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

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saint whose name the gotra bears". There is thus nothing to bar the conjecture that the exogamous gotras of the whole Brahmans were once a form of totem-kindred, which (like aspiring non-Aryan stocks at the present day) dropped the totem-name and renamed the septs from some eponymous hero, medicine-man, or Rishi.

      Constant repetition of the same set of facts becomes irksome, and yet is made necessary by the legitimate demand for trustworthy and abundant evidence. As the reader must already have reflected, this living mythical belief in the common confused equality of men, gods, plants, beasts, rivers, and what not, which still regulates savage society,(1) is one of the most prominent features in mythology. Porphyry remarked and exactly described it among the Egyptians—"common and akin to men and gods they believed the beasts to be."(2) The belief in such equality is alien to modern civilisation. We have shown that it is common and fundamental in savagery. For instance, in the Pacific, we might quote Turner,(3) and for Melanesia, Codrington,(4) while for New Zealand we have Taylor.(5) For the Jakuts, along the banks of the Lena in Northern Asia, we have the evidence of Strahlenberg, who writes: "Each tribe of these people look upon some particular creature as sacred, e.g., a swan, goose, raven, etc., and such is not eaten by that tribe" though the others may eat it.(6) As the majority of our witnesses were quite unaware that the facts they described were common among races of whom many of them had never even heard, their evidence may surely be accepted as valid, especially as the beliefs testified to express themselves in marriage laws, in the blood-feud, in abstinence from food, on pillars over graves, in rude heraldry, and in other obvious and palpable shapes. If we have not made out, by the evidence of institutions, that a confused credulity concerning the equality and kinship of man and the objects in nature is actually a ruling belief among savages, and even higher races, from the Lena to the Amazon, from the Gold Coast to Queensland, we may despair of ever convincing an opponent. The survival of the same beliefs and institutions among civilised races, Aryan and others, will later be demonstrated.(7) If we find that the mythology of civilised races here agrees with the actual practical belief of savages, and if we also find that civilised races retain survivals of the institutions in which the belief is expressed by savages, then we may surely infer that the activity of beasts in the myths of Greece springs from the same sources as the similar activity of beasts in the myths of Iroquois or Kaffirs. That is to say, part of the irrational element in Greek myth will be shown to be derived (whether by inheritance or borrowing) from an ascertained condition of savage fancy.

      (1) See some very curious and disgusting examples of this confusion in Liebrecht's Zur Volkskunde, pp. 395, 396 (Heilbronn, 1879).

      (2) De Abst., ii. 26.

      (3) Nineteen Years in Polynesia, p. 238, and Samoa by the same author. Complete totemism is not asserted here, and is denied for Melanesia.

      (4) Journ. Anthrop. Inst., "Religious Practices in Melanesia".

      (5) New Zealand, "Animal Intermarriage with Men".

      (6) Description of Asia (1783), p. 383.

      (7) Professor Robertson Smith, Kinship in Arabia, attempts to show that totemism existed in the Semitic races. The topic must be left to Orientalists.

      CHAPTER IV. THE MENTAL CONDITION OF SAVAGES—MAGIC—METAMORPHOSIS—METAPHYSIC—PSYCHOLOGY.

       Table of Contents

      Claims of sorcerers—Savage scientific speculation—Theory of causation—Credulity, except as to new religious ideas—"Post hoc, ergo propter hoc"—Fundamental ideas of magic—Examples: incantations, ghosts, spirits—Evidence of rank and other institutions in proof of confusions of mind exhibited in magical beliefs.

      "I mean eftsoons to have a fling at magicians for their abominable lies and monstrous vanities."—PLINY, ap. Phil. Holland.

      "Quoy de ceux qui naturellement se changent en loups, en juments, et puis encores en hommes?"—MONTAIGNE, Apologie pour Raymond de Sebonde.

