Rig Veda), it is sometimes regarded as a late addition. But we can
scarcely think the main conception late, as it is so widely scattered
that it meets us in most mythologies, including those of Chaldaea
and Egypt, and various North-American tribes. Not satisfied
with this myth, the Aryans of India accounted for the origin of
species in the following barbaric style. A being named Purusha
was alone in the world. He differentiated himself into two beings,
husband and wife. The wife, regarding union with her producer
as incest, fled from his embraces as Nemesis did from those of
Zeus, and Rhea from Cronus, assuming various animal disguises.
The husband pursued in the form of the male of each animal, and
from these unions sprang the various species of beasts (Satapatha-Brahmana,
xiv. 4, 2; Muir i. 25). The myth of the cosmic egg
from which all things were produced is also current in the
Brahmanas. In the Puranas we find the legend of many successive
creations and destructions of the world a myth of world-wide
distribution.
As a rule, destruction by a deluge is the most favourite myth, but destructions by fire and wind and by the wrath of a god are common in Australian, Peruvian and Egyptian tradition. The idea that a boar, or a god in the shape of a boar, fished up a bit of earth, which subsequently became the world, out of the waters, is very well known to the Aryans of India, and recalls the feats of American musk-rats and Coyotes already described.[1] The tortoise from which all things sprang, in a myth of the Satapatha-Brahmana, reminds us of the Iroquois turtle. The Greek and Mangaian myth of the marriage of Heaven and Earth and its dissolution is found in the Aitareya-Brahmana (Haug’s trans. ii. 308; Rig Veda, i. lxii.).
So much for the Indian cosmogonic myths, which are a collection of ideas familiar to savages, blended with sacerdotal theories and ritual mummeries. The philosophical theory of the origin of things, a hymn of remarkable stateliness, is in Rig Veda, x. 129. The Scandinavian cosmogonic myth starts from the abyss, Ginnungagap, a chaos of ice, from which, as it thawed, was produced the giant Ymir. Ymir is the Scandinavian Purusha. A man and woman sprang from his armpit, like Athene from the head of Zeus. A cow licked the hoar-frost, whence rose Bur, whose children, Odin, Vile and Ve, slew the giant Ymir. “Of his flesh they formed the earth, of his blood seas and waters, of his bones mountains, of his teeth rocks and stones, of his hair all manner of plants.” This is the story in the Prose Edda, derived from older songs, such as the Grimnersmal. However the distribution of this singular myth may be explained, its origin can scarcely be sought in the imagination of races higher in culture than the Tinneh and Tacullies, among whom dogs and beavers are the theriomorphic form of Purusha or Ymir.
Myths of the Origin of Man.—These partake of the conceptions of evolution and of creation. Man was made out of clay by a supernatural being. Australia: man was made by Pund-jel. New Zealand: man was made by Tiki; “he took red clay, and kneaded it with his own blood.” Mangaia: the woman of the abyss made a child from a piece of flesh plucked out of her own side. Melanesia: “man was made of clay, red from the marshy side of Vanua Levu”; woman was made by Qat of willow twigs. Greece: men were πλάσματα πηλοῦ, figures baked in clay by Prometheus.[2] India: men were made after many efforts, in which the experimental beings did not harmonize with their environment, by Prajapati. In another class of myths, man was evolved out of the lower animals—lizards in Australia; coyotes, beavers, apes and other beasts in America. The Greek myths of the descent of the Arcadians, Myrmidons, children of the swan, the cow, and so forth, may be compared. Yet again, men came out of trees or plants or rocks: as from the Australian wattle-gum, the Zulu bed of reeds, the great tree of the Ovahereros, the rock of the tribes in Central Africa, the cave of Bushman and North-American and Peruvian myth, “from tree or stone” (Odyssey, xix. 163). This view was common among the Greeks, who boasted of being autochthonous. The Cephisian marsh was one scene of man’s birth according to a fragment of Pindar, who mentions Egyptian and Libyan legends of the same description.
Myths of the Arts of Life.—These are almost unanimously attributed to “culture-heroes,” beings theriomorphic or anthropomorphic, who, like Pund-jel, Qat, Quawteaht, Prometheus, Manabozho, Quetzalcoatl, Cagn and the rest, taught men the use of the bow, the processes (where known) of pottery, agriculture (as Demeter), the due course of the mysteries, divination, and everything else they knew. Commonly the teacher disappears mysteriously. He is often regarded by modern mythologists as the sun.
Star Myths.—“The stars came otherwise,” says Browning’s Caliban. In savage and civilized myths they are usually metamorphosed men, women and beasts. In Australia, the Pleiades, as in Greece, were girls. Castor and Pollux in Greece, as in Australia, were young men. Our Bear was a bear, according to Charlevoix and Lafitau, among the North-American Indians; the Eskimo, according to Egede, who settled the Danish colony in Greenland, regarded the stars “very nonsensically,” as “so many of their ancestors”; the Egyptian priests showed Plutarch the stars that had been Isis and Osiris. Aristophanes, in the Pax, shows us that the belief in the change of men into stars survived in his own day in Greece. The Bushmen (Bleek) have the same opinion. The Satapatha-Brahmana (Sacred Books of the East, xii. 284) shows how Prajapati, in his incestuous love, turned himself into a roebuck, his daughter into a doe, and how both became constellations. This is a thoroughly good example of the savage myths (as in Peru, according to Acosta) by which beasts and anthropomorphic gods and stars are all jumbled together.[3] The Rig Veda contains examples of the idea that the good become stars.
