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Myth and Totemism as
Primitive Modes
of Representation.
―――♦―――
AN INTRODUCTION
by
Rey Bowen.© |
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Intellectual imperialism, where the languages, philosophies and
histories of dominant societies are imposed upon less aggressive
societies, has been used as a tool for perpetuating an alternative
interpretation of a group's culture in order to control the thoughts of
that group, so that they become unconsciously fettered, thereby creating
a state of mental colonialism. Such manipulation leads to the
direction, redirection or even misdirection of a people's actions.
Thus according to the Diopian [1.]
thesis on culture, to reinterpret and repackage just one facet of a
people's culture is to erase a part of their collective memory.
Knowledge of a society's cultural expressions is, therefore, an
important means of giving that unit historical continuity, stability and
vision. Without that knowledge the social psychology, cohesiveness
and current status of that group will be spurious. Furthermore, a
vehicle for transmitting culture is through a community's mythology.
Mythology, however, can be defined in either of two ways: as a "mode of
explaining natural phenomena" or as "modes of representation". How
one's past is interpreted, is then dependent upon which definition is
ascribed to.
Amongst many nineteenth century European, imperial
scholars, who were intent on proving the inferiority of less
industrially advanced societies, the norm was to accept myths as "the
habit of savages", a collection of fanciful tales constructed after
nights of drunken and orgiastic stupor. Much of what native
peoples had as an oral tradition, and even aspects of Kamite mythology,
were nothing more than "the ancient, cruel, and grotesque savage
element" of an untutored humanity. Moreover, these anthropologists
who had subscribed to such a thesis, went on to assert that only through
the aegis of Christianity could the "savage rhythms" of primitive life
be subdued. Yet one in their midst did stand up and reject the
notion of the "noble savage"; one who brought evidence to bear that the
highest virtue, Christianity, was but the literal interpretation of the
Kamite mythos. Indeed this was a paradox. This individual was
Gerald Massey.
Gerald Massey, author, spiritualist and Egyptologist,
was also one of Britain's poet laureates. Essentially an
autodidactic, Massey was born on 28 May, 1828, to a poor working class
family, at Tring, Hertfordshire. He occasionally attended a
British national school to which his father would pay one penny a day.
At the age of eight, Massey left school and went to work first in a silk
mill, then went on to become a straw plaiter. For his labours,
Massey was paid one shilling and three pence, for a twelve hour working
day. Massey later recalled that it was his mother who helped him
to supplement his meagre education when she acquired for him the Bible,
Pilgrims Progress, Robinson Crusoe and a few Wesleyan tracts.
By the age of fifteen, Massey set off to London to
seek his fortune. During his early years in the capital, Massey
gained employment as clerk and subsequently as a messenger boy.
He continued to educate himself by reading whatever he could lay his
hands on, and by being actively involved in the new radical working
class politics of the day, Massey, thus became a member of the Chartist
movement in February 1848, two months before the ill-fated Kennington
common incident that saw the demise of the movement.
His first five years in London brought him into
contact with radical politics, a compendious list of reading materials,
and the inspiration to write poetry and news articles for a number of
popular organs.
Between 1852 and 1869 Massey evolved from being a
socialist, to national poet and then became a spiritualist, before
settling down to study Km't: the Black Land. In the process,
Massey came under the influence of famous and influential people who
undoubtedly helped to shape his life. From his political days, for
instance, he was a colleague of both William Lovett and Francis Place,
the figures who had drafted the "People's Charter", in 1838. Then
there was William Cuffay, a black man, whose role in the London chapter
of the Chartists has been grossly underrated, even though he was
lampooned by the many journals of the day as "the black man and his
party". There was also another prominent figure in the
movement that tutored Massey's early radicalism, that was Julian Harney.
In a letter to his life long friend Frederick Engels, Harney bemoans the
fact that unlike Massey, who received a government pension and could
therefore afford to devote himself to historical research and writing,
he had no such regular source of income to finance his own writing.
Massey's rise as a poet of the people brought him the
admiration of the likes of John Ruskin, Charles Dickens, George Eliot
and Hepworth Dixon, editor of the
Athenæum, who it could be said "discovered" him. However it
seems that the real catalyst which spurred Massey's interest into
ancient Egyptian (Kamite) origins was his first wife, Rosina Jane
Knowles. Mrs Massey, who was a clairvoyant, "offered enquirers a
crop of Clairvoyant Phenomena every Monday and Thursday.
Admission, 2s. 6d. cut price". It is surmised that Mrs Massey's
use of Kamite symbolism and her untimely death attributed to her
husband's more than burgeoning interest into the spirit world. As
a spiritualist, Massey met two savants who were to figure prominently in
his early quest into the African origins of symbols, language, religions
and myths. They were the explorer Richard Burton and, one of the
principal exponents of the evolution theory, Alfred Russel Wallace.
Aside from all the other activities Massey was undertaking, he still
found time to study Shakespeare. In fact Massey developed a
reputation of sorts as a Shakespearean scholar with the publication of a
volume entitled,
Shakespeare's Sonnets Never Before Interpreted. He claimed
it was through spirit communications that he was able to give fresh
insight into the bard's works. By 1870, Massey claimed he had
stumbled across the idea that the human race had its origins in
equatorial Africa, and thus retired and receiving a civil pension, he
was now able to make the study of Km't his principal occupation.
During his first ten years of research, Massey
befriended the eminent British Egyptologist Dr Samuel Birch and the
Assyriologist Goldridge Pinches. In addition Massey undertook
studies into anthropology, comparative philology, and mythology.
It has been said that it was his eye as a poet that gave Massey the
vision to see through the opaque visor of imperial scholarship.
Massey went further than most and taught himself to read the hieroglyphs
(mdw ntr), even though it was possible to study under Birch, Naville and
Renouf who had established classes for teaching the art. However
whenever Massey translated a piece of text he would get the authority of
Dr Birch to verify his findings. It took Massey thirty-seven years
to produce a six-volume set of works that attempted to show that
the origins of human culture began in the African hinterland, with
Egypt as the mouthpiece. His first four volumes,
A Book of
the Beginnings and
The Natural
Genesis, had both Samuel Birch and Alfred Russel Wallace as
readers, but it was another twenty-seven years before Massey would
publish his
tour de force,
Ancient Egypt: The Light of the World
[2.]. In between the
publication of his first four tomes and Ancient Egypt, Massey
had published in limited editions, a number of
lectures that had their premise in
his work on typology,
The Natural Genesis. The essay contained below, however,
was published at the end of the nineteenth century in a literary
periodical of repute, as a retort to Andrew Lang's monumental
Myth, Ritual, and Religion [3.].
In Lang's work, which was later summarized and
inserted into the eleventh edition of Encyclopædia Britannica, he brings
together all known knowledge of the day on the origins of mythology and
totemism as precursors to religion, and furnishes a definitive diegesis,
that defines myths as a "mode of explaining natural phenomena". He
considers Max Muller's "disease of language" origins of mythology
redundant and lacking in comparative evidence, and Herbert Spencer's
description of mythology as "the defect in early speech" amongst other
sociological factors equally unattractive. Nevertheless what
Lang held in common with his learned peers was the belief that the
origins of myths were a development out of the "confused and nebulous
condition" of early humans, in particular the non-Aryan type. As a
consequence, terms such as "animal-worship", "star", "tree" and
"stone-worship" became acceptable traits of "uncivilized" peoples of the
world who used myths as a "mode of explaining natural phenomena".
