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MYTHS AND DREAMS
MYTHS AND DREAMS
MYTHS AND DREAMS BY EDWARD CLODD AUTHOR OF ‘THE CHILDHOOD OF THE WORLD,’ ‘THE STORY OF CREATION,’ ETC. SECOND EDITION, REVISED London CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY 1891 TO RICHARD A. PROCTOR, B.A., AUTHOR OF ‘THE SUN,’ ‘OTHER WORLDS,’ ETC., EDITOR OF ‘KNOWLEDGE.’ My dear Proctor —The best gifts of life are its friendships, and to you, with whom friendship has ripened into fellowship, and under whose editorial wing some of the chapters of this book had temporary shelter, I inscribe them i
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PREFACE.
PREFACE.
The object of this book is to present in compendious form the evidence which myths and dreams supply as to primitive man’s interpretation of his own nature and of the external world, and more especially to indicate how such evidence carries within itself the history of the origin and growth of beliefs in the supernatural. The examples are selected chiefly from barbaric races, as furnishing the nearest correspondences to the working of the mind in what may be called its “eocene” stage, but exampl
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§ I.
§ I.
ITS PRIMITIVE MEANING. It is barely thirty years ago since the world was startled by the publication of Buckle’s History of Civilisation , with its theory that human actions are the effect of causes as fixed and regular as those which operate in the universe; climate, soil, food, and scenery being the chief conditions determining progress. That book was a tour de force , not a lasting contribution to the question of man’s mental development. The publication of Darwin’s epoch-making Origin of Spe
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§ II.
§ II.
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 d
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§ III.
§ III.
PERSONIFICATION OF THE POWERS OF NATURE. ( a. ) The Sun and Moon. A good deal hinges upon the evidences in savage myth-making of the personification of the powers of nature. Obviously, the richest and most suggestive material would be supplied by the striking phenomena of the heavens, chiefly in sunrise and sunset, in moon, star, star-group and meteor, cloud and storm, and, next in importance, by the strange and terrible among phenomena on earth, whether in the restless waters, the unquiet tre
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§ IV.
§ IV.
THE SOLAR THEORY OF MYTH. The cogency of the evidence concerning the development of belief in Satan out of light-and-darkness myths is generally admitted, but it is of a kind that must not be pushed too far. For the phases of Nature are manifold; manifold also is the life of man; and we must not lend a too willing ear to theories which refer the crude explanations of an unscientific age, when the whole universe is Wonderland, to one source. Cave hominem unius libri , says the adage, and we may a
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§ V.
§ V.
BELIEF IN METAMORPHOSIS INTO ANIMALS. The belief that human beings could change themselves into animals has been already alluded to, but in view of its large place in the history of illusions, some further reference is needful. Superstitions which now excite a smile, or which seem beneath notice, were no sudden phenomena, appearing now and again at the beck and call of wilful deceivers of their kind. That they survive at all, like organisms, atrophied or degenerate, which have seen “better days,
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§ VI.
§ VI.
TOTEMISM: BELIEF IN DESCENT FROM ANIMAL OR PLANT. In addition to the beliefs in the transformation of men into animals and in the transmigration of souls into the bodies of animals, we find among barbarous peoples a belief which is probably the parent of one and certainly nearly related to both, namely, in descent from the animal or plant, more often the former, whose name they bear. Its connection with transmigration is seen in the belief of the Moquis of Arizona, that after death they live in
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§ VII.
§ VII.
SURVIVAL OF MYTH IN HISTORY. For proofs of the emergence of the higher out of the lower in philosophy and religion, to say nothing of less exalted matters, whether the beast-fable or the nursery rhyme, as holding barbaric thought in solution, examples have necessarily been drawn from the mythology of past and present savage races. But these are too remote in time or standpoint to stir other than a languid interest in the reader’s mind; their purpose is served when they are cited and classified a
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§ VIII.
§ VIII.
MYTH AMONG THE HEBREWS. With the important exception of reference to the change effected in the Jewish doctrine of spirits, and its resulting influence on Christian theology, by the transformation of the mythical Ahriman of the old Persian religion into the archfiend Satan, but slight allusion has been made in these pages to the myths and legends of the Semitic race. Under this term, borrowed from the current belief in their descent from Shem, are included extant and extinct people, the Assyrian
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§ IX.
§ IX.
CONCLUSION. The multitude of subjects traversed in the foregoing sections has compelled presentment in so concise a form that any attempt to gather into a few sentences the sum of things said would be as a digest of a digest, and it is, therefore, better to briefly emphasise the conclusions to which the gathered evidence points. It was remarked at the outset, when insisting on the serious meaning which lies at the heart of myths, that they have their origin in the endeavour of barbaric man to ex
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§ I.
§ I.
DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SAVAGE AND CIVILISED MAN. The evidence as to pre-historic man’s material furniture and surroundings, which was first gathered from and restricted to ancient river valleys and bone caverns of Great Britain, France, and Belgium, is no longer isolated. It is supported by evidence which has been collected from every part of the globe inhabited in past or present times, and its uniform character has enabled us to determine what lies beyond an horizon which within the last half cent
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§ II.
§ II.
