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« on: July 13, 2019, 04:36:43 PM »
https://archive.org/details/mythologyofallra12gray/page/n22Volume XII EGYPTIAN PLATE I Hnit-ma-dawgyi Nat This Nat is the elder sister of Min Magaye, or Mahagiri, and is usually worshipped together with him. After Temple, Thirty-Seven Nats of Burma, No. 3. See pp. 347-48- THE MYTHOLOGY OF ALL RACES IN THIRTEEN VOLUMES LOUIS HERBERT GRAY, A.M., PH.D., Editor GEORGE FOOT MOORE, A.M., D.D., LL.D., Consulting Editor EGYPTIAN INDO-CHINESE BY W. MAX MtJLLER BY SIR JAMES GEORGE SCOTT K.C.I.E. VOLUME XII BOSTON MARSHALL JONES COMPANY MDCCCC XVIII . Copyright, 191 8 By Marshall Jones Company Entered at Stationers' Hall, London All rights reserved Printed February, 191 8 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY THE UNIVERSITY PRESS CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS BOUND BY THE BOSTON BOOKBINDING COMPANY CONTENTS EGYPTIAN Author's Preface 3 Introduction 7 Chapter I. The Local Gods 15 II. The Worship of the Sun 23 III. Other Gods Connected with Nature ... 33 IV. Some Cosmic and Cosmogonic Myths .... 68 V. The Osirian Circle 92 VI. Some Texts Referring to Osiris-Myths . . 122 VII. The Other Principal Gods 129 VIII. Foreign Gods 153 IX. Worship of Animals and Men 159 X. Life after Death 173 XI. Ethics and Cult 184 XII. Magic 198 XIII. Development and Propagation of Egyptian Religion 212 INDO-CHINESE Author's Preface 249 Transcription and Pronunciation 251 Chapter I. The Peoples and Religions of Indo-China 253 IL Indo-Chinese Myths and Legends 263 III. The Festivals of the Indo-Chinese .... 323 IV. The Thirty-Seven Nats 339 Notes, Egyptian 361 Notes, Indo-Chinese 429 Bibliography, Egyptian 433 Bibliography, Indo-Chinese 448 ILLUSTRATIONS FULL PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS PLATE FACING PAGE I Hnit-ma-dawgyi Nat — Coloured Frontispiece II I. Greek Terra-Co tta of the Young Horus Floating in his Boat ii6 2. Bes in the Armour of a Roman Soldier - 3. Zeus-Serapis III I. Amen-hotep 170 X2. I-m-hotep 3. The Zodiacal Signs IV Shrine of the Tree-Spirit 254 V Tsen-Yii-ying 260 VI Shrine of the Stream-Spirit 268 VII I. Naga Min — Coloured 272 2. Galon 3. Bilu VIII Shrine of the Tree-Spirit 280 IX Prayer-Spire 300 X The Guardian of the Lake 302 XI Sale of Flags and Candles 310 XII A. The White Elephant 316 B. The White Elephant 316 XIII Funeral Pyre of a Burmese Monk 326 XIV The Goddess of the Tilth 330 XV Red Karen Spirit-Posts . 336 ' XVI Thagya Min Nat — Coloured 342 XVII Mahagiri Nat — Coloured 344 XVIII An Avatar Play 346 XIX Shwe Pyin Naungdaw Nat — Coloured 348 XX The Guardian of the Lake 352 XXI Min Kyawzwa Nat — Coloured 354 viii ILLUSTRATIONS ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT FIGURE PAGE 1 The Triad of Elephantine: Khnum, Sa|et, and 'Anuqet . 20 2 Some Gods of Prehistoric Egypt whose Worship Later was Lost 22 3 The Sun-God Watching the Appearance of his Disk in the Eastern Gate of Heaven 24 4 Pictures of Khepri in Human Form 24 5 Khepri as the Infant Sun 25 6 Khepri with the Sun in Double Appearance 25 7 The Sun-God Rows a Departed Soul over the Sky ... . 26 8 A Star as Rower of the Sun in the Day-Time 26 9 The Sun-Boat as a Double Serpent 26 10 The Sun-God at Night-Time 27 1 1 Atum behind the Western Gate of Heaven 28 12 Thout as a Baboon 32 13 Baboons Greet the Sun 32 14 Baboons Saluting the Morning Sun 32 15 Thout 33 16 Thout, the Scribe 33 17 Thout in Baboon Form as Moon-God and Scribe of the Gods 33 18 Khons as Moon-God 34 19 A Personified Pillar of the Sky 35 20 The Sun-God on his Stairs 35 21 The Dead Witnesses the Birth of the Sun from the Celestial Tree 35 22 The Sun-Boat and the Two Celestial Trees 36 23 The Dead at the Tree and Spring of Life 36 24 Amon as the Supreme Divinity Registers a Royal Name on the "Holy Persea in the Palace of the Sun" 37 25 Symbol of Hat-hor from the Beginning of the Historic Age 37 26 Hat-hor at Evening Entering the Western Mountain and the Green Thicket 38 27 The Sun-God between the Horns of the Celestial Cow . 38 28 The Dead Meets Hat-hor behind the Celestial Tree ... 39 29 "Meht-ueret, the Mistress of the Sky and of Both Coun- tries" (i. e. Egypt) 39 30 The Goddess of Diospolis Parva 40 31 Nut Receiving the Dead 41 ILLUSTRATIONS ix FIGURE PAGE 32 Nut with Symbols of the Sky in Day-Time 41 33 Qeb as Bearer of Vegetation 42 34 Qeb with his Hieroglyphic Symbol 42 35 Qeb as a Serpent and Nut 42 36 Qeb Watching Aker and Extended over him 43 37 Disfigured Representation of Aker Assimilated to Shu and Tefenet 43 38 Shu, Standing on the Ocean (?), Upholds Nut, the Sky . . 43 39 Shu-Heka and the Four Pillars Separating Heaven and Earth 44 40 Tefenet 44 41 The Nile, his Wife Nekhbet, and the Ocean 45 42 Nuu with the Head of an Ox 47 43 "Nuu, the Father of the Mysterious Gods," Sends his Springs to "the Two Mysterious Ones" 47 44 Two Members of the Primeval Ogdoad 48 45 Heh and Hehet Lift the Young Sun (as Khepri) over the Eastern Horizon 48 46 Unusual Representation of the Husband of the Sky-Goddess 49 47 The Sky-Goddess in Double Form and her Consort ... 49 48 The Young Sun in his Lotus Flower 50 49 Khnum Forms Children, and Heqet Gives them Life ... 51 50 Meskhenet 52 51 Sekhait, Thout, and Atum Register a King's Name on the Celestial Tree, Placing the King within it 53 52 The Planet Saturn in a Picture of the Roman Period . . 54 53 Sothis-Sirius 54 54 Sothis (called "Isis") 55 55 Sothis and Horus-Osiris Connected 55 56 Decanal Stars from Denderah 56 57 Early Picture of Orion 57 58 The Double Orion 58 59 The Ferryman of the Dead 58 60 Constellations Around the Ox-Leg 59 61 Three Later Types of Epet (the Last as Queen of Heaven) 60 62 An-Horus Fighting the Ox-Leg 61 63 Old Types of Bes from the Twelfth and Eighteenth Dynas- ties 61 64 Bes with Flowers 62 65 Bes Drinking 62 X ILLUSTRATIONS FIGURE PAGE 66 The Female Bes 63 67 The Female Bes 63 68 A"Pataik" 64 69 Lost Stellar Divinity 64 70 The East and West Winds 65 71 The Air-God Shu-Heb with the South and North Winds 65 72 An Hour 66 73 Nepri, the Grain-God, Marked by Ears of Grain .... 66 74 The Field-Goddess 67 75 The Birth of the Sun-God 71 76 Further Symbols of the Birth of the Sun-God 71 'j'j The Heavenly Cow, the Sun-God, and the Gods Support- ing her (Shu in the Centre) 78 78 Thout in Ibis-Form (Twice), with Shu and Tefenet as the Two Lions 87 79 Thout Greets Tefenet Returning from Nubia 88 80 The Solar Eye In the Watery Depth 89 81 The Solar Eye Guarded In the Deep 89 82 Osiris as a Black God 92 83 Osiris Hidden in his Pillar 92 84 Osiris in the Celestial Tree 93 85 The Nile Revives the Soul of Osiris in Sprouting Plants . . 94 86 Osiris Rising to New Life In Sprouting Seeds 94 87 Birth and Death of the Sun, with Osiris as Master of the Abysmal Depth 96 88 Osiris as Judge on his Stairs 97 89 Osiris with the Water and Plant of Life, on which Stand his Four Sons 97 90 Isis 98 91 The Symbol of Isis 99 92 Isis-Hat-h6r 99 93 The West Receiving a Departed Soul 99 94 The Celestial Arms Receiving the Sun-God 100 95 "The Double Justice" 100 96 The Symbol of the Horus of Edfu loi 97 One of the Smiths of Horus loi 98 Oldest Pictures of Seth 102 99 Seth Teaches the Young King Archery, and Horus Instructs him in Fighting with the Spear 103 100 Apop Bound In the Lower World 104 ILLUSTRATIONS xi FIGURE PAGE loi The Sons of Osiris Guard the Fourfold Serpent of the Abyss before their Father 105 102 'Apop Chained by "the Children of Horus" 105 103 The Unborn Sun Held by the Water Dragon 105 104 The Cat-God Killing the Serpent at the Foot of the Heav- enly Tree 106 105 "TheCat-LikeGod" 106 106 The Dead Aiding the Ass against the Dragon 107 107 The God with Ass's Ears in the Fight against Apop . . 108 108 The God with Ass's E^ars 109 109 Genii Fighting with Nets or Snares 109 no Horus-Orion, Assisted by Epet, Fights the Ox-Leg ... no 111 Nephthys no 112 Anubis as Embalmer in 113 Divine Symbol Later Attributed to Anubis in 114 The Sons of Horus in '?' 115 The Four Sons of Osiris-Horus United with the Serpent of the Deep Guarding Life 112 116 The Sons of Horus-Osiris in the Sky near their Father Orion (called "Osiris") 112 /'I17 Osiris under the Vine 113 118 Isis (as Sothis or the Morning Star.'') and Selqet-Nephthys Gathering Blood from the Mutilated Corpse of Osiris . 114 >'II9 Isis Nursing Horus in the Marshes 116 120 Osiris in the Basket and in the Boat, and Isis 117 121 Horus Executes Seth (in the Form of an Ass) before Osiris 119 122 Horus Kills Seth as a Crocodile . 119 123 Amon 129 124 Amonet 130 125 Antaeus 130 126 Buto 132 127 Ehi 133 128 Hat-mehit 133 129 Hesat .- 134 130 Kenemtefi 134 131 Old Symbol of Mafdet 135 132 Meret in Double Form 136 133 Mi-hos, Identified with Nefer-tem 137 134 Hieroglyphic Symbols of Min from Prehistoric Objects 137 135 Barbarians of the Desert Climbing Poles before Min . . 