Myths, then, were a result of primordial humanity believing that the
external forces were akin to themselves. In other words, humankind
personified the elements and described them as part of, and extensions
to, their personalities. Massey could not, on the other hand,
agree with such an outlook. To him, the term "worship" was but "a
modern counterfeit". He reasoned that our early ancestors lacked
the "mental richness" to explain human likeness as visages of animals or
external forces. To them the power of the pawing sun (Atum), the
mighty panting wind (Shu), and the forcible ejection of moisture
(Tefnut), were beyond the human conceptions of strength. Natural
forces could only be explained by superhuman types and so there is the
zootype, the mode of representing power beyond human capability by way
of the Lion and Lioness. Massey wrote:
The powers first perceived in external nature were not
only unlike the human, they were very emphatically and distinctly more
than human, and, therefore, could not be adequately expressed by
features recognizable as merely human. Primitive men
were all too abjectly helpless in the presence of these powers to think
of them or to conceive them in their own similitude. The one
primordial and most definite fact of the whole matter was the distinct
and absolute unlikeness to themselves. Also, they themselves were too
little the cause of anything by the causation mentally... The
human being could only impress his own image on external nature in
proportion to his mastery over natural condition.
In Massey's opinion it was both "mental poverty" and
"the poverty of language" that gave rise to representation of natural
forces by the use of signs and symbols.
Mythology was in no way an attempt to explain the workings of the
world, but a system, a language that used whatever means were available
at the time and in the space. Massey, moreover, demonstrates
that myths were a sign-language used as a "substitution of similars".
Yet to Lang, and others from his school of thought, those early
mythologists, believed to be still surviving as the San, Twa, and other
indigenous peoples of the developing world, were living in a semi if not
total state of barbarism. Therefore, as imperial
scholars, it was necessary to explain away their "primitive" psychology
in order to justify the "civilizing" mission of colonialism.
Lang's attack on totemism was equally pedantic, although open to the
"exogamous divisions" of clans theory, the myths about totemic origins
were considered "of no historical value". In opposition Massey
proposed that a totem whether a natural element, an animal or a plant
was never meant to be an object of worship. It was first a
means of distinguishing one clan from another, a division, a way of
tracing one's genealogy. In effect it was the first way of knowing
the historical background of a group.
Instead of the son of Mrs Smith, there was the offspring of the
hippopotamus (Apt), the Great Mother. Massey saw totemism beginning "in
sign-language rather than in sociology, the signs being afterwards
applied for use in sociology as they were in mythology and fetishism".
To Massey, myth and totemism implied more than "modes
of representation". They were the earliest means of recording
human history before there were written records. Besides the use
of signs and symbols, myth and totemism was enacted by the ceremonial
dance. This is why, suggested Massey, the Kamite deity Bes an
Inner African neter, was portrayed as dancing. It was one of the
only types that knew the secrets of the beginnings, through its dance of
the first times. So important was this type, that several Kamite
expeditions were sent up the Nile to bring back a living type of Bes,
the "Deng" (Twa). Although Massey produced his thesis over a
century ago, it is only recently that modern day anthropologists have
viewed mythology as an important part of the human experience. The
Dogon, for example, have provided the world with a catalogue of
astronomical facts that stem from signs, symbols and the oral tradition,
intact and stupendous in content [4.].
Today as the Twenty-first century approaches, people like the Dogon are
seen as true carriers of a community's collective memory and cultural
expressions, that could not be repackaged let alone interpreted without
the correct language.
In sum, Myth and Totemism as Primitive Modes of
Representation provides the reader with an insight into the mind of
a truly profound scholar, who challenged the orthodox view of mythology
and left an indelible mark on Nile Valley Studies for all time.
Massey establishes without a doubt that not only was Africa the birth
place of humanity, but its peoples provided the templates that were the
foundations of human culture. It was this essay that, nineteen
years later, was expanded to form the first two chapters of
Ancient Egypt. It has taken over one hundred years for
Massey's works to filter down to a wider readership. This is due,
in the main, to the efforts of revisionist African-centred scholars who
have written for a new generation that seeks the truth about Kamite
origins. Massey died within a month of the publication of his
final opus, in October 1907, yet left a legacy that reverberates around
the English speaking world, even today.
Rey Bowen.
March 1995
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1. |
Diop, C.A. |
Civilization or Barbarism. New York: Lawrence Hill, 1991. |
|
2. |
Massey, G. |
Ancient Egypt: The Light of the World. 2 Vols. London : T Fisher
Unwin, 1907. |
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3. |
Lang, A. |
Myth, Ritual, and Religion. 2 Vols. London : Longmans, Green, &
Co., 1887. |
|
4. |
Griaule, M.
& Dieterlen, G. |
The Pale Fox. Chino Valley: Continuum Foundation, 1986. |
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―――♦―――
MYTH AND TOTEMISM AS PRIMITIVE
MODES OF REPRESENTATION
BY GERALD MASSEY (1888).
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1. In his recent well-written study of Myth,
Ritual, and Religion, Mr.Andrew Lang has said much concerning the
irrationality, the non-naturalness, and the grossness of Mythology in
general, and of Savage Myth in particular. He asserts, and
strenuously insists, that "everything in the civilized mythologies which
we regard as irrational seems only part of the accepted and natural
order of things to contemporary savages, concerning whom we have
historical information." He describes the Savage Mythos as being a
"jungle of foolish fancies, a Walpurgis Nacht of gods and beasts and
men and stars and ghosts, all moving madly on a level of common
personality and animation, and all changing shapes at random" in a
"burlesque ballet of Priapus," where "everything may be anything; where
nature has no laws, and imagination no limits."
2. This state of things, or the appearance of such a
state of things, which, as we shall see, is very widely different, he
attributes to "savage beliefs," "savage fancies," "savage conceptions,"
and "savage confusions," which survive from a condition of primordial
savagery—in short, to the primitive perversion, if not the original sin
or "cussedness " of savage nature, that from the beginning persisted in
prepensely going against the commonest testimony of the simplest senses
in everyday matters of fact. The great and prevalent mistake here
made is a result of assuming that the non-natural features of mythology
in its latest phases are anything like a faithful reflection of the
primal mental condition of aboriginal men in some apocryphal past, when
everything in nature could be seen non-naturally, and anything believed
in which could not be seen. The mirror might have been trusted
more if these things had been a direct survival. But they are
not; and it is we who are being befooled by this mode of producing
evidence that savages are the living representatives of a primordial
race of born natural-fools.
3. Before we attempt to measure the intellectual
status, or determine the mental condition and standpoint, of the men who
first thought and spoke mythically, we must at least learn something of
their symbolical mode of language. The symbolism is not a veil
with which a more refined age sought to cover the rudeness of reality;
myth and symbol are twin brothers from the birth. It is the mode
more than the matter which makes the mythos. Much that appears
irrational when the matter is taken literally may become congruous and
rational when we can understand the indirect method of representation.
And if it can be shown that a primitive mode of expression has become
the later mould of thought, it follows that the later thought or belief
may be no true guide to, or criterion of, the earlier standpoint.
4. According to the mythic mode, then, one thing can
be equated by another to express the unknown by the known, as serpent =
lightning, scorpion = sunstroke, crocodile = darkness, cow = mother,
beetle = creator, cat = moon, hawk = sun, ape = typhoon, or hippopotamus
= deluge. But supposing we are unable to read this hieroglyphical
language, and have no misgivings on the score of our importance, it is
just possible that we may transfer our own mental mist of confusion to
the primitive or other misrepresented man, and charge him with not
knowing a serpent from the lightning-stroke, the scarabaeus from a god,
a woman from a cow, or big B from a bull's foot. This is exactly
what has been, and still is, done by writers who entirely misinterpret
the primitive typology, and tell us that the early men made no
distinction between themselves and the lower animals, but believed they
could transform into each other at will because originally reversible,
as if they were the natural prototypes of Mr. Hyde and Dr. Jekyl.
