The traditional world, like the modern world, is a fabric woven of many stuffs and colors, and patched with strange materials, some old, some almost new. If one wonders how it was all thrown together, one must consider that the type of mind which collects and analyzes facts, which experiments in order to discard error, which defines terms and reasons from them, did not appear until late in the world’s history and even now is not common. Aristotle, the chief scientist of antiquity, debated why a dead kingfisher, suspended from a string, should foretell the direction of the winds by turning its bill toward that corner of the heavens whence they were to come. Sir Thomas Browne hung a kingfisher on a string, and found that it did not do this thing.

Except when directed to its immediate problems of food and shelter, the antique mind thought in images, rather than in definite terms. Its processes were akin to dreams, in which one takes strange things for granted, nor seeks to verify anything. Save when they drove a bargain, men took one another’s statements for granted. Much the same thing is true of the savage to-day.

The realms and races of prodigy form the main burden of travel tale. Except when travels took the form of commercial voyagings, or military expeditions, and with a few other exceptions, such as the journeys of Pytheas the Massilian and Marco the Venetian, their theme, almost until modern times, was wonder. Home-keeping folks wanted to hear, as still they do, of countries and customs, and men and animals, that were different. The myths of geography have come out of the contacts of the dreaming mind of savagery and early civilization with the unknown. They represent men in the process of getting acquainted with the world about them.

For primitive man they began at the very boundary of his district. Mystery was there, and forbidding things were suspected; and if waste lands lay beyond, these got themselves uncouth populations. The stranger that crossed the boundary was dreaded and hated as something not quite human, or at least as wielder of a magic that might work harm. It is said of wild tribesmen in Borneo that when they meet a stranger they turn their backs and hide their faces because the sight of him makes them dizzy. “The stranger is for the wolf,” is an Arab saying, and the early rule of the world was that he must die in the interest of those upon whom he had thrust himself. “He had salt water in his eyes,” was the Fiji formula when castaways were clubbed to death. Many tribes call themselves by names which mean simply “men,” as distinguished from all other peoples, whose human nature is not conceded.

But the cruel host of to-day might be the helpless guest of to-morrow. There came a time of toleration, the limited toleration recorded in the Slavic proverb, “A guest and a fish smell on the third day.” As men crossed and recrossed the tribal boundary its weird legends were shifted to remoter horizons, became things to gossip about rather than act upon, and might mellow into genial report. Even historical peoples living at a distance were swathed in horizon haze. The justice of the Indians, their freedom from bodily ailments, and their contempt of death are favorite themes of Ctesias. Herodotus spoke of the Egyptians as later ages have spoken of the Chinese. Adam of Bremen gave a fantastic picture of the peoples of the far north—small, sinister Finns, whose magic could wreck passing ships and draw the very fish out of the sea; cruel islanders colored bluish green by salt water, and the “most noble” Northmen, bravest, most loyal, most temperate of men. Above all other races in consideration, so the west agreed for some centuries of unwonted humility, were the Chinese. Among them, says Purchas, “is reported to be neither Thiefe nor Whore, nor Murtherer, nor Hailes, nor Pestilence, nor such like Plagues.” And they live to be two hundred years old.

Travelers were the agents of distance, bringing the woof which the stay-at-home worked into the warp of his fancy. Until very recent times they were the world’s telegraph, mails and newspapers, all in one. Their coming was an event, and their going was remarked upon. Over rough ways, through countries where inns were not, among peoples who had instinctive dislike of a stranger and deemed it no fault to despoil or enslave him, the wanderer pursued his uncertain fates as merchant, pilgrim or mendicant. He paid his fare by the stories he took with him—winning a precarious hospitality in strange lands and an eager welcome when he reached home. The more curious the tale he told, the more kindly he was entreated—Ulysses repaid royal hospitality with royal guerdon—and in the ancient world so little was known that one might tell almost any tale he pleased. There was no means of checking up a report. Of course there were skeptics here and there, and there was, and is, a suspicion that old men and wanderers use rather more than the truth. The Ancient Mariner, being both old and traveled, had a great tale to tell.

