be put to his ingenuity and arts? Could he not as easily change a man into a wolf or a bear as a woman into a cat? and had not each secured this by a compact with him, the foe of God and His Church? The evidence in support of the one was as clear and cogent as in support of the other; hence werewolf hunting and burning became as Christian a duty and as paying a profession as witch-smelling and torturing. Any cruelty was justified by its perpetrators when the object in view was the vindication of the majesty of God; and not until the advancing intelligence of men recoiled against the popular explanations of witchcraft and lycanthropy were the laws against both repealed.
Those explanations were survivals of savage mental philosophy blended with a crude theology. To the savage, all diseases are the work of evil spirits. If a man hurts himself against a stone, the demon in the stone is the cause. If the man falls suddenly ill, writhes or shrieks in his pain, the spirit which has smuggled itself in with the food or the drink or the breath is twisting or tearing him; if he has a fit, the spirit has flung him; if he is in the frenzy of hysteria, the spirit within him is laughing in fiendish glee. And when the man suddenly loses his reason, goes, as people say, “out of his mind,” acts and looks no longer like his former self, still more does this seem the work of an evil agent within him. It is kindred with the old belief that the sickly and ugly infant had been left in the cradle by the witch in place of the child stolen by her before its baptism.[39] And the thing to do is to find some mode of conjuring or frightening or forcing the demon out of the man, just as it became a sacred duty to watch over the newly-born until the sign of the cross had been made on its forehead, and the regenerating water sprinkled over it.
“Presbyter is but old priest writ large.” And the theory of demoniacal agency was but the savage theory in a more elaborate guise. To theologians and jurists it was a sufficing explanation; it fitted in with the current notions of the government of the universe, and there was no need to frame any other. Body and mind were to them as separate entities as they are to the savage and the ignorant. Each regarded the soul as independent of the body, and framed his theories of occasional absence therefrom accordingly. But science has taught us to know ourselves not as dual, but as one. She lays her finger on the subtle, intricate framework of man’s nervous system, and finds in the derangement of this the secret of those delusions and illusions which have been so prolific in agony and suffering. She makes clear how the yielding to morbid tendencies can still foster delusions, which, if no longer the subject of pains and penalties in the body politic, are themselves ministers of vengeance in the body where they arise. And in the recognition of a fundamental unity between the physical and the mental, in the healthy working of the one as dependent on the wholesome care of the other, she finds not only the remedy against mental derangement and all forms of harmful excitement, but also the prevention which is better than cure.
Traditions of transformation of men into beasts are not confined to the Old world.[40] In Dr. Rink’s Tales of the Eskimo there are numerous stories both of men and women who have assumed animal form at will, as also incidental references to the belief in stories such as that telling how an Eskimo got inside a walrus skin, so that he might lead the life of that creature. And among the Red races, that rough analogy which led to the animal being credited with life and consciousness akin to the human, still expresses itself in thought and act. If even now it is matter of popular belief in the wilds of Norway that Finns and Lapps, who from remote times have passed as skilful witches and wizards, can at pleasure assume the shape of bears, the common saying, according to Sir George Dasent, about an unusually daring and savage beast being, “that can be no Christian bear,” we may not be surprised that lower races still ascribe power of interchange to man and brute. The werewolf superstition is extant among the North-Western Indians, but free from those diabolical features which characterised it in mediæval times among ourselves. It takes its place in barbaric myth generally, and although it may have repellent or cruel elements, it was never blended with belief in the demoniacal. The Ahts say that men go into the mountains to seek their manitou (that is, the personal deity, generally the first animal seen by a native in the dream produced by his fasting on reaching manhood), and, mixing with wolves, are after a time changed into these creatures. Although the illustration bears more upon what has to be said concerning the barbaric belief in animal-ancestors, it has some reference to the matter in hand to cite the custom among the Tonkanays, a wild and unruly tribe in Texas, of celebrating their origin by a grand annual dance. One of them, naked as he was born, is buried in the earth, then the others, clothed in wolf-skins, walk over him, sniff around him, howl in wolfish style, and then dig him up with their nails.[41] The leading wolf solemnly places a bow and arrow in his hands, and, to his inquiry as to what he must do for a living, advises him “to do as the wolves do—rob, kill, and rove from place to place, never cultivating the soil.” Dr. Brinton, in quoting the above from Schoolcraft, refers to a similar custom among the ancient dwellers on Mount Soracte.
