There is a pleasant myth told by the inhabitants of the island of Mangaia in the South Pacific. When the Creator of all things had ordered the solid land to rise from the primeval waters, he walked abroad to survey his work. “It is good,” said he aloud to himself. “Good,” answered an echo from a neighbouring hill. “What!” exclaimed the Creator. “Is some one here already? Am not I first?” “I first,” answered the echo. Therefore the Mangaians assert that earliest of all existences is the bodiless Voice.[91] It is their way of saying, “In the beginning was the Word.”

Not only may we call it the first, it is also the mightiest of the unseen agencies which mould man and his destinies.

“Power over men,” remarks Count Tolstoï in one of his essays, “lies not in material force, but in thought and its clear expression.” Disraeli, that subtlest of diplomats, once said, “We govern men with—words.”

No idea can be clearly conveyed to another unless there is a word to express it. Inward thought and outward utterance are the correlated conditions of intelligent advancement. The spoken word evokes in the mind of the hearer the picture, the emotion, the reasoning, which is occupying our own. A thousand minds are brought instantly to bear on the same thought by the words in the mouth of one. I cannot place too high the instant and magical effect of the word.

Not only does it convey a new thought to the mind, but it is itself the begetter of thought. It is a seed sown, which grows and branches, bearing flower and fruit, beauteous and everlasting, or noxious and destructive.

Through the faculty of speech, social life becomes possible; on it depends the sweet interchange of souls; by it we are led to think in unison; through it we share the meditations of the philosopher, and the inspired visions of the poet and the prophet.

If there is any way in which the spirits of the sky and air, the hosts of the Divine, can touch and teach our souls, it must be chiefly through the spoken word.

Every religion of the world bears witness to this. There is no other element in them in which all join with like unanimity. From the rudest to the ripest they echo the verse of the evangelist philosopher when he wrote: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

The highest teachings of them all are expressed in the formula: “And the word of the Lord came saying—”

We may go back to the earliest forms of the ancient Egyptian religion, and we find the doctrine that the man who had learned and could pronounce the divine words revealed through the god Thoth (Thought, Mind), by their utterance would be elevated to the god, and be blended with him, as one and inseparable. “The primary idea concerning the ritual formulas was assimilation to God, brought about by the power of the words themselves.”[92]

Probably in all primitive faiths the word is regarded as a magical power in itself. In Egypt it was believed that by words the most powerful of the gods could be made obedient to the will of man. By them, as exorcisms or incantations everywhere, demons could be loosed or bound, and spirits summoned from the vasty deep. The stock in trade of the Indian medicine-man is principally his store of exorcisms, and among the Goras of North-Western India any one can become a priest who will learn the formulas which compel the demons.[93]

Our word “charm” comes from the Latin carmen, the sacred rhythmic formula, such as Virgil averred could by its occult power drag the moon from the sky.

There were such songs scarcely less potent among the Australian Blacks, which could summon the rain in dry seasons or cause it to cease in floods.[94]

No demon, however malevolent, can resist, in their belief, the power of the right word. The natives of New South Wales say that an evil spirit in the shape of a dwarf with monstrous head roams the woods at night and devours those whom he meets. But if the man utters the word “Boonbolong,” the dwarf passes on his way and does not harm him.[95]

When Jesus was in Capernaum, and at his command an unclean spirit had gone out of a man possessed, the multitude said one to the other,—τις εστι ουτος λογος, “What is this Word, by the authority and might of which this man casts out devils?” (Luke iv., 36.) They believed he used some cabalistic formula of exorcism which constrained the demons to obey his will.

Nowhere did the Word display its terrible effect more fearfully than in the curse or imprecation. In ancient Assyria, writes Professor Sayce, “The power of the mamit, or curse, was such that the gods themselves could not transgress it.”[96] Not only did it unloose the demons of destruction, but it constrained the gods against their will, changing them from protectors to enemies.[97]

Amid savage tribes, in undoubted and repeated instances, the curse kills as certainly as a knife. Among the western Indians of our country, when a medicine-man “gathers his medicine,” that is, rises to the full height of inspired volition, and utters a withering curse on his antagonist, commanding him to die, the latter knows all hope is lost. Sometimes he drops dead on the spot, or at best lingers through a few days of misery.[98] The Australians believe that the curse of a potent magician will kill at the distance of a hundred miles.[99]

Not only is the word thus mighty in the unseen world, but it is itself the very efflux and medium of the divine power itself.

Thus in the drama of creation recorded in the first chapter of Genesis we read: “And God said, ‘Light, be,’ and light was”; and in the corresponding myth of the Quiche Indians of Central America, the maker of the world calls forth, Uleu! Earth! and at the word the solid land grew forth.[100]

Sir George Grey relates a story that in New Zealand there was a huge, carved wooden head, which could speak, and by the dreadful might of its words slew all who approached it. But when by superior magic its voice was reduced to a whisper, its power was gone and it was destroyed.[101]

It is to be noted that the magical influence of the word is independent of its meaning. It is distinctly not the idea, image, or truth which it conveys to which is ascribed its efficacy. On the contrary, the most potent of all words are those which have no meaning at all or of which the sense has been lost.