Whole races wandered as well as single individuals. The migrations of peoples, and most if not all of them have had a nomad period, have had something to do with bringing the more beautiful of their legends into being—the tales of ideal lands, abodes of the blest where their dead are, or whither their heroes are translated without dying. The journeys of the sun are tracked upon them and human wistfulness has builded there, but so has memory. The homeland which the ancestors of a people abandoned long before, driven out, it may be, by an invading host, lives in its legends as a region desirable above all others. The hardships of the exodus are remembered also, and tradition magnifies the cruel height of the mountains, the swiftness of deep, unfordable rivers, the terror of moonless trails and all the heavinesses of the way. When the dead go home, or the heroes pass to rest, the path of souls which they travel back is the path their forefathers followed and the one journey ends where the other began, in a land that is a province of the Golden Age.

This hypothesis, which is Herbert Spencer’s, may not explain all the elysiums that a yearning fancy has created. Yet in the South Seas they lie in the direction whence the islanders came; the Hindu legend of the blissful Uttarakarus of the north is thought to hold the memory of a migration southward from some Himalayan valley; while the curious Persian legend of the enclosed garden of Yima, where was neither deformity nor iniquity, may be a note on the early movement of the Iranians from their cold ancestral home to the Azerbaijan region, and a halt there before renewing their march toward the sun and the sea.

Though seldom we may follow the process, religion, and symbolism, which is its handmaiden, and magic, which is its elder brother, traced the outlines of most of the fabulous animals and peculiar peoples; human forgetfulness, savage logic and hearsay have filled them in. The natural history of the traditional world was in good part the contribution of the religions of Egypt, Assyria, Persia, and India. The tribes of grotesque peoples, the dog-faced generations, the satyrs, the demons of the waste, the fowls with woman faces, the women with fish-tails, the winged quadrupeds, all seem more like the carven creatures which populate the walls and towers of mediæval cathedrals than breathing tenants of fields and waters. The seeming is significant. When the hunchback, Quasimodo, was on the roof of Notre Dame at night, “then said the women of the neighborhood, the whole church took on something fantastic, supernatural, horrible; eyes and mouths were opened here and there; one heard the dogs, the monsters, and the gargoyles of stone, which keep watch night and day, with outstretched necks and open jaws, around the monstrous cathedral, barking.” When the edifice took fire, continues Hugo, “there were griffins which had the air of laughing, gargoyles which one fancied one heard yelping, salamanders which puffed at the fire, tarasques which sneezed in the smoke.”

In the temples of the Middle Ages the fabulous birds of the traditional world came home to their roosts, and the fabulous animals to their dens. They had been taken from the temples of earlier religions and they found their way back through the medium of an art which did not know where these creatures came from. Nor did ancient travelers and geographers. These, they supposed, were real races of men, real beasts and birds. They had never seen them, for they roamed the outer spaces, but everywhere they saw their effigies—in the porches of palaces, upon the columns of imperial courts, and on the monuments of princes, as well as within the shrines of strange gods.

Creatures of allegory these were, religious symbols, survivals of totemistic worship of beasts. Yet the entablatures on which their outlines were graven were mistaken for illustrated natural history, accepted as literal records of fact, like the columns which companioned them and which kings set up along the highways of the east to proclaim that hither they had come and here they had prevailed in battle.

The imagery of all religions musters them. Eskimo mythology is a witch-haunted shore, Aztec mythology a charnel-house, Chilean mythology a forbidding menagerie. The Chiriqui of Panama have an alligator, a jaguar, and a parrot god, all with human bodies. In Egyptian myth one reads of the watch-dog of Osiris in the underworld—the Swallower of the West, mixture of crocodile, lion, and hippopotamus. On a man’s shoulders Anubis carried a jackal head; and half human were the bull-gods, hawk-gods, goat-gods, vulture-gods, cat-gods. The Ægean pantheon shows human figures with the heads of asses, lions, bulls, and birds. The god Brhaspati of Hindu myth was seven-mouthed and seven-rayed, beautiful-tongued, sharp-horned, blue-backed, and hundred-winged. Hanuman was a monkey-god. The goddess Kali was a dark-blue female with four arms and three eyes. Siva himself had four faces, which appeared in turn when a ravishing nymph created by Brahma walked quite around him to tempt him.