138 xii ILLUSTRATIONS FIGURE PAGE 136 The Earliest Sanctuaries of Min, Decorated with a Pecu- liar Standard 138 137 Min before his Grove 139 138 Mon^u 139 139 Oldest Type of Mon^u 140 140 Mut with a Head-Dress Assimilating her to Amon .... 140 141 Nefer-tem 140 142 Emblem of Nefer-tem 141 143 Nehem(t)-'auit 141 144 Neith 142 145 Nekhbet Protecting the King 142 146 Late Type of Onuris 143 147 Ophois 144 148 Opet 144 149 Ptalj 145 150 Sekhmet 147 151 Sokari Hidden in his Boat or Sledge 148 152 Sopd as an Asiatic Warrior 148 153 Archaic Type of Sopd 149 154 Tait Carrying Chests of Linen 150 155 Ubastet 150 156 Unut 151 157 Statuette of the Museum of Turin Showing Hat-hor of Byblos 154 158 Reshpu 155 159 Resheph-Seth 155 160 "Astarte, Mistress of Horses and of the Chariot" ... 156 161 Astarte 156 162 Astarte as a Sphinx 156 163 Qedesh 157 164 Asit 157 165 Anat 157 166 Hieroglyphs of Dedun and Selqet 158 167 Statuette of the Apis Showing his Sacred Marks .... 162 168 Buchis 163 169 The Mendes Ram and his Plant Symbol 164 170 Amon as a Ram 164 171 Atum of Heliopolis 164 172 "Atum, the Spirit of Heliopolis" 165 173 Shedeti 165 ILLUSTRATIONS xiii FIGURE PAGE 174 KhatuH-Shedeti 165 175 The Phoenix 165 176 "The Soul of Osiris" in a Sacred Tree Overshadowing his Sarcophagus-like Shrine 166 177 Statue of a Guardian Serpent in a Chapel 166 178 Egyptian Chimera ?. . 169 179 The Birth of a King Protected by Gods 170 180 The Ka of a King, Bearing his Name and a Staff-Symbol Indicating Life 170 181 The Soul-Bird 174 182 The Soul Returning to the Body 174 183 The Soul Returns to the Grave 175 184 The Dead Visits his House 175 185 The Dead Wanders over a Mountain to the Seat of Osiris 176 186 The Dead before Osiris, the Balance of Justice, the Lake of Fire, and "the Swallower" 179 187 The Condemned before the Dragon 179 188 Shades Swimming in the Abyss 180 189 A Female Guardian with Fiery Breath Watches Souls, Symbolized by Shades and Heads, in the Ovens of Hell 180 190 Thout's Baboons Fishing Souls i8l 191 Dancers and a Buffoon at a Funeral 182 192 Large Sacrifice Brought before a Sepulchral Chapel in the Pyramid Period 182 193 Temples of the Earliest Period 187 194 Guardian Statues and Guardian Serpents of a Temple . 187 195 Front of a Temple according to an Egyptian Picture . . 188 196 Royal Sacrifice before the Sacred Pillars of Bubastos . . 190 197 The King Offering Incense and Keeping a Meat-Offering Warm 191 198 Temple Choir in Unusual Costume 191 199 Two Women Representing I sis and Nephthys as Mourners at Processions I92 200 "The Worshipper of the God" 192 201 Priest with the Book of Ritual 193 202 Archaistic Priestly Adornment 193 203 A King Pulling the Ring at the Temple Door 193 204 A God Carried in Procession 194 205 A Small Portable Shrine . 194 206 Mythological Scenes from a Procession 194 xiv ILLUSTRATIONS FIGURE PAGE 207 An Acrobat Following a Sacrificial Animal 195 208 Small Holocaustic Sacrifice on an Oven 195 209 Human Sacrifice at a Royal Tomb of the First Dynasty 196 210 Nubian Slaves Strangled and Burned at a Funeral . . . 196 211 A Ritual Priest 198 212 A Section of the Metternich Stele 207 213 Fragment of a Magic Wand 208 214 Late Nameless God of the Universe 223 215 Amen-hotep IV and his Wife Sacrificing to the Solar Disk 225 216 Profile of Amen-hotep IV . 226 217 Prayer-Stele with Symbols of Hearing 232 218 Antaeus-Serapis 240 219 Guardian Deities on the Tomb of Kom-esh-Shugafa near Alexandria 241 220 Guardian Symbol from the Same Tomb 241 221 Nut, Aker, and Khepri 368 222 Shu with Four Feathers 368 223 Ageb, the Watery Depth 371 224 " Sebeg in the Wells " 373 225 "Horus of the Two Horizons" 388 226 The Jackal (?) with a Feather 393 227 The Harpoon of Horus 397 228 "Horus on his Green" 401 229 Symbol of Selqet as the Conqueror 412 230 Souls In the Island of Flames among Flowers and Food . 417 231 The Earliest Construction Commemorating a " Festival of the Tail" 419 232 A Priestess Painting the Eyes of a Sacred Cow 420 EGYPTIAN MYTHOLOGY BY W. MAX MtJLLER TO MORRIS JASTROW, JR., ph.d. OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA AND TO ALBERT TOBIAS CLAY, ph.d., ll.d. AND CHARLES CUTLER TORREY, ph.d., d.d. OF YALE UNIVERSITY AUTHOR'S PREFACE THIS study can hope to give only a sketch of a vast theme which, because of its endless and difficult material, has thus far received but superficial investigation even from the best of scholars; its complete elaboration would require several volumes of space and a lifetime of preparation. The principal difficulty is to make it clear to the modern mind that a religion can exist without any definite system of doctrine, being composed merely of countless speculations that are widely divergent and often conflicting. This doctrinal uncertainty is increased by the way in which the traditions have been transmitted. Only rarely is a piece of mythology complete. For the most part we have nothing but many scat- tered allusions which must be united for a hazardous restora- tion of one of these theories. In other respects, likewise, the enormous epigraphic material presents such difficulties and is so confusing in nature that everything hitherto done on the religion of Egypt is, as we have just implied, merely pioneer work. As yet an exhaustive description of this religion could scarcely be written. A minor problem is the question of transliterating Egyptian words and names, most of which are written in so abbre- viated a fashion that their pronunciation, especially in the case of the vowels, always remains dubious unless we have a good later tradition of their sound. It is quite as though the abbre- viation "st." (= "street") were well known to persons having no acquaintance with English to mean something like "road," but without any indication as to its pronunciation. Foreigners would be compelled to guess whether the sound of the word 4 AUTHOR'S PREFACE were set, sat, seta, sota, etc., or este, usot, etc., since there is abso- lutely nothing to suggest the true pronunciation "street." A great part of the Egyptian vocabulary is known only in this way, and in many instances we must make the words pro- nounceable by arbitrarily assigning vowel sounds, etc., to them. Accordingly I have thought it better to follow popular mispro- nunciations like Nut than to try Newet, Neyewet, and other unsafe attempts, and even elsewhere I have sacrificed correct- ness to simplicity where difficulty might be experienced by a reader unfamiliar with some Oriental systems of writing. It should be borne in mind that Sekhauit and Uzoit, for example, might more correctly be written S(e)khjewyet, Wezoyet, and that e is often used as a mere filler where the true vowel is quite unknown. Sometimes we can prove that the later Egyptians themselves misread the imperfect hieroglyphs, but for the most part we must retain these mispronunciations, even though we are con- scious of their slight value. All this will explain why any two Egyptologists so rarely agree in their transcriptions. Returning in despair to old-fashioned methods of conventionalizing tran- scription, I have sought to escape these difficulties rather than to solve them. In the transliteration kh has the value of the Scottish or German ch;h is a. voiceless laryngeal spirant — a rough, wheez- ing, guttural sound; q is an emphatic k, formed deep in the throat (Hebrew p) ; ' is a strange, voiced laryngeal explosive (Hebrew ^); J Is an assibilated t (German z); z is used here as a rather Inexact substitute for the peculiar Egyptian pro- nunciation of the emphatic Semitic s (Hebrew V, in Egyptian sounding like ts, for which no single type can be made). For those who may be unfamiliar with the history of Egypt It will here be sufficient to say that Its principal divisions (dis- regarding the intermediate periods) are : the Old Empire (First to Sixth Dynasties), about 3400 to 2500 b. c; the Middle Empire (Eleventh to Thirteenth Dynasties), about 2200 to AUTHOR'S PREFACE 5 1700 B. c; the New Empire (Eighteenth to Twenty-Sixth Dynasties), about 1600 to 525 b. c. Pictures which could not be photographed directly from books have been drawn by my daughter; Figs. 13, 65 (b) are taken from scarabs in my possession. Since space does not permit full references to the monu- ments, I have omitted these wherever I follow the present general knowledge and where the student can verify these views from the indexes of the more modern literature which I quote. References have been limited, so far as possible, to observations which are new or less well known. Although I have sought to be brief and simple in my presentation of Egyp- tian mythology, my study contains a large amount of original research. I have sought to emphasize two principles more than has been done hitherto: (a) the comparative view — Egyptian religion had by no means so isolated a growth as has generally been assumed; (b) as in many other religions, its doctrines often found a greater degree of expression in religious art than in religious literature, so that modern interpreters should make more use of the Egyptian pictures. Thus I trust not only that this book will fill an urgent demand for a reliable popular treatise on this subject, but that for scholars also it will mark a step in advance toward a better understanding of Egypt's most interesting bequest to posterity. W. MAX MtJLLER. University of Pennsylvania, September, 19x7.