This is constantly seen in the formulas of savage tribes. They preserve archaisms of language no longer understood by those who utter them, and in other instances they are obviously made up of syllables strung together without regard to intelligibility.

The same fact is abundantly shown in the cabalistic jargon of classical and mediæval diviners, and in the charms drawn from contemporary folk-lore. Indeed, the famous cabalist, Pico de Mirandola, asserts that a word without meaning has most influence over the demons.

Not only one or a few words may be thus unintelligible, but long communications may be in articulate sounds conveying no thought whatever. This is the “gift of tongues,” the power to speak in unknown languages.

It is common in savage life. Many of the important chants at the sacred ceremonies are mere iterations of meaningless syllables. The idea would seem to be that what men cannot understand, the gods do; or else, that it is the god expressing himself through human organs but in a speech unknown to human ears. Bishop Galloway says that the charm songs of the Zulus are often quite unintelligible to themselves[102]; and this is one of many examples.

Of all words, the most sacred is the Name. In primitive thought, the personal name of an individual is not merely an attribute, it is an integral part of his Self, his Ego. The Eskimos say that a man consists of three parts, his body, his soul, and his name, and of these the last mentioned alone achieves immortality. This seems very advanced. Most of our ambitious men appear to think more of rendering their names than their souls worthy of immortality. Very generally, the name was associated with the personal guardian spirit, derived from it or indicating it, and hence received a ceremonial sanctity.[103]

As being a part of oneself, injury or contumely heaped upon a name reacted upon the individual who bore it, and even life could be destroyed in this manner.

For this reason, throughout America the natives rarely disclosed their real appellations, but were designated by nicknames. In Australia some tribes were so cautious that the young men on entering adult life renounced the names by which they had been known and assumed no other; while a woman preserved indeed her appellation, but no one except her husband was entitled to pronounce it.[104] The Dyaks take the prudent precaution, after an attack of illness, to change their names; so that the demon who sent the sickness may not recognise them, and continue his malevolent pursuit.[105]

In Polynesia, where the name was not thus concealed, it could be applied, according to the ceremonial law, only to the person, although it was generally a common noun. Hence arose the curious custom called tepi. All words which formed part of the name of the chieftain, and all syllables of other words which had a similar sound were dropped from the language and others substituted for them during his lifetime. Thus, forty or fifty of the most common terms of the language would drop out of use at once, and as many more be materially changed in sound, to the great annoyance of missionaries and visitors.[106]

The Kamschatkans were so particular that they would not name the bear or wolf, for these animals understood the language of men, and would be offended at such familiarity![107]

Even if it does not hear, the power for good or evil which a being has, can, in primitive opinion, be communicated through its name. For that reason the priest known as the flamen dialis among the Romans would not only avoid touching a dog or bear, but he would not pronounce their names, lest he should be contaminated! And to this day a Mohammedan, if he pronounces the word for “hog,” will spit, that his mouth may not be defiled by the name of the unclean beast.

Even more universal was the avoidance of the names of the dead. This prevailed throughout Africa, Australia, Tasmania, Polynesia, and America. The reason was, that the name was held to be a part of the spirit of the departed, and to pronounce it would disturb the rest of the grave, and probably indeed bring the perturbed spirit to the circle of auditors.[108]

If such was the case with the names of men and beasts, how sacred must be the names of the gods!

This is an extraordinary feature, common to the rudest superstitions of savage and the most developed faiths of civilised lands, and it has for its basis the conception of the name as a real attribute, a part of the Self.

“In all the religions of ancient Asia,” writes Lenormant, “the mysterious Name was considered a real and divine being, who had a personal existence and exclusive power over both nature and the world of spirits.”[109]

In the name dwelt the essential power of the deity. An Egyptian magical formula, placed in the mouth of a god, reads:

The knowledge of this name by another enabled him to exert a power over the god himself. That by naming a demon, he can be forced to appear, was a cardinal principle of ancient magic. “The list of divine names possessed by the Roman pontiffs in their indigitamenta was their most efficacious magical instrument, laying at their mercy all the forces of the spirit world.”[111]

For this reason, the gods of ancient Egypt sedulously concealed their names, and we cannot doubt that it was the fear of some such subjection of their deity through the malicious use of his name, which led the early Jews to conceal it so well that it is now lost. It was the same with the Semitic Arabians. Instead of the true divine name, they substituted Allah, the Mighty One, so that now the original is conjectural or unknown.

