Custom and Myth

164

Lib. xxviii.

165

Schoolcraft.

166

Talvj, Charakteristik der Volkslieder, p. 3.

167

Fauriel, Chants de la Grèce moderne.

168

Thus Scotland scarcely produced any ballads, properly speaking, after the Reformation. The Kirk suppressed the dances to whose motion the ballad was sung in Scotland, as in Greece, Provence, and France.

169

L. Preller’s Ausgewählte Aufsätze. Greek ideas on the origin of Man. It is curious that the myth of a gold, a silver, and a copper race occurs in South America. See Brasseur de Bourbourg’s Notes on the Popol Vuh.

170

See essay on Early History of the Family.

171

This constant struggle may be, and of course by one school of comparative mythologists will be, represented as the strife between light and darkness, the sun’s rays, and the clouds of night, and so on. M. Castren has well pointed out that the struggle has really an historical meaning. Even if the myth be an elementary one, its constructors must have been in the exogamous stage of society.

172

Sampo may be derived from a Thibetan word, meaning ‘fountain of good,’ or it may possibly be connected with the Swedish Stamp, a hand-mill. The talisman is made of all the quaint odds and ends that the Fetichist treasures: swan’s feathers, flocks of wool, and so on.

173

Sir G. W. Cox’s Popular Romances of the Middle Ages, p. 19.

174

Fortnightly Review, 1869: ‘The Worship of Plants and Animals.’

175

Mr. McLennan in the Fortnightly Review, February 1870.

176

M. Schmidt, Volksleben der Neugriechen, finds comparatively few traces of the worship of Zeus, and these mainly in proverbial expressions.

177

Preller, Ausgewählte Aufsätze, p. 154.

178

Tylor, Prim. Cult., ii. 156. Pinkerton, vii. 357.

179

Universities Mission to Central Africa, p. 217. Prim. Cult,, ii. 156, 157.

180

Quoted in ‘Jacob’s Rod’: London, n.d., a translation of La Verge de Jacob, Lyon, 1693.

181

Lettres sur la Baguette, pp. 106-112.

182

Turner’s Samoa, pp, 77, 119.

183

Cox, Mythol. of Aryan Races, passim.

184

See examples in ‘A Far-travelled Tale,’ ‘Cupid and Psyche,’ and ‘The Myth of Cronus.’

185

Trübner, 1881.

186

Hahn, p. 23.

187

Ibid., p. 45.

188

Expedition, i. 166.

189

Herodotus, ii.

190

See Fetichism and the Infinite.

191

Sacred Books of the East, xii. 130, 131,

192

Lectures on Language. Second series, p. 41.

193

A defence of the evidence for our knowledge of savage faiths, practices, and ideas will be found in Primitive Culture, i. 9-11.

194

A third reference to Pausanias I have been unable to verify. There are several references to Greek fetich-stones in Theophrastus’s account of the Superstitious Man. A number of Greek sacred stones named by Pausanias may be worth noticing. In Bœotia (ix. 16), the people believed that Alcmene, mother of Heracles, was changed into a stone. The Thespians worshipped, under the name of Eros, an unwrought stone, αyαλμα παλαιοτατον, ‘their most ancient sacred object’ (ix. 27). The people of Orchomenos ‘paid extreme regard to certain stones,’ said to have fallen from heaven, ‘or to certain figures made of stone that descended from the sky’ (ix. 38). Near Chæronea, Rhea was said to have deceived Cronus, by offering him, in place of Zeus, a stone wrapped in swaddling bands. This stone, which Cronus vomited forth after having swallowed it, was seen by Pausanias at Delphi (ix. 41). By the roadside, near the city of the Panopeans, lay the stones out of which Prometheus made men (x. 4). The stone swallowed in place of Zeus by his father lay at the exit from the Delphian temple, and was anointed (compare the action of Jacob, Gen. xxviii. 18) with oil every day. The Phocians worshipped thirty squared stones, each named after a god (vii. xxii.). ‘Among all the Greeks rude stones were worshipped before the images of the gods.’ Among the Trœzenians a sacred stone lay in front of the temple, whereon the Trœzenian elders sat, and purified Orestes from the murder of his mother. In Attica there was a conical stone worshipped as Apollo (i. xliv.). Near Argos was a stone called Zeus Cappotas, on which Orestes was said to have sat down, and so recovered peace of mind. Such are examples of the sacred stones, the oldest worshipful objects, of Greece.

195

See essays on ‘Apollo and the Mouse’ and ‘The Early History of the Family.’

196

Here I may mention a case illustrating the motives of the fetich-worshipper. My friend, Mr. J. J. Atkinson, who has for many years studied the manners of the people of New Caledonia, asked a native why he treasured a certain fetich-stone. The man replied that, in one of the vigils which are practised beside the corpses of deceased friends, he saw a lizard. The lizard is a totem, a worshipful animal in New Caledonia. The native put out his hand to touch it, when it disappeared and left a stone in its place. This stone he therefore held sacred in the highest degree. Here then a fetich-stone was indicated as such by a spirit in form of a lizard.

197

Much the same theory is propounded in Mr. Müller’s lectures on ‘The Science of Religion.’

198

The idea is expressed in a well known parody of Wordsworth, about the tree which

‘Will grow ten times as tall as me

And live ten times as long.’

199

See Essay on ‘The Early History of the Family.’

200

Bergaigne’s La Religion Védique may be consulted for Vedic Fetichism.

201

Early Law and Custom.

202

Studies in Ancient History, p. 127.

203

Descent of Man, ii. 362.

204

Early Law and Custom, p. 210.

205

Here I would like to point out that Mr. M’Lennan’s theory was not so hard and fast as his manner (that of a very assured believer in his own ideas) may lead some inquirers to suppose. Sir Henry Maine writes, that both Mr. Morgan and Mr. M’Lennan ‘seem to me to think that human society went everywhere through the same series of changes, and Mr. M’Lennan, at any rate, expresses himself as if all those stages could be clearly discriminated from one another, and the close of one and the commencement of another announced with the distinctness of the clock-bell telling the end of the hour.’ On the other hand, I remember Mr. M’Lennan’s saying that, in his opinion, ‘all manner of arrangements probably went on simultaneously in different places.’ In Studies in Ancient History, p. 127, he expressly guards against the tendency ‘to assume that the progress of the various races of men from savagery has been a uniform progress: that all the stages which any of them has gone through have been passed in their order by all.’ Still more to the point is his remark on polyandry among the very early Greeks and other Aryans; ‘it is quite consistent with my view that in all these quarters (Persia, Sparta, Troy, Lycia, Attica, Crete, &c.) monandry, and even the patria potestas, may have prevailed at points.’

206

Early Law and Custom, p. 212.

207

Studies in Ancient History, pp. 140-147.

208

Totem is the word generally given by travellers and interpreters for the family crests of the Red Indians. Cf. p. 105.

209

Domestic Manners of the Chinese, i. 99.

210

Fortnightly Review, June 1, 1877.

211

Kamilaroi and Kurnai. Natives call these objects their kin, ‘of one flesh’ with them.

212

Studies, p. 11.

213

O’Curry, Manners of Ancient Irish, l. ccclxx., quoting Trin. Coll. Dublin MS.

214

See also Elton’s Origins of English History, pp. 299-301.

215

Kemble’s Saxons in England, p. 258. Politics of Aristotle, Bolland and Lang, p. 99.226

216

‘Gentiles sunt qui inter se eodem nomine sunt. Qui ab ingeniis oriundi sunt. Quorum majorum nemo servitutem servivit. Qui capite non sunt deminuti.’

217

Studies in Ancient History, p. 212.

218

Fortnightly Review, October 1869: ‘Archæologia Americana,’ ii. 113.

219

Suidas, 3102.

220

Herod., i. 173.

221

Cf. Bachofen, p. 309.

222

Compare the Irish Nennius, p. 127.

223

The illustrations in this article are for the most part copied, by permission of Messrs. Cassell & Co., from the Magazine of Art, in which the essay appeared.

224

Part of the pattern recurs on the New Zealand Bull-roarer, engraved in the essay on the Bull-roarer.

225

See Schliemann’s Troja, wherein is much learning and fancy about the Aryan Svastika.

226

Mr. Grant Allen kindly supplied me some time ago with a list of animal and vegetable names preserved in the titles of ancient English village settlements. Among them are: ash, birch, bear (as among the Iroquois), oak, buck, fir, fern, sun, wolf, thorn, goat, horse, salmon (the trout is a totem in America), swan (familiar in Australia), and others.