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« on: July 13, 2019, 04:35:58 PM »
https://archive.org/details/mythologyofallra12gray/page/246INDO-CHINESE MYTHOLOGY BY SIR JAMES GEORGE SCOTT AUTHOR'S PREFACE THE mythology of Burma, Siam, and Indo-China needs no special discussion. It has been borrowed almost en- tirely from India and is only slightly modified by aboriginal characteristics. A great deal, however, has been grafted on from the serpent-, tree-, and spirit-worship of the native tribes, or (in the case of the Burmese) from the tribal beliefs held before the Indo-Chinese peoples came to settle in their present abodes. Research has thus far been insufficient to show whence the Burmese came, whether they received their religion first from the north or from the south, or whether they originally had a script of their own. There Is hope that, with further investigation, enough data may be found to determine the Pyu character, but the few examples hitherto found have not enabled Mr. Blagden to go very far. For the coloured plates In this study I am Indebted to the courtesy of Sir Richard Carnac Temple and to his publishers, Messrs. W. Griggs and Sons, Ltd., London, who have placed at my disposal the Illustrations of his Thirty-Seven Nats of Burma. J. GEORGE SCOTT. London, May 21, 1917. TRANSCRIPTION AND PRONUNCIATION THE system of transliteration and pronunciation here fol- lowed is the one prescribed by the Government of India for the Indian languages generally. The vowels, on the whole, are pronounced as in Italian; e has the sound of e in French mere or of e in terror^ and e oi e in French verite, while e has a similar value, though less accentuated. The vowels of the diphthongs generally coalesce. Thus ai is pronounced as in aisle; ao and au are sounded as in Latin aurum or English how, with greater stress in the case of ao than in that of au\ aw is pronounced as in saw, ei as in feign, eo as in Eothen, oi as in soil; a and o are pronounced as in German, and the pe- culiar Shan diphthongs au and 6u have the u sound added, the former almost resembling the miauling of a cat. In Burmese and Shan the aspirate is sounded before other consonants, such as t, p, k, I, s, and w, and is therefore prefixed, as in ht, hp, hk, hi, hs, and hw; it amounts to a rough breathing. In such words as gyi and kya, gy and ky are nearly equivalent toj, but have a lighter sound, almost like dyi or tya pronounced as one syllable. The sound of kzv is approximately that of qua in quantity; my, ny, and py with a following vowel are always pronounced as one syllable, the y being little more than a slight breathing; ng is decidedly nasal, the n predominating and whittling the g to a mere shadow. The pronunciation of hnget ("bird") is taken as the test of correct Burmese vocahz- ing; it begins with a guttural h, blends into a nasal n, all but ignores the g, and ends on a staccato e, with the t eliminated. INDO-CHINESE MYTHOLOGY CHAPTER I THE PEOPLES AND RELIGIONS OF INDO-CHINA SOME ethnologists maintain that at one time a common language was spoken all over Farther India from the Irra- waddy River to the Gulf of Tongking. Whether this was Mon, the language of the Talaings, who for a thousand years held the south of Burma and warred with the Burmese, or whether it was Hkmer (or Khmer), the language of the founders of Champa and of the builders of the great Angkor Temple in Cambodia, has not been determined and is not likely to be ascertained. Down to the present day the Munda languages are spoken in a belt which extends right across Continental India from Murshidabad on the east to Nimar on the west, Munda being the name given by F. Max Miiller to the whole family of languages. The early philologists, Hodgson and Logan, called this Munda group the Kol family, but Sir George Campbell altered this to Kolarian, to the great indigna- tion of those who thought it might lead the unlearned to imag- ine a connexion with the Aryans, which would be quite wrong, though he meant only to suggest Kolar in Southern India as a sort of nucleus. There are resemblances between the Munda languages and the Mon-Hkmer which have long been pointed out, and the theory is that there may have been at one time a common tongue which was spoken from the Indian Ocean to the China Sea, across the Indian Continent, over the whole 254 INDO-CHINESE MYTHOLOGY of Indo-China, and even In the East Indian Archipelago and Australia.^ There Is certainly a substratum In common, and there are links In the Nancaorl dialects of the Nicobars and In the vocabularies of the Malacca neighbourhood. But the Dravldlans, who Inhabit the southern half of India, also fused with the Negritos from Malaysia, and It Is quite certain that the Dravldlans are fundamentally distinct from the Munda. It might be thought that the mythology of the various races should help In this puzzle, but It gives no assistance, and there are as great differences in the myths as there are in the lan- guages, which are as distinct from one another as French Is from German. There are general resemblances just as there are resemblances between the flint arrow-heads found in all con- tinents and Islands. The celts found In the graves of Algon- quian chiefs are not easily distinguished from those used at the present day by the Papuans of the Snowy Range in New Guinea, and those found near the tumulus on the Plain of Marathon could be fitted to the reed shafts of the Sam- oyeds without looking singular. It Is the same with the super- stitions and the myths which are found among primitive tribes all over the world. They are very vague In their religious con- ceptions, but they all agree in believing that this world Is the home of a shadowy host of powerful and malevolent beings who usually have a local habitation In a hill, stream, or patch of primeval forest, and interest themselves in the affairs of men. As often as not they are dead ancestors, the originators of the tribe or caste, with a vague following of distinguished or insignificant descendants. Indeed, some scholars are con- vinced that the worship of death is the basis and root of all religions, and Grant Allen, In his History of Religion, main- tained that all the sacred objects of the world are either dead men themselves, as corpses, mummies, ghosts, or gods; or else the tomb where such men are buried; or else the temple, shrine, or hut which covers the tomb; or else the tombstone, altar, Image, or statue standing over it and representing the PLATE IV Shrine of the Tree-Spirit This spirit-shrine is shaded by a pipal-tree {Ficus religiosa), which is associated with spirits in India as well. The sheds of the bazaar may be seen just behind the shrine, which is about fifteen miles north of Loilem, one of the district head-quarters of the Southern Shan States. Cf. Plate VIII. PEOPLES AND RELIGIONS OF INDO-CHINA 255 ghost; or else the statue, idol, or household god which is fashioned as the deputy of the dead; or else the tree which grows above the barrow; or else the well, or tank, or spring, natural or artificial, by whose side the dead man has been laid to rest. Families worshipped their first and subsequent an- cestors; villagers worshipped the man who founded the village, and from whom they all claimed descent. In similar fashion Herbert Spencer was persuaded that "the rudimentary form of all religion is the propitiation of dead ancestors." Myths are woven round the history of their lives; illness and mis- fortunes of all kinds are attributed to their influence; there is a general belief in magic and witchcraft, and a ritual is devised which elaborates the legend. Wizards are employed to deter- mine the cause of trouble and to remove it, either by incanta- tions and exorcism, or by placating the offended ghostly being by a suitable sacrifice; their services are also requisitioned when it is desired to secure good crops, to cause an injury to an enemy, or to ascertain the omens relating to some proposed course of action. However important the cult of the dead may be in primitive religion, it is not the only factor. Natural forces long familiar- ized to the popular mind are transformed into actual beings with human passions and prejudices, and thus we get per- sonifications of Thanatos (Death), the brother of Sleep; Bel- Merodach, the light of the sun; Surya, Zeus, the Sun itself; Indra, the god of the atmosphere; and Balder, the summer god. The dwarfish races