As in past times among ourselves, so in times present among races such as the foregoing, their wizards and shamans are believed to have power to turn themselves as they choose into beasts, birds, or reptiles. By whatever name these professional impostors are known, whether as medicine-men, or, as in Cherokee, by the high-sounding title of “possessors of the divine fire,” they have traded, and wherever credulity or darkest ignorance abide, still trade on the fears and fancies of their fellows by disguising themselves in voice and gait and covering of the animal which they pretend to be. Among races believing in transformation such tricks have free course, and the more dexterous the sorcerer who could play bear’s antics in a bear’s skin proved himself in throwing off the disguise and appearing suddenly as a man, the greater his success, and the more firmly grounded the belief.
The whole subject, although presented here only in the barest outline, would not be fitly dismissed without some reference to the survival of the primitive belief in men-animals in the world-wide stories known as beast-fables, in which animals act and talk like human beings. When to us all nature was Wonderland, and the four-footed, the birds, and the fishes, among our play-fellows; when in fireside tale and rhyme they spoke our language and lived that free life which we then shared and can never share again, the feeling of kinship to which the old fables gave expression may have checked many a wanton act, and, if we learned it not fully then, we may have taken the lesson to heart since—
“Never to blend our pleasure or our pride
With sorrow of the meanest thing that lives.”
And then those Fables of Æsop, even with the tedious drawback of the “moral,” as powder beneath the jam, did they not lighten for us in school-days the dark passages through our Valpy (for the omniscient Dr. William Smith was not then the tyro’s dread), and again give us communion with the fowl of the air and the beast of the field? Now our mature thought may interest itself in following the beast-myths to the source whence Babrius and Phædrus, knowing not its springhead and antiquity, drew their vivid presentments of the living world, and find in the storied East the well-spring that fed the imagination of youngsters thousands of years ago. Such tales have not fallen in the East to the low level which they have reached here, because they yet accord in some degree with extant superstitions in India, whereas in Europe they find little or nothing to which they correspond. With some authorities the Egyptians have the credit of first inventing the beast-fable, but among them, as among every other advanced race, such stories are the remains of an earlier deposit; relics of a primitive philosophy in which wisdom and skill and cunning are no monopoly of man’s. The fondness of the negro races, whose traditions are not limited to South and Central Africa, for such fables is well known, as witness the tales of which “Uncle Remus” is a type, and it is strikingly illustrated in the history of the Vai tribe, who having, partly through contact with whites, elaborated a system of writing, made the beast-fable their earliest essay in composition.[42]
The evidence in support of the common ancestry of the languages spoken by the leading peoples in Europe, and by such important historical races in Asia as the Hindu and the Persian, has been already summarised. That evidence, it was remarked, is considered corroborative not only of the common origin of the myths on which the framework of the great Indo-European epics rests, but also of the possession by the several clans of a common stock of folk-lore and folk-tale, in which, of course, the beast-fables are included, these being the relics in didactic or humorous guise of that serious philosophy concerning the community of life in man and brute amongst the barbaric ancestors of the Indo-Europeans, upon which stress enough has been laid.
Even if the common origin be disproved, the evidence would be shifted merely from local to general foundations, because the uniform attitude of mind before the same phenomena would have further confirmation; but the resemblances are too minute in detail to be explained by a theory of independent creation of the tales where we now find them. The likenesses are many, the unlikenesses are few, being the result of local colouring, historical fact blended with the fiction, popular belief, and superstition, all affected by the skill of the professional story-teller. As in the numerous variants of the familiar Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Punchkin, and the like, the same fairy prince or princess, the same wicked magician and clever versatile Boots, peep through, disclosing the near relationship of Hindu nursery tales to the folk-tales of Norway and the Highlands, of Iceland and Ceylon, of Persia and Serbia, of Russia and the lands washed by the Mediterranean.
In the venerable collection of Buddhist Birth Stories, now in course of translation by Dr. Rhys Davids,[43] and to which is prefaced an interesting introduction on the source and migration of folk-tales, we are face to face with many a fable familiar to us in the Æsop of our school-days. There is the story of the Ass in the Lion’s Skin, not in which, as Æsop has it, the beast dressed himself, but which the hawker put on him to frighten the thieves who would steal his goods. Left one day to browse in a field whilst his master refreshed himself at an inn, some watchmen saw him, and, raising hue and cry, brought out the villagers, armed with their rude implements. The ass, fearing death, made a noise like an ass, and was killed. Long might he, adds the ancient moral—
“Clad in a lion’s skin
Have fed on the barley green;
But he brayed!
