MYTH, RITUAL, AND RELIGION.*
MORE than a hundred years ago, long before the science of anthropology was ushered into existence, Fontenelle, the nephew of Corneille, applied the anthropological method to the explanation of mythology, a course in which he had been partially anticipated by Eusebius, a Christian apologist of the third century, and much more fully by our own countryman, Spencer, the head of a Cambridge College, who died near the close of the seventeenth century, in his curious work on Hebrew Ritual. But the clue thus afforded to the deter- mination of the true significance of myths, and of their place in the history of man, was neglected, and the problem was not again discussed, otherwise than incidentally, until it fell into the hands of the Sanskritists, from which it has been Mr. Lang's task to effect its rescue, already, but less definitely, undertaken by Mannhardt, McLennan, and Tylor.
The present volumes, however, are not primarily of a con- troversial character, nor do they form a complete treatise on mythology. Their aim is to " disengage and examine, as far as possible, separately, and as far as possible, historically, the various elements of religion and myth" upon the lines laid down by Fontenelle. The description is not strictly accurate, for they are only incidentally concerned with the origin and evolution of religion, with which myth-systems are far from being identical; still less do they deal with ritual. What Mr. Lang seems to have set himself specially to do, was to place side by side the body of savage myths and the body of Aryan myths, with the object of showing their virtual identity of structure. In this he has fully succeeded, and the work, which is marked by all Mr. Lang's well-known qualities of style, including a tendency to funny writing which we cannot admire, throws a flood of light upon some of the most obscure but interesting stages of human progress.
In all myths there are both rational and irrational elements present. Tales about war-heroes and culture-heroes are not absolutely impossible hypotheses. Even divine legends often have a not unnatural air about them, and at least do not clash with, though they may transcend, experience. But when animals are endowed with more than human powers, or beings worshipped as gods are at the same time believed to be re- pulsively vicious or imbecile in their conduct towards men and each other, the irrational element appears. In using this lan- guage, however, we must not fall into the error, which Mr. Lang does not appear wholly to avoid, of judging savage beliefs or practices by a civilised standard. The irrational myth was not originally sc very irrational, perhaps, after all. The life-history of a myth, could we get at it, which we can by inferential hypothesis only, would show a perfectly natural, and
• Myth, Ritual, and Religion. By Andrew Lang. 2 vols. London: Longman. in the main even rational, course of development. The principal original difference between men and brutes, on the evolutionary theory, is that the former, by the aid of language, have a practically unlimited power of recording the experience and thought of the race, while the latter can only record constantly repeated experience, and that within the narrow limits of hereditary instincts. But under the influence of natural selection, only the useful element is preserved in instinct, while man hands down from generation to generation a con- stantly accumulating stock of error scarcely touched by selection. Thus, the brute knows little, but he knows that little well; man knows infinitely more, but his knowledge is inaccurate and vague. It is not that the faculties of early man were not greatly superior to those of animsla, but his thought, dealing with an infinitesimal part of the universe, and lacking all knowledge of the rest, led him to conceptions which were wrong in fact, though justified by such knowledge as he had. The belief, for instance, that the sun moved round the earth was far from being an ill-founded one, in the absence of any exact study of the solar system. It is in this perpetuation of error, only gradually vincible through the increased exer- cise and widened sphere, rather than through any funda- mental development of human faculties, that the explanation must be looked for of the problem thus stated by Mr. Lang, —" Why do people who possess a sentiment or instinct of the existence of a good being or beings habitually attach to his name the most recklessly immoral myths ?"—which, though the process may be, as Mr. Lang asserts, beyond our direct ken, and beyond the view of history, is nevertheless not wholly insoluble. For the myths which appear "recklessly immoral" to later generations and men at a higher stage of evolution than that reached by the myth-makers, did not appear so to the latter themselves. They were the crude and naif stories of a cave-man's struggles with the world around him, organic and inorganic, full of natural terrors, of craft and of cruelty, mixed up with memories of gratified appetite and longings for sensual indulgence. In the course of time, these tales, variously modified and added to, embellished perhaps or intensified, became invested with a certain halo of antiquity, and were laid hold of by primitive medicine-men or sorcerers, who attached them to ritual practices, the beginnings