To us this ancient typology is one of the dead languages, and the oldest
of them all. But we can no more understand the ideas of primitive
or uncivilized men in survival without mastering their earliest mode of
expressing them, than we can read the language of gestures and
hieroglyphics without first learning the current value of the signs.
What are the reasons, with any root of reality in human experience, for
thinking with Mr. Lang that there ever was a mental condition in which
all that is irrational, monstrous, and non-natural now-a-days could be
looked upon as natural, every-day occurrences of old? It never
could have been a matter of savage any more than civilized experience
that men had the same nature or possessed the power to change shapes
with the beasts. Dress themselves as they might in feathers, they
never learned to fly; nor could they live under water, for all their
totemic kinship with the water-cow or crocodile. And yet this is
supposed to have been a common if not the universal "belief", without
any actual basis whatever, resulting, as Mr. Lang says, from the
"eternal confusion of the savage mind."
5. But surely there must be some other way of
accounting for such perplexing appearances! The evolutionist, at
least, may rest assured that early men were not the victims of that
modern disease, subjectivity; not the sufferers from introspection or
innate illusions; not the natural transformers of external objects into
living subjects; but close clingers to their rock of reality rather than
the self-deluded dreamers of vain dreams, or the fools of metaphysical
fancies. If they had not secured a firm foot-hold, however
slowly, on the ground of natural fact, however limited they could not
have beaten out a practical pathway for those who followed after them.
6. The present contention is that there never was such
an original savage as postulated, whose brain was turned by watching the
whirl round of things which he could not keep up with; that there never
existed such a mental condition as that of conscious myth-making men;
that mythology does not begin with a series of rude guesses at an
explanation of natural phenomena; and that, primarily, the myths are
not attempts to account for the facts in nature, or to read the riddle
of the universe, by way of satisfying a primordial crave of curiosity
concerning the cause of things in general. It is in no
wise probable that very early or savage men began by asking where the
river came from, and then started off to seek its source.
They drank of it as an element of life, or were drowned in it, and the
power of drowning was imaged by the crocodile, hippopotamus, or other
wide-jawed dweller in the waters. Mythology and zootypology are
among the results deposited by the primitive mode of representation,
but they do not offer reasons, and are not an explanation.
7. Explanation is the function of later science, not
of the earliest observation. Simple explanation would not have
needed so much explaining! It is this looking upon the myths as an
explanation of natural phenomena, instead of a limited means of
representation, that makes them appear so irrational at times, so
unnatural. But those who have done this and denounced the
"myth-makers" as senseless, insane, obscene, and blasphemous, or
suffering from mental aberration, have been spitting beside the mark.
The senselessness of the Mythos comes in mainly where we have lost the
sense. It can certainly be demonstrated that the asserted tendency
of the human mind to project itself and mould external phenomena in its
own likeness does not go back to the beginnings of mythology, and that
anthropomorphic representation was not the primary mode; it can further
be shown that the natural genesis of myth was not in a faculty of
non-natural conception or a primitive system of false explanation, but
in a symbolical kind of representation which was necessitated for those
who had to think in things and make use of signs when there was no other
mode of expression. Here at starting there is a wide gulf fixed
between mythology considered as a mode of representing phenomena, and
mythology as a system of explaining it. In the one case we have
the results of objective observation presented in a primitive phase of
sign-language; in the other, a subjective interpretation of nature in
the sphere of causation.
8. When the moon was represented by the cat who sees
in the dark, or by the tadpole that transforms in the water, that
implies no attempt at accounting for phenomena, no concern as to cause,
no veiling of an esoteric meaning in a physical allegory. And when
the condemned soul in the Egyptian Judgment Scenes is compelled to enter
into the black pig and be driven down into the abyss, that is the
typological representation of its being Typhonian, not a picture of the
transmigration of human souls into the bodies of animals.
Primitive mythology when "simple of itself," unadulterated or
unperveted, was neither confused, immoral, insane, nor obscene. It
was nothing more than unmoral, with no pretence of moralizing.
The phenomena represented belonged to external nature and were not
human. The primary actors in its drama were not human beings, but
the elements themselves, or the beasts, birds, reptiles, fishes or
insects, the natural types of elemental powers, which were continued as
ideographs in the representation of later ideas. The moderns do
but apply a false standard if they consider that to be obscene which was
only childish. In the presence of primitive nature we have no call
to keep on blushing publicly for shame; no need to foist a fig-leaf kind
of consciousness on the face of very simple folk.
Notwithstanding the physical nudity of Egyptian art, for example, the
spirit of it is seriously pure. It is perversion from intended use
that is always and everywhere the most fatal cause of debasement and
degradation. The comparative mythologist who is also an
evolutionist has no business to speak of the "barbarous and brutal
disguises" in which the Egyptians veiled their deities, as if they had
sought to vulgarise the divine. There is no meaning in such
language when the course of development is properly apprehended.
They neither placed the animals on a level with man nor reduced the gods
to the status of beasts; at least that is not the real clue to the mode
of representation. This counter-postulate can be
proved.
9. The Mother of the Beginnings is as general in
mythology as she was in the Totemic system of sociology. She is
Typhon in Egypt, who is portrayed as the water-cow, or the crocodile,
because she brought forth her brood of the nature-powers from the abyss.
She is Tavthe or Tiamat in Babylonia, the Dragon of the beginning,
because this beginning with birth from the waters necessitated the
water-type, whence the fish-mother. The water-cow as Typhon in
Egypt was the primary form of the old first bringer-forth. Next
the Great Mother as Hathor was the milch-cow. Lastly, the beast
becomes a woman as the Mother-Nature. The Bushman pantheon
consists of zootypes with "an old woman" as the fountain-head of all.
The Mangaian Great Mother is the old woman named
Vari-ma-takere, "the very beginning." The Andaman Islanders
trace their origin to the "First Woman", who was found by Pulugu
"swimming about in the waters." With the Eskimo all descent is
from a "nameless female" who has her dwelling deep under the sea.
The beginning and mode of representation are identical in each form of
the mythos, and the mother is the same whether imaged by the water-cow
or crocodile, the nameless female under the sea—La Source—or the
first woman "swimming about in the waters" on the way to becoming the
mythical mermaid. The Zulu tradition that men were not born but
were belched forth by a cow, can be read right back to this beginning,
whether as the cow on land or in the water. As the cow the mother
first gave the breath of life to men, or rather to the powers first born
of nature; indeed, one form of these powers is described as the Seven
destroying Winds or Storm-spirits, like the Seven Maruts of India;
breath and spirit being at one time identical or synonymous. Those
who related these things with knowledge were able to distinguish the
elemental forces that could be "belched up" like the Seven Winds or
Spirits of the Tempest, whereas the later storytellers Unwittingly made
them Men and the First Mother a Woman, instead of the dragon, the cow,
or other animal. This conversion of the zootype into the human
being was a primary cause of the great confusion that has not hitherto
been explained. For example, the first Great Mother when
represented as a crocodile could bring forth the young of crocodiles
without any violation of natural law. But when the same old
genetrix gives birth in human form as Isis-Neith, and is portrayed in
the act of nursing two crocodiles, we are then left to marvel in the
maze of mythology. The same change from the zoomorphic to the
anthropomorphic representation will account for the tradition of the
African Balakai that it was a woman who gave birth to their totemic
animals.
10. The elemental conflict of light and darkness was
portrayed by means of two birds as zootypes of the air. In the
Egyptian representation the bird of day is the golden hawk. The
bird of night is a black vulture called the Neh. The
two are twinned together to typify the power of darkness and light in
the double image of Sut-Horus. These are paralleled by the crow
and eagle of the Australian Aborigines, which are in eternal conflict as
the two natural opponents, whose contest as such is true to nature.
Also as birds they are true to the elemental typology. Later on
the representation is humanized, whilst the matter of the myth remains
the same. Now the same phenomena are interpreted by human beings,
and the two actors become the well-known twin-brothers as Sut and
Osiris, Cain and Abel, or Gaunab and Tsuni-Goam, who are always seeking
to slay each other. Here the venue is entirely changed. If
the devourer of the lunar light be a jackal, wolf, or the dragon of
eclipse, it does not matter morally; but when it comes to a brother
killing his brother, or a son swallowing his own father, as Sut=Jackal
is said to swallow Osiris; or the child Heitsi-Eibib violates his own
mother; Rhea brings forth a fawn; Neith nurses twin-crocodiles; and
these things are related as histories, whether human or divine, then the
myth becomes obscene, or savage, or senseless.
11. The female in mythology, as in sociology, was the
primary parent or producer. She, as we have seen, was the dragon
of darkness, or the cow, that brought forth the child of light.
Later on, her child, who was also her consort, attains to the supremacy
of the individualized and causative fatherhood, whereupon his own
mother-becomes his own daughter, and the mother, wife, and daughter of
the Egyptian sun-god Ra, are all one! This will show how the
matter of mythology may be, and has been, deposited by the mode of
representation, and did not originate in false belief or natural
nastiness. Thus we can comprehend how the non-human became
inhuman, and the ante-human was changed into the
anti-human, so that the matter of the primitive mythos can only
be really read as pre-human. For instance, when the Athenians
honoured as ancestors the men and women who were anciently transformed
into birds, they were reversing the typology and handing it on by the
wrong end.
12. The early observers of nature have been libelled by the
misinterpreters of mythology, especially by those who have impotently
applied the philological method of explanation to matters that were
extant before either written or spoken language existed.
13. Professor Sayce, in his Hibbert lectures, says:
"We find that primitive peoples confound (the stars) with animals, their
automatic motions being apparently explicable by no other theory."
Doubtless the human childhood had its puerilities, but one would think
that such an explanation belongs rather to the second childhood of the
race. Why should the silent dog-star be mistaken for a barking
dog, or still earlier, the howling jackal? Surely no people,
however primitive, could have thought or fancied the starry system
turning round the pole was a real live serpent. They saw it glide
round subtly as the reptile, and so we find it figured as the great
polar serpent or dragon. The dog-star in Egypt was first adopted
as the Watcher above, and therefore it was a typical announcer of the
coming Nile, as the dog that watched and made the announcement.
The moon was only like a cat as the seer by night; or like a frog
because it transformed. To suppose the Aborigines went upon direct
likeness in these matters is not to correct the primitive ignorance by
modern knowledge, but to confuse and obscure the ancient knowledge
through modern ignorance of its mode of representation. Bird-men,
bird-gods, and bird-ghosts were not begotten of belief; they are not
creations or chimeras of early human fancy, nor grotesque conceptions of
the savage mind, any more than is the sphinx, the centaur, or the
seven-headed serpent, portrayed in Egypt, India, and Babylonia.
When Berosus describes these compound types depicted on the walls of the
Temple of Belus in Babylon, he calls them an allegorical description of
nature; they belong to the mythical mode of representing ideas in
combination, and did not originate ready-made in any form of savage
belief. The one-legged people of the past were no false creations
of belief, nor are they the abortions of verbal metaphor.
One-legged was simply the image of an undivided stock.
14. Bleeck tells us that the bushmen believe or imagine that
their sorcerers and magicians, i.e. the wise men, the wizards can and do
assume the form of jackals! Now if we turn to the Egyptian
hieroglyphics we find the jackal " Seb" (which is also the wolf) is the
zootype of wisdom, craft, and cunning. His name signifies the
councillor. In fact, the jackal is the wise one, the magus in
animal guise, but not in disguise. This shows how the wizard could
transform into the jackal or be represented by and as the wolf.
The type is the same whether as living animal or graven ideograph,
although the primitive mode of
imaging may come to be mistaken for the later belief or
imagining.
15. Bosman speaks of the African belief that man was made by
Ananzie, a spider with ten legs. It is also said that the Bushmen
think that "most things" were created by the mantis insect, Cagn, their
Supreme Being. But did these Africans believe or conceive, imagine
or assume, that the Creator of most things—if not all—became incarnate
in the mantis or the spider? Did the Egyptians believe that the
world was made by a beetle when they imaged the Creator as Khepr the
Scarabaeus rolling up its little globe of earth as a nidus for its seed?
Not at all. They were simple naturalists, who observed curiously,
and named the beetle as the Former, and then applied the type to other
modes of forming. Hence the Supreme Former or Creator could be and
was at length represented by (or as) the beetle. In this way Egypt
shows us how to read the typology of the spider and the mantis in Africa
beyond. The spider manifested a power of weaving, of suspending
itself, of bridging space, beyond the reach of man, and so was made use
of in sign-language as the figure of a power beyond the human range.
16. We are told that the Maori believe the souls of the true
and faithful dead can pass to Heaven by a bridge of gossamer filaments
woven by the spider. The name of the insect is pungawere—were,
from punga, "to anchor," and
werewere, "to be suspended." This shows how the spider
could become the type of an anchorage above, a hope fixed on heaven, a
mode of crossing the gulf of death. And if we were to search all
nature through, we should find no apter ideograph of an invisible power,
whether considered as delusive and deadly, or as the likeness of life
that may exist and lurk beyond appearance, than is to be found in the
mantis faustus, which imitates the forms and colours of
the leaves around, and thus presents a living effigy of that which is
and is not according to appearance, an external type of the god who,
like the beetle Khepr-Ptah, "concealeth his form." Speaking of the
mysteries of the mantis Cagn, the bushman Qing said to Mr. Orpen, "Only
the initiated men of that dance know these things." He, himself,
did not dance that dance, or was not master of the Gnosis.
Again, in the Egyptian hieroglyphics the dead are portrayed as the
reversed or capsized. Hence the soul of the deceased who finds
that he lives on, exclaims, "I do not walk on my head" (ch. 53).
He went down as one of the reversed, but has righted again. So it
is with the Red men, who reverse the totemic figure on their grave-posts
as the sign of the dead. The Maori likewise describe a
Spirit or atua as one who comes walking in a reverse position, and in
that manner "little Maui," a mythical character, descends the hill-side.
In all three the description of the dead is identical. Again, we
may ask if this is the result of a universal Savage belief that such was
the mode of locomotion practised by the departed, or does it belong to a
typical phase of expression that was common to all three races—the very
image being presented in nature by the dying moon that descends, with
horns inverted, to the underworld in this reversed position of the
dead, and looking like the boat capsized, which gets righted again with
every re-appearance of the new moon.
17. If the belief of the Savage today be practically
limitless, this mode of representing natural phenomena never did
originate in primitive belief, or faith, however foolish. All the
folly is inherent to the false interpretation, whether that be the work
of savage or civilized ignorance. The aborigines of Victoria are
credited with the belief that their wild dog at one time was able to
talk; and in Egypt the dog, or dog-headed ape is the Speaker
impersonated as Taht, the Word, Speech, or Logos, of the later gods.