And that moment he came to ruin.”
The variants of this old fable are found in mediæval, in French, German, Indian, and Turkish folk-lore, as are also those of the tortoise who lost his life through “much speaking.” Desiring to emigrate, two ducks agreed to carry him, he seizing hold of a stick which they held between their beaks. As they passed over a village the people shouted and jeered, whereupon the irate tortoise called out: “What business is it of yours?” and, of course, thereby let go the stick and, falling down, split in two. Therefore—
“Speak wise words not out of season;
You see how, by talking overmuch,
The tortoise fell.”
In Æsop the tortoise asks an eagle to teach him to fly; in Chinese folk-lore he is carried by geese.
Jacob Grimm’s researches concerning the famous mediæval fable of “Reynard the Fox” revealed the ancient and scattered materials out of which that wonderful satire was woven, and there is no feature of the story which reappears more often in Eastern and Western folk-lore than that cunning of the animal which has been for the lampooner and the satirist the type of self-seeking monk and ecclesiastic. When Chanticleer proudly takes an airing with his family, he meets master Reynard, who tells him he has become a “religious,” and shows him his beads, and his missal, and his hair shirt, adding, in a voice “that was childlike and bland,” that he had vowed never to eat flesh. Then he went off singing his Credo, and slunk behind a hawthorn. Chanticleer, thus thrown off his guard, continues his airing, and the astute hypocrite, darting from his ambush, seizes the plump hen Coppel. So in Indian folk-tale a wolf living near the Ganges is cut off from food by the surrounding water. He decides to keep holy day, and the god Sakka, knowing his lupine weakness, resolves to have some fun with him, and turns himself into a wild goat “Aha!” says the wolf, “I’ll keep the fast another day,” and springing up he tried to seize the goat, who skipped about so that he could not be taken. So Lupus gives it up, and says as his solatium: “After all, I’ve not broken my vow.”
The Chinese have a story of a tiger who desired to eat a fox, but the latter claimed exemption as being superior to the other animals, adding that if the tiger doubted his word he could easily judge for himself. So the two set forth, and, of course, every animal fled at sight of the tiger, who, too stupid to see how he had been gulled, conceived high respect for the fox, and spared his life.
Sometimes the tables are turned. Chanticleer gets his head out of Reynard’s mouth by making him answer the farmer, and in the valuable collection of Hottentot tales which the late Dr. Bleek, with some warrant, called Reynard in South Africa, the cock makes the jackal say his prayers, and flies off while the outwitted beast folds his hands and shuts his eyes.
But further quotations must be resisted; enough if it is made clearer that the beast-fable is the lineal descendant of barbaric conceptions of a life shared in common by man and brute, and another link thus added to the lengthening chain of the continuity of human history.
§ VI.
TOTEMISM: BELIEF IN DESCENT FROM ANIMAL OR PLANT.
In addition to the beliefs in the transformation of men into animals and in the transmigration of souls into the bodies of animals, we find among barbarous peoples a belief which is probably the parent of one and certainly nearly related to both, namely, in descent from the animal or plant, more often the former, whose name they bear. Its connection with transmigration is seen in the belief of the Moquis of Arizona, that after death they live in the form of their totemic animal, those of the deer family becoming deer, and so on through the several gentes. The belief survives in its most primitive and vivid forms among two races, the aborigines of Australia and the North American Indians. The word “totemism,” given to it both in its religious and social aspects, is derived from the Algonquin “dodaim” or “dodhaim,” meaning “clanmark.” Among the Australians the word “kobong,” meaning “friend” or “protector,” is the generic term for the animal or plant by which they are known. It is somewhat akin in significance to the Indian words “manitou,” “oki,” etc., comprehending “the manifestations of the unseen world, yet conveying no sense of personal unity,” which are commonly translated by the misleading word “medicine;” hence “medicine-men.”