This extends to the rudest tribes. The African traveller Holub says that the actual name of the god of the Marutse and allied tribes along the Zambesi river is Njambe; but to avoid revealing this, they employ the term Molemo, “He above.” Among the south-eastern Australian tribes their leading deity is Turramulun (the One-legged), who lives in the sky. His name is never revealed to women, nor to youths before their initiation to manhood.[112]

The Choctaw Indians regarded the name of their highest divinity as self-existing, essential, and unspeakable. Therefore, when it was necessary to refer to him, they adopted a circumlocution, for, says their historian, “according to their fixed standard of speech, had they made any nearer approach to the beloved Name, it would have been reckoned a profanation.”[113]

How completely this notion has survived among ourselves is shown by the second clause of that prayer on which we have all been brought up, “Hallowed be Thy Name.” But how few who repeat it reflect that the name referred to, whatever it was, is now through long concealment totally lost!

Thus we see that the doctrine of “the ineffable Name” is the common property of savage and cultured faiths.

From the misuse of the name to compel the obedience of the god, or to injure his dignity and worth, came the idea of profanity, sternly forbidden by the early Jewish law,—“Take not the name of the Lord in vain”—and by many other faiths of a primitive aspect.

Quite consistently with this idea of real existence in names, the god who had many names had just as many powers or faculties. For that reason, the prominent gods of ancient Egypt, especially Isis, were called upon by so numerous epithets that the Greeks spoke of them as “myrionomous,” ten-thousand-named. In later Babylonian times all the names of the fifty great gods were ascribed to Êa, by which process they were themselves absorbed into his being. “When they lost their names, they lost their personality as well.”[114] To the Mohammedan the “One hundred names of God” repeated in the Koran express the multitude of His powers.

The same tendency is visible in the native religions of America. The Mexicans applied many names to the same divinity, and in the Popol Vuh, the sacred book of the Quiches, the chief deity is called by a variety of titles, some sounding strange to us, as “the opossum-hunter,” the “green snake,” the “calebash,” all of symbolic sense.[115]

In the South Seas, the name of a god, adopted by a chief, identified him in the opinion of the people with the god and secured for him the reverence and adoration ascribed to his divine namesake.[116]

This idea is that which in many early and later faiths led to what are called the “theophorous” or god-bearing names, where the individual is called by the proper name of a saint or god. They were especially frequent in early Semitic religions, and are customary among Catholics to-day.[117]

We find their origin in the custom, very general among the American Indians, for the person to take the name of the spirit who appears to him during the vigils and fasts which attend the ceremonies of initiation to manhood. By assuming the name of the divinity, the two natures or essences are believed to be united. This was precisely also the opinion of the early Christians, as we see in the expression of St. Ephrem, a Syrian saint of the fourth century: “Merciful was the Lord in that He clad on our Names. His Names make us great; our Names make Him small.”[118]

If we seek the explanation of this strange power attributed to words and names, often apart from their signification, we shall find it in their extreme activity as agents of mental suggestion. They are intense psychic stimulants, stirring the soul to its depths. The Word is by odds the most effective of all agencies to bring about altered and abnormal mental conditions either in the individual or in the mass. Through it, judiciously applied, the profoundest hypnotic trance, or the wildest, maniacal nervous seizures can be produced at will.[119]

The repetition of a word greatly heightens its suggestive influence and promotes the exclusion from the mind of all other concepts and associations than its own. In many languages, a word repeated is equivalent to the superlative degree, and in every tongue the repetition has a similar effect, as in the phrase: “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Sabaoth.”

No words in this relation are more efficient than names. Consider what our own lives would be if we had to change our names every year, how it would seem to obliterate our personality, how it would dissipate all dreams of posthumous glory and renown. Our consciousness of Self would suffer diminution, and the keenest interest of our lives would be lost. Our name is really and truly a part of ourselves, and he who would rob us of it would leave us poor indeed. Why is every point of view carved with the names of obscure tourists, why does it give us pleasure to note our names among the hundreds at some grand function, but that we think it more desirable to live “as naked nominations, without desert or noble deeds,” as Sir Thomas Browne said, than to pass away and leave not that little which the Roman poet considered the least,—nominis umbra, “the shadow of a name.”

For the practical purposes of life the name confers or creates the personality. This fact exerted a profound influence in the earliest development of religion. The vague sense of spiritual power first became centred in the idea of an individual, of a personal god, when it received a name.

The primitive words of barbaric tongues used to signifying the divine have not the connotation of individuality. Wakan, mahopa, manito, teotl, huaca, ku, are such words from American languages, not one of which conveys the concept of personality. That concept was first gained when some single expression of spiritual power was differentiated and named.[120]

The essential religious element in the Word is its power to bring man into relation to the gods. This is possible in three directions,—we may address them; they may address us; or we may talk about them. These furnish the three forms of sacred expression in speech: 1. The word to the gods,—Prayer; 2. The word from the gods,—Revelation; and 3. The word about the gods,—the Myth. We will consider each of these.

