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

the evidence of the statements of civilised observers, next on the evidence of the savage institutions in which it is embodied.

      (1) Creuzer and Guigniaut, vol. i. p. 111.

      The opinion of Mr. Tylor is naturally of great value, as it is formed on as wide an acquaintance with the views of the lower races as any inquirers can hope to possess. Mr. Tylor observes: "We have to inform ourselves of the savage man's idea, which is very different from the civilised man's, of the nature of the lower animals. … The sense of an absolute psychical distinction between man and beast, so prevalent in the civilised world, is hardly to be found among the lower races."(1) The universal attribution of "souls" to all things—the theory known as "Animism"—is another proof that the savage draws no hard and fast line between man and the other things in the world. The notion of the Italian country-people, that cruelty to an animal does not matter because it is not a "Christian," has no parallel in the philosophy of the savage, to whom all objects seem to have souls, just as men have. Mr. Im Thurn found the absence of any sense of a difference between man and nature a characteristic of his native companions in Guiana. "The very phrase, 'Men and other animals,' or even, as it is often expressed, 'Men and animals,' based as it is on the superiority which civilised man feels over other animals, expresses a dichotomy which is in no way recognised by the Indian. … It is therefore most important to realise how comparatively small really is the difference between men in a state of savagery and other animals, and how completely even such difference as exists escapes the notice of savage men … It is not, therefore, too much to say that, according to the view of the Indians, other animals differ from men only in bodily form and in their various degrees of strength; in spirit they do not differ at all."(2) The Indian's notion of the life of plants and stones is on the same level of unreason, as we moderns reckon reason. He believes in the spirits of rocks and stones, undeterred by the absence of motion in these objects. "Not only many rocks, but also many waterfalls, streams, and indeed material objects of every sort, are supposed each to consist of a body and a spirit, as does man."(3) It is not our business to ask here how men came by the belief in universal animation. That belief is gradually withdrawn, distinctions are gradually introduced, as civilisation and knowledge advance. It is enough for us if the failure to draw a hard and fast line between man and beasts, stones and plants, be practically universal among savages, and if it gradually disappears before the fuller knowledge of civilisation. The report which Mr. Im Thurn brings from the Indians of Guiana is confirmed by what Schoolcraft says of the Algonkin races of the northern part of the continent. "The belief of the narrators and listeners in every wild and improbable thing told helps wonderfully in the original stories, in joining all parts together. The Indian believes that the whole visible and invisible creation is animated. … To make the matter worse, these tribes believe that animals of the lowest as well as highest class in the chain of creation are alike endowed with reasoning powers and faculties. As a natural conclusion they endow birds, beasts and all other animals with souls."(4) As an example of the ease with which the savage recognises consciousness and voluntary motion even in stones, may be cited Kohl's account of the beliefs 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