The evolution of these divine beast-men, ancestors of the fabulous races of geography, begins with the annual sacrifice of a sacred animal and the preservation of its skin for the ensuing year. At first this was stored, then stuffed, then drawn over a wooden or stone image, to which, as worship lost its primal grossness, the human form was imparted. The result might be an ass- or goat-god, a centaur or satyr. Yet, with religious symbolism shaping it, evolution has operated also in reverse, dowering anthropomorphic deities with animal parts to signify typical qualities. This is seen even in Christian story. On the choir stalls of a Rhine church begging friars were depicted with the cowled head of a monk, but with a pig’s body and fox tail, while a Bible of the tenth century shows the evangelists as beast-headed men, and the four gospels as a four-headed composite animal called the tetramorph.

Out of the magic dances of men, as out of their temples, the races of fable have come trooping. By donning the heads and perhaps the tails of horses, bulls, asses, and goats, and treading certain measures, ritual mummers became, in the thought of the time, horse-demons, ox-demons, ass-demons, and goat-demons, and as such semidivine. They danced to bring fertility to the flocks and herds, while the god—it is Pindar speaking—“laughed aloud to see the romping license of the monstrous beasts.” The masks of wild animals and of reptiles and birds were worn also, and the motions of these creatures were repeated in other dances, as they are to-day, in order to propitiate dangerous beasts, or bring luck in the chase, or constrain heat and cold, sun and rain, through animals that were their symbols. Possibly the First People of Indian myth, equally with the satyrs of the classics, derive from rites in which dancers simulated beasts, and seemed, therefore, both human and bestial. Belief that ritual dancers donned the animal nature with their masks; travelers’ reports; the ambiguous records of pictograph and frieze, and tribal forgetfulness of the meaning of long-abandoned rites—all were avenues by which the mummers passed out of the atmosphere of a naïve township magic into the spacious precincts of marvel. Greek tragedy and Greek comedy grew up in their steps, flourished for some splendid moments, and died out. But the ritual mime, whence these came, is still danced by peasants clad in skins.

If, as pragmatism claims, the intellectual world is “pervaded and perverted by errors, lies, fictions, and illusions”—things real only in the sense that they can be talked about—it could not be otherwise than that the folk-mind would throng the galleries of fable with its cruder creations. Was it not a slighter thing to picture “gorgons, hydras, and chimæras dire” than to give the wood its guardian deity, or to reach the poetry of Indian belief that the echo is the Lizard-Man telling back? The night terrors of the savage, the dream figures of an age when dreams were very real, the hallucinations of medicine-men, the deep reactions of the imagination to what seems abnormal but is merely strange, even the easy success of the alarming masks and deforming paraphernalia of tribesmen on the warpath—all contributed to the fabulous populations. In the house of the mind, one chamber is a museum where it strives to improve on nature’s handiwork. It invents no new thing, but it shifts familiar combinations, exaggerating, deforming, recombining. The product is either a caricature or a composite, a grotesque or a chimæra. Nature itself has set a pattern in the bat, which the Persians say is compounded of bird, dog, and muskrat, since it flies like a bird, has dog teeth and lives in holes like a muskrat.

By his own handiwork has man been misled, or led away into curious valleys of vision. Savage art seems constrained by some obscure law of the mind to give its subjects, be they god, man, or beast, a grotesque delineation. It may be that primitive drawing was evolved inversely from the drawing of children, whose first animals are usually horizontal human beings; the first men pictured by the cave artists were more like erect animals. Paleolithic man, so Luquet thinks, learned how to represent animals before he did men, and gave the latter beast countenances and misshapen members in his early attempts to represent them. The stuff of myth is in the rock drawings. In sculpture itself its influence is clearly marked.

