Custom and Myth

We shall presently see that a similar story is told of persons in whom the dawn can scarcely be recognised, so that ‘the best proof’ is not very good.

The name of Pururavas, again, is ‘an appropriate name for a solar hero.’.. Pururavas meant the same as Πολυδευκης, ‘endowed with much light,’ for, though rava is generally used of sound, yet the root ru, which means originally ‘to cry,’ is also applied to colour, in the sense of a loud or crying colour, that is, red. 57 Violet also, according to Sir G. W. Cox, 58 is a loud or crying colour. ‘The word (ιος), as applied to colour, is traced by Professor Max Müller to the root i, as denoting a “crying hue,” that is, a loud colour.’ It is interesting to learn that our Aryan fathers spoke of ‘loud colours,’ and were so sensitive as to think violet ‘loud.’ Besides, Pururavas calls himself Vasistha, which, as we know, is a name of the sun; and if he is called Aido, the son of Ida, the same name is elsewhere given 59 to Agni, the fire. ‘The conclusion of the argument is that antiquity spoke of the naked sun, and of the chaste dawn hiding her face when she had seen her husband. Yet she says she will come again. And after the sun has travelled through the world in search of his beloved, when he comes to the threshold of Death and is going to end his solitary life, she appears again, in the gloaming, the same as the dawn, as Eos in Homer, begins and ends the day, and she carries him away to the golden seats of the Immortals.’ 60

Kuhn objects to all this explanation, partly on what we think the inadequate ground that there is no necessary connection between the story of Urvasi (thus interpreted) and the ritual of sacred fire-lighting. Connections of that sort were easily invented at random by the compilers of the Brahmanas in their existing form. Coming to the analysis of names, Kuhn finds in Urvasi ‘a weakening of Urvankî (uru + anc), like yuvaça from yuvanka, Latin juvencus.. the accent is of no decisive weight.’ Kuhn will not be convinced that Pururavas is the sun, and is unmoved by the ingenious theory of ‘a crying colour,’ denoted by his name, and the inference, supported by such words as rufus, that crying colours are red, and therefore appropriate names of the red sun. The connection between Pururavas and Agni, fire, is what appeals to Kuhn – and, in short, where Mr. Müller sees a myth of sun and dawn, Kuhn recognises a fire-myth. Roth, again (whose own name means red), far from thinking that Urvasi is ‘the chaste dawn,’ interprets her name as die geile, that is, ‘lecherous, lascivious, lewd, wanton, obscene’; while Pururavas, as ‘the Roarer,’ suggests ‘the Bull in rut.’ In accordance with these views Roth explains the myth in a fashion of his own. 61

Here, then, as Kuhn says, ‘we have three essentially different modes of interpreting the myth,’ 62 all three founded on philological analysis of the names in the story. No better example could be given to illustrate the weakness of the philological method. In the first place, that method relies on names as the primitive relics and germs of the tale, although the tale may occur where the names have never been heard, and though the names are, presumably, late additions to a story in which the characters were originally anonymous. Again, the most illustrious etymologists differ absolutely about the true sense of the names. Kuhn sees fire everywhere, and fire-myths; Mr. Müller sees dawn and dawn-myths; Schwartz sees storm and storm-myths, and so on. As the orthodox teachers are thus at variance, so that there is no safety in orthodoxy, we may attempt to use our heterodox method.

None of the three scholars whose views we have glanced at – neither Roth, Kuhn, nor Mr. Müller – lays stress on the saying of Urvasi, ‘never let me see you without your royal garments, for this is the custom of women.’ 63 To our mind, these words contain the gist of the myth. There must have been, at some time, a custom which forbade women to see their husbands without their garments, or the words have no meaning. If any custom of this kind existed, a story might well be evolved to give a sanction to the law. ‘You must never see your husband naked: think what happened to Urvasi – she vanished clean away!’ This is the kind of warning which might be given. If the customary prohibition had grown obsolete, the punishment might well be assigned to a being of another, a spiritual, race, in which old human ideas lingered, as the neolithic dread of iron lingers in the Welsh fairies.

