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CONFUSION OF EARLY THOUGHT BETWEEN THE LIVING AND THE NOT LIVING.

In selecting from the literature of savage mythology the material overburdens us by its richness. Much of it is old, and, like refuse-heaps in our mining districts once cast aside as rubbish but now made to yield products of value, has, after long neglect, been found to contain elements of worth, which patience and insight have extracted from its travellers’ tales and quaint speculations. That for which it was most prized in the days of our fathers is now of small account; that within it which they passed by we secure as of lasting worth. Much of that literature is, however, new, for the impetus which has in our time been given to the rescue and preservation of archaic forms has reached this, and a host of accomplished collectors have secured rich specimens of relics which, in the lands of their discovery, have still the authority of the past, unimpaired by the critical exposure of the present.

The subject itself is, moreover, so wide reaching, bringing the ancient and the modern into hitherto unsuspected relation, showing how in customs and beliefs, to us unmeaning and irrational, there lurk the degraded representations of old philosophies, and in what seems to us burlesque, the survivals of man’s most serious thought.

One feels this difficulty of choice and this temptation to digress in treating of the confusion inherent in the savage mind between things living and not living, arising from superficial analogies and its attribution of life and power to lifeless things. The North American Indians prefer a hook that has caught a big fish to the handful of hooks that have never been tried, and they never lay two nets together lest they should be jealous of each other. The Bushmen thought that the traveller Chapman’s big waggon was the mother of his smaller ones; and the natives of Tahiti sowed in the ground some iron nails given them by Captain Cook, expecting to obtain young ones. When that ill-fated discoverer’s ship was sighted by the New Zealanders they thought it was a whale with wings. The king of the Coussa Kaffirs having broken off a piece of the anchor of a stranded ship soon afterwards died, upon which all the Kaffirs made a point of saluting the anchor very respectfully whenever they went near it, regarding it as a vindictive being. But perhaps one of the most striking and amusing illustrations is that quoted by Sir John Lubbock from the Smithsonian Reports concerning an Indian who had been sent by a missionary to a colleague with four loaves of bread, accompanied by a letter stating their number. The Indian ate some of the bread, and his theft was, of course, found out. He was sent on a second errand with a similar batch of bread and a letter, and repeated the theft, but took the precaution to hide the letter under a stone while he was eating the loaves, so that it might not see him! As the individual is a type of the race, so in the child’s nature we find analogy of the mental attitude of the savage ready to hand. To the child everything is alive. With what timidity and wonder he first touches a watch, with its moving hands and clicking works; with what genuine anger he beats the door against which he has knocked his head, whips the rocking-horse that has thrown him, then kisses and strokes it the next moment in token of forgiveness and affection.

“As children of weak age

Lend life to the dumb stones

Whereon to vent their rage,

And bend their little fists, and rate

the senseless ground.”[2]

Even among civilised adults, as Mr. Grote remarks, “the force of momentary passion will often suffice to supersede the acquired habit, and an intelligent man may be impelled in a moment of agonising pain to kick or beat the lifeless object from which he has suffered.” The mental condition which causes the wild native of Brazil to bite the stone he stumbled over may, as Dr. Tylor has pointed out in his invaluable Primitive Culture, be traced along the course of history not merely in impulsive habit, but in formally enacted law. If among barbarous peoples we find, for example, the relatives of a man killed by a fall from a tree taking their revenge by cutting the tree down and scattering it in chips, we find a continuity of idea in the action of the court of justice held at the Prytaneum in Athens to try any inanimate object, such as an axe, or a piece of wood or stone, which has caused the death of any one without proved human agency, and which, if condemned, was cast in solemn form beyond the border. “The spirit of this remarkable procedure reappears in the old English law, repealed only in the present reign, whereby not only a beast that kills a man, but a cart-wheel that runs over him, or a tree that falls on him and kills him, is deodand or given to God, i.e. forfeited and sold for the poor.” Among ancient legal proceedings at Laon we read of animals condemned to the gallows for the crime of murder, and of swarms of caterpillars which infected certain districts being admonished by the Courts of Troyes in 1516 to take themselves off within a given number of days, on pain of being declared accursed and excommunicated.[3]