The family name, or second name borne by all the tribes in lineal descent, and which corresponds to our surname, i.e. super nomen, or “over-name,” is derived from names of beasts, birds, plants, etc., around which traditions of their transformation into men linger. Sir George Grey[44] says that there is a mysterious connection between a native and his kobong. It is his protecting angel, like the “daimôn” of Socrates, like the “genius” of the early Italian. “If it is an animal, he will not kill one of the species to which it belongs, should he find it asleep, and he always kills it reluctantly and never without affording it a chance of escape. The family belief is that some one individual of the species is their dearest friend, to kill whom would be a great crime,” as, in Hindu belief, when a Rajah was said to have entered at death into the body of a fish, a “close time” was at once decreed. Among the Indian tribes we find well-nigh the whole fauna and flora represented, their totems being the Bear, Turtle, Deer, Snake, Eagle, Pike, Corn, Tobacco, etc. Like the Australians, these tribes regarded themselves as being of the breed of their particular animal-totem, and avoided hunting, slaying, and eating (of which more presently) the creature under whose form the ancestor was thought to be manifest. The Chippeways carried their respect even farther. Deriving their origin from the dog, they at one time refrained from employing their supposed canine ancestors in dragging their sledges. The Bechuana and other people of South Africa will avoid eating their tribe-animal or wearing its skin. The same prohibitions are found among tribes in Northern Asia, and the Vogulitzi of Siberia, when they have killed a bear, address it formally, maintaining “that the blame is to be laid on the arrows and iron, which were made and forged by the Russians!” Among the Delawares the Tortoise gens claimed supremacy over the others, because their ancestor, who had become a fabled monster in their mythology, bore their world on his back. The California Indians are in interesting agreement with Lord Monboddo when, in claiming descent from the prairie wolf, they account for the loss of their tails by the habit of sitting, which, in course of time, wore them down to the stump! The Kickapoos say their ancestors had tails, and that when they lost them the “impudent fox sent every morning to ask how their tails were, and the bear shook his fat sides at the joke.” The Patagonians are said to have a number of animal deities, creators of the several tribes, some being of the caste of the guanaco and others of the ostrich. In short, the group of beliefs and practices found among races in the lower stages of culture point to a widespread common attitude towards the mystery of life around them. In speaking of totemism among the Red races Dr. Brinton thinks that the free use of animate symbols to express abstract ideas, which he finds so frequent, is the source of a confusion which has led to their claiming literal descent from wild beasts. But the barbaric mind bristles with contradictions and mutually destructive conceptions; nothing is too wonderful, too bizarre, for its acceptance, and the belief in actual animal descent is not the most remarkable or far-fetched among the articles of its creed.
The subject of totemism is full of interest both on its religious and social side:—
On its religious side it has given rise, or, if this be not conceded, impetus, to that worship of animals which assuredly had its source in the attribution of mysterious power through some spirit within them, making them deity incarnate.
On its social side it has led to prohibitions which are inwoven among the customs and prejudices of civilised communities. But, before speaking of these prohibitions, the barbaric mode of reckoning descent should be noticed.
The family name borne by most Australian tribes is perpetuated by the children, whether boys or girls, taking their mother’s name. Precisely the same custom is found among some American Indians, the children of both sexes being of the mother’s clan. Among the Moquis of Arizona all the members of each gens trace descent from a common ancestor; they are regarded as brothers and sisters.[45] Now, the family, as we define it, does not exist in savage communities, nor, as Mr. McLennan says in his very remarkable work on Primitive Marriage, had “the earliest human groups any idea of kinship, ... the physical root of which could be discerned only through observation and reflection.” Where the relations of the sexes were confused and promiscuous, the oldest system in which the idea of blood-ties was expressed was a system of kinship through the mother. The habits of the “much-married” primitive men made mistake about any one’s mother less likely than mistake about his father; and, if in civilised times it is, as the saying goes, a wise child that knows its own father, he was, in barbarous times, a wise father who knew his own child. Examples tracing the kinship through females, father and offspring being never of the same clan, abound in both ancient and modern authorities, and perhaps the most amusing one that can be given is found in Dr. Morgan’s Systems of Consanguinity. He says that the “natives of the province of Keang-se are celebrated among the natives of the other Chinese provinces for the mode or form used by them in address, namely, ‘Laon peaon,’ which, freely translated, means, ‘Oh, you old fellow, brother mine by some of the ramifications of female relationship!’”[46]
The prohibitions arising out of or confirmed by totemism are two: 1. Against intermarriage between those of the same name or crest. 2. Against the eating of the totem by any member of the tribe called after it.