On the evidence of broken statues, desert peoples based tales of forgotten races that had been turned into stone. On the evidence of wooden idols, snow-mantled in the land of the Samoyeds, their neighbors based tales of a northern nation frozen into immobility with each recurring winter and thawed out by the sun’s return. There were sculptures and bas-reliefs in Egypt which ministered to the pride of kings by picturing them several times as large as their subjects and vassals; and these were evidence to the stranger that he had come into a country which held both giants and dwarfs. Primitive drawings betray ignorance of perspective, and this archaic style was retained by religious conservatism after art had found itself. The sculptures that show Egyptian countenances in profile, with eyes as long as in the full face, also show profiles of quadrupeds having but two legs and a single horn. Here, and not in “the wild, white, fierce, chaste moon, whose two horns are indissolubly twisted into one,” may be the secret of the unicorn.

The power to evoke myths of the living has been in marble statues and wooden images from the beginning, for in the beginning they were wrought in the thought that life would enter them. A passage in The Flame of Life reveals the creative quality in D’Annunzio reacting to their spell: “In the fruit orchards, in the vineyards, among the vegetables, among the pastures, rose the surviving statues. They were numberless like a dispersed people. Some still white, some gray or yellow with lichens or greenish with moss, or spotted; in all attitudes, with all gestures, goddesses, heroes, nymphs, seasons, hours, with their bows, with their arrows, their garlands, their cornucopias, their torches, with all the emblems of their riches, power, and pleasure, exiled from fountains, grottos, labyrinths, harbors, porticos; friends of the evergreen, box, and myrtle, protectors of passing loves, witnesses of eternal vows, figures of a dream far older than the hands that had formed them and the eyes that had seen them in the ravaged gardens.”

Sovereign reason itself has sent emissaries to the courts of fable. Science is tolerant and until it knows it speaks the language of Montaigne, “It is a sottish presumption to disdaine and condemne that for false, which unto us seemeth to beare no show of likelihood or truth.” Empedocles, precursor of physical scientists, and perhaps first to glimpse the doctrine of evolution, provided the classic world with a working explanation of the prodigious animals and peoples and gave a law to the menageries of myth. He thought that the various parts of men and animals were separately created by the elements, which were his deities. There were heads without necks, arms without shoulders, eyes without sockets; and as they wandered about in space these members united, forming man-headed beasts, beast-headed men, and various bizarre beings which because of their maladjustment did not survive in competition with normal men and animals. The doctrine has been echoed in modern times in the contention that the composite creatures of fable—part reptile, part bird, and part beast—represent intermediate forms, experiments which nature inaugurated and abandoned in evolving higher types of life. The marsupial kangaroo, the duck-billed platypus, and the flying lizard are surviving testimony to such experiment.

A kindred philosophy may be discerned here and there in the folklore of aboriginal Americans. In the deluge legend of the Pimas, Fox and Sister, escaping in two arks, set to work to fashion a new world of men out of mud; Fox molds manikins with one arm, one leg, one eye, but Sister derides these and tells him to put his journeyman’s product away behind the ocean in another world; then she breathes into her own better handiwork the breath of life; these deformed folk are still living somewhere, the Pimas think. The haunting Indian myth of a First People, who had the human form but the beast nature, and from whom the animals derive, and the companion myth of a First People who had the brute form, but discarded it for the human, are things with the Empedoclean quality, but reach deeper; and a true note of observation is in them. Somewhere in every man one catches a glimpse of some animal. All created things are reflected in his form, his gait, his face. “Somewhat of me down there?” was the question of Emerson when he caught a dog’s understanding glance; and in men’s countenances he had seen, he thought, “the features of the mink, of the bull, of the rat, and the barnyard fowl.”

Thus the Metamorphoses of Ovid take on a tinge of plausibility. “What keeps these wild tales in circulation for thousands of years?” asks Emerson. “What but the wild fact to which they suggest some approximation of theory!” In lighter vein in Penguin Island Anatole France sketches the metamorphosis of birds into men: “Immediately the penguins were transformed. Their foreheads enlarged and their heads grew round like the dome of St. Maria Rotunda in Rome. Their oval eyes opened more widely on the universe; a fleshy nose clothed the two clefts of their nostrils; their beaks were changed into mouths, and from their mouths went forth speech; their necks grew short and thick; their wings became arms and their claws legs; a restless soul dwelt within the breast of each of them. However, there remained with them some traces of their first nature. They were inclined to look sideways; they balanced themselves on their short thighs; their bodies were covered with fine down.”

There is good terrestrial history as well as the dreams and guesses of the mind hidden in travel tales, and in them are embalmed some of the oldest memories of mankind. Paleolithic man found various subraces of men in Europe when he came there, savage prowlers from whose skeletal remains modern science has restored the outlines of squat, ape-necked, beetle-browed human beings, crudely formed as a heathen idol. Against these he waged the relentless war of one species against another—a war of extermination. The memory of their odious appearance would survive longest in the stories told to entertain or frighten children. As Sir Harry Johnston has suggested, “the dim racial remembrance of such gorilla-like monsters, with cunning brains, shambling gait, hairy bodies, strong teeth, and possibly cannibalistic tendencies, may be the germ of the ogre in folklore.”

It is certain that folklore shows the traces of other and less frightful races of men who in turn were driven off the European scene. The giants of nursery tales are identified by Tylor with Stone Age heathen, shy of the conquering tribes of men, loathing their agriculture and the sound of their church bells. When the Scandinavian sagas speak of dwarfs, furtive and cunning, garbed in reindeer kirtle and colored cap, hiding in caves, and armed with bone-tipped arrows, they are picturing the persecuted and once widely spread Lapp race.

It may be that a vague recollection of now extinct animals has survived in legend. There is an Iroquois story recorded by Father Charlevoix of a great elk which stood so high that eight feet of snow did not impede his movements, and with “a sort of arm which comes out of his shoulder and which he uses as we do ours.” Kaska tribesmen speak of a large, hairy, tusked animal which roamed their land long ago. The Indians of North America must at some time have seen living members of the elephant family. It has been suggested that the tortoises of Hindu myth which bear the world on their backs are a memory of the huge Himalayan tortoise.

There are legends that are true myths of observation, exercises not of memory, but of primitive logic. They disclose man pondering the ruinous records of the past and satisfying the necessity for a theory that shall explain them. The diminutive burial cysts and dolmens made by departed races and scattered over the world were thought to be the graves of dwarfs, or their houses, or their treasure places. Fossil bones have produced a veritable cycle of these philosophic myths. The frozen mammoths and fossil bones of Siberia have been known to man from earliest times and have produced a stock of legends as well as an immemorial trade in ivory. Some of these, reciting the battles of prehistoric animals with one another and with men, have almost the dignity of epics.

The mistaken logic that produced the creatures of legend has had at various points a sort of whimsical confirmation. Save for his fiery breath, the dragon of fable mirrors the leathern-winged, serpent-tailed, crocodile-bellied saurians that haunted the marshes of the ancient world and passed from the scene ages before man is supposed to have come upon it. There are living things as weird of aspect as any created by the unbridled imagination of man, but most of them are small. Such are the vampire bat, the dragon fly, and the so-called fiend fly, the black face and curved horns of which gave it in the Middle Ages a diabolic name. Seas and fresh-water streams and marshes all contain creatures which so much resemble, and so much differ from, the familiar land animals as to seem the product of a conscious venture into the grotesque. With a fish net and microscope one might bring to view an array of animals that in everything save size would rival the exhibits of fable. The wildest dream of man has not pictured anything so beautiful and strange as the life-drama of the little creature that is first a larva, then a chrysalis, and then the butterfly of a single summer.

There are words in which the germinal idea has been so enveloped in wrappers of metaphor and inference, so incased in concentric shells of rationalization, so burdened with borrowed significances, so freighted by sentiment and reflection, and so enriched by art and historical accretion that they may be called microcosms of the world of fable; the proper noun, Babylon, is one of these. In large measure the peoples of prodigy and in some measure the lands of legend owe their being to a search for causes confined within the domain of etymology. They may be called a literary phenomenon, a product of words and the ways of words, and a by-product of libraries. Words breed myths. Given a Rome, people will invent a Romulus. Given the ancient Britons and Celts, people will invent a Britannus and a Celtus, their eponymous chiefs. The theory of totemism—supposed descent from an animal ancestor—arose, as Spencer thinks, from the efforts of savages to explain the animal names which they bore.