Barbaric confusion in the existence of transferable qualities in things, as when the New Zealander swallows his dead enemy’s eye that he may see farther, or gives his child pebbles to make it stony and pitiless of heart; and as when the Abipone eats tiger’s flesh to increase his courage, has its survival in the old wives’ notion that the eye-bright flower, which resembles the eye, is good for diseases of that organ, in the mediæval remedy for curing a sword wound by nursing the weapon that caused it, and in the old adage, “Take a hair of the dog that bit you.” As illustrating this, Dr. Dennys[4] tells a story of a missionary in China whose big dog would now and again slightly bite children as he passed through the villages. In such a case the mother would run after him and beg for a hair from the dog’s tail, which would be put to the part bitten, or when the missionary would say jocosely, “Oh! take a hair from the dog yourself,” the woman would decline, and ask him to spit in her hand, which itself witnesses to the widespread belief in the mystical properties of saliva.[5] Among ourselves this survives, degraded enough, in the cabmen’s and boatmen’s habit of spitting on the fare paid them. Treacle (Greek thēriake, from thērion, a name given to the viper) witnesses to the old-world superstition that viper’s flesh is an antidote to the viper’s bite. Philips, in his World of Words, defines treacle as a “physical compound made of vipers and other ingredients,” and this medicament was a favourite against all poisons. The word then became applied to any confection or sweet syrup, and finally and solely to the syrup of molasses.

The practice of burning or hanging in effigy, by which a crowd expresses its feelings towards an unpopular person, is a relic of the old belief in a real and sympathetic connection between a man and his image; a belief extant among the unlettered in by-places of civilised countries. When we hear of North American tribes making images of their foes, whose lives they expect to shorten by piercing those images with their arrows, we remember that these barbarous folk have their representatives among us in the Devonshire peasant, who hangs in his chimney a pig’s heart stuck all over with thorn-prickles, so that the heart of his enemy may likewise be pierced. The custom among the Dyaks of Borneo of making a wax figure of the foe, so that his body may waste away as the wax is melted, will remind the admirers of Dante Rossetti how he finds in a kindred mediæval superstition the subject of his poem “Sister Helen,” while they who prefer the authority of sober prose may turn to that storehouse of the curious, Brand’s Popular Antiquities. Brand quotes from King James, who, in his Dæmonology, book ii. chap. 5, tells us that “the devil teacheth how to make pictures of wax or clay, that by roasting thereof the persons that they bear the name of may be continually melted or dried away by continual sickness;” and also cites Andrews, the author of a Continuation of Henry’s Great Britain, who, speaking of the death of Ferdinand, Earl of Derby, by poison, in the reign of Elizabeth, says, “The credulity of the age attributed his death to witchcraft. The disease was odd, and operated as a perpetual emetic; and a waxen image, with hair like that of the unfortunate earl, found in his chamber, reduced every suspicion to certainty.” A century and half before this the Duchess of Gloucester did penance for conspiring with certain necromancers against the life of Henry VI. by melting a waxen image of him, while, as hinging the centuries together, “only recently a corp cré, or clay image, stuck full of birds’ claws, bones, pins, and similar objects, was found in one of the Inverness-shire rivers. It was a fetish which, as it dissolved away by the action of the stream, was supposed to involve the ‘wearing away’ of the person it was intended to represent.”[6] The passage from practices born of such beliefs to the use of charms as protectives against the evil-disposed and those in league with the devil, and as cures for divers diseases, is obvious. Upon this it is not needful to dwell; the superstitious man is on the same plane as the savage, but, save in rare instances, without such excuse for remaining, as Bishop Hall puts it, with “old wives and starres as his counsellors, charms as his physicians, and a little hallowed wax as his antidote for all evils.”

But we have travelled in brief space a long way from our picture of man, weaving out of streams and breezes and the sunshine his crude philosophy of personal life and will controlling all, to the peasant of to-day, his intellectual lineal descendant, with his belief in signs and wonders, his forecast of fate and future by omens, by dreams, and by such pregnant occurrences as the spilling of salt, the howling of dogs, and changes of the moon; in short, by the great mass of superstitions which yet more or less influence the intelligent, terrorise the ignorant, and delight the student of human development.