Solar and Lunar Myths.—These are universally found, and are too numerous to be examined here. The sun and moon, as in the Bulgarian ballad of the Sun’s Bride (a mortal girl), are looked on as living beings. In Mexico they were two men, or gods of a human character who were burned. The Eskimo know the moon as a man who visits earth, and, again, as a girl who had her face spotted by ashes which the Sun threw at her. The Khasias make the sun a woman, who daubs the face of the moon, a man. The Homeric hymn to Helios, as Max Müller observes, “looks on the sun as a half-god, almost a hero, who had once lived on earth.” This is precisely the Bushman view; the sun was a man who irradiated light from his armpit. In New Zealand and in North America the sun is a beast, whom adventurers have trapped and beaten. Medicine has been made with his blood. In the Andaman Islands the Sun is the wife of the Moon (Jour. of Anth. Soc., 1882). Among aboriginal tribes in India (Dalton, p. 186) the Moon is the Sun’s bride; she was faithless and he cut her in two, but occasionally lets her shine in full beauty. The Andaman Islanders account for the white brilliance of the moon by saying that he is daubing himself with white clay, a custom common in savage and Greek mysteries. The Red Men accounted to the Jesuits for the spherical forms of sun and moon by saying that their appearance was caused by their bended bows. The Moon in Greek myths loved Endymion, and was bribed to be the mistress of Pan by the present of a fleece, like the Dawn in Australia, whose unchastity was rewarded by a gift of a red cloak of opossum skin. Solar and lunar myths usually account for the observed phenomena of eclipse, waning and waxing, sunset, spots on the moon, and so forth by various mythical adventures of the animated heavenly beings. In modern folk-lore the moon is a place to which bad people are sent, rather than a woman or a man. The mark of the hare in the moon has struck the imagination of Germans, Mexicans, Hottentots, Sinhalese, and produced myths among all these races.[4]
Myths of Death.—Few savage races regard death as a natural event. All natural deaths are supernatural with them. Men are assumed to be naturally immortal, hence a series of myths to account for the origin of death. Usually some custom or “taboo” is represented as having been broken, when death has followed. In New Zealand, Maui was not properly baptized. In Australia, a woman was told not to go near a certain tree where a bat lived; she infringed the prohibition, the bat fluttered out, and men died. The Ningphoos were dismissed from Paradise and became mortal, because one of them bathed in water which had been tabooed (Dalton, p. 13). In the Atharva Veda, Yama, like Maui in New Zealand, first “spied out the path to the other world,” which all men after him have taken. In the Rig Veda (x. 14), Yama “sought out a road for many.” In the Solomon Islands (Jour. Anth. Inst., Feb. 1881), “Koevari was the author of death, by resuming her cast-off skin.” The same story is told in the Banks Islands. In the Greek myth (Hesiod, Works and Days, 90), men lived without “ill diseases that give death to men” till the cover was lifted from the forbidden box of Pandora. As to the myths of Hades, the place of the dead, they are far too many to be mentioned in detail. In almost all the gates of hell are guarded by fierce beasts, and in Ojibway, Finnish, Greek, Papuan and japanese myths no mortal visitor may escape from Hades who has once tasted the food of the dead.
Myths of Fire-stealing.—Those current in North America (where an animal is commonly the thief) will be found in Bancroft, vol. iv. The Australian version, singularly like one Greek legend, is given by Brough Smyth. Stories of the theft of Prometheus are recorded by Hesiod, Aeschylus, and their commentators. Muir and Kuhn may be consulted for Vedic fire-stealing.
Heroic and Romantic Myths.—In addition to myths which are clearly intended to explain facts of the universe, most nations have their heroic and romantic myths. Familiar examples are the stories of Perseus, Odysseus, Sigurd, the Indian epic stories, the adventures of Ilmarinen and Wainamoinen in the Kalewala, and so forth. To discuss these myths as far as they can be considered apart from divine and explanatory tales would demand more space than we have at our disposal. It will become evident to any student of the romantic myths that they consist of different arrange-
- ↑ Black Yajur-Veda and Satapatha-Brahmana; Muir, i. 52.
- ↑ Aristophanes, Aves, 686; Etym. Magn., s.v. Ἰκόνιον. Pausanias saw the clay (Paus. x. iv.). The story is also quoted by Lactantius from Hesiod.
- ↑ See also Vishnu Purana, i. 131.
- ↑ See Cornhill Magazine, “How the Stars got their Names” (1882, p. 35), and “Some Solar and Lunar Myths” (1882, p. 440); Max Müller, Selected Essays, i. 609–611.