Taht was the man in the moon, whose dog was the cynocephalus, i.e. the
dog-headed clicking ape, and its mode of speaking was as the teller of
time by the lunations. He is sometimes portrayed in the act of
jotting down the dates, with a branch of date-palm for his tally; the
Talker and Writer in one.
18. In another case it is the serpent that talks, as we meet
with it in the Hebrew book of Genesis. This likewise is one of the
talkers in the hieroglyphics, where it is an ideograph of Tet, the
mouth, tongue, word, or speech. As the Ru, or reptile, it is also
synonymous with the mouth. A moment's thought will show that the
serpent is all mouth, so to say, from its lack of other members.
It is a mouth personified. As such it was adopted straight from
nature as a mouthsign, or mouth-piece, of speech, and became the
serpent that talked, according to later " belief," or ignorance.
Moreover, we may read upon the monuments some of the things it said.
Because the serpent was seen to slough its skin periodically, it became
the supreme type of "renewal coming of itself." It was worn as the
symbol of reproduction in the phase of motherhood. It was an image
of a
λιγγευεσια
applied to the reproducing, fructifying, earth; a type of
transformation in the lunar phenomena. It was set in the stars of
heaven as a figure of time. The periods of time are called the
serpents of Kronus (Seb). The serpent could be recognized at a
known value for an ideograph in a dozen different phases of character as
one of the transformers, and as an emblem of re-genesis it was also the
ideograph of future life. The dead in the Egyptian Ritual actually
make their transformation in this likeness of future life, the serpent
(ch. 87). The root-meaning is the same when the Marawi or the
Zulus are said to believe that the spirits of their dead ancestors
return to their huts in the shape of serpents. Here the serpent is
but a type, not to be confused with a spirit, as the Zulus hold the
revenant to be a reality; and those Savages who recognise their
dead as ghosts are careful to distinguish them from the spirits or
powers of the elements, which continued to be represented by the totemic
zootypes; they strive not to have them mixed up together.
As Mariner testifies, the primitive divinities or nature-powers of the
Tongans are expressly represented by such zootypes as the lizard,
water-snake, and porpoise; and these are the images of the gods as
distinguished from the human ghosts, who do not return, or are not
recognized in the forms which are held exclusively sacred to the primary
super-human powers. The Savages distinguish. Hence the
Thlinkeets assert emphatically that the ancestor of the Wolfclan does
not reappear to them in the wolf form. They recognize the
difference between the totemic type and the ancestral spirit. It
is our modern metaphysical explanation, and the vague theories of a
universal animism that confuse the gods and ghosts together, elemental
spirits with human, and the zootypes with the non-totemic ancestors.
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19. In the Book of the Dead, the Cat and the Ass are
two of the "Sayers of Great Words" in the House of Heaven. Not
because the Egyptians ever believed the cat and donkey talked. The
cat was an animal that could see and pounce on her prey in the dark.
She was made a zootype of the moon, the seer in heaven by night.
In this character she watches while men sleep, and bruises or holds down
the head of the serpent of darkness all through the night. The ass
in three characters of the mother, colt, and virile male, was a triple
type of the moon's three, phases reckoned at ten days each.
But did the Egyptians adore the cat and the ass in consequence?
The ignorant on-lookers, ancient or modern, might fancy so, because they
could not read the signs. When Porphyry asserts that the Egyptians
believed the beasts to be common and akin to men and gods, it merely
shows be did not understand the ideographic nature of their symbolism
any more than he could read the hieroglyphics. But we are now in a
position to correct the errors and false inferences of the Greeks
concerning that which they continued but did not comprehend.
There is ample evidence to show that these were first adopted for use
and not for worship; hence the head of the ass remains in the
hieroglyphics as the numeral sign for thirty, the number of days in a
soli-lunar month. The ass was also stationed in the planisphere as
a teller of time, a "Sayer of Great Words" in heaven, and in later
legendary lore we meet naturally enough with an ass that talks.
The crocodile having represented the dragon of darkness that swallowed
the light, its head survives as the sign of an eclipse in the Calendar,
and its tail as the ideograph of the word
Kam for blackness in the Egyptian hieroglyphics.
20. Thus we see that the language assigned to beasts and
birds in the folk-tales did not originate in the fancy of any ancient
fabulists, nor in the primitive beliefs of incredibly credulous
simpletons, but in the beasts, birds, and reptiles having been made use
of as signs, as the living images or zootypes in the earliest language
of men.
21. The Egyptians have preserved for us and bequeathed the
means of interpreting this typology of the early thought. The
primitive consciousness or knowledge which has lapsed or got confused in
Inner Africa, or Australia, India, or Greece, lived on and left its
record in their system. If the Australian savage does attribute
the earliest marriage laws to a crow, he is but saying the same thing as
Hor-Apollo (1, 8-9), who tells us that when the Egyptians denote
marriage they depict two crows, because the birds cohabit in the human
fashion, and their laws of intercourse are strictly monogamic.
22. The great power, or most potent medicine of the supreme
being Cagn, the Bushman's deity, lies in his tooth; and we find the
tooth, "Hu," in the hieroglyphics is the type of the adult male, and
that it bears the name of the sphinx-god, "Hu." This emblem of
virility was extracted in the mystery of young-man-making when the youth
was typically reduced to the most childish status, to be reborn into the
tribe and become a blood-brother as an adult male. The tail
of the lioness worn by the Pharaoh is the same sign of power when
suspended from the roof of his hut by the Xosa Kaffir chief as his
symbol of supremacy. The hare, the jackal, and vulture have the
same characters in the Hottentot tales that they keep when they become
three divine types, or gods and goddesses in Egyptian mythology.
Certain races identify the crocodile with the human soul, and it is
reported as a belief, both of the Batavian aborigines and some inner
Africans, that when the mother gives birth to a child she at the same
time brings forth a crocodile. But Egypt shows us how this belongs
to the zoomorphic typology. The crocodile, Sevekh, was a type of
extreme intelligence (Plutarch says supreme) or a soul. The spirit
of the deceased during his transformations in the Ritual, exclaims, "I
am the crocodile whose soul comes from men"; that was as the type of
great intelligence. Whether applied to the birth or re-birth, the
symbolism is the same. When the Zulus say that mankind came "out
of a bed of reeds," the typology is that of the Egyptian hieroglyphics
in which we find one reed stands for "A," the old, first one; another
reed, " Su," is the sign for the child; and the reed denotes origin for
Egypt itself. The credulity of living savages may be, in some
respects, as Mr. Lang says, "practically boundless," without the
necessity of our assuming that any aboriginal race of men did ever
believe, conceive, imagine, or suppose that they came from a bed of
reeds, or a mantis, a snail, an ant, a snipe, a snake, a frog, skunk, or
bird, or plant.
23. No wonder that certain totemic tribes should claim
descent from the plant or other vegetable product, when we find the god
Seb in Egypt, who
personates the earliest form of the fatherhood in this very
phase, as the lord of nutriment, the soul of sap and leafy life.
Seb is god of the earth, and he symbols fecundity in an ithyphallic form
of vegetation, or the element of wood as the productive power of earth.
The plant-life and human form are both united in Seb, who is sometimes
portrayed lying on the ground covered with leaves.
24. In the Bundahish (ch. 15) the primal pair of human
beings Mashya and Mashydoi spring from a plant. The natural
allegory had then passed into historic narrative, and the early mode of
expression had become the later mould of thought. But the
Egyptians never thought or taught that man descended from a plant or
from wood, when they imaged the father on earth (who preceded the father
in heaven) as the ithyphallic
planter of human existence, the figure of fertility, the
masculine tree of life.