of religion, whence their transference was easy to the earliest demons, who were at a later period partially transformed into, or wholly replaced by, gods making, after a fashion, for righteous- ness. In a passage quoted by Mr. Lang, Eusebius explains their persistence in language so clear that it cannot be im- proved upon :—" In later days, when (men) became ashamed of the religious beliefs of their ancestors, they invented private and respectful interpretations, each to suit himself. For no one dared to shake the ancestral beliefs, as they honoured at a very high rate the sacredness and antiquity of old associations, and of the teaching they had received in childhood." With the origin of religion myths are not directly concerned. Myths became attached to the religious sentiment, and were preserved by it ; but they did not give rise to religion, though they modified and were modi- fied by its course. Nor do they really throw much light upon the history of religious thought ; they rather, indeed, obscure it. Religion, no doubt, was a development of ritual which was itself a sort of codification of the practices of sorcerers and medicine- men, of the " wise men " who were the moral ancestors of the priestly class. How sorcerers came to possess the influence they wielded, it is not easy to determine—origins seldom are—and we have nothing but the practices of sorcerers to furnish any direct help in the inquiry. But it is not unreasonable to suppose that they were the clever heads of the tribe, who saw somewhat further into things than their fellows, and were really helpful to them ; but at the same time, through their very cleverness, which enabled them more effectually to operate with the tribal stock of error, were driven further astray in their conceptions, just as we see clever men at the present day guilty of absurdities of which commonplace people would be incapable.
The most interesting and instructive myths, though for directly opposite reasons, are those of the Australians and of the Greeks. The former are almost bare myths, owing, perhaps, to the long isolation of their makers; the latter con- sist in large measure of accretions and glosses upon a sort of nucleus of bare myth. The Australians and .the Greeks stand at the two extremes of the mythopceic scale; the fancies
of the former have no artistic merit, but are more genuine expressions of nascent thought than those of the latter, which rather exemplify the workings of civilisation referred to by Eusebius in the passage already quoted. Mr. Lang would have done better, in the interests of science at least, had he given a much fuller comparative account of Australian and Bushmen myths, and Greek myths, and treated the other Aryan and savage mythologies he has dealt with as subsidiary subjects. As it is, the reader is taken over a wide tract of inquiry without being allowed a sufficiently complete view of interesting points. Pund-jel, the chief deity of the Murray tribes, is a mighty sorcerer, venerated under the form of a bird ; Zeus is little more, stripped of the qualities attributed to him by the poets. Both are subject to higher influences, the one to the vicissitudes of Nature, the other to the power of Fate. The parallel cannot be pursued here, but carried out between the gods of Olympus and the Australian Pantheon, would reveal an extraordinary series of close resemblances, affording signal proof, were any necessary, of the essential identity of human thought throughout time and apace.
The last chapter deals, very summarily of course, with folk- lore, with those ancient and widely spread tales that do not profess, save incidentally, to explain any of the problems of the world around, but constitute the earliest form of fiction, historical, social, and romantic. That the materials of these tales should be found all over the world, is not sur- prising; but that the same plots or combinations of materials should be so universally met with, has long been matter of wonder. In reality, however, the plots of the more widely circulated tales consist of a few elementary situa- tions, variously modified to suit local circumstances, and padded with subordinate incidents differing more or less in each version. The theme, as Captain R. C. Temple, in the analysis he has appended to his admirable Wide-Awake Stories, terms it, remains the same ; the treatment varies. Thus, in stepmother-tales, the elements of the theme are the cruelty of the woman who stands in the place of a mother but is not one ; the escape of the victim, or his destruction; his occa- sional good fortune ; the punishment, or it may be the immunity, of the woman. Wherever stepmothers have existed, these elements must have existed also : the modes of cruelty, the methods of escape, the means by which good' fortune is attained, the character of the retribution, differ according to time, place, and narrator. Hence, the migration of tales is not a necessary hypothesis, though undoubtedly tales do pass from tribe to tribe and people to people without literary help. The probability is that very few tales are thus spread, save in the wake of conquering immigrations, or religious missions, such as those of the Buddhists, which have carried Indian tales all over Eastern Asia, to furthest Japan and northernmost Manchuria.
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