of America, Scotland, and the Deccan are believed by many to have become hobgoblins ; and the personi- fications of fire, wind, and war are obvious symbols. These are all features of animism — the belief which attributes human intelligence and action to every phenomenon and object of nature, and which sees in them all a human anima, or prin- ciple of life. The people of Burma, Siam, and Annam were all animists in the earliest days, and there are strong traces of the belief among the Buddhists they now claim to be. These 256 INDO-CHINESE MYTHOLOGY universal features are sometimes coupled with belief in a supreme god, who usually interests himself very little in earthly affairs, and with belief in metempsychosis, or transincorpora- tion of souls; and the shadowy beings are sometimes Invested with definite powers and functions, and provided with a genealogy and bodily form. But all these primitive deities — wherever they are found — bear a close resemblance to one another. Spiritually they are as much alike as, physically, are the arrow-heads that are discovered everywhere, or the early pottery which is very much of the same style no matter where it has been produced. There might be some hope of consistence In the mythological beliefs If we could be at all certain that a considerable pro- portion of the original Inhabitants of Indo-China might still be found In Burma, Slam, and Annam, There is not even an agreement as to who the aborigines were, whether Negrito, or Malaysian, or Mongolian, and it is practically certain that they are as extinct as the Iroquois in Chicago or the Trinobantes in Middlesex, except for a few baffling, isolated groups which remain like boulders carved far back In the Glacial Age, or peaks that rise out of the ocean as the last vestige of submerged continents. Students of ethnology dispute relentlessly with one another as to whether certain tribes are autochthonous, like ridges worn by the Ice-streams of glaciers, or are erratic boulders, ground moraine, or boulder clay, stranded in alien countries, like round masses of Ailsa Craig granite carried down to South Wales, the Midlands, and even the north of Ireland, The ice-sheet always moving south changed the face of the land, just as the waves of humanity which poured south from Central Asia altered the populations. They followed one on the other, set in motion by some natural or social upheaval, and they drove their forerunners before them, or followed the example of the Israelites, who "warred against the Midianltes, . . . and they slew all the males . . , and they burnt all their cities wherein they dwelt." PEOPLES AND RELIGIONS OF INDO-CHINA 257 The history of these old days is a series of paroxysms. Its keynote was bloodshed and famine and the merciless oblitera- tion of countless innocents. The slaughter of Orientals by Orientals has none of the characteristics of religious or political hatred. It is simple blood-lust and it goes on still where it is possible. When the Manchus marched south, early in the seventeenth century, to destroy the fugitive Ming Court at Nan- king, they massacred eight hundred thousand of the population (estimated at a million) of Yang-chou-fu. In 191 1 the Chinese Republicans sacked the Tatar city of Si-ngan-fu and butchered every Manchu man, woman, and child. Pestilences spare a few here and there; savage man does not. But there was one saving point about the genuine savages of two thousand or more years ago which distinguishes them from the civilized savages. They seldom brought their women with them, or only a few, and so they took to wife the daughters of the land. As a consequence, the only races that are not composite are those who are settled in inaccessible mountains which tempted no one to conquer. The result of this is that there is no general Indo-Chinese, or even separate Burmese, Siamese, or Annamese mythology, as there is an Eddie, a Semitic, Egyptian, Graeco-Roman, or Indian mythology. The Mundas and Dravidians may have brought some of their traditional beliefs or myths with them when they were driven from India to Indo-China by the con- quering Aryans, but when Kublai Khan broke up the Lao-tai (Shan) Kingdom in Yiin-nan in the thirteenth century, a flood of Tibeto-Burman and Siamese-Chinese legends must have submerged or diluted the old traditions. The mythology of all three countries, therefore, is a mixture of hero-worship and distorted history — national and individual — each of them mixed with the worship of intangible natural forces. Conse- quently the mythological beliefs of the three countries are as heterogeneous as their populations. The vast majority of the inhabitants of Annam, not less than of Burma and Siam, are 258 INDO-CHINESE MYTHOLOGY nominally Buddhist; but there are deities of Brahmanic origin, alongside of demons with human passions and prejudices, and abundance of obvious nature-myths. As a matter of fact, Indo-China seems to have been the com- mon refuge for fugitive tribes from both India and China. The expansion of the Chinese Empire (which for centuries did not exist south of the Yang-tse-kiang), and the inroads of Scythian tribes on the confines of the Indian empires of Chan- dragupta and Asoka, whose reigns ended in 297 and 232 (or 231) B. c. respectively, combined to drive out the aborigines, both to the north-east and to the north-west; and these met and struggled with one another, not for supremacy, but for mere existence, in the lands which we call Indo-China. It is only some such theory which will account for the extraordi- nary variety and marked dissimilarity of races to be found in the sheltered valleys or in the high ranges of the Shan States, the Lao country, and Tongking and Annam. There is a general similarity of myths and traditions among all the races and tribes of Eastern Asia. In some of them this resemblance exists as it has been handed down for many generations; in others it is to be inferred only from practices and superstitions which remain In essence despite profound outward changes. It is not possible to say which tribe or people can claim to be the originator, and which merely the taught. There Is a common deposit, and all the beliefs, rites, and cus- toms may have found their way from north to south, or from east to west; or they may have been universal and simulta- neous; and the modifications may be due only to the individual character and habits of each separate tribe. It is not possible to say that there is any noticeable uniformity in customs even among the same clan or settlement, to say nothing of the family or sub-family. All of them believe in witchcraft, and there are striking resem.blances and differences. The resemblances may be due to a sort of logical process following on common Ideas, or the similar practices may be due to the Kachins borrowing PEOPLES AND RELIGIONS OF INDO-CHINA 259 from the Burmese, or perhaps from the Shans, or the Do mimicking the practices of the Tongkingese, or vice versa. All of them, English-speaking Burmans or French-speaking Anna- mese, have, deep-seated in their being, a primitive belief in spirits, demons, Nats, Hpis, Dewas, or whatever they may be called. The great ethnic religions of Asia have never been able to eradicate the firm belief among the mass of the people that ghosts, spirits, demons, angels, or devils are able to interfere in the affairs of man. Perhaps ninety per cent of the population of the three Indo- Chinese countries are, and believe themselves to be, Buddhist; but their Buddhism is not the abstruse philosophy which Gotama taught, any more than it is the practical popular religion set forth in the edicts of Asoka in the third century before Christ. The Buddha did not teach the existence of any supreme being; he made no attempt to solve the mystery of the beginning of human existence; and he had very little to say of the end, or of Nirvana. King Asoka was not concerned to do more than to give a simple version of a pure religion, urg- ing mankind to the performance of good deeds and promising a reward, which the least educated could understand, in the happy, semi-human existence of the Lower Heavens round about Mount Meru (supposed to form the centre of the inhabited world), the mythical height which the Burmese call Myimmo Taung, and the Siamese Phra Men. Superstition and love of the marvellous are, however, inborn in mankind. Legends and myths seem to be necessary to the masses, and the consequence has been the practical deification of the Buddha Gotama and of some imagined predecessors, the acknowledgement of a celes- tial hierarchy, and the introduction of complicated ceremonies and of a ritual of which the Teacher of the Law or his devout interpreters never dreamed. Buddhism was in the beginning a reformed Brahmanism, induced by the arrogance of the priesthood and the system of caste. In India, the astute Brah- mans enticed dissenters back by representing Gotama to be