Our method will be, to prove the existence of singular rules of etiquette, corresponding to the etiquette accidentally infringed by Pururavas. We shall then investigate stories of the same character as that of Urvasi and Pururavas, in which the infringement of the etiquette is chastised. It will be seen that, in most cases, the bride is of a peculiar and perhaps supernatural race. Finally, the tale of Urvasi will be taken up again, will be shown to conform in character to the other stories examined, and will be explained as a myth told to illustrate, or sanction, a nuptial etiquette.

The lives of savages are bound by the most closely-woven fetters of custom. The simplest acts are ‘tabooed,’ a strict code regulates all intercourse. Married life, especially, moves in the strangest fetters. There will be nothing remarkable in the wide distribution of a myth turning on nuptial etiquette, if this law of nuptial etiquette proves to be also widely distributed. That it is widely distributed we now propose to demonstrate by examples.

The custom of the African people of the kingdom of Futa is, or was, even stricter than the Vedic custom of women– ‘wives never permit their husbands to see them unveiled for three years after their marriage.’ 64

In his ‘Travels to Timbuctoo’ (i. 94), Caillié says that the bridegroom ‘is not allowed to see his intended during the day.’ He has a tabooed hut apart, and ‘if he is obliged to come out he covers his face.’ He ‘remains with his wife only till daybreak’ – like Cupid – and flees, like Cupid, before the light. Among the Australians the chief deity, if deity such a being can be called, Pundjel, ‘has a wife whose face he has never seen,’ probably in compliance with some primæval etiquette or taboo. 65

Among the Yorubas ‘conventional modesty forbids a woman to speak to her husband, or even to see him, if it can be avoided.’ 66 Of the Iroquois Lafitau says: ‘Ils n’osent aller dans les cabanes particulières où habitent leurs épouses que durant l’obscurité de la nuit.’ 67 The Circassian women live on distant terms with their lords till they become mothers. 68 Similar examples of reserve are reported to be customary among the Fijians.

In backward parts of Europe a strange custom forbids the bride to speak to her lord, as if in memory of a time when husband and wife were always of alien tribes, and, as among the Caribs, spoke different languages.

In the Bulgarian ‘Volkslied,’ the Sun marries Grozdanka, a mortal girl. Her mother addresses her thus: —

Grozdanka, mother’s treasure mine,For nine long years I nourished thee,For nine months see thou do not speakTo thy first love that marries thee.

M. Dozon, who has collected the Bulgarian songs, says that this custom of prolonged silence on the part of the bride is very common in Bulgaria, though it is beginning to yield to a sense of the ludicrous. 69 In Sparta and in Crete, as is well known, the bridegroom was long the victim of a somewhat similar taboo, and was only permitted to seek the company of his wife secretly, and in the dark, like the Iroquois described by Lafitau.

Herodotus tells us (i. 146) that some of the old Ionian colonists ‘brought no women with them, but took wives of the women of the Carians, whose fathers they had slain. Therefore the women made a law for themselves, and handed it down to their daughters, that they should never sit at meat with their husbands, and that none should ever call her husband by his name.’ In precisely the same way, in Zululand the wife may not mention her husband’s name, just as in the Welsh fairy tale the husband may not even know the name of his fairy bride, on pain of losing her for ever. These ideas about names, and freakish ways of avoiding the use of names, mark the childhood of languages, according to Mr. Max Müller, 70 and, therefore, the childhood of Society. The Kaffirs call this etiquette ‘Hlonipa.’ It applies to women as well as men. A Kaffir bride is not called by her own name in her husband’s village, but is spoken of as ‘mother of so and so,’ even before she has borne a child. The universal superstition about names is at the bottom of this custom. The Aleutian Islanders, according to Dall, are quite distressed when obliged to speak to their wives in the presence of others. The Fijians did not know where to look when missionaries hinted that a man might live under the same roof as his wife. 71 Among the Turkomans, for six months, a year, or two years, a husband is only allowed to visit his wife by stealth.