LIMITATIONS OF BARBARIC LANGUAGE. Illustrations of the low intellectual stage of some extant races not quite at the bottom of the scale, drawn from simple matters, will make clearer how they will interpret matters of a more complex order, and interpret them only in one way. Of the beginning of thought we can know nothing. For numberless ages man was marked out from the animals most nearly allied to him by that power of more readily adapting means to ends which gave him mastery over nature. Throu
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§ III.
§ III.
BARBARIC CONFUSION BETWEEN NAMES AND THINGS. Races which have names for different kinds of oaks, but none for an oak, still less for a tree, and who cannot count beyond their fingers, may be expected to have hazy notions concerning the objective and subjective; or, to put these in terms less technical, concerning that which belongs to the object of thought, and that which is to be referred to the thinking subject. Although primitive religion and philosophy are too nearly allied to admit of sharp
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§ IV.
§ IV.
BARBARIC BELIEF IN VIRTUE IN INANIMATE THINGS. The artificial divisions which man in his pride of birth made between the several classes of phenomena in the inorganic world, and also between the inorganic and the organic, are being swept away before the larger knowledge and insight of our time. Indeed, it would seem that the surest test we can apply to the worth of any kind of knowledge is whether it adds to or takes from our growing conception of unity. If it does the former, we cannot overthro
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§ V.
§ V.
BARBARIC BELIEF IN THE REALITY OF DREAMS. The confusion in the barbaric mind between the objective and the subjective, and between the name and the person or thing, which has been illustrated in the foregoing pages, will enable us to see more clearly how the like confusion must enter into the interpretation of such occult and compound phenomena as dreams, and all their kind. They supply the conditions for exciting and sustaining that feeling of mystery which attends man’s endeavour to get at the
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§ VI.
§ VI.
BARBARIC THEORY OF DISEASE. That disease is a derangement of functions interrupting their natural action, and carrying attendant pain as its indication, could not enter the head of the uncivilised: and, indeed, among ourselves a cold or a fever is commonly thought of as an entity in the body which has stolen in, and, having been caught, must be somehow expelled. With the universal primitive belief in spiritual agencies everywhere inhaled with the breath or swallowed with the food or drink, all d
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§ VII.
§ VII.
BARBARIC THEORY OF A SECOND SELF OR SOUL. In thus far illustrating the confusion inherent in the barbaric mind between what is and what is not external to itself, the explanation given of matters still dividing philosophers into opposite camps has been hardly indicated. The uniformity of this confusion among the lower intelligence in every zone and age might surprise us, and we should be in bondage to the theory which explains it by assumption of primal intuitions of the race, were we not rejoic
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§ VIII.
§ VIII.
BARBARIC PHILOSOPHY IN “PUNCHKIN” AND ALLIED STORIES. As bearing upon the barbaric belief in the soul leaving the body at pleasure, there is a remarkable group of stories, the central idea of which is the dwelling apart of the soul or heart, as the seat of life, in some secret place, in an egg, or a necklace, or a flower, the good or evil fortunes of the soul involving those of the body. To this group the name of “Punchkin,” the title of one of the older specimens, may conveniently be given. In
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§ IX.
§ IX.
BARBARIC AND CIVILISED NOTIONS OF THE SOUL’S NATURE. In proof of the closing remarks in § VII., that the breath has given the chief name to the soul, we find the Western Australians using the same word, waug , for “breath, spirit, soul”; in Java the word nawa is used for “health, life, soul”; in the Dakota tongue niya is literally “breath,” figuratively “life”; in Netela piuts is “breath” and “soul”; in Eskimo silla means “air” and “wind,” and is also the word that conveys the highest idea of th
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§ X.
§ X.
BARBARIC BELIEF IN SOULS IN BRUTES AND PLANTS AND LIFELESS THINGS. More graceful is the conception which makes the soul spring up as a flower or cleave the air as a bird. It is, of course, the purified survival of the primitive thought which did not limit its belief in an indwelling spirit to man, but extended it to brutes and plants, and even to lifeless things. For the lower creatures manifested the phenomena from which the belief in spirits in higher creatures was inferred. They moved and bre
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§ XI.
§ XI.
BARBARIC AND CIVILISED NOTIONS ABOUT THE SOUL’S DWELLING-PLACE. The existence of the ghost-soul or other self being unquestioned, the inquiry follows, where does it dwell? Like the trolls of Norse myth, who burst at sunrise, the flitting spirit vanishes in the light and comes with the darkness; but what places does it haunt when the quiet of the night is unbroken by its intrusion, and where are they? The answers to these are as varied as the vagaries of rude imagination permit. We must not expec
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§ XII.
§ XII.
CONCLUSIONS FROM THE FOREGOING. It would exceed the limits and purport of this book to follow the extension of the belief in spirits to its extreme range; in other words, to belief in controlling spirits in inanimate objects, which were advanced pari passu with man’s advancing conceptions to place and rank as the higher gods of polytheism. Such belief, as already indicated, is the outcome of that primitive philosophy which invests the elements above and the earth beneath with departmental deitie
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§ XIII.
§ XIII.
DREAMS AS OMENS AND MEDIA OF COMMUNICATION BETWEEN GODS AND MEN. Reference has now to be made to the part played by dreams as supposed channels of communication between heaven and earth; as portents, omens, etc. The common belief among the nations of antiquity that they were sent by the gods, and the like belief lurking in the minds of the superstitious to this day, are the scarcely-altered survivals of barbaric confusion respecting them. When man had advanced from the earlier stages of undefine
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