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https://archive.org/details/mythologyofallra06gray/page/n19PLATE I DURGA The wife of Siva, in her dread aspect, slays the Asura Mahisa. Standing in an attitude of triumph on the demon, who, as his name implies, is in the shape of a buffalo, she drags his soul (symbolized in human form) from him. From a Javanese lava sculpture, probably from Prambanan, in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. See p. ii8. THE MYTHOLOGY OF ALL RACES IN THIRTEEN VOLUMES LOUIS HERBERT GRAY, A.M., PH.D., Editor GEORGE FOOT MOORE, A.M., D.D., LL.D., Consulting Editor INDIAN BY A. BERRIEDALE KEITH D.C.L., D.LiTT. BY ALBERT J. CARNOY Ph.D., Litt.D. VOLUME VI BOSTON MARSHALL JONES COMPANY M DCCCC XVII THE ^-iW VOIJ.K Asros, LfiNoS: A>n) Copyright, 1917 By Marshall Jones Company Entered at Stationers' Hall, London All rights reserved Printed in January, 1917 PRIKTED IN TEIE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY THE UNIVERSITY PRESS CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS BOUND BY THE BOSTON BOOKBINDING COMPANY CONTENTS INDIAN Author's Preface 5 Transcription and Pronunciation 9 Introduction . 11 Chapter I. The Rgveda — Gods of Sky and Air .... 15 II. The Rgveda — Gods of Earth, Demons, and Dead 41 III. The Mythology of the Brahmanas .... 73 IV. The Great Gods of the Epic 103 V. Minor Epic Deities and the Dead .... 131 VI. The Mythology of the Puranas 162 VII. Buddhist Mythology in India and Tibet ... 187 VIII. The Mythology of the Jains 220 IX, The Mythology of Modern Hinduism . . . 230 IRANIAN Author's Preface 253 Transcription and Pronunciation 257 Introduction •. 259 Chapter I. Wars of Gods and Demons 263 II. Myths of Creation 275 III. The Primeval Heroes 293 IV. Legends of Yima 304 V. Traditions OF THE Kings AND Zoroaster . . . 320 • VI. The Life to Come 344 VII. Conclusion 348 Notes, Indian ^SS Notes, Iranian 360 Bibliography, Indian 371 Bibliography, Iranian 395 V ILLUSTRATIONS FULL PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS PLATE FACING PAGE I Durga — Photogravure Frontispiece II Idol Car 22 III Surya . 26 IV Indra — Coloured 34 V Apsarases — Coloured 60 VI Brahma — Coloured 78 VII Kala-Siva 82 VIII A. Tortures of Hell 100 B. Tortures of Hell 100 IX Trimurti 108 X Marriage of Siva and Parvati 118 XI Birth of Brahma — Coloured 120 XII Varahavatara 122 XIII Laksmi — Coloured 124 XIV Krsna 126 XV Hanuman 128 XVI Garuda 140 XVII Vasuki 154 XVIII Yaksi 156 XIX Kubera 158 XX Visnu Slays the Demons — Coloured 164 XXI Laksmi 170 XXII Ganesa 182 XXIII The Great Buddha — Coloured 188 XXIV The Buddha and Sujata — Coloured 190 XXV The Buddha on the Lotus 192 XXVI Temptation of the Buddha — Coloured 196 viii ILLUSTRATIONS PLATE FACING PAGE XXVII Avalokitesvara 202 XXVIII Tirthakara 220 XXIX DilwSra Temple •. 226 XXX Shrine of Bhiimiya 234 XXXI Bhairon 238 XXXII Iranian Deities on Indo-Scythian Coins 260 1. Mithra 2. Apam Napat 3. Mah 4. Vata or Vayu 5. Khvarenanh 6. Atar 7. Vanainti (Uparatat) 8. Verethraghna XXXIII I. Typical Representation of Mithra 264 2. Scenes from the Life of Alithra XXXIV Iranian Deities on Indo-Scythian and Sassanian |, Coins 272 ^ I. Tishtrya 2. Khshathra Vairya "" ., 3. Ardokhsho '^ 4. Asha Vahishta 5. Ahura Mazda 6. Fire Altar 7. Fire Altar 8. Fravashi XXXV Ancient Fire Temple near Isfahan 284 XXXVI I. Mithra Born from the Rock 288 2. Alithra Born from the Rock XXXVII The Simurgh — Coloured 290 XXXVIII Tahmurath Combats the Demons — Coloured . . 302 XXXIX I. Dahhak (Azhi Dahaka) — Coloured 310 2. Jamshid on His Throne — Coloured XL Rustam and the White Demon — Coloured ... 328 XLI The Death of Suhrab — Coloured 332 XLII Kai Kaus Attempts to Fly to Heaven — Coloured 336 ILLUSTR.\TIOXS PLATE XLIII Gushtasp Kills a Dragon — Coloured . . . XLIV Sculpture Supposed to Represent Zoroaster IX FACING PAGE 340 342 ILLUSTRATIONS IX THE TEXT FIGURE PAGE 1 Agni 42 2 The Churning of the Ocean 104 3 The Propitiation of Uma, or Devi 117 4 The Narasirhha ("Man-Lion") Avatar of Visnu .... 123 5 The Matsya ("Fish") Avatar of Visnu 167 INDIAN MYTHOLOGY BY A. BERRIEDALE KEITH, D.C.L., D.Lirr. REGIUS PROFESSOR OF SANSCRIT AND COMPARATIVE PHILOLOGY EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY TO THE MEMORY OF Field Marshal The Right Honourable EARL KITCHENER OF KHARTOUM K.G., K.P., O.M., G.C.B., G.C.S.I., G.C.M.G., G.C.I.E., LL.D. LORD RECTOR OF THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH (19I4-I916) AUTHOR'S PREFACE THE mythology of India claims unique interest by virtue of its unparalleled length of life. It is true that not even the discoveries at Boghaz Kyoi render it prudent for us to place the Rgveda at an earlier period than 1500 B.C., and in part at least that collection may come from three centuries later, so that as contrasted with the dates of Egyptian and Babylonian records the earliest monument of Aryan mythology is comparatively recent. In mass of content and in value for mythology, however, these cannot compare with the Rgveda. Of still more importance is the fact that from the period of the J^gveda to the present day, a space of some thirty-five hundred years, we have a mythology which is in constant but organic development. The high mythic systems of Teuton, Celt, and Slav, of Greek and Roman, have perished before the onslaught of a loftier faith and survive in little else than folk-lore. In India, on the contrary, though foreign invasion has often swept over the north-west of the land, though Islam has annexed souls as well as territories, though Christianity (especially in the south) has contributed elements to the faith of the people, still it remains true that the religion and the mythology of the land are genuinely their own and for this reason have in them- selves the constant potency of fresh growth. Moreover, amidst the ceaseless change which is the heritage of human things, there is relative stability in the simpler thoughts of the human mind, and as in many parts of India the peasant still labours with the implements and in the mode of his ancestors in periods far remote, so his mind frames the same hypotheses to account for those phenomena of nature which in India more than else- where determine irrevocably his weal or his woe. 6 AUTHOR'S PREFACE The rich variety of the mythology, despite its attraction for the student of the history of myths, renders the task of concise exposition one of pecuUar difficulty. For the mythology of the present day available material is enormous: each part of the vast area of India has its own abundant store of myth and tradition, and to give detail for this period would be impossible. The same consideration applies with but slightly lessened force for the earlier epochs: the Veda, the epics, the Purdnas, the literature of the Buddhists and of the Jains, each present data in lavish abundance. It has been necessary, therefore, to cir- cumscribe narrowly the scope of the subject by restricting the treatment to that mythology which stands in close connexion with religion and which conveys to us a conception of the manner in which the Indian pictured to himself the origin of the world and of life, the destiny of the universe and of the souls of man, the gods and the evil spirits who supported or menaced his existence. Gods and demons were very present to the mind of the Indian then as they are today, and they are inextricably involved in innumerable stories of folk-lore, of fairy tale, and of speculation as to the origin of institutions and customs. The task of selecting such myths as will best illustrate the nature of the powers of good and evil is one in which we cannot hope for complete success; and the problem is rendered still more hard by the essential vagueness of many of the figures of Indian mythology: the mysticism of Indian concep- tion tends ever to a pantheism alien to the clear-cut creations of the Hellenic imagination. The difficult task of selecting suitable illustrations has been shared with the editor of this series. Dr. Louis H, Gray, of whose valuable assistance in this and other matters I desire to express my most sincere appreciation; and my friend Pro- fessor Charles R. Lanman, of Harvard University, has gener- ously lent us valuable volumes from his private library. Dr. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, with his wonted generosity and devotion to the cause of promoting the knowledge of Indian AUTHOR'S PREFACE 7 art, not merely accorded permission for the reproduction of illustrations from his Rajput Paintings (published by the Oxford University Press), but placed at my disposal the resources of his admirable Visvakarma^ a kindness for which I am deeply grateful. To the India Society and the Oxford University Press I am indebted for permission to reproduce illustrations from Lady Herringham's splendid copies of the Ajanta frescoes, published by the Press for the Society, Messrs. W. Griggs and Sons, of Hanover Street, Peckham, London, S. E., have been good enough to permit the reproduction of certain illustrations from their Journal of Indian Art; and I owe to the generosity of the India Office the photographs which Messrs. Griggs and Sons have made for me from negatives In the collection of that Department. Lieut.