1. Among both Australians and Indians a man is forbidden to marry in his own clan, i.e. any woman of his own surname or badge, no matter where she was born or however distantly related to him. The Navajoes of Arizona say that if they married in their own clan “their bones would dry up and they would die.”
Were this practice of “Exogamy,” as marriage outside the totem-kin is called, limited to one or two places, it might be classed among exceptional local customs based on a tradition, say, of some heated blood-feud between the tribes. But its prevalence among savage or semi-savage races all the world over points to reasons the nature of which is still a crux to the anthropologists. The late Mr. McLennan, whose opinion on such a matter is entitled to the most weight, connects it with the custom of female infanticide, which, rendering women scarce, led at once to polyandry, or one female to several males, within the tribe, and to the capturing of women from other tribes. This last-named practice strengthens Mr. McLennan’s theory. He cites numerous instances from past and present barbarous races, and traces its embodiment in formal code until we come to the mock relics of the custom in modern times, as, for example, the harmless “survival” in bride-lifting, that is, stealing, as in the word “cattle-lifting.”
Connected with this custom is the equally prevailing one which forbids intercourse between relations, as especially between a couple and their fathers and mothers-in-law, and which also forbids mentioning their names. So far as the aversion which the savage has to telling his own name, or uttering that of any person (especially of the dead) or thing feared by him is concerned, the reason is not far to seek. It lies in that confusion between names and things which marks all primitive thinking. The savage, who shrinks from having his likeness taken in the fear that a part of himself is being carried away thereby, regards his name as something through which he may be harmed. So he will use all sorts of roundabout phrases to avoid saying it, and even change it that he may elude his foes, and puzzle or cheat Death when he comes to look for him. But why a son-in-law should not see the face of his mother-in-law, for so it is among the Navajoes, (where the offender would, they say, go blind), the Aranaks of South America, the Caribs and other tribes of more northern regions, the Fijians, Sumatrans, Dyaks, the natives of Australia, the Zulus, in brief, along the range of the lower culture, is a question to which no satisfactory answer has been given, and to which reference is here made because of its connection with totemism.
2. That the animal which is the totem of the tribe should not be eaten, even where men did not hesitate to eat men of another totem, is a custom for which it is less hard to account. The division of flesh into two classes of forbidden and permitted, of clean and unclean, with the resulting artificial liking or repulsion for food which custom arising out of that division has brought about, is probably referable to old beliefs in the inherent sacredness of certain animals. The Indians of Charlotte Island never eat crows, because they believe in crow-ancestors, and they smear themselves with black paint in memory of that tradition; the Dacotahs would neither kill nor eat their totems, and if necessity compels these and like barbarians to break the law, the meal is preceded by profuse apologies and religious ceremonies over the slain. Although the aborigines of Victoria, who are to be ranked among the lowest savages extant, devour the most loathsome things, worms, slugs, and vermin, they have a classification of meats to be eaten or avoided. A Kumite is deeply grieved when hunger compels him to eat anything which bears his name, but he may satisfy his hunger with anything that is Krokee. The abstention of the Brahmans from meat, the pseudo-revealed injunction to the Hebrews against certain flesh-foods (has that against pork its origin in the forgotten tradition of descent from a boar?), need no detailing here. But, as parallels, some restrictions amongst the ancient dwellers in these islands are of value. It was, according to Cæsar,[47] a crime to eat the domestic fowl, or goose, or hare, and to this day the last-named is an object of disgust in certain parts of Russia and Brittany. The oldest Welsh laws contain several allusions to the magical character of the hare, which was thought to change its sex every month or year, and to be the companion of the witches, who often assumed its shape.[48] The revulsion against horse-flesh as food may have its origin in the sacredness of the white horses, which, as Tacitus remarks,[49] were kept by the Germans at the public cost in groves holy to the gods, whose secrets they knew, and whose decrees regarding mortals their neighings interpreted. That this animal was a clan-totem among our forefathers there can be no doubt, and the proofs are with us in the white horses carved in outline on the chalk hills of Berkshire and the west, as in the names and crests of clan descendants.
The totem is not only the clan-name indicating descent from a common ancestor. It is also the clan-symbol, badge, or crest. Where the tribes among whom it is found are still in the picture-writing stage, i.e. when the idea is expressed by a portrait of the thing itself instead of by some sound-sign—a stage in writing corresponding to the primitive stage in language, when words were imitative—there we find the rude hieroglyphic of the totem a means of intercourse between different tribes, as well as with whites. A striking example of the use of such totemic symbols occurs in a petition sent by some Western Indian tribes to the United States Congress for the right to fish in certain small lakes near Lake Superior.
The leading clan is represented by a picture of the crane; then follow three martens, as totems of three tribes; then the bear, the man-fish, and the cat-fish, also totems. From the eye and heart of each of the animals runs a line connecting them with the eye and heart of the crane, to show that they are all of one mind, and the eye of the crane has also a line connecting it with the lakes on which the tribes have their eyes, and another line running towards Congress.
In the barbaric custom of painting or carving the totem on oars, on the bows and sides of canoes, on weapons, on pillars in the front of houses, and on the houses themselves; in tattooing it on various parts of the body (in the latter case, in some instances, together with pictures of exploits; so that the man carries on his person an illustrated history of his own life) we have the remote and forgotten origin of heraldic emblems. The symbols of civilised nations, as, e.g. the Imperial eagle, which so many states of ancient and modern renown have chosen; the crests of families of rank, with their fabulous monsters, as the cherub, the Greek gryps, surviving in the griffin, the dragon, the unicorn, which, born of rude fancy or terrified imagination, are now carved on the entrance-gates to the houses of the great; the armorial bearings on carriages; the crest engraven on ring or embossed on writing-paper, these are the lineal descendants of the totem; and the Indians, who could see no difference between their system of manitous and those of the white people, with their spread-eagle or their lion-rampant, made a shrewd guess that would not occur to many a parvenu applying at the Heralds’ College for a crest. The continuity is traceable in the custom of the Mexicans and other civilised nations of painting the totemic animals on their banners, flags, crests, and other insignia; and it would seem that we have in the totem the key to the mystery of those huge animal-shaped mounds which abound on the North American continent.
The arbitrary selection in the “ages of chivalry” of such arms as pleased the knightly fancy or ministered to its pride, or, as was often the case, resembled the name in sound, together with the ignorance then and till recently existing as to the origin of crests, and also the discredit into which a seemingly meaningless vanity had fallen, have made it difficult to trace the survival of the totem in the crests even of that numerous company of the Upper Ten who claim descent from warriors who came over with the Conqueror. But there is no doubt that an inquiry conducted on the lines suggested above, and not led into by-paths by false analogies, would yield matter of interest and value. It would add to the evidence of that common semi-civilised stage out of which we have risen. Such names as the Horsings, the Wylfings, the Derings, the Ravens, the Griffins, perhaps hold within themselves traces of the totem name of the horse, wolf, deer, raven, and that “animal fantasticall,” the griffin. In Scotland we find the clan Chattan, or the wild cat; in Ireland “the men of Osory were called by a name signifying the wild red deer.” On the other hand such names may have been given merely as nicknames (i.e. ekename or the added name, from eke, “also,” or “to augment”), suggested by the physical or mental likeness to the thing after which they are called.
But it is time to turn to the religious significance of the totem, as shown among races worshipping the animal which is their supposed ancestor.
At first glance this seems strong argument in support of Mr. Herbert Spencer’s theory that all forms of religion, and all myth, have their origin in ancestor worship. The mysterious power of stimulation, of excitation to frenzy, or of healing and soothing, or of poisoning, which certain plants possess, has been attributed to indwelling spirits, which, as Mr. Spencer contends, are regarded as human and ancestral. Very many illustrations of this occur, as, e.g. the worship of the Soma plant, and its promotion as a deity among the Aryans; the use of tobacco in religious ceremonies among the tribes of both Americas; whilst now and again we find trees and plants as totems. The Moquis have a totem-kin called the tobacco-plant, and also one called the seed-grass. One of the Peruvian Incas was called after the native name of the tobacco-plant; and among the Ojibways the buffalo grass was carried as a charm, and its god said to cause madness.
In Algonquin myth “there is a spirit for the corn, another for beans, another for squashes. They are sisters, and are very kind to each other. There are spirits in the water, in fire, in all the trees and berries, in herbs and in tobacco, in the grass.”