I. The Word to the Gods.—1. The Word to the gods is Prayer. It is a very prominent and nigh universal element in primitive religions. The injunction “Pray always” is nowhere else so nearly carried out. Captain Clark, an officer of our army with the widest experience of Indian life, writes: “It seems a startling assertion, but it is, I think, true, that there are no people who pray more than Indians. Both superstition and custom keep always in their minds the necessity for placating the anger of the invisible and omnipotent power, and for supplicating the active exercise of his faculties in their behalf.”[121]

In fact, Prayer may be said to be the life of the faith of savage tribes, and it is so recognised by themselves. According to the legends of the Maoris of New Zealand, when they first migrated to that island from Hawaii, they did not bring with them their ancestral gods, but took care to carry along the potent prayers which the gods cannot but hear and grant.[122]

Some writers have claimed that certain tribes have been found without any notion of an appeal to unseen agencies, and have quoted as instances the Yahgans of Tierra del Fuego, and the Mincopies of the Andaman Islands. But closer examination proves that the priests of the Yahgans call upon a mysterious being, Aiapakal,[123] and other invisible existences, and the Mincopies are acknowledged to have prayers at the present time.

The earliest hymns and prayers do not, as a rule, contain definite requests, but are general appeals to the god to be present, to partake of the feast which is spread, or to join the dance and to continue his good offices toward those who call upon him. Such are the hymns of the Rig Veda, and those of ancient Mexico, which I have collected and published.[124] They are like the evocatio deorum of the Romans.

The three forms of “the Word to the gods,” or Prayer, are those of thanksgiving, by praise or laudation; of petition for assistance or protection; and of penitence or contrition for neglect of duty. All these are common in the most primitive faiths. In all of them you will find the deity appealed to as great, mighty, a lord, a king, terror-inspiring, loving his followers, and by hundreds of such epithets of amplification and flattery. He is addressed endearingly as father or grandfather; not at all implying a physical relationship, as some modern writers have erroneously stated; but with reference to the loving care he is supposed to extend to his worshippers.

As we might expect, most of the petitions in primitive prayers are for material benefits. The burden of most of them is well expressed by one in the Rig Veda: “O God, prosper us in getting and in keeping!” They ask for increase of goods, abundant food, success in war, and fine weather.

Yet among the rudest there are signs of an appreciation of something higher. A prayer of the Khonds, a Dravidian tribe of Northern India, reads: “O Lord, we know not what is good for us. Thou knowest what it is. For it we pray.”

It is strange to find among the Navahoes, a rude hunting tribe of our western territories, an intense longing for the beautiful. One of their prayers runs: “O Lord on high, whose youth is immortal, ruler above, I have made you the offering, preserve my body and members, preserve it in beauty, make all things beautiful, let all be completed in beauty.”[125]

At other times the prayer is for moral control, as in this of a Sioux Indian: “O my grandfather, the Earth, I ask that thou givest me a long life and strength of body. When I go to war, let me capture many horses and kill many enemies. But in peace, let not anger enter my heart.”[126]

Penitential prayers are uttered when one has broken the ceremonial law or tabu; and in general, when misfortune and defeat seem to indicate that the gods are irritated at some insult offered them, though the worshipper may not be clear what it is.

“O merciful Lord,” says an Aztec prayer, “let this chastisement with which thou hast visited us give us freedom from evil and follies.”[127]

In many prayers we find formulas preserved which are no longer understood; and very frequently the power of the prayer is believed to be increased by repeating it a number of times. The prayer choruses of nearly all savage tribes offer endless examples of this. The notion of increased force by repetition, a notion founded on the augmented suggestive power of the Word through its iteration, to which I have already referred, is so common that it was especially noted and condemned by Jesus as of no spiritual value.

This form of prayer, indeed, degenerated into a mere magical formula, as we see was the case with the apostolic benediction of the Christian church during the middle ages, which became a charm in use by necromancers and sorcerers.

In its sublimest essence, however, prayer has been recognised as something far beyond any form of suppliancy. It is, as an orthodox authority says, “the habitual state of a being who constantly lives in relation to God, and cultivates a constant exchange with Him.”[128] So understood, it is even more than inspiration; it is a communion of spiritual life, a dwelling in God. This is the precise mental condition of many of the mystics and devotees of primitive religions. They are with the god, the god with and in them.

II. The Word from the Gods.—If the mere name of the god was thus mighty and thus venerated, how much more the words he himself uttered! The “Word of God,” as understood by the worshippers, is the kernel and core of every faith on earth. Every religion is, to its votaries, a revelation. None is so material, none so primitive, as to claim any other foundation than the expressed will of divinity. None is so devoid of ritual as to lack some means of ascertaining this will.

The word from the gods is clothed under two forms, the Law and the Prophets,—in other terms, Precept and Prediction. In every religion, from the most primitive to the highest, we find these two modes of divine utterance.

In the earliest phases of religion, the law is essentially prohibitory. It is in the form of the negative, “Thou shalt not——.” Ethnologists have adopted for this a word from Polynesian dialects, tabu, or tapu, akin to tapa, to name,[129] that which was solemnly named or announced being sacred, and hence forbidden to the profanum vulgus.