-Col. A. H. Milne, of Cults, Aber- deenshire, Scotland, kindly permitted the photographing of one of the pieces of his rich collection; the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Peabody Museum in Salem, Mass., have been no less generous than he; and Mrs. Louis H. Gray placed her expert knowledge at our service In seeing the vol- ume through the press. To my wife I owe thanks for help and criticism. A. BERRIEDALE KEITH. University of Edinburgh, 22 September, 19 16. TRANSCRIPTION AND PRONUNCIATION THE system of transcription followed is that used by the Royal Asiatic Society and accords closely with the one adopted in the Grundriss der indo-arischen Philologie und Altertumskuiide. The pronunciation is much as in English, but c is pronounced as ch, and g is always hard; the characters repre- sented by kh, gh, ch, jh, th, dh, th, dh, ph, bh have the h sounded half-separately, somewhat as in pot-hook, madhouse, hap- hazard, etc. Of the letters distinguished by diacritical marks t, th, d, dh, and n are pronounced very much like the ordinary dentals; s is sounded as sh, and i as sh or s; the s is always hard, never soft like z. The letter r denotes the vowel sound of r and is pronounced approximately like ri; and similarly / is almost like li. The letters n and n denote a nasal assimilated to the following sound, guttural and palatal respectively, and m indicates a nasal sound which corresponds very roughly to ng. The "visarga," h, was probably pronounced like the Scottish or German ch. The vowels e (pronounced like a in fate) and o, which represent an original ai and au, are always long. The vowel a is pronounced somewhat in the manner of the u in English hut; other vowels have the same value as in Italian. INTRODUCTION THE earliest record of Indian mythology is contained in the ^gveda, or "Hymn Veda," a series of ten books of hymns celebrating the chief Vedic gods. The exact motives of the collection are uncertain, but it is clear that in large measure the hymns represent those used in the Soma sacrifice, which formed a most important part of the worship of the gods in the ritual of the subsequent period. It is now recognized that the religion and mythology contained in this collection are not primitive in character and that they represent the result of a long period of development of sacred poetry. Thus it is that the gods who form the subject of this poetry often appear ob- scure in character, though in the great majority of cases it is clear that the myths related of them refer to physical happen- ings. The date of the Rgveda is much disputed and admits of no definite determination; it may be doubted whether the old- est poetry contained in it is much earlier than 1200 B.C., but it is not probable that it was composed later than 800 B.C., even in its most recent portions. Both in its mythology and in its composition the Rgveda is clearly older than the other three Vedas, the Sdmaveda, the Yajurveda, and the Atharvaveda — the "Chant Veda," the "Formula Veda," and the "Veda of the Atharvan Priests" — and, in point of date, these three stand much on a level with the Brdhmanas, or explanatory prose texts which are attached to or form part of them. In them are to be found many specu- lations of a more advanced kind than those of the Rgveda^ yet at the same time the Atharvaveda contains a mass of popular religion which has been taken up and worked over by the same priestly classes to whose activity the other texts are due. It 12 INTRODUCTION must, therefore, be recognized that the Rgveda gives only an Imperfect Impression of Indian mythology and that. In a sense, It is the work of an aristocracy; but at the same time it is im- possible to regard the Atharvaveda as a direct complement of the Rgveda and as giving the popular side of the Rgvedic reli- gion. The Atharvaveda was probably not reduced to Its present form much, If at all, earlier than 500 B.C., and the popular worship included in it is one which Is at once separated by a considerable period In time from that of the Rgveda and is pre- sented to us, not In Its primitive form, but as It was taken up by the priests. The other Vedas and the Brdhmanas may be referred roughly to a period which runs from 800 to 600 B.C. To the Brdhmanas are attached, more or less closely, treatises called Aranyakas ("Silvan"), which were to be studied by oral tradition in the solitude of the forests, and Upanisads, treatises of definitely philosophical content, whose name is de- rived from the "session" of the pupils around their teacher. The oldest of these works probably date from before 500 B.C. On the other hand, the Sutras, or rules regarding the sacrifice both In Its more elaborate and In Its more domestic forms, and regulations concerning custom and law give Incidental infor- mation as to the more popular side of religion. The Sutras, at any rate, and possibly even the Brdhmanas, in their later portions, are contemporaneous with the begin- nings of the two great epics of India, the Mahdbhdrata and the Rdmdyana. The first composition of these works as real epics, made up from ballads and other material, may be assigned to the fourth century b.c, and It Is probable that the Rdmdyana was practically complete before the Christian era. In the case of the Mahdbhdrata, however, there is no doubt that the orig- inal heroic epic has been overwhelmed by a vast mass of relig- ious, philosophical, and didactic matter, and that it was not practically complete before the sixth century a.d., though most of it probably may be dated In the period from 200 B.C. to 200 A.D. These works reveal, to an extent which cannot be INTRODUCTION 13 paralleled in the texts of the preceding periods, the religion of the warrior class and of the people generally. It cannot be as- sumed that the religion thus described is a later development, in point of time, than the Vedic religion, so far as the chief features of this religion are concerned; but much of the myth- ology is clearly a working over of the tales reported in the period of the Brdhmanas, of which, in so far, the epic period is a legitimate successor. The epic period is followed by that of the Purdnas, which show undoubted signs of the development of the religion and mythology of the epics. No doubt the material in these texts is often old, and here and there narratives are preserved in a form anterior to that now seen in the Mahdbhdrata. Yet, on the whole, it is probable that no Purdna antedates 600 a.d., and there is little doubt that portions of some of them are much later, falling within the last few centuries. Nor, indeed, is there any definite check to the continuance of this literature: at least two of the Purdnas have no definite texts, and any author, without fear of positive contradiction, is at liberty to compose a poem in honour of a place of worship or of pilgrimage, and to call it a portion of either of these Purdnas. This is the literature which, to the present day, contains the authorita- tive sacred texts of Hindu myth and worship. Yet it is essen- tially priestly and learned, and the popular religion which it embodies has been elaborated and confused, so that it is neces- sary, for a clear view of modern Hindu mythology, to supple- ment the account of the Purdnas with records taken from the actual observation of the practices of modern India. Besides the main stream of Hindu mythology there are im- portant currents in the traditions of the Buddhists and the Jains. Buddhism has left but faint traces of its former glories in India itself; undoubtedly from about 500 B.C. to 700 a.d. it must be ranked among the greatest of Indian religions, and in the school of the Mahayana, or "Great Vehicle," it de- veloped an elaborate mythology which displays marked orig- 14 INTRODUCTION inal features. In comparison with Buddhism Jainism has added little to the mythology of India, but in its own way it has de- veloped many themes of Indian mythology, with the main doctrines of which it remains in much closer contact than does Buddhism. The subject, therefore, divides itself, in accordance with the literary sources upon which any treatment must be based, into seven divisions: I. The Period of the Ilgveda (Chapters I and II) ; II. The Period of the Brdhmanas (Chapter III) ; III. The Period of the Epics (Chapters IV and V); IV. The Period of the Purdnas (Chapter VI) ; V. The Mythology of Buddhism (Chapter VII) ; VI. The Mythology of Jainism (Chapter VIII); VII. The Mythology of Modern India (Chapter IX).