25. Doubtless the ideal significance of the zootypes may be
mistaken for reality in the later stage of interpretation by the savage,
as it constantly is by the civilized man. Indeed, it is certain
that the zootypes were confused with the superhuman powers of nature, as
when the Zunis pray to the animal gods and call them their fathers, or
the Omahas say to the dying man, "You came hither from the animals, and
you are going back thither. Do not face this way again. When you
go, continue walking! "—like a man. Also, when the New Caledonians
will stay a child from killing a lizard by telling him to "beware of
killing his own ancestor." But the confusion is only mystical, not
actual. The mist is raised by the mode of expression, which needs
interpretation. The mist may get into the child's mind, but no
brotherhood or family of men who knew they were born of a mother from
whom they traced their line of descent, ever thought, believed,
conceived, or fancied they came from a lizard, or the lizard from a
woman. Nor is the gnosis of the original representation quite
extinct. Even a race so degraded or undeveloped as the Bushmen
have their hidden wisdom, their magi, with an esoteric interpretation of
their dramatic dances and pantomime which preserve and perpetuate the
mythic meaning of their religious mysteries. What we do really
find is that the Inner Africans and other aborigines still continue to
talk and
think their thought in the same figures of speech that are made
visible by art, such as is yet extant amongst the Bushmen; that the
Egyptians also preserved the primitive consciousness together with the
clue to this most ancient knowledge, with its symbolic methods of
communication, and that they converted the living types into the later
lithographs and hieroglyphics.
26. Animals that talk in the folk-tales of the Bushmen or
the Indians, or the Marchen of Europe, are still the living originals
which became pictographic and ideographic in the zootypology of Egypt,
where they represent divinities or devils, i.e. nature-powers at first
and deities afterwards, then ideographs and finally the phonetics of the
Egyptian alphabet. The elemental origin of the powers first
portrayed by means of the zootypes is still recognizable, when
everything in nature is classified according to the elements and divided
on that principle among the totems of certain Australian and American
tribes. Moreover, the Kamilaroi have their ideographs of the
pre-human "Sayers" which are continued in their " Sayings" (Gurre); and
these are reducible to phonetic value as the Kangaroo=B; Emu=D; Sheep=J;
Duck=E; Eagle=M; Snake=N; a Stork with fish=G, etc. (Ridley). It
can thus be shown that the hypothetical "myth-making man" in the sense
of a conscious fabulist or an inventor of impossibilities, is (in the
modern sense of the word) the greatest myth of all; that mythology was
not a system of explanation but typological mode of representing natural
phenomena; that the earliest actors or
dramatis personae in this mode of representation were animals
and not human beings; that the transformations and shape-shifting
betwixt the beasts and men did not originate in savage beliefs, savage
perversions of nature or universal confusion of personality; that the
persistence of the same mythos with a change of characters from animal
to human is accountable for much that is non-natural in later phases;
and that as mythology is a mirror of sociology which reflects the
changes in human relationships and reckonings of descent from the female
or the father, these changes have seriously affected the morals of the
later gods and goddesses, more particularly in Greece. It was not
the primitive races who fancied that the gods were fond of disguising
themselves and appearing to men as trees walking, or carrying on their
amours with women as masqueraders in animal forms. The
perplexities presented by mythology in its later phases, such as the
Greek, are not the result of a simple or direct survival of savage
belief so much as the consequence of ignorant perversion and
misrepresentation of the original matter and mode of portrayal, which
have been the cause of a very chaos of confusion.
27. It has been suggested by Mr. Herbert Spencer that
Totemism originated in a
misinterpretation of nicknames; but Totemism is a department of
this same primitive system of Zootypology which goes back to the time
before personal names could have existed, when the thinking and the
labelling had to be done in things or the images of things, with the aid
of gesture signs. It has now to be shown that Totemism, or
tribe-heraldry, was not founded on the human worship of animals, birds,
reptiles, and insects. Zootypology, in Totemism as elsewhere, did not
commence as Zoolatry.
28. The term "worship" is too often imported into the
remotest past from lack of the larger knowledge which might have
supplied a more rational explanation of human phenomena. If the
primitive or archaic men had begun by worshipping beasts and holding
their deadliest foes religiously sacred as their dearest friends, if
they had not fought with them for very existence every foot of the way,
and conquered at last, they never could have attained supremacy over
their natural enemies of the animal world. Totemism does not imply any
worship of animals on the part of primitive men.
29. It is the sheerest fallacy to suppose that the most
undeveloped aborigines began to worship, say, fifty beasts, reptiles,
insects, or birds, because each in some way or measure fulfilled one of
fifty different conceptions of the deity that was recognized beneath its
half-hundred masks. Nor does Totemism prove the existence of
an alleged "savage mental attitude," which assumes a kindred between man
and beast, nor of a "savage habit of confusing in a community of kinship
men, stars, plants, beasts, the heavenly bodies, and the forces of
nature." This is to confuse the mystical descent according to the
totemic type with an actual descent from the original animal; to mistake
the sign of kin for kinship. The confusion here is mainly modern;
civilized not savage. Totemism was earlier than the
anthropomorphic mode of representation; hence the system remains almost
universally pre-human, and is to a large extent zootypological.
30. The ancestor of the Takulli Indians was a dog; and
"takulli" is their name for the dog. Like the Tinneh, they are the
Dog-Indians. The name of the African Gbe tribe signifies the dog.
In both cases the progenitor is but the Totemic type. It would be
going directly against all ; known natural tendency for us to imagine
that human nature in the early stage of Totemic sociology was confused
with that of the lower animals. The very earliest operation of the
consciousness that discreted the creature with a thumb from those who
were falling behind him on four feet, was by distinguishing himself from
his predecessors; and the line of difference once drawn, the mental
landmark once laid down, must have broadened with every step in his
advance. His recognition of himself depended on his perceiving the
unlikeness to them, and fishes were first adopted as zootypes on
account of their superior power in relation to the various elements,
and, therefore,
because of their unlikeness to the nature of man.
31. The ancestral animal, then, is neither an ideal nor
imaginary being as a primitive parent supposed to have been a beast, or
a bird, a star, any more than the first female as head of the Gaelic
Clan Chatton was a Great Cat, or was believed to be the Great Cat.
The life-tie assumed between totemic man and the totemic animal, or
zootype, was
consciously assumed and we can perceive by what processes and on
what ground the assumption was made. The zootype being
adopted as a badge of distinction the primeval coat of arms, it was a
custom for the human beings to enter into a brotherhood of blood.
That is, the men who were not born of the same mother, or the two
sisters, could extend natural tie of blood by a typical rite to others
who were born of different mothers. In this way the larger family,
tribe, clan, or sept was formed on the basis of brotherhood under some
totemic sign.
32. One mode of entering this second blood-brotherhood was
by the shedding, the exchanging, or the interfusion of blood. In
the mysteries of pubescence, or young-man-making, there was a process of
regeneration or re-birth, by which a new life-tie was engendered; this
was held to be closer than that of nature, and a bond of covenant was
established which was considered more inviolate than that of uterine
relationship, because it was an institution consciously created for the
most important purpose of avoiding promiscuity or incest, as then
reckoned. In some of the mysteries the totemic animal was tattooed
on the body of the initiate, burned into the flesh, or branded in his
blood, which served as the crimson of covenant equally well with the
later seal of red wax. Moreover, the rite of this blood-covenant
was further extended to the beast of the Totem. In an early phase
of Sociology the same covenant was made between man and beast as between
the affiliated human brothers, and their blood was likewise shed to be
commingled together, or smeared upon the stone of witness, to be made
one. In this case also the beast would be the totemic type that
was thus made akin to the family or tribe.
33. Now if the animal becomes of kin to the human brother by
virtue of a covenant intentionally made in the blood of both, that
proves the kinship did not exist before. The relationship did not
spring from any root in nature, or false belief, but was planted for the
purpose, and is consequently limited to the particular beast and
brotherhood. The bear is only kinsman to those whom he serves as a
totem, an image of the ancestor, female or male, and a type of the
fraternity. So is it with all the other zootypes which had
been employed from before the time when the individual fatherhood was
known. There is no necessary confusion of identity. An
African woman of the ape totem may be seen in the act of suckling a
child at one breast and a monkey at the other (as described by
Schomburgh) without our inferring that she thinks the monkey is her
child or was her ancestor.
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34. If men had abstained from eating the animals on the
ground of spiritual kinship and intercommunion of nature, because of a
confusion or identification of themselves with the beasts, they ought to
have abstained from eating any, whereas they ate them all in turn, the
exceptions being made solely on the artificial ground of the totemic
brotherhood. The beast only became of the "same flesh" with the
particular family because it had been consciously adopted as their
totem, ancestral animal, or foster brother of the blood-covenant, and
not on account of any belief that they descended from this or the other
non-human parent with a different progenitor for every separate group.
Even in the human relationship the being "of one flesh" is determined by
the totemic typology rather than by the ties of blood.
Those of the same totem are always and everywhere of "one flesh," which
shows that the system represents a later extension of the same family
that first derived from one mother; the mode of extension being by the
blending of blood, the re-birth, the drinking of the covenant and eating
of the fetish. But there was nothing promiscuous in this
arrangement, which had been made on purpose to avoid promiscuity.
They did eat, and did not tolerate being eaten by, each other's totems.
The relationship of men with beasts was most deliberately adopted, and
the partnership was held with the strictest regard to the law of limited
liability. Thus the blood-brotherhood with the beasts
was not based on any belief that they were on a level with the human
being, nor on any mental confusion respecting their oneness of nature.
At least it was not that which first rendered the animals tapu,
or made them sacred.
The typical character of the totemic animal was continued in various
ways; putting on the skin was a mode of assimilating the wearer to the
Powers beyond the beast, the superhuman forces which the beasts had
represented in visible symbolry. Hence, on going to battle they wore the
skins and acted the role of the animals, birds, and reptiles, as their
link of alliance with the superhuman nature-powers that were over all.
35. In like manner the god Shu, the warrior of the gods, the
Egyptian Mars, does battle whilst wearing the superhuman power of the
lioness on his head! And the moon-god, Taht-Aan, is clothed with
the power of the great ape, the ideograph of superhuman rage when he
fights against the demons of darkness by night, on behalf of the absent
solar god. In performing the magic passes, for the purpose of
healing, the Indian medicine-men would clothe themselves in these signs
of superior potency; and we are told that in the act of healing the
Omahas would imitate the motions and the cries of their totemic animals.
In this sense the Minnitaree Indians considered the wolf to be a very
powerful medicine. This transformation of the medas or
medicine-men was connected with the abnormal condition of trance.
Into this they entered at times, wrapped up in the skin of the totemic
beast, for the purpose of communing with the spirits of the dead.
Thus the trance, the transformer, and the transformation; the beast, the
nature-power, and the human ghost, got all mixed up together. Such
being the fact, it is easy to identify the foundation of the faith or
belief that the medicine-men had everywhere the power of transforming
into wolves, hymnas, or tigers themselves, and that would cause the fear
lest they should apply this power of metamorphosis to others, and
ultimately create the belief in their power to transform human beings
into animal shapes. The only veritable power of metamorphosis
possessed by the ancient medicine-men or mages, the witches or wizards,
was that of inducing the condition of trance. This was and is a
fact in nature with which the primitive races were profoundly well
acquainted. But those who are ignorant of such phenomena will be
apt to mistake a surface appearance for the underlying reality, and must
find it difficult to distinguish between the
vera causa and a false belief.
36. The representative character of the animal is
unconsciously acknowledged, even where it is not actually known, as
shown by the recognition of some great prototype, such as the Indian
bear that "does not die," the bird that "lives again," or the turtle
that is eternal; which is not any individual bear, or bird, or turtle.
37. Not only were blood-covenants enacted with the beasts of
prey as representatives of the destroying nature-powers, called by Zunis
the "prey-gods"; not only were the beasts considered too sacred to be
eaten by the human brothers, except as a sacrament; the human brothers
also offered their own flesh and blood to the totemic animals in the
most solemn sacrifice. Garcilasso affirms that men offered up to
their totemic animals "what they usually saw them eat"; and as most of
the great powers amongst the elementals were the devourers of flesh and
drinkers of blood these were offered to them in a propitiatory
sacrifice, the practice being perpetuated when the sun, or some more
abstract conception of power, had taken the place of the
Carnivora. In the mysteries they changed place and
shape and nature with the beasts of prey. They masked themselves
in the skins of animals, reptile and birds, and sat at feast in those
forms to devour the sacrifice when the human brother or substitute was
slain. In that way they transformed, and were said to change
themselves into wolves or tigers, bears or crocodiles, to partake of
this most primitive eucharistic rite. For it did become a
religions ceremony and a mode of entering into alliance and communion
with the powers first apprehended as super-human. When the ghastly
grim reality had passed into the legendary phase, we are told, as Plato
tells us in the
Republic, that those who ate of the human sacrifices offered to
the wolf were transformed into wolves. Herodotus likewise relates
that the Neurian wizards changed themselves into wolves for a few days
once a year. First, the men who ate human flesh had changed
themselves into wolves to eat it, according to the mode of masking.
Next, it was said that by eating human flesh men would become
Were-wolves, and, lastly, we have the were-wolf as a man who turns into
the wolf on purpose to devour human flesh. Such are the tricks of
typology, based on the primitive simplicity and the ignorant
misinterpretation of later times when the mythos passes into the fable
which deposits these types of the were-wolf, the mermaid, the
cockatrice, the serpentwoman, the vampire, or the moon-calf.
38. It was a masquerade; but the men beneath the masks
originally knew they were acting in characters which they themselves had
created. They wore skins in a typical transformation; they clothed
themselves thus in the super-human powers for a definite purpose, and
not because they were returning to the condition of beasts from which
they came. The masking and metamorphosis were but a mode of the
mysteries, which included the mystery of trance. This primitive
drama is not yet played out. It is still to be recognized in
certain scenes, characters, and transformations of our Christmas
pantomime. The non-natural masks and shapes of beasts still
represent the nature-powers, the elementals, or spirits of the elements
now become gnomes and fairies, giants, and dwarfs, and other types of
beings that never were human. The rites and doctrines are also to
be identified at times as survivals in religious ritual. A
startling illustration may be seen in a collection of English hymns
(1754) where these lines occur:
What greater glory could there be
Than to be clothed with God?
He drew his skin upon my skin,
His blood upon my blood.
39. That son of the Incas, Garcilasso de la Vega, tells us
in his valuable commentaries how, in the beginning men had only sought
for
pacharissa (or totems), whereby to discriminate one human stock
from another. "Each desired to have a god (or figure) that was
different from the other, and their only thought was how to make one
different from another," for the purpose of distinguishing the one
stock, group, or brotherhood from all the rest.
40. The origin of family or tribal Totemism could not be
more explicitly stated. Also, the Dieri tribe of Australian
aborigines have a legend that mankind had married promiscuously until
the good spirit ordered them to be divided into groups which were to be
called after such of the zootypes as Dogs, Emus, Iguanas, and other
totems, the members of each branch being forbidden to intermarry. Thus
Totemism was evolved as the necessary means of dividing the race, of
establishing the social group, and distinguishing each from all around,
by making use of the beasts for the particular badges; the earliest mode
of doing so being by wearing their skins,
before their likenesses could be otherwise imaged; and,
therefore, it did not arise from nicknaming individuals after the
animals, nor from any desire on the part of primitive men to merge their
newly-found identity with the nature of the beasts, or lose it through
claiming a common kinship with reptiles, plants, and stones. The
cause of a mystical relationship that was recognized between man and the
animals may now be traced on grounds less lofty than that of the
supposed divine incarnations, and more natural than that of an
animistic interfusion which led to a confusion of identity or
personality. The animals were first recognized as powers in
themselves, but they were also adopted as the living, visible symbols of
elemental powers that were superior to both the animal and the human as
a means of representing natural phenomena. They were further
adopted into the human family as totemic types with religious rites that
gave them all the sanctity of the blood-covenant, and made them of one
flesh with the human brothers. Thus they were doubly adopted; and
this led to their becoming later living fetishes as the naturalized
representatives of super-human powers, if not as the objects of direct
human worship.
41. The blood-covenant which had been entered into with the
beasts was still further extended to the powers they represented
considered as elemental spirits. These were offered the first lap
of the life newly shed. It is at this depth we should have to
grope for the origin of human sacrifice, and of the Cannibalistic gods.
If it stood alone, the making of a blood-covenant with the totem and its
elemental power would account for later belief in a mysterious
liferelationship between the man and animal. The Geawegal of N.
S. Wales thought they were related to their totem, but in a way that
could not be explained. And in the course of descent, as the
zootype became fetishtic in the superstitious phase, the life-tie might
be looked upon as hereditary and pre-natal by those who came later and
could not keep track of the beginnings, and who consequently confused
the symbolical with an actual descent, and confounded the ancestral
animal with an animal ancestor.
42. The theory of interpretation now presented is that the
primitive thinkers were
thingers; that gesture-signs and zootypes were among the
earliest means and modes of expression; that as the elements manifested
the primary powers recognized in the phenomena of destruction and
physical forces inimical to man, so the beast of prey were first
identified as fitting representatives on some natural ground of likeness
in the mode of manifestation, or equivalence of power, to express the
earliest perception of that which was superhuman. The animals and
reptiles thus acknowledged were primarily the most terrible and
fearsome, and therefore they were both really and ideally the fetishes
of fear, on the way to becoming the sacred zootypes of later times and
more complex conditions of thought and expression.
43. We find the human development is reflected in the
modification of the significance assigned to the zootypes, as when the
serpent, once evil, was changed into a symbol of that which is good; the
crocodile, as devourer, was turned into a type of intelligence; the
water-cow, as mother of life, was supplemented by the milch-cow, as
Hathor, the Egyptian Goddess of Love.
44. With the development of perception, and the necessity
for an increase in the means of expression, the range of the types was
extended to innumerable living things differing according to the
fauna of different lands, which were self-suggested, and then
adopted as symbols of other, later ideas. The facts can be
followed in totemic typology, in the Marchen of races, both civilized
and savage, in their characters of mythology; and the register may be
read in the Egyptian system of hieroglyphy, in the petroglyphs and
pictographs of the Red Indians and Bushmen, in canting heraldry; in
metaphor, as when the brave man is called a lion, the greedy one a hog,
the cunning one a fox; and lastly, in ancestral names. It has
often been a matter of wonder why the men of the Palaeolithic age should
have shown such skill in the drawing of animals, and left an art beyond
that of the Neolithic age which followed. But this may possibly be
explained by the scarcity of skins and the growing need of copying the
totemtic zootypes. As the first objects required from the
sign-painters were symbolic animals, that may account for the most
primitive races having been most expert in pictographic art as it is
found in the European bone-caves, and amongst the Bushmen. The
tattoo marks showed the tribe or totem at a glance. As one of the
Haida Indians said to Mr. Swan, "If you were tattooed with the design of
a swan, the Indians would all know your family name."
45. The zootypes were adopted for the ideal purpose they
served. They were made totemic; their likenesses were assumed in
the mysteries of masking; they were imitated in tattoo; they were copied
on bones and shells and stones; they culminated in the hieroglyphical
signs which finally became phonetic in the Egyptian alphabet, where we
find A as the Eagle, B as the Ram, F the Snake, H the Frog, K the Calf,
M the Vulture, N the Fish, P the Widgeon, R the Lion, S the Goose, T the
Beetle, U the Hare. From first to last the natural living types
were made use of as humanly adopted and humanly developed ideographs
derived from the prehuman "Sayers."
46. This zoomorphic and totemic typology was eternalized in
the zodiacal and other celestial signs as determinatives of time and
starry ideographs of the elements and seasons, which will remain the
everlasting witnesses to this primitive mode of representation.
47. An old English name for the zodiac at one time was the
"Bestiary." And in the Egyptian Ritual the sun-god or Soul of the
Deceased, in the eschatological phase, passes through the "Bestiary";
only instead of saying that he enters into or passes through the signs,
they represent him as making his transformation into the Ram or Bull,
the Lion or Cat, by assuming the shape of the animal. He becomes
the Hawk at one equinox, the Phoenix at the other; the Ape in the fury
of Tempest; the Jackal of thunder, the Lion of heat, the Fish of the
waters, the Beetle of transformation, the Bennu of resurrection, the
Serpent of eternal life. This was the same drama of metamorphosis
that was first performed in the Totemic Mysteries; the zootypes being
continued
faute de mieux as the extra-human means of expressing the later
ideas of spiritual forces and of super-human life.
48. The Powers, Spirits, or Gods of Mythology had been
derived from the elements. They were represented by the zootypes,
and to that origin we may look for the Cannibalistic or unintelligent
deities. In the chief mythologies they are seven in number, or
eight—the Ogdoad—with the Mother included. The number seven
identifies the elementals as non-human spirits.
49. The powers were seven at first as destroyers in physical
phenomena; seven as the giants or Titans that were dispossessed and
superseded; seven as the gods of constellations, the seven Watchers in
heaven; and they were seven finally in the planetary phase. The
seven in Egypt became the seven souls of the sun-god, the Supreme Being
in whom the elemental and starry pantheon was unified, humanized, and
spiritualized at last. This One God was worshipped as Osiris in
one cult; as Amen-Ra in another; Sevekh-Ra in another, and Atum-Ra in
another. In this last the One God "without change" was portrayed
in the human likeness as the Divine Father in heaven, the creator of a
son or soul "beyond time" on earth. His material type in each of
these four religions was the sun in the underworld, the Seer unseen, the
Vivifier for ever.
50. It has often been asserted that monotheism was of
Semitic origin; but this goal had been reached, this type of Eternal
attained in Egypt when the monuments began, that is, more than six
thousand years ago; how many aeons earlier no mortal knows.
Nevertheless, the zootypes survived and the Eel of Atum, the Hare of
Osiris, the Crocodile of Sevekh, the Kaf-Ape of Shu, the Jackal of
Sut-Anup, the Serpent of Seb, the Lioness of Tefnut, the Scorpion of
Serk, the Cat of Pasht, the Hawk of Horus, the Ibis of Taht, and
Water-Cow of Typhon, still survived as Determinatives of the Primary
Powers; their dead bodies being frequently embalmed in mummied forms;
and they still remain as witnesses to the immense period of
pre-monumental development in the old Totemic times of Egypt that
preceded this anthropomorphic representation of the One Supreme God.
――――♦――――
ED.―see also The Nile Genesis,
by Dr. Charles S. Finch. |
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