The tabu extends its veto into every department of primitive life. It forbids the use of certain articles of food or raiment; it hallows the sacred areas; it lays restrictions on marriage, and thus originates what is known as the totemic bond; it denounces various actions, often the most trivial and innocent, and thus lays the foundation for the ceremonial law.

The penalty for the infraction of the tabu includes all that flows from the anger of the gods, reaching to death itself. A few examples, from the very rudest religions, will serve to illustrate this.

The Kamschatkans in the beginning of the last century were very low in the scale of humanity and curiously pessimistic. They had a hero-god, Kutka, their mythic progenitor, of whom they told many strange and disgusting stories. They cursed him oftener than they blessed him, and refused to believe that anything good could come from the gods. But to escape the ill-will of these malevolent beings they practised various ceremonies and refrained from sundry actions calculated to displease those capricious spirits. Thus, one must not cook fish and flesh in the same pot, or he would be punished with sores; he must not step in the tracks of a bear, or he would be visited with a skin disease; he must not scrape the snow from his shoes with a knife, or there would be violent storms; and so on, through a long law of prohibitions.[130]

The Mincopies of the Andaman Islands have no forms of worship, they have no invocations to the gods, their language, indeed, has no original word for “prayer.” They believe firmly, however, in the existence of numerous spirits, not the souls of the deceased, but self-created and undying, who will injure them if they commit certain transgressions, such as to cook turtle or fish by burning a particular kind of wood; to roast a pig instead of boiling it, and so on.[131]

The Yahgans of Tierra del Fuego have been often, though erroneously, quoted as a tribe devoid of religion. Their ceremonial law was rigid. The hairs that fell from the head must be burned, or the individual would fall ill; the name of the dead must not be mentioned, or the ghost would return and plague them; the young ducklings must not be killed, or bad weather would follow.[132]

The tabu in Polynesia, whence it derives its name, was carried to an incredible degree of stringency. The dread of its violation was so vivid, that in itself it was often the cause of the death of the offender.[133]

The second form of the “Word from God” was when it was uttered as a prophecy, a prediction of the future. In this form it appears throughout the world under the innumerable aspects of divination, as oracles, prophetic utterances, forecasts of time to come, second-sight, clairvoyance, and the like.

The essence of every religious rite may be said to be divinatory, inasmuch as its final aim is either to learn or to modify the Will of God, and thus to influence the future of the individual or society by extra-natural agencies.

There is nothing in this derogatory to religion as an element of mind. The constant effort of the reason is to banish the idea of chance from the universe; and he who regards the Will of God as a law of the universe does exclude chance from its events just in proportion as he learns that Will and acts in conformity to it.

Prediction in primitive religions is by two widely different methods, Divination and Prophecy.

The diviner, relying on his own sense and reasoning powers, foretells the future by observation of certain trains of events which he believes reveal the intentions of the gods; the prophet is one inspired by the divine mind itself to speak its own words and to convey directly the thoughts and wishes of deity.

This distinction is visible in early religions. Any one can learn the “signs” and “omens” which will be auspicious or inauspicious for his undertakings; though, of course, to read their full significance one must have made special studies in the art of augury. To become an inspired prophet requires a much more serious preparation, and some form of communion direct with the gods must be established.

III.—The Word concerning the Gods. A brilliant French writer (E. Scherer) has said: “It was the Word that made the gods,” “Le mot, c’est l’artisan des idoles.” He but expressed in a pointed apothegm what the profound German mythologist Kuhn stated in more formal terms when he wrote: “The foundation of mythology is to be looked for in the domain of language.”

What, indeed, does the term “myth” itself mean? It is merely the Greek for “a word,” something spoken, and in this general sense it is used by Homer. Later, its connotation became restricted to what was spoken concerning the gods, the narratives of their doings, the descriptions of their abodes and attributes.

Men began to frame such tales the moment they consciously recognised the existence of such unseen agencies. They were founded on visions, dreams, and those vague mental states which, as I have shown, fill up so large a part of savage life. They were not intentional fictions, by any means, for the criteria between the real and unreal fade away in those psychic conditions, and the faintest hold on actuality is enough to guarantee an indefinitely complex fancy.

It was a strange error by one of the most earnest students of primitive religions, the Reverend W. Robertson Smith, when he advocated his theory that the myth was derived from the ritual, not the ritual from the myth.[134] Had he studied the actual religious condition of the rudest tribes, he would have found them with scarcely any ritual but a most abundant mythology; and he would have discovered that where the myth was taken from the ritual, it is when the latter has lost its original meaning, and some other is devised to explain it.

As examples of such notions, I may take the Bushmen of South Africa. They enjoy the general reputation of being the lowest of the human race. They have no temples, no altars, no ritual; yet the missionary Bleek collected among them thousands of tales concerning their gods in their relations to men and animals.[135]

The Andamanese are alleged to have no forms of worship whatever; but they have many myths about the mighty Puluga, self-created and immortal, about the origin of fire, and the transactions of the invisible spirits.

It would be easy to give many other examples, but it is enough to refute such an opinion by referring to the vast body of myths in all religious peoples which have no reference to ritual whatever.

The sources of mythology are psychic. They are not to be traced to the external world, whether ritual or natural. Myths are not figurative explanations of natural phenomena, they are not vague memories of ancestors and departed heroes, they are not philosophic speculations or poetic fancies. They are distinctly religious in origin, and, when genuine, are the fruit of that insight into the divine, that “beatific vision,” on which I have laid such emphasis as the real and only foundation of all religions whatsoever.

They receive their form and expression through spoken language, and are, therefore, intimately associated with, often dependent upon its sounds, and laws. In how many ways this may influence them I may briefly mention.

Primitive language is predominantly concrete. The connotations of its terms are mainly objective. By this necessity arose the materialisation of the spiritual thought. It had to be expressed under external imagery.

Primitive languages are usually intensely individualising and specific. There is scarcely a native tongue in America in which one could say “hand”; one must always add a pronoun indicating whose hand is meant, “my, thy, his,” hand.

The generic distinctions in such tongues are often far reaching and real, not purely formal, as with us. A word in the masculine or feminine gender is understood to mean that the object to which it refers is positively male or female. Many other distinctions are thus conveyed, as what is animate and inanimate, noble or vulgar, etc.

The result of these distinctions in such languages as the Aryan and Semitic was that the gods perforce were arranged sexually as male and female, and this persists to-day even in our English tongue.

Many myths arose directly from words, through casual similarities between them which were attributed to some divine cause. This is the theory so well known by the advocacy of Professor Max Müller, who is charged, unfairly I believe, with having called mythology a “disease of language.” He, Professor Kuhn, and others lay great and just stress on the influence of “paronomy,” that is, similarity in the sound of words, as the starting-point of myths. They have adduced endless examples from the classical tongues, but I shall content myself with two from wholly primitive sources.

I have just referred to the Andamanese as at the bottom of religious growth, but with an abundant mythology. In their tongue it happens that the word garub means “night” and also a species of caterpillar. It is probably a mere coincidence of sound. But they saw in it much more. Night to them is a depressing period, and it would not have been created by the supreme Puluga without just cause. Evidently the double meaning of the word garub indicated this. And as the wise men proceed on that universally sound opinion that when there is a row there is a woman in it, they perceive that some woman must have wantonly killed a garub, a caterpillar, in order that Puluga should have sent garub, the night, as a punishment. And this is the sum of a long mythical story.[136]

Another example is from a far distant area, from among the Carrier Indians of British America. The arctic fox which they hunt has a sharp yelp which sounds khaih. Their word for “light” is yekkhaih. Evidently the fox was the animal who first called for the light and, by the magical power of the word, obtained it. Through what difficulties he accomplished this is told in a long and curious myth obtained from them by Father Morice.[137]

In the development of myths it was, indeed, often the case that those concerning one deity could be told of another—singularly incongruous as it often was,—or that the divine attributes primarily assigned to a deity and drawn from its character could be transferred to a human type, as when those of a flower were placed on the god.[138]

It is equally an error to suppose that myths were at first mere stories and received their religious character later. The true myth has a religious aim from the outset, and is not the product of an idle fancy. Those who have taught otherwise have been misled by a superficial acquaintance with the psychology of savage tribes. Mythology comes from religion, not religion from mythology.

The savage understands perfectly the difference between a sacred and a secular story, between a narrative of the doings of the gods handed down from his ancestors, and the creation of the idle fancy brought forth to amuse a circle of listeners.

I have already referred to the strange similarity in the myths of savage nations far asunder in space and kinship. The explanation of this is not to be found in borrowing or in recollections from a common, remote unity; but in the laws of the human mind. The same myths are found all over the world, with the same symbolism and imagery, woven into cycles dealing with the same great questions of human thought. This is because they arise from identical psychic sources, and find expression under obligatory forms, depending on the relations of man to his environment, and on the unity of mental process throughout the race.

It is not possible for me at the present time to enter far into the vast temple of mythology. I must content myself with selecting a few of the most prominent mythical cycles, aiming by these to show how they form the ground-plan and substructure of the whole edifice of mythical narrative.

I will select seven which are the most prominent, those relating to: 1. the Cosmical Concepts; 2. the Sacred Numbers; 3. the Drama of the Universe; 4. the Earthly Paradise; 5. the Conflict of Nature; 6. the Returning Saviour; and 7. the Journey of the Soul.

1. The Cosmical Concepts.—Wherever man is placed on the earth, he is guided in his movements by space and direction. These are among the earliest notions he derives from the impressions on his senses. His anatomical conformation, the anterior and posterior planes of his body and his right and left sides, lead him to a fourfold division of space, as before him and behind him, to one side or the other. He conceives the earth, therefore, as a plain with four quarters, the chief directions as four, to wit, the cardinal points, and the winds as four principal currents from these points. The sky is to him a solid covering, supported at each of its four corners by a tree, a pillar, or a giant, and is itself divided into four courts or regions like the earth.

These were his cosmical concepts, his primal ideas of the universe, and they entered deeply into his life, his acts, and his beliefs. He founded his social organisation on them, he pitched his tents or built his cities on their model, he oriented his edifices to simulate them, and framed his myths to explain and perpetuate them.

We find these concepts practically universal. The symbolic figures which represent them are scratched in the soil at the Bora, or initiation ceremonies of the Australians; they are etched into the pots and jars we dig up in the mounds of the Mississippi valley; they are painted in strange figures on the manuscripts of the Mayas and Mexicans; they reappear in the mysterious symbols of the svastika and the Chinese Ta-Ki; they underlie the foundation stones of Egyptian pyramids, and recur in the lowest strata of Babylonian ziggarats.[139]

2. The Sacred Numbers.—The cosmical concepts were closely connected with the sacred numbers. Wherever we turn in myth and rite, in symbolism or sacred art, we find certain numbers which have a hallowed priority in religious thought. These numbers are pre-eminently the three and the four, and those derived from them. They are distinctly antithetic in character, arising from contrasting psychical sources, which I will briefly explain.

The number four derives its sacredness in mythology from the cosmical concepts just mentioned. It was, therefore, connected with the objective and phenomenal world, and had a material and concrete origin and applications.

The number three, on the other hand, was surrounded with the halo of sanctity from the operations of the mind itself. These, the processes of thinking, are carried on by a triple or rather triune action of the intelligence, which logicians express in the three fundamental “laws of thought,” and in the trilogy of the syllogism. These ever-present laws of thinking impress themselves on the mind and mental acts whether they are recognised or not, and all the more absolutely in that involuntary action in which, as “sub-limital consciousness” or “psychic automatism,” I have revealed to you the true source of the conception of the Divine.[140]

How natural, then, that we should find in so many primitive faiths the belief in the triplicate nature of divinity, should find myths, idols, rites, so devised as to reflect and inculcate this! Such is the case, and it is easy to quote examples, whether we turn to the Indians of America or the Indians of Hindostan, whether we touch on the triads of ancient Egypt or those of the Druids, whether we recall the three Norns of Teutonic myth or the three Fates of the Hellenes. As a writer, who has made the subject his special branch, observes: “It is impossible to study any single system of worship throughout the world, without being struck with the peculiar persistence of the triple number in regard to Divinity.”[141]

The exception to this would naturally be where the concept of the number itself was too feeble to impress itself upon the myth. There are tribes who cannot count four, whose languages have no word for any number beyond two, and yet who are by no means deficient either in mythologies or practical arts.[142] Among these, we should look in vain for the sacredness of numbers.

3. The Drama of the Universe.—I have already quoted the saying of the wise men of ancient India, “There is no limit to the knowing of the Self that knows.” He who through meditation and prayer has become one with God, knows what God knows. Thus it is that in the rudest tribes we find the story of the beginning of things clearly told as coming from the inspired knowledge of the seers.

This story has many points of similarity, wherever we find it, not owing, I hasten again to say, to any unity of origin in place, but due to the higher unity of the mind of man, and the necessary results of its activity.

Look in what continent we please, we shall find the myth of a Creation or of a primeval construction, of a Deluge or a destruction, and of an expected Restoration. We shall find that man has ever looked on this present world as a passing scene in the shifting panorama of time, to be ended by some cataclysm and to be followed by some period of millennial glory.

Whenever we have a fairly complete body of the mythology of a primitive stock, we discover the same scenario of the vast drama of the universe, varying abundantly in detail and local colour, but true to the grandiose lines of its composition.

It is instructive to analyse its various elements and trace them to their psychic sources. Let us begin with the modes of action of the creative power itself.

This mysterious power is known to man under three forms.

The simplest is that of the moulder or manufacturer, as the potter makes his pots, the shoemaker his shoes. This is the conception which underlies many myths of the Creator, as is shown by the names he bears. Thus the Australians called him Baiame, “the cutter-out,” as one cuts out a sandal from a skin, or a figure from bark. The Maya Indians used the term Patol, from the verb pat, to mould, as a potter his clay, Bitol, which has the same meaning, and Tzacol, the builder, as of a house.[143] With the Dyaks of Borneo, the Creator is Tupa, the forger, as one forges a spear-blade[144]; and so on.

The second form is that of creation in the sense of generation, and this is a constant simile in the myths, with reference to the process both in the vegetable and animal kingdoms.

The Creator is often referred to as the Father, the parent, more or less literally, of all that is. He has many such titles in the myths of America and Polynesia. In bi-sexual myths he is associated with some universal mother as the genetrix.