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1916 Semitic Mythology pag.39: The Hebrew tradition connected their ancestral home with SYRIA, (so NOT PALESTINE !) also page 72 Habiru OR saishu Dilmun Saudi Arabia? and especially with the “land of the rivers,” the region of Harran and Paddan on the river Balih. https://archive.org/details/mythologyofallra51gray/page/n5https://archive.org/details/ShlomoSandTheInventionOfTheJewishPeople2009https://archive.org/details/ShlomoSandTheInventionOfTheLandOfIsrail_201801/page/n23https://archive.org/details/SandHowIStoppedBeingAJewTHE MYTHOLOGY OF ALL RACES Volume V SEMITIC SEMITIC BY STEPHEN HERBERT LANGDON, M.A. JESUS COLLEGE, OXFORD FELLOW OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY MARY W. SHILLITO READER IN AND PROFESSOR OF ASSYRIOLOGY VOLUME V ARCHAEOLOGICAL INSTITUTE OF AMERICA MARSHALL JONES COMPANY • BOSTON M DCCCC XXXI l\ A Copyright, 1931 By Marshall Jones Company, Incorporated Copyrighted in Great Britain All rights reserved including the right to re- produce this hook or parts thereof in any form Printed July, 1931 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY THE PLIMPTON PRESS • NORWOOD • MASSACHUSETTS TO THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS AND FACULTY OF THE UNION THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK BY A FORMER SCHOLAR OF THE SEMINARY -f ^ OQO -L O G O Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2016 https://archive.org/details/mythologyofallra51gray CONTENTS PAGE Introduction xv Chapter I. Geographical and Linguistic Distribution OF Semitic Races, and Deities i II. The Sumero-Accadian Pantheon .... 88 III. The Legend of Etana and the Plant of Birth i66 IV. The Myth of Adapa and Adam 175 V. The Sumerian Legends of Tagtug and Paradise 190 VI. Legends of the Deluge 203 VII. The Epic of Gilgamish 234 VIII. Legends of the Destruction of Men, or THE Poem of Ea and Atarhasis 270 IX. The Babylonian Epic of Creation and Simi- lar Semitic Myths 277 X. The Descent of Ishtar to Arallu .... 326 XI. Tammuz and Ishtar 336 XII. The Devils, Demons, Good and Evil Spirits 352 Notes 375 Bibliography 419 Index 433 ILLUSTRATIONS FIGURES AND PLATES PAGE 1 Sabaean Altar 3 A. Grohmann, Gottersymbole, Abb. 88. 2 Lapis-lazuli Seal 4 Delaporte , i, PI. 35, No. 7.
3 Copper Coin with Crescent and Disk 4
From cast supplied by the British Museum. See p. 377, n. 9.
4 Copper Coin Shewing Sacred Baetyl 16
G. F. Hill , PL iv. 2.
5 Basalt Statue of Busares 17
Syria, V. PI. xx. No. 2.
6 Tyche of Antioch 18
Journal of Hellenic studies, ix, after P. Gardner.
7 Tyche of Damascus 19
Journal Asiatique, 1904, PI. i, No. 2.
8 Head of Tyche 1 9
G. F. Hill ,Pl. vi. 10.
9 The Assyrian Tyche 23
Sidney Smith, History of Assyria, p. 233.
10 Venus as Goddess of War 24
Langdon [h], PI. i, No. 1.
11 Ishtar’s War Chariot 27
Langdon [d], PI. vii, No. 2.
12 Enkidu and the Bull of Heaven 29
A. Boissier, Note sur deux cylindres orientaux, p. 9.
13 Egyptian Bas-relief, Shewing ‘Anat facing 30
H. Gressmann, Texte und Bilder^ PI. cxiv, opp. p. 30.
14 Hesi-Nekht Astart of Beth-shan facing 32
From photograph supplied by the University Museum, Philadel-
phia, opp. p. 31.
15 Terra-cotta Shrine of Beth-shan 31
Museum Journal, Vol. xvii, p. 295.
16 Ishtar Parakyptousa 32
D. G. Hogarth, Efhesus, PI. 28, No. 5.
17 Terra-cotta Movable Altar 33
W. Andrae, Die Archaischen Ischtar-Temfel, Taf. 17.
ILLUSTRATIONS
X
FIGURES AND PLATES PAGE
1 8 Nude Ishtar 34
R. Koldewey, Das wiedererstehende Babylon, p. 271.
19 Azizos and Monimos 35
Revue Archeologique, 1903, Part ii, p. 130.
After R. Dusseaud.
20 ‘Ate of Hierapolis 36
E. Babelon, Les Rots Perses, p. lii, Fig. 15.
21 Atargatis 36
H. Strong and J. Garstang, The Syrian Goddess, p. 70.
22 Western Type of Adad-Rimmon 39
Revue d^Assyriologie, xiii, p. 16, PI. ii, No. 16, after V. Scheil.
23 Yaw, Coin of Gaza 43
G. F. Hill, Coins of Palestine, PI. xix, 29.
24 Astart-Yaw 44
E. Babelon, Les Rois Perses, PI. viii. No. 7.
25 Stele of Mikal of Beisan jacing 44
Museum Journal, xix, p. 150. See pp. 46-8.
26 Bas-relief from Moab 46
H. Gressmann, Texte und Bilder^ Abb. 617.
27 Phoenician Deity, from Amrith 47
Ibid. Abb. 307.
28 SealofAddumu 48
Catalogue De Clercq, Vol. i. No. 386.
29 Seal of Rameses II 49
Museum Journal, xx, p. 55.
30 Coin of Tyre, Melkart on Sea-horse 51
E. Babelon, Les Rois Perses, PI. xxxv. No. 13.
31 Colonial Coin of Tyre with Sun Pillars 51
Ibid, xxxvii. No. 16.
32 Coin of Tyre 53
Ibid, xxxv. No. 20.
33 Sun-symbol of Tyre in Chariot 54
Ibid, xxxii, No. 15.
34 Tessara from Palmyra 57
Comptes Rendus de PAcademie frangaise, 1903, p. 277.
35 Bas-relief; Semia, Solar Deity, Adad 59
Revue Archeologique, 1904, Part ii, p. 249.
36 Sumerian Roll Seal 60
Otto Weber, Siegelbilder, No. 375.
37 Palmyrene Altar 62
Memoir es de PInstitut frangais, xx, PI. i. No. i.
After Layard.
ILLUSTRATIONS
XI
FIGURES AND PLATES PAGE
38 El with Wings. Astarte 68
E. Babelon, Les Rots Perses, PI. xxvii, No. 4.
39 Seal Shewing Two-headed Marduk 69
Babyloniaca, ix, p. 78, No. 128, after Contenau.
40 Stele of Yehaw-Melek 70
H. Gressmann, Texts uni Bilder^ Abb. 516.
41 Coin of Elagabalus. Eshmun the Healer 77
G. F. Hill, Coins of Phoenicia, PI. x, No. 14.
42 Statue of Dagan 8 1
Archiv fur Keilschriftforschung, iii, p. iii, after Nassoubi.
43 Coin Shewing Dagon 83
G. F. Hill, Coins of Phoenicia, PI. xlv. No. i.
44 Babylonian Bronze Plaque 85
Bronze Plaque in Collection de Clercq, after Catalogue De Clercq
ii, PI. xxxiv.
45 Assyrian Cone Seal with Fish-men 86
W. H. Ward, Seal Cylinders of Western Asia, No. 659.
46 Pictograph for Earth-goddess 90
Design by the author.
47 Grain-goddess 90
Catalogue De Clercq, No. 140.
48 God with Overflowing Waters 95
Revue d' Assyriologie, v, p. 131.
49 Winged Angel with Water of Life 96
Museum Journal, xviii, p. 75.
50 Gilgamish with Jar of Overflowing Water 98
Catalogue De Clercq, No. 46.
51 Boundary Stone of Melishipak facing 106
Delegation en Perse, i, PL xvi, opp. p. 105.
52 Top of a Water Jar IIO
Langdon, S. [d], PI. xiii. No. 2.
53 Mother and Child Ill
From photograph by the Oxford-Field Museum Expedition.
54 Ningirsu 116
Delaporte L. , p. 13, T. no.
55 Marduk in Chariot 118
W. H. Ward, Seal Cylinders of Western Asia, No. 127.
56 Musrussu 127
R. Koldewey, Das wiedererstehenie Babylon, Fig. 31.
ILLUSTRATIONS
xii
FIGURES AND PLATES PAGE
57 Ninurta Pursuing Musrussu 131
W. H. Ward, Seal Cylinders of Western Asia, No. 579.
58 Seal from Kish 133
From photograph by the Oxford-Field Museum Expedition.
59 Terra-cotta Bas-relief from Kish 137
From photograph by the Oxford-Field Museum Expedition.
60 Sun-god and Hammurabi 149
Delegation en Perse, iv, PI. iii.
61 Four-pointed Star 150
Babyloniaca, ii, p. 144.
62 Model of Statue of Shamash 151
H. C. Rawlinson, Inscriptions of Western Asia, v, PI. 57.
63 Coin of Caracalla Shewing Moon-god 154
Hill, G. F. , PI. xii. No. 8.
64 Assyrian Seal. Marduk and Nabu 159
Delaporte, L. [c], PI. 88, A 686.
65 Combat of Eagle and Serpent 1 70
Museum Journal, xix, p. 392, No. 28.
66 Etana on Eagle 172
O. Weber, Siegelbilder, No. 404.
67 Ilabrat or Papsukkal 176
From photograph by the Oxford-Field Museum Expedition.
68 Serpent and Tree of Life (?) 177
Delegation en Perse, xii. Fig. 288, after Toscane. See p. 179.
69 Woman and Serpent 178
Ibid., Fig. 299, after Toscane, see p. 179.