      The second feature in the savage intellectual condition which we promised to investigate was the belief in magic and sorcery. The world and all the things in it being conceived of vaguely as sensible and rational, are supposed to obey the commands of certain members of each tribe, such as chiefs, jugglers, or conjurors. These conjurors, like Zeus or Indra, can affect the weather, work miracles, assume what shapes, animal, vegetable, or inorganic, they please, and can metamorphose other persons into similar shapes. It has already been shown that savage man has regarded all THINGS as PERSONS much on a level with himself. It has now to be shown WHAT KIND OF PERSON HE CONCEIVES HIMSELF TO BE. He does not look on men as civilised races regard them, that is, as beings with strict limitations. On the other hand, he thinks of certain members of his tribe as exempt from most of the limitations, and capable of working every miracle that tradition has ever attributed to prophets or gods. Nor are such miraculous powers, such practical omnipotence, supposed by savages to be at all rare among themselves. Though highly valued, miraculous attainments are not believed to be unusual. This must be kept steadily in mind. When myth-making man regards the sky or sun or wind as a person, he does not mean merely a person with the limitations recognised by modern races. He means a person with the miraculous powers of the medicine-man. The sky, sun, wind or other elemental personage can converse with the dead, and can turn himself and his neighbours into animals, stones and trees.

      To understand these functions and their exercise, it is necessary to examine what may be called savage science, savage metaphysics, and the savage theory of the state of the dead. The medicine-man's supernatural claims are rooted in the general savage view of the world, of what is possible, and of what (if anything) is impossible. The savage, even more than the civilised man, may be described as a creature "moving about in worlds not realised". He feels, no less than civilised man, the need of making the world intelligible, and he is active in his search for causes and effects. There is much "speculation in these eyes that he doth glare withal". This is a statement which has been denied by some persons who have lived with savages. Thus Mr. Bates, in his Naturalist on the Amazon,(1) writes: "Their want of curiosity is extreme. … Vicente (an Indian companion) did not know the cause of thunder and lightning. I asked him who made the sun, the stars, the trees. He didn't know, and had never heard the subject mentioned in his tribe." But Mr. Bates admits that even Vicente had a theory of the configuration of the world. "The necessity of a theory of the earth and water had been felt, and a theory had been suggested." Again, Mr. Bates says about a certain Brazilian tribe, "Their sluggish minds seem unable to conceive or feel the want of a theory of the soul"; and he thinks the cause of this indolence is the lack "of a written language or a leisured class". Now savages, as a rule, are all in the "leisured class," all sportsmen. Mr. Herbert Spencer, too, has expressed scepticism about the curiosity attributed to savages. The point is important, because, in our view, the medicine-man's powers are rooted in the savage theory of things, and if the savage is too sluggish to invent or half consciously evolve a theory of things, our hypothesis is baseless. Again, we expect to find in savage myths the answer given by savages to their own questions. But this view is impossible if savages do not ask themselves, and never have asked themselves, any questions at all about the world. On this topic Mr. Spencer writes: "Along with absence of surprise there naturally goes absence of intelligent curiosity".(2) Yet Mr. Spencer admits that, according to some witnesses, "the Dyaks have an insatiable curiosity," the Samoans "are usually very inquisitive," and "the Tahitians are remarkably curious and inquisitive". Nothing is more common than to find travellers complaining that savages, in their ardently inquiring curiosity, will not leave the European for a moment to his own undisturbed devices. Mr. Spencer's savages, who showed no curiosity, displayed this impassiveness when Europeans were trying to make them exhibit signs of surprise. Impassivity is a point of honour with many uncivilised races, and we cannot infer that a savage has no curiosity because he does not excite himself over a mirror, or when his European visitors try to swagger with their mechanical appliances. Mr. Herbert Spencer founds, on the statements of Mr. Bates already quoted, a notion that "the savage, lacking ability to think and the accompanying desire to know, is without tendency to speculate". He backs Mr. Bates's experience with Mungo Park's failure to "draw" the negroes about the causes of day and night. They had never indulged a conjecture

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