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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 in their enlarged and independent form.

  Yours sincerely,
    EDWARD CLODD.




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 examples are also cited from civilised races, as
witnessing to that continuity of ideas which is obscured by familiarity or
ignored by prejudice.

Had more illustrations been drawn from sources alike prolific, the
evidence would have been swollen to undue dimensions without increasing
its significance; as it is, repetition has been found needful here and
there, under the difficulty of entirely detaching the arguments advanced
in the two parts of this work.

Man's development, physical and psychical, has been fully treated by Mr.
Herbert Spencer, Dr. Tylor, and other authorities, to whom students of the
subject are permanent debtors, but that subject is so many-sided, so
far-reaching, whether in retrospect or prospect, that its subdivision is
of advantage so long as we do not permit our sense of inter-relation to be
dulled thereby.

My own line of argument will be found to run for the most part parallel
with that of the above-named writers; there are divergences along the
route, but we reach a common terminus.

The footnotes indicate the principal works which have been consulted in
preparing this book, but I desire to express my special thanks to Mr.
Andrew Lang for his kindness in reading the proofs, and for suggestions
which, in the main, I have been glad to adopt.

E. C.

  ROSEMONT, TUFNELL PARK,
    LONDON, _March 1885_.




CONTENTS.


  PART I.

  MYTH: ITS BIRTH AND GROWTH.

  SECTION                                                             PAGE

     I. ITS PRIMITIVE MEANING                                            3

    II. CONFUSION OF EARLY THOUGHT BETWEEN THE LIVING AND THE
        NOT LIVING                                                      12

   III. PERSONIFICATION OF THE POWERS OF NATURE                         19
          (_a._) The Sun and Moon                                       19
          (_b._) The Stars                                              29
          (_c._) The Earth and Sky                                      34
          (_d._) Storm and Lightning, etc.                              41
          (_e._) Light and Darkness                                     48
          (_f._) The Devil                                              53

    IV. THE SOLAR THEORY OF MYTH                                        61

     V. BELIEF IN METAMORPHOSIS INTO ANIMALS                            81

    VI. TOTEMISM: BELIEF IN DESCENT FROM ANIMAL OR PLANT                99

   VII. SURVIVAL OF MYTH IN HISTORY                                    114

  VIII. MYTH AMONG THE HEBREWS                                         131

    IX. CONCLUSION                                                     137


  PART II.

  DREAMS: THEIR PLACE IN THE GROWTH OF BELIEFS IN THE SUPERNATURAL.

  SECTION                                                             PAGE

     I. DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SAVAGE AND CIVILISED MAN                    143

    II. LIMITATIONS OF BARBARIC LANGUAGE                               148

   III. BARBARIC CONFUSION BETWEEN NAMES AND THINGS                    154

    IV. BARBARIC BELIEF IN VIRTUE IN INANIMATE THINGS                  160

     V. BARBARIC BELIEF IN THE REALITY OF DREAMS                       168

    VI. BARBARIC THEORY OF DISEASE                                     174

   VII. BARBARIC THEORY OF A SECOND SELF OR SOUL                       182

  VIII. BARBARIC PHILOSOPHY IN "PUNCHKIN" AND ALLIED STORIES           188

    IX. BARBARIC AND CIVILISED NOTIONS OF THE SOUL'S NATURE            198

     X. BARBARIC BELIEF IN SOULS IN BRUTES AND PLANTS AND
        LIFELESS THINGS                                                207

    XI. BARBARIC AND CIVILISED NOTIONS ABOUT THE SOUL'S DWELLING
        PLACE                                                          215

   XII. CONCLUSIONS FROM THE FOREGOING                                 222

  XIII. DREAMS AS OMENS AND MEDIA OF COMMUNICATION BETWEEN GODS
        AND MEN                                                        236

  INDEX      245




I.

MYTH: ITS BIRTH AND GROWTH.


"Unchecked by external truth, the mind of man has a fatal facility for
ensnaring, entrapping, and entangling itself. But, happily, happily for
the human race, some fragment of physical speculation has been built into
every false system. Here is the weak point. Its inevitable destruction
leaves a breach in the whole fabric, and through that breach the armies of
truth march in."

Sir H. S. MAINE.


MYTH: ITS BIRTH AND GROWTH.


Sec. 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 Species_[1] showed wherein it fell short; how the
importance of the above-named causes was exaggerated and the existence of
equally potent causes overlooked. Buckle probably had not read Herbert
Spencer's _Social Statics_, and he knew nothing of the profound revolution
in silent preparation in the quiet of Darwin's home; otherwise, his book
must have been rewritten. This would have averted the oblivion from which
not even its charm of style can rescue it. Its brilliant but defective
theories are obscured in the fuller light of that doctrine of descent with
modifications by which we learn that external circumstances do not alone
account for the widely divergent types of men, so that a superior race, in
supplanting an inferior one, will change the face and destiny of a
country, "making the solitary place to be glad, and the desert to rejoice
and blossom as the rose." Darwin has given us the clue to those subtle and
still obscure causes which bring about, stage by stage, the unseen
adaptations to requirements varying a type and securing its survival, and
which have resulted in the evolution of the manifold species of living
things. The notion of a constant relation between man and his surroundings
is therefore untenable.

But incomplete as is Buckle's theory, and all-embracing as is Darwin's, so
far as organic life is concerned, the larger issue is raised by both, and
for most men whose judgment is worth anything it is settled. Either man is
a part of nature or he is not. If he is not, there is an end of the
matter, since the materials lie beyond human grasp, and cannot be examined
and placed in order for comparative study. Let Christian, Brahman,
Bushman, and South Sea Islander each hold fast his "form of sound words"
about man's origin. One is as good as another where all are irrational and
beyond proof. But if he is, then the inquiry concerning him may not stop
at the anatomy of his body and the assignment of his place in the
succession of life on the globe. His relation, materially, to the
simplest, shapeless specks of living matter; structurally, to the highest
and more complex organisms, is demonstrated; the natural history of him is
clear. This, however, is physical, and for us the larger question is
psychical. The theory of evolution must embrace the genesis and
development of mind, and therefore of ideas, beliefs, and speculations
about things seen and unseen.

In the correction of our old definitions a wider meaning must be given to
the word _myth_ than that commonly found in the dictionaries. Opening any
of these at random we find myth explained as fable, as something
designedly fictitious, whether for amusement only, or to point a moral.
The larger meaning which it holds to-day includes much more than this--to
wit, the whole area of intellectual products which lie beyond the historic
horizon and overlap it, effacing on nearer view the lines of separation.
For the myth, as fable only, has no place for the crude fancies and
grotesque imaginings of barbarous races of the present day, and of races
at low levels of culture in the remote past. And so long as it was looked
upon as the vagrant of fancy, with no serious meaning at the heart of it,
and as corresponding to no yearning of man after the truth of things,
sober treatment of it was impossible. But now that myth, with its prolific
offspring, legend and tradition, is seen to be a necessary travailing
through which the mind of man passed in its slow progress towards
certitude, the study and comparison of its manifold, yet, at the centre,
allied forms, and of the conditions out of which they arose, takes rank
among the serious inquiries of our time.

Not that the inquiry is a new one. The limits of this book forbid detailed
references to the successive stages of that inquiry--in other words, to
the pre-Christian, patristic, and pseudo-scientific theories of myth which
remained unchallenged, or varied only in non-essential features, till the
rise of comparative mythology. But apology for such omission here is the
less needful, since the list of ancient and modern vagaries would have the
monotony of a catalogue. However unlike on the surface, they are
fundamentally the same, being the products of non-critical ages, and one
and all vitiated by assumptions concerning gods and men which are to us as
"old wives' fables."

In short, between these empirical theories and the scientific method of
inquiry into the meaning of myth there can be no relation. Because, for
the assigning of its due place in the order of man's mental and spiritual
development to myth, there is needed that knowledge concerning his origin,
concerning the conditions out of which he has emerged, and concerning the
mythologies of lower races and their survival in unsuspected forms in the
higher races, which was not only beyond reach, but also beyond conception,
until this century.

Except, therefore, as curiosities of literature, we may dismiss the
Lempriere of our school-days, and with him "Causabon"-Bryant and his
symbolism of the ark and traces of the Flood in everything. Their keys,
Arkite and Ophite, fit no lock, and with them we must, in all respect be
it added, dismiss Mr. Gladstone, with his visions of the Messiah in
Apollo, and of the Logos in Athene.

The main design of this book is to show that in what is for convenience
called _myth_ lie the germs of philosophy, theology, and science, the
beginnings of all knowledge that man has attained or ever will attain, and
therefore that in myth we have his serious endeavour to interpret the
meaning of his surroundings and of his own actions and feelings. In its
unbroken sequence we have the explanation of his most cherished and now,
for the most part, discredited beliefs, the persistence of which makes it
essential and instructive not to deal with the primitive myth apart from
its later and more complex phases. Myth was the product of man's emotion
and imagination, acted upon by his surroundings, and it carries the traces
of its origin in its more developed forms, as the ancestral history of the
higher organisms is embodied in their embryos. Man wondered before he
reasoned. Awe and fear are quick to express themselves in rudimentary
worship; hence the myth was at the outset a theology, and the gradations
from personifying to deifying are too faint to be traced. Thus blended,
the one as inevitable outcome of the other, they cannot well be treated
separately, as if the myth were earth-born and the theology heaven-sent.
And to treat them as one is to invade no province of religion, which is
quite other than speculation about gods. The awe and reverence which the
fathomless mystery of the universe awakens, which steal within us unbidden
as the morning light, and unbroken on the prism of analysis; the
conviction, deepening as we peer, that there is a Power beyond humanity,
and upon which humanity depends; the feeling that life is in harmony with
the Divine order when it moves in disinterested service of our kind--these
theology can neither create nor destroy, neither verify nor disprove. They
can be bound within no formula that man or church has invented, but
undefined

  "Are yet the fountain life of all our day,
   Are yet a master light of all our seeing."

At what epoch in man's history we are to place the development of the
myth-making faculty must remain undetermined. It is of course coincident
with the dawn of thought. We cannot credit the nameless savage of the
Ancient Stone Age with it. If he had brains and leisure enough to make
guesses about things, he has left us no witness of the fact. His relics,
and those of his successors to a period which is but as yesterday in the
history of our kind, are material only; and not until we possess the
symbols of his thought, whether in language or rude picture, do we get an
inkling of the meaning which the universe had for him, in the details of
his pitiless daily life, in the shapes and motions of surrounding
objects, and in the majesty of the heavens above him. Even then the
thought is more or less crystallised, and if we would watch it in the
fluent form we must have a keen eye for the like process going on among
savages yet untouched by the Time-spirit, although higher in the scale
than the Papuans and hill tribes of the Vindhya. Although we cannot so far
lull our faculty of thought as to realise the mental vacuity of the
savage, we may, from survivals nowadays, lead up to reasonable guesses of
savage ways of looking at things in bygone ages, and the more so when we
can detect relics of these among the ignorant and superstitious of modern
times.

What meaning, then, had man's surroundings to him, when eye and ear could
be diverted from prior claims of the body, and he could repose from
watching for his prey, and from listening to the approach of wild beast or
enemy? He had the advantage, from greater demand for their exercise, in
keener senses of sight, hearing, smell, and touch, than we enjoy; nor did
he fail to take in facts in plenty. But there was this vital defect and
difference, that in his brains every fact was pigeon-holed, charged with
its own narrow meaning only, as in small minds among ourselves we find
place given to inane peddling details, and no advance made to general and
wide conception of things. In sharpest contrast to the poet's utterance:

  "Nothing in this world is single,
     All things by a law divine
   In one another's being mingle,"

every fact is unrelated to every other fact, and therefore interpreted
wrongly.

Man, in his first outlook upon nature, was altogether ignorant of the
character of the forces by which he was environed; ignorant of that
unvarying relation between effect and cause which it needed the experience
of ages and the generalisations therefrom to apprehend, and to express as
"laws of nature." He had not even the intellectual resource of later times
in inventing miracle to explain where the necessary relation between
events seemed broken or absent.

His first attitude was that of wonder, mingled with fear--fear as
instinctive as the dread of the brute for him. The sole measure of things
was himself, consequently everything that moved or that had power of
movement did so because it was alive. A personal life and will was
attributed to sun, moon, clouds, river, waterfall, ocean, and tree, and
the varying phenomena of the sky at dawn or noonday, at gray eve or
black-clouded night, were the manifestation of the controlling life that
dwelt in all. In a thousand different forms this conception was expressed.
The thunder was the roar of a mighty beast; the lightning a serpent
darting at its prey, an angry eye flashing, the storm demon's outshot
forked tongue; the rainbow a thirsty monster; the waterspout a long-tailed
dragon. This was not a pretty or powerful conceit, not imagery, but an
explanation. The men who thus spoke of these phenomena meant precisely
what they said. What does the savage know about heat, light, sound,
electricity, and the other modes of motion through which the
Proteus-force beyond our ken is manifest? How many persons who have
enjoyed a "liberal" education can give correct answers, if asked off-hand,
explaining how glaciers are born of the sunshine, and why two sounds,
travelling in opposite directions at equal velocities, interfere and cause
silence? The percentage of young men, hailing from schools of renown, who
give the most ludicrous replies when asked the cause of day and night, and
the distance of the earth from the sun, is by no means small.

Whilst the primary causes determining the production of myths are uniform,
the secondary causes, due in the main to different physical surroundings,
vary, bringing about unlikeness in subject and detail. Nevertheless, in
grouping the several classes of myths, those are obviously to be placed
prominently which embrace explanations of the origin of things, from sun
and star to man and insect, involving ideas about the powers to whom all
things are attributed. But in this book no exhaustive treatment is
possible, only some indication of the general lines along which the
myth-making faculty has advanced, and for this purpose a few illustrations
of barbaric mental confusion between the living and the not living are
chosen at the outset. They will, moreover, prepare us for the large
element of the irrational present in barbaric myth, and supply a key to
the survival of this in the mythologies of civilised races.


Sec. 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
days of our fathers is now of small account; that within it which they
passed by we secure as of lasting worth. Much of that literature is,
however, new, for the impetus which has in our time been given to the
rescue and preservation of archaic forms has reached this, and a host of
accomplished collectors have secured rich specimens of relics which, in
the lands of their discovery, have still the authority of the past,
unimpaired by the critical exposure of the present.

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

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

  "As children of weak age
     Lend life to the dumb stones
   Whereon to vent their rage,
     And bend their little fists, and rate
         the senseless ground."[2]

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

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

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

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


Sec. 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 trees, the grotesquely-shaped rocks, and the fear inspired in man
by creatures more powerful than himself. Through the whole range of the
lower culture, sun, moon, and constellations are spoken of as living
creatures, often as ancestors, heroes, and benefactors who have departed
to the country above, to heaven, the _heaved_, up-lifted land. The Tongans
of the South Pacific say that two ancestors quarrelled respecting the
parentage of the first-born of the woman Papa, each claiming the child as
his own. No King Solomon appears to have been concerned in the dispute,
although at last the infant was cut in two. Vatea, the husband of Papa,
took the upper part as his share, and forthwith squeezed it into a ball
and tossed it into the heavens, where it became the sun. Tonga-iti
sullenly allowed the lower half to remain a day or two on the ground,
but, seeing the brightness of Vatea's half, he compressed his share into a
ball and tossed it into the dark sky, during the absence of the sun in the
nether world. Thus originated the moon, whose paleness is owing to the
blood having all drained out of Tonga-iti's half as it lay upon the
ground. Mr. Gill, from whose valuable collection of southern myth this is
quoted, says that it seems to have its origin in the allegory of an
alternating embrace of the fair Earth by Day and Night. But despite the
explanations, more or less strained, which some schools of comparative
mythologists find for every myth, the savage is not a conscious weaver of
allegories, or an embryo Cabalist, and we shall find ourselves more in
accord with the laws of his intellectual growth if, instead of delving for
recondite and subtle meanings in his simple-sounding explanations of
things, we take the meaning to be that which lies on the surface. More on
this, however, anon. Among the Red races one tribe thought that sun, moon,
and stars were men and women who went into the sea every night and swam
out by the east. The Bushmen say that the sun was once a man who shed
light from his body, but only for a short distance, until some children
threw him into the sky while he slept, and thus he shines upon the wide
earth. The Australians say that all was darkness around them till one of
their many ancestors, who still shine from the stars, shedding good and
evil, threw, in pity for them, an emu's egg into space, when it became the
sun. Among the Manacicas of Brazil, the sun was their culture-hero,
virgin-born, and their jugglers, who claimed power to fly through the air,
said that his luminous figure, as that of a man, could be seen by them,
although too dazzling for common mortals.

The sun has been stayed in his course in other places than Gibeon,
although by mechanical means of which Joshua appears to have been
independent.