Myth, Ritual and Religion (Vol. 1&2). Andrew Lang

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СКАЧАТЬ of the Objibeways.(5) Nearly every Indian has discovered, he says, an object in which he places special confidence, and to which he sacrifices more zealously than to the Great Spirit. The "hope" of Otamigan (a companion of the traveller) was a rock, which once advanced to meet him, swayed, bowed and went back again. Another Indian revered a Canadian larch, "because he once heard a very remarkable rustling in its branches". It thus appears that while the savage has a general kind of sense that inanimate things are animated, he is a good deal impressed by their conduct when he thinks that they actually display their animation. In the same way a devout modern spiritualist probably regards with more reverence a table which he has seen dancing and heard rapping than a table at which he has only dined. Another general statement of failure to draw the line between men and the irrational creation is found in the old Jesuit missionary Le Jeune's Relations de la Nouvelle France.(6) "Les sauvages se persuadent que non seulement les hommes et les autres animaux, mais aussi que toutes les autres choses sont animees." Again: "Ils tiennent les poissons raisonnables, comme aussi les cerfs". In the Solomon Islands, Mr. Romilly sailed with an old chief who used violent language to the waves when they threatened to dash over the boat, and "old Takki's exhortations were successful".(7) Waitz(8) discovers the same attitude towards the animals among the negroes. Man, in their opinion, is by no means a separate sort of person on the summit of nature and high above the beasts; these he rather regards as dark and enigmatic beings, whose life is full of mystery, and which he therefore considers now as his inferiors, now as his superiors. A collection of evidence as to the savage failure to discriminate between human and non-human, animate and inanimate, has been brought together by Sir John Lubbock.(9)

      (1) Primitive Culture, i. 167–169.

      (2) Among the Indians of Guiana (1883), p. 350.

      (3) Op. Cit., 355.

      (4) Schoolcraft, Algic Researches, i. 41.

      (5) Kohl, Wanderings Round Lake Superior, pp. 58, 59; Muller, Amerikan Urrelig., pp. 62–67.

      (6) 1636, p. 109.

      (7) Western Pacific, p. 84.

      (8) Anthropologie der Natur-Volker, ii. 177.

      (9) Origin of Civilisation, p. 33. A number of examples of this mental attitude among the Bushmen will be found in chap. v., postea.

      To a race accustomed like ourselves to arrange and classify, to people familiar from childhood and its games with "vegetable, animal and mineral," a condition of mind in which no such distinctions are drawn, any more than they are drawn in Greek or Brahmanic myths, must naturally seem like what Mr. Max Muller calls "temporary insanity". The imagination of the savage has been defined by Mr. Tylor as "midway between the conditions of a healthy, prosaic, modern citizen, and of a raving fanatic, or of a patient in a fever-ward". If any relics of such imagination survive in civilised mythology, they will very closely resemble the productions of a once universal "temporary insanity". Let it be granted, then, that "to the lower tribes of man, sun and stars, trees and rivers, winds and clouds, become personal, animate creatures, leading lives conformed to human or animal analogies, and performing their special functions in the universe with the aid of limbs like beasts, or of artificial instruments like men; or that what men's eyes behold is but the instrument to be used or the material to be shaped, while behind it there stands some prodigious but yet half-human creature, who grasps it with his hands or blows it with his breath. The basis on which such ideas as these are built is not to be narrowed down to poetic fancy and transformed metaphor. They rest upon a broad philosophy of nature; early and crude, indeed, but thoughtful, consistent, and quite really and seriously meant."(1)

      (1) Primtive Culture, i. 285.

      For the sake of illustration, some minor examples must next be given of this confusion between man and other things in the world, which will presently be illustrated by the testimony of a powerful and long diffused set of institutions.

      The Christian Quiches of Guatemala believe that each of them has a beast as his friend and protector, just as in the Highlands "the dog is the friend of the Maclaines". When the Finns, in their epic poem the Kalewala, have killed a bear, they implore the animal to forgive them. "Oh, Ot-so," chant the singers, "be not angry that we come near thee. The bear, the honey-footed bear, was born in lands between sun and moon, and he died, not by men's hands, but of his own will."(1) The Red Men of North America(2) have a tradition showing how it is that the bear does not die, but, like Herodotus with the sacred stories of the Egyptian priests, Mr. Schoolcraft "cannot induce himself to write it out".(3) It is a most curious fact that the natives of Australia tell a similar tale of THEIR "native bear". "He did not die" when attacked by men.(4) In parts of Australia it is a great offence to skin the native bear, just as on a part of the west coast of Ireland, where seals are superstitiously regarded, the people cannot be bribed to skin them. In New Caledonia, when a child tries to kill a lizard, the men warn him to "beware of killing his own ancestor".(5) The Zulus spare to destroy a certain species of serpents, believed to be the spirits of kinsmen, as the great snake which appeared when Aeneas did sacrifice was held to be the ghost of Anchises. Mexican women(6) believed that children born during an eclipse turn into mice. In Australia the natives believe that the wild dog has the power of speech; whoever listens to him is petrified; and a certain spot is shown where "the wild dog spoke and turned the men into stone";(7) and the blacks run for their lives as soon as the dog begins to speak. What it said was "Bones".

      (1) Kalewala, in La Finlande, Leouzon Le Duc (1845), vol. ii. p. 100; cf. also the Introduction.

      (2) Schoolcraft, v. 420.

      (3) See similar ceremonies propitiatory of the bear in Jewett's Adventures among the Nootkas, Edinburgh, 1824.

      (4) Brough Smyth, i. 449.

      (5) J. J. Atkinson's MS.

      (6) Sahagun, ii. viii. 250; Bancroft, iii. 111. Compare stories of women who give birth to animals in Melusine, 1886, August-November. The Batavians believe that women, when delivered of a child, are frequently delivered at the same time of a young crocodile as a twin. Hawkesworth's Voyages, iii. 756. Liebrecht, Zur Volkskunde, p. 17 et seq.

      (7) Brough Smyth, Aborigines of Victoria, i. 497.

      These are minor examples of a form of opinion which is so strong that it is actually the chief constituent in savage society. That society, whether in Ashantee or Australia, in North America or South Africa, or North Asia or India, or among the wilder tribes of ancient Peru, is based on an institution generally called "totemism". This very extraordinary institution, whatever its origin, cannot have arisen except among men capable of conceiving kinship and all human relationships as existing between themselves and all animate and inanimate things. It is the rule, and not the exception, that savage societies are founded upon this belief. The political and social conduct of the backward races is regulated in such matters as blood-feud and marriage by theories of the actual kindred and connection by descent, or by old friendship, which men have in common with beasts, plants, the sun and moon, the stars, and even the wind and the rain. Now, in whatever way this belief in such relations to beasts and plants may have arisen, it undoubtedly testifies to a condition of mind in which no hard and fast line was drawn between man and animate and inanimate nature. The discovery of the wide distribution of the social arrangements based on this belief is entirely due to Mr. J. F. M'Lennan, the author of Primitive Marriage. Mr. M'Lennan's essays ("The Worship of Plants and Animals," "Totems and Totemism") were published in the Fortnightly Review, 1869–71. Any follower in the footsteps of Mr. M'Lennan has it in his power to add a little evidence to that originally set forth, and perhaps to sift the somewhat uncritical authorities adduced.(1)

      (1) See also Mr. Frazer's Totemism, and Golden Bough, with chapter on Totemism in Modern Mythology.

      The name "Totemism" or "Totamism" was first applied СКАЧАТЬ