The worship of animals is on Mr. Spencer’s theory explained as due to the giving of a nickname of some beast or bird to a remote ancestor, the belief arising in course of time that such animal was the actual progenitor, hence its worship. We call a man a bear, a pig, or a vampire, in symbolic phrase, and the figure of speech remains a figure of speech with us. But the savage loses the metaphor, and it crystallises into hard matter-of-fact. So the traditions have grown, and Black Eagle, Strong Buffalo, Big Owl, Tortoise, etc., take the shape of actual forefathers of the tribe bearing their name and crest. According to the same theory the adoration of sun, moon, and mountains, etc., is due to a like source. Some famous chief was called the Sun; the metaphor was forgotten; the personal and concrete, as the more easily apprehended, remained; hence worship of the powers of nature “is a form of ancestor-worship, which has lost in a still greater degree the character of the original.”[50]
The objection raised in these pages to the extreme application of the solar theory applies with equal force to Mr. Spencer’s limitation of the origin of myth and religion to one source. Having cleared Scylla, we must not dash against Charybdis. Religion has its origin neither in fear of ghosts, as Mr. Spencer’s theory assumes, nor in a perception of the Infinite inherent in man, as Professor Max Müller holds. Rather does it lie in man’s sense of vague wonder in the presence of powers whose force he cannot measure, and his expressions towards which are manifold. There is underlying unity, but there are, to quote St. Paul, “diversities of operation.” There is just that surface unlikeness which one might expect from the different physical conditions and their resulting variety of subtle influences surrounding various races; influences shaping for them their gods, their upper and nether worlds; influences of climate and soil which made the hell of volcanic countries an abyss of sulphurous stifling smoke and everlasting fire, and the hell of cold climates a place of deathly frost; which gave to the giant-gods of northern zones their rugged awfulness, and to the goddesses of the sunny south their soft and stately grace. The theory of ancestor-worship as the basis of every form of religion does not allow sufficient play for the vagaries in which the same thing will be dressed by the barbaric fear and fancy, nor for the imagination as a creative force in the primitive mind even at the lowest at which we know it. And, of course, beneath that lowest lies a lower never to be fathomed. We are apt to talk of primitive man as if his representatives were with us in the black fellows who are at the bottom of the scale, forgetting that during unnumbered ages he was a brute in everything but the capacity by which at last the ape and tiger were subdued within him. Of the beginnings of his thought we can know nothing, but the fantastic forms in which it is first manifest compel us to regard him as a being whose feelings were uncurbed by reason. That ancestor-worship is one mode among others of man’s attitude towards the awe-begetting, mystery-inspiring universe, none can deny. That his earliest temples, as defined sacred spots, were tombs; that he prayed to his dead dear ones, or his dead feared ones, as the case may be, is admitted. From its strong personal character, ancestor-worship was, without doubt, one of the earliest expressions of man’s attitude before the world which his fancy filled with spirits. It flourishes among barbarous races to-day; it was the prominent feature of the old Aryan religion; it has entered into Christian practice in the worship of saints, and perhaps the only feature of religion which the modern Frenchman has retained is the culte des morts. That it was a part of the belief of the Emperor Napoleon III. the following extract from his will shows:—“We must remember that those we love look down upon us from heaven and protect us. It is the soul of my great Uncle which has always guided and supported me. Thus will it be with my son also if he proves worthy of his name.”
But the worship of ancestors is not primal. The comparatively late recognition of kinship by savages, among whom some rude form of religion existed, tells against it as the earliest mode of worship. Moreover, Nature is bigger than man, and this he was not slow to feel. Even if it be conceded that sun-myth and sun-worship once arose through the nicknaming of an ancestor as the Sun, we must take into account the force of that imagination which enabled the unconscious myth-maker, or creed-maker, to credit the moving orbs of heaven with personal life and will. The faculty which could do that might well express itself in awe-struck forms without intruding the ancestral ghost. Further, the records of the classic religions, themselves preserving many traces of a primitive nature-worship, point to an adoration of the great and bountiful, as well as to a sense of the maleficent and fateful, in earth and heaven which seem prior to the more concrete worship of forefathers and chieftains.
If for the worship of these last we substitute a general worship of spirits, there seems little left on which to differ. As aids to the explanation of the belief in animal ancestors and their subsequent deification and worship, as of the lion, the bull, the serpent, etc., we have always present in the barbaric mind the tendency to credit living things, and indeed lifeless, but moving ones, with a passion, a will, and a power to help or harm immeasurably greater than man’s. This is part and parcel of that belief in spirits everywhere which is the key to savage philosophy, and the growth of which is fostered by such secondary causes as the worship of ancestors.