When the meaning of words becomes forgotten or their form corrupted, a myth follows. Mediæval Spain, for example, believed that Jews were born with tails, confusing the word rabbi with rubo (a tail). Château Vert in England has become Shotover, and peasants have it that Little John shot over a high hill near by. Maid Marian of the Robin Hood ballad cycle is the Mad Morion of the Morris dance, a boy who whirled through its measures wearing a morion or helmet.

How names can become corrupted the public-house signs of England will attest. The Bag O’Nails should be the Bacchanals; the Bully Ruffian should be the ship Bellerophon; the Cat and Wheel should be St. Catherine’s wheel; the Goat and Compasses should be God Encompasses Us; the Iron Devil should be Hirondelle (the swallow), and the Queer Door should be the Cœur Doré (the golden heart). The effigies of bags of nails, cats, goats, and doors under these uncouth names are pictorial fables based upon bad etymology.

In like fashion Pliny confused the name of the Canaries with the Latin canis (dog) and says these islanders are called thus because, like dogs, they devour the entrails of wild beasts. Similar confusions of words have brought legendary islands upon the maps. Avalon, the Celtic paradise in the west, whither Arthur was ferried unto peace, is Apple Island of the classics, the place of the golden, dragon-guarded apples of the Hesperides. Antilia, mystic mediæval island of the remote Atlantic, is perhaps Ante-ilya, or island off the Portuguese coast. Milton’s “cold Estotiland” and Estland, islands which held their place for centuries on the maps of the northern seas, are probably misreadings for Scotland and Iceland, transferred from faded sketch-maps to a Venetian chart of the sixteenth century.

“Not Angles, but angels,” said a punning ecclesiastic when he saw fair-haired Saxon captives in the slave markets of the Mediterranean. So the Greeks and Romans gave to savage tribes the names that in their own tongues sounded most like what these tribes called themselves. A myth might result—a record of some deformity, or some inhuman custom. A larger number of myths arose from men’s giving a literal meaning to figurative terms in their own language. To speak in riddles was more than a social game with the ancients, is more than a social game now with various peoples. There were certain things which must not be named, but only referred to indirectly. There were times when riddles must be propounded and times when they must not; and riddle-time, says Frazer, was usually in the presence of a dead body or at a sacrifice.

What might follow, a glance at a few Finnish riddles will show. One of them runs, “Beyond the great water a large old man shouts,” and another, “A cry from the forest and light from the hill.” In each case thunder is the answer. The sky is described as a blue field strewn with silver. “A child looks through the hedge” means the sunrise. “A red cock springs from house to house” means fire. “A small white man was sowing, he became very mischievous,” means snow. As Müller remarks, here are elements which in the mind of a poet or a grandmother would soon create a number of delightful myths.

In its contacts with enigmatic language the end of literalism is fable. Speak of fleet horses as children of the wind, and you have the story of Iberian mares impregnated by the west wind. Speak of swift runners as shadow-footed, and there appears on the canvas of Ind the silhouettes of natives asleep under the shade of their gigantic feet. “We are a people without a head,” said the kingless Turkomans, and the Headless People shouldered their way into the map of fable. “Their shoulders are where our heads are,” Indians of Guiana told Raleigh, describing a tall neighbor race, and artists delineated them with eyes, noses, and mouths where their breasts ought to be. Sometimes savage tribes stretch their ears by attaching weights to them; hence, perhaps, the tale of folk who used one ear as mattress, the other as coverlet. As to the people whose feet were turned backward, may these not be, Tylor asks, the Antipodes on the other side of the globe, whose feet, surely enough, are planted “the opposite way” every time they set them down?

The method explains much, although care must be taken that it be not made to explain too much. The germ of fable is found in such figurative epithets as bull-browed, long-headed, horse-faced, ox-eyed, lion-hearted, bird-witted. But for these phrases to fructify in marvel, it would need that in a time more naïve and among a people who knew neither the ends of the world nor the ways of speech, men of one race should use them in telling another the manners and customs of a third. For cultivated minds these conditions cannot be reproduced except in the magic and make-believe of poetry. For the unlettered, alike in lands of culture and of barbarism, they still exist.

The power of wish and the power of words are chief gods in the world of fable.