The number of these instances could probably be increased by a little research. Our argument is that the widely distributed myths in which a husband or a wife transgresses some ‘custom’ – sees the other’s face or body, or utters the forbidden name – might well have arisen as tales illustrating the punishment of breaking the rule. By a very curious coincidence, a Breton sailor’s tale of the ‘Cupid and Psyche’ class is confessedly founded on the existence of the rule of nuptial etiquette. 72

In this story the son of a Boulogne pilot marries the daughter of the King of Naz – wherever that may be. In Naz a man is never allowed to see the face of his wife till she has borne him a child – a modification of the Futa rule. The inquisitive French husband unveils his wife, and, like Psyche in Apuleius, drops wax from a candle on her cheek. When the pair return to Naz, the king of that country discovers the offence of the husband, and, by the aid of his magicians, transforms the Frenchman into a monster. Here we have the old formula – the infringement of a ‘taboo,’ and the magical punishment – adapted to the ideas of Breton peasantry. The essential point of the story, for our purpose, is that the veiling of the bride is ‘the custom of women,’ in the mysterious land of Naz. ‘C’est l’usage du pays: les maris ne voient leurs femmes sans voile que lorsqu’elles sont devenues mères.’ Now our theory of the myth of Urvasi is simply this: ‘the custom of women,’ which Pururavas transgresses, is probably a traditional Aryan law of nuptial etiquette, l’usage du pays, once prevalent among the people of India.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.

1

Compare De Cara: Essame Critico, xx. i.

2

Revue de l’Hist. des Rel. ii. 136.

3

Sprachvergleichung und Urgeschichte, p. 431.

4

Prim. Cult. i. 394.

5

A study of the contemporary stone age in Scotland will be found in Mitchell’s Past and Present.

6

About twenty years ago, the widow of an Irish farmer, in Derry, killed her deceased husband’s horse. When remonstrated with by her landlord, she said, ‘Would you have my man go about on foot in the next world?’ She was quite in the savage intellectual stage.

7

At the solemn festival suppers, ordained for the honour of the gods, they forget not to serve up certain dishes of young whelp’s flesh. (Pliny, H. N. xxix. 4.)

8

Nov. 1880.

9

‘Ah, once again may I plant the great fan on her corn-heap, while she stands smiling by, Demeter of the threshing floor, with sheaves and poppies in her hands’ (Theocritus, vii. 155-157).

10

Odyssey, xi. 32.

11

Rev. de l’Hist. des Rel., vol. ii.

12

Pausanias, iii. 15. When the boys were being cruelly scourged, the priestess of Artemis Orthia held an ancient barbaric wooden image of the goddess in her hands. If the boys were spared, the image grew heavy; the more they were tortured, the lighter grew the image. In Samoa the image (shark’s teeth) of the god Taema is consulted before battle. ‘If it felt heavy, that was a bad omen; if light, the sign was good’ – the god was pleased (Turner’s Samoa, p. 55).

13

Kamilaroi and Kurnai, p. 268.

14

Fison, Journal Anthrop. Soc., Nov. 1883.

15

Taylor’s New Zealand, p. 181.

16

This is not the view of le Père Lafitau, a learned Jesuit missionary in North America, who wrote (1724) a work on savage manners, compared with the manners of heathen antiquity. Lafitau, who was greatly struck with the resemblances between Greek and Iroquois or Carib initiations, takes Servius’s other explanation of the mystica vannus, ‘an osier vessel containing rural offerings of first fruits.’ This exactly answers, says Lafitau, to the Carib Matoutou, on which they offer sacred cassava cakes.

17

The Century Magazine, May 1883.

18

Κωνος ξυλαριον ου εξηπται το σπαρτιον και εν ταις τελεταις εδονειτο ινα ροιζη. Lobeck, Aglaophamus (i. p. 700).

19

De Corona, p. 313.

20

Savage Africa. Captain Smith, the lover of Pocahontas, mentions the custom in his work on Virginia, pp. 245-248.

21

Brough Smyth, i. 60, using evidence of Howitt, Taplin, Thomas, and Wilhelmi.

22

Kamilaroi and Kurnai, p. 214.

23

Περι ορχησεως, c. 15.

24

Cape Monthly Magazine, July 1874.

25

Wallace, Travels on the Amazon, p. 349.