§ VII.
SURVIVAL OF MYTH IN HISTORY.
For proofs of the emergence of the higher out of the lower in philosophy and religion, to say nothing of less exalted matters, whether the beast-fable or the nursery rhyme, as holding barbaric thought in solution, examples have necessarily been drawn from the mythology of past and present savage races. But these are too remote in time or standpoint to stir other than a languid interest in the reader’s mind; their purpose is served when they are cited and classified as specimens. Not thus is it with examples drawn nearer home from sources at which our young thirst for the stirring and romantic was slaked. When we learn that famous names and striking episodes are in some rare instances only transformed and personified natural phenomena, or, as occurring everywhere, possibly variants of a common legend, the far-reaching influence of primitive thought comes to us in more vivid and exciting form. And although one takes in hand this work of disenchantment in no eager fashion, the loss is more seeming than real. Whether the particular tale of bravery, of selflessness, of faithfulness, has truth of detail, matters little compared with the fact that its reception the wide world over witnesses to human belief, even at low levels, in the qualities which have given man empire over himself and ever raised the moral standard of the race. Moreover, in times like these, when criticism is testing without fear or favour the trustworthiness of records of the past, whether of Jew or Gentile, the knowledge of the legendary origin of events woven into sober history prepares us to recognise how the imagination has fed the stream of tradition, itself no mean tributary of that larger stream of history, the purity of which is now subject of analysis. As a familiar and interesting example let us take the story of William Tell.
Everybody has heard how, in the year 1307 (or, as some say, 1296) Gessler, Vogt (or Governor) of the Emperor Albert of Hapsburg, set a hat on a pole as symbol of the Imperial power, and ordered every one who passed by to do obeisance to it; and how a mountaineer named Wilhelm Tell, who hated Gessler and the tyranny which the symbol expressed, passed by without saluting the hat, and was at once seized and brought before Gessler, who ordered that as punishment Tell should shoot an apple off the head of his own son. As resistance was vain, the apple was placed on the boy’s head, when Tell bent his bow, and the arrow, piercing the apple, fell with it to the ground. Gessler saw that Tell, before shooting, had stuck a second arrow in his belt, and, asking the reason, received this for answer: “It was for you; had I shot my child, know that this would have pierced your heart.”
Now, this story first occurs in the chronicle of Melchior Russ, who wrote at the end of the fifteenth century, i.e. about one hundred and seventy years after its reputed occurrence. The absence of any reference to it in contemporary records caused doubt to be thrown upon it three centuries ago. Guillimann, the author of a work on Swiss antiquities, published in 1598, calls it a fable, but subscribes to the current belief in it because the tale is so popular! The race to which he belonged is not yet extinct. A century and a half later a more fearless sceptic, who said that the story was of Danish origin, was condemned by the Canton of Uri to be burnt alive, and in the well-timed absence of the offender his book was ordered to be burnt by the common hangman. But the truth is great, and prevails. G. von Wyss, the Swiss historian, has pointed out that the name of Wilhelm Tell does not occur even once in the history of the three cantons, neither is there any trace that a Vogt named Gessler ever served the house of Hapsburg there. Moreover, the legend does not correspond to any fact of a period of oppression of the Swiss at the hands of their Austrian rulers.
“There exist in contemporary records no instances of wanton outrage and insolence on the Hapsburg side. It was the object of that power to obtain political ascendancy, not to indulge its representatives in lust or wanton insult,” and, where records of disputes between particular persons occur, “the symptoms of violence, as is natural enough, appear rather on the side of the Swiss than on that of the aggrandising Imperial house.”[51]
Candour, however, requires that the “evidence” in support of the legend should be stated. There is the fountain on the supposed site of the lime-tree in the market-place at Altdorf by which young Tell stood, as well as the colossal plaster statue of the hero himself which confronts us as we enter the quaint village. But more than this, the veritable cross-bow itself is preserved in the arsenal at Zurich!
However, although the little Tell’s chapel, as restored, was opened with a national fête, in the presence of two members of the Federal Council, in June 1883,[52] the Swiss now admit in their school-teaching that the story of the Apfelschusz is legendary.
Freudenberger, who earned his death-sentence for affirming that the story came from Denmark, was on the right track, for the following variant of it is given by Saxo Grammaticus, a Danish writer of the twelfth century, who puts it as happening in the year 950:—