The third form is more recondite and loftier. In an earlier lecture I have emphasised how man is conscious within himself of the Will as an ultimate source of power. This he clearly recognised in his primitive conditions, and to its exertion repeatedly in his myths did he attribute the origin of things. They were self-evolved in the thought of the primal Being, or, as the native American expression is, they were “created by thought.”

We find this in the rudest tribes of North America; and among the sedentary Zuñis of New Mexico, it is said of their demiurge Awonawilona that at the beginning “he conceived within himself and thought outward in space,” in order to bring nature into existence. We see the connection in the Vitian dialect of Polynesian, in which mania is “to think”; mana, a miracle, and the power to perform one. According to the myths of Hawaii, it was “by an act of the will” that their triple-natured Creator “broke up the night” (Po), and from its fragments evoked into being the world of light and life.[145]

Whatever the mode of creation, it was felt that it did not tell the whole story. The conceptions of time and space are in their essence limitless, and any creation must have been within them. Thus in Polynesian myth, Po represents not a dateless chaos but the debris of some former state of things; and in Algonquin legend the primeval ocean had engulfed some older world.[146]

This psychic molimen, ceaselessly acting, led in more developed mythologies to some defined fancies of these earlier periods of cosmic existence and thus to the myths of the Ages of the World or the Epochs of Nature. These are clearly outlined among the Mexicans, Mayas, Peruvians, and other tribes of the New World and among many on the Eastern Hemisphere. The Aztecs count them as four, each followed by a formidable catastrophe, nearly or quite destroying all that lived.

The last of these destructions was generally blended with the notion of the emergence of the solid land from the primeval waters; and this is the origin of the Deluge Myth, the story of the Universal Flood, which we find in so many primitive peoples. It has excited especial attention, and by writers has been explained as the remembrance of some local overflow, or the recollection of the Hebrew tradition. Its real origin, purely psychic and derived from the myth of the Epochs of Nature, I explained thirty years ago in discussing its prevalence among American tribes.[147]

4. The Earthly Paradise.—Associated with this cycle is the myth of the terrestrial Paradise, watered by its four rivers, and enclosing the tree of life,—the happy abode of early man. The four rivers are the celestial streams from the four corners of the earth, watering the tree as the emblem of life. Thus we find it among the American Indians, the Sioux and the Aztecs, the Mayas, the Polynesians, the ancient Aryans and Semites, etc.[148] Its origin is purely psychic, and though we can easily understand how the writer of the Book of Genesis sought to identify these mythical streams with some known to him, it is strangely out of date for scholars of to-day to follow his footsteps in that vain quest.[149]

5. The Conflict of Nature.—Another great cycle of psychic myths arose from the conflict of nature as apprehended by the primitive mind. Everywhere it seems to be raging around us. The hourly struggle of light with darkness; of day with night; of sunshine with storm; of summer with winter; of youth with age, of health with disease; of life with death; of all that makes toward good with all that makes toward evil—this endless battle of two principles underlies all movement and is forever stirring the soul to throw itself into the fray.

In a thousand forms this eternal combat was portrayed in myths, all pregnant with one meaning, bodying it forth in varied symbol and expression. The world-wide stories of the conflict of the first two brothers, of men with gods, of giants with heroes, of the deities among themselves, arose from this perception of the unceasing interaction of natural forces, imagined as a war between conscious existences.

6. The Returning Saviour.—Out of this imagined turmoil and slaughter grew the wonderful mythical cycles concerning the Deliverer and Saviour. He would come from afar, out of the morning light or the distant sky, or he would be born of a virgin and the son of a god. He would lead his people to happiness and power, crushing by his might the enemies who afflicted them, whether on earth or among the envious gods. Blond-bearded and light-haired, even among Polynesians and Americans, we cannot err in seeing in this majestic figure the personified idea of Light, transferred from the plane of physical phenomena into that of psychical anticipation.[150]

7. The Journey of the Soul.—Lastly, I mention the cycle which describes the journey of the soul after death. The extraordinary similarity which I and others have pointed out between the opinions on this subject among Egyptians, Greeks, ancient Celts, and North American Indians,[151] is not to be explained by any theory of inter-communication, nor “by chance,” as some have argued, but by fixed psychic laws, working over the same material under similar conditions.

The soul passes toward the west, crosses a sea or river to the abode of the departed, and meets everywhere nearly the same obstacles, to be overcome by proper preparations and mortuary ceremonies. I need not rehearse the details. They can be compared elsewhere. But their substantial identity confirms in an emphatic manner the thesis I am advocating, that in these universal mythical cycles we are dealing not with fragments of some one set of fancies borrowed from a common source, but with independent creations of the human intellect, framed under laws common to it everywhere, and which tend always to produce fruits generically everywhere the same.

LECTURE IV.
Primitive Religious Expression: In the Object.