26

New Zealand, Taylor, pp. 119-121. Die heilige Sage der Polynesier, Bastian, pp. 36-39.

27

A crowd of similar myths, in one of which a serpent severs Heaven and Earth, are printed in Turner’s Samoa.

28

The translation used is Jowett’s.

29

Theog., 166.

30

Apollodorus, i. 15.

31

Primitive Culture, i. 325.

32

Pauthier, Livres sacrés de l’Orient, p. 19.

33

Muir’s Sanskrit Texts, v. 23. Aitareya Brahmana.

34

Hesiod, Theog., 497.

35

Paus. x. 24.

36

Bleek, Bushman Folklore, pp. 6-8.

37

Theal, Kaffir Folklore, pp. 161-167.

38

Brough Smith, i. 432-433.

39

i. 338.

40

Rel. de la Nouvelle-France (1636), p. 114.

41

Codrington, in Journal Anthrop. Inst. Feb. 1881. There is a Breton Märchen of a land where people had to ‘bring the Dawn’ daily with carts and horses. A boy, whose sole property was a cock, sold it to the people of this country for a large sum, and now the cock brings the dawn, with a great saving of trouble and expense. The Märchen is a survival of the state of mind of the Solomon Islanders.

42

Selected Essays, i. 460.

43

Ibid. i. 311.

44

Ueber Entwicklungsstufen der Mythenbildung (1874), p. 148.

45

ii. 127.

46

G. D. M., ii. 127, 129.

47

Gr. My., i. 144.

48

De Abst., ii. 202, 197.

49

Rel. und Myth., ii. 3.

50

Ursprung der Myth., pp. 133, 135, 139, 149.

51

Contemporary Review, Sept. 1883.

52

Rev. de l’Hist. rel. i. 179.

53

That Pururavas is regarded as a mortal man, in relations with some sort of spiritual mistress, appears from the poem itself (v. 8, 9, 18). The human character of Pururavas also appears in R. V. i. 31, 4.

54

Selected Essays, i. 408.

55

The Apsaras is an ideally beautiful fairy woman, something ‘between the high gods and the lower grotesque beings,’ with ‘lotus eyes’ and other agreeable characteristics. A list of Apsaras known by name is given in Meyer’s Gandharven-Kentauren, p. 28. They are often regarded as cloud-maidens by mythologists.

56

Selected Essays, i. p. 405.

57

Cf. ruber, rufus, O. H. G. rôt, rudhira, ερυθρος; also Sanskrit, ravi, sun.

58

Myth. Ar. Nat., ii. 81.

59

R. V. iii. 29, 3.

60

The passage alluded to in Homer does not mean that dawn ‘ends’ the day, but ‘when the fair-tressed Dawn brought the full light of the third day’ (Od., v. 390).

61

Liebrecht (Zur Volkskunde, 241) is reminded by Pururavas (in Roth’s sense of der Brüller) of loud-thundering Zeus, εριyδουπος.

62

Herabkunft des Fetters, p. 86-89.

63

Liebrecht (Zur Volkskunde, p. 241) notices the reference to the ‘custom of women.’ But he thinks the clause a mere makeshift, introduced late to account for a prohibition of which the real meaning had been forgotten. The improbability of this view is indicated by the frequency of similar prohibitions in actual custom.

64

Astley, Collection of Voyages, ii. 24. This is given by Bluet and Moore on the evidence of one Job Ben Solomon, a native of Bunda in Futa. ‘Though Job had a daughter by his last wife, yet he never saw her without her veil, as having been married to her only two years.’ Excellently as this prohibition suits my theory, yet I confess I do not like Job’s security.

65

Brough Smyth, i. 423.

66

Bowen, Central Africa, p. 303.

67

Lafitau, i. 576.

68

Lubbock, Origin of Civilisation (1875), p. 75.

69

Chansons Pop. Bulg., p. 172.

70

Lectures on Language, Second Series, p. 41.

71

J. A. Farrer, Primitive Manners, p. 202, quoting Seemann.

72

Sébillot, Contes Pop. de la Haute-Bretagne, p. 183.