70 The Temptation According to Sumerian Myth 179
W. H. Ward, Seal Cylinders of Western Asia, No. 388.
71 Deity Offering Poppy Branch to a Worshipper 186
L. W. King, History of Sumer and Accad, p. 246.
72 Goddess Offering Palm Branch to Three Gods .... 187
Delaporte, L. [a]. No. 81.
73 Mother-goddess, Worshipper, and Tammuz 188
Ibid., No. III.
74 Flood Stratum at Kish facing 216
From photograph by the Oxford-Field Museum Expedition, opp.
p. 204.
75 Babylonian Map of the World 217
From CT. xxii, PL 48, after R. C. Thompson. Restored conjec-
turally, with omission of cuneiform text.
76 Enkidu in Combat with Two Lions 237
Revue d'Assyriologie, vi, p. 156, PI. i. No. 4.
ILLUSTRATIONS xlii
FIGURES AND PLATES PAGE
77 Gilgamish and Enkidu 238
From photograph by the Oxford-Field Museum Expedition.
78 Gilgamish, Enkidu, and Ishtar 245
Louis Speelers, Catalogue des Intailles et Emfreintes Orientates des
Musees Royaux du Cinquantenaire, p. 166.
79 Terra-cotta Mask of Humbaba 254
Revue d’Assyriologie, xxii, p. 23.
80 Terra-cotta Bas-relief of Humbaba 255
Ibid., p. 25.
81 Combat of Marduk and a Dragon 278
Otto Weber, Siegelbilder, No. 3 1 1 .
82 Combat of Marduk and Zu 279
W. H. Ward, Seal Cylinders of Western Asia, No. 580.
83 Combat of Marduk and Scorpion-man 280
Delaporte, L. [c], No. 652.
84 Combat of Marduk and the Eagle-headed Lion 281
W. H. Ward, Seal Cylinders of Western Asia, No. 585.
85 Marduk in Combat with Winged Lion 282
From photograph by the Oxford-Field Museum Expedition.
86 Combat of Marduk and a Dragon (Ostrich) 283
Delaporte, L. [a]. No. 330.
87 Man in Combat with Sphinx 284
Ibid., No. 325.
88 The Dragon Musrussu 285
Revue d’Assyriologie, vi, p. 96.
89 The Constellations Leo and Hydra as Musrussu .... 286
Archiv fiir Keilschriftforschung, iv, PI. v.
90 Marduk and Musrussu . 301
F. Weissbach, Babylonische Miscellen, p. 16.
91 Constellations Corvus, Hydra, and Virgo 305
Revue d’Assyriologie, xvi, p. 135.
92 The Pleiades. Moon in Taurus 305
Archiv fiir Keilschriftforschung, iv, PI. v.
93 The Tower of Babel 309
Journal of the Society of Oriental Research, xiv, p. 2.
94 Bas-relief of Ishtar 331
From photograph by the Oxford-Field Museum Expedition.
95 The Arabian Ghoul 353
C. M. Doughty, W anderings in Arabia, i, p. 54.
96 Assyrian Winged 359
L. W. King, Guide to the Babylonian and Assyrian Antiquities^
p. 10, PI. iv.
XIV
ILLUSTRATIONS
FIGURES AND PLATES PAGE
97 The Sumerian Lamassu 360
H. R. Hall, Assyrian Sculptures, PI. Ixviii, BM. 90954.
98 Lamashtu Sent on Her Journey jacing 368
Photograph from Beiblatt zuni Jahrbuch des Konigl-Preusz.
Kunstsatnlung. See p. 417, note 39, opposite p. 367.
99 Babylonian Amulet. Expulsion of Lamashtu 368
F. Weissbach, Babylonische Miscellen, p. 42.
100 Babylonian Amulet. Seven Devils and Lamashtu .... 370
Revue d'Assyriologie, xviii, PI. i, No. 2, after F. Thureau-Dangin.
1 01 Pazuzu, Demon of the Winds 371
Museum Journal, viii (1917), p. 43.
102 Head of Pazuzu
Revue d’Assyriologie, xi, p. 57.
372
INTRODUCTION
T he subject of this book offered such great difficulties in
the vastness of its material, in its contents, time, and geo-
graphical extent, in its significance as the presentation of the
mythology and religion of those cognate races, on whose soil
arose three great religions of the world, Judaism, Christianity,
and Mohammedanism, that the author has been embarrassed
by the difficulty of selecting what is strictly essential. Since the
notable effort of W. Robertson Smith to compass in a single
volume the religion of the Semitic races in his Religion of the
Semites (1889, 1894, 1901), in which the most important of
all Semitic races, the Accadian, was almost entirely neglected,
and the equally valuable survey by M. P. Lagrange, l^tudes sur
les religions semitiques (1903, 1905), the material, especially
in Cuneiform, South Arabian, and Phoenician, has increased to
such extent that the whole subject appears in a new light. This
book has been written almost entirely from the sources in the
original languages, Sumerian, Accadian, Hebrew, Phoenician,
Aramaic, Himyaritic (South Arabic), and Arabic. In the case
of the sources in the last two mentioned languages I have had
from time to time the invaluable assistance of my colleague.
Dr. D. S. Margoliouth, Laudian Professor of Arabic. On all
important points the specialists are requested to refer to the
notes j more especially have I felt bound to state in these the
philological reasons for arguments and translations based upon
Sumerian and Accadian texts. Here the new material is so im-
portant, and in some cases utilized for the first time, that the
notes are necessarily numerous.
In the translation of Sumerian and Accadian texts a few pe-
culiarities must be made clear to the general reader. Words in
XVI
INTRODUCTION
italics indicate that the meaning of the corresponding words of
the texts has not been fully established. It may appear incon-
sistent to find both “ land” and “ Land” in the translations;
“ Land ” is employed only when the Sumerian kalam-ma, Ac-
cadian matu, refer to the “ home-land,” that is, Sumer, Accad,
Babylonia, Assyria. In this book “ Accadian ” means the
Semitic languages of Babylonia and Assyria, which are funda-
mentally identical. Sumerian is not a Semitic language, but no
discussion of Semitic religion is possible without the Sumerian
sources. This language belongs to the agglutinating group, and
was spoken by the earliest inhabitants of Mesopotamia. They
founded the great cities of that land, Opis, Sippar, Kish, Nip-
pur, Erech, Ellasar, Shuruppak, Ur, Eridu, Lagash, etc., long
before 4000 b.c., and formulated the religious system which
the Accadians adopted. The date of the entry of the Semites
into Mesopotamia is uncertain, and it is even debatable whether
they are not as ancient in that land as the Sumerians themselves.
The entire evidence of the very early inscriptions proves that
the Sumerians not only invented the pictographic script, which
they developed into the more easily written cuneiform script,
but that they already had a very considerable literature, and a
great pantheon, when the Semites learned to write, and adopted
their religion and culture. The new material, now rapidly in-
creasing for the study of the most remote period of writing, tends
to confirm this view of the origin of Babylonian and Assyrian
mythology and religion. In taking a general survey of the
whole field of Semitic religion, over the wide territory of
Western Asia, and through the four thousand years and more
in which it ran its course, it is clear that it can be classified into
two large groups. The religion and mythology of all those
Semitic peoples, which, by accident of geographical contiguity
and cultural influence, came into contact with the advanced and
affluent civilization of Sumer and Accad, Babylonia and As-
syria, became heavy borrowers from that source. Sumero-
Babylonian cults established themselves in the very midst of
INTRODUCTION
xvii
the old Canaanitish, Aramaean, Phoenician, Moabite, and
Nabataean cults. The mythological conceptions of their own
deities were assimilated to or transformed by the doctrines
taught in the great temples of Sumer and Accad. Their
legends and myths are almost entirely of Sumero-Babylonian
origin. The cult of Tammuz, the lord of weeping and the
resurrection, appears firmily established at Gebal on the shores
of the Mediterranean at an early period. On the other hand
there is only the religion of Arabia, which remained entirely
outside the mission of the higher culture and theology of Sumer
and Accad.
There are, then, only two great currents of mythology and
religion in the Semitic lands — the Sumero-Babylonian of the
east and north, and the Arabian of the south. In the great cur-
rent of the northern stream are mingled many pure Semitic
sources in the west. Some of their cults, notably that of Adad,
actually influenced the mythology of Sumer and Accad. Of
these two systems of mythology, the Sumero-Babylonian is
Infinitely more profound and elaborate. Here alone great
mythological poems and epics were written, which attempted
to grapple with the problems of life, the origin of the universe,
the relation of the gods to men, the salvation of their souls.
In exposing the fundamental facts of the mythologies of the
western group, the history of Hebrew religion is a unique ele-
ment in the vast Semitic field. Although from the beginning
and during its entire evolution the religion of this small
Canaanitish people was constantly influenced by Babylonian
mythology, they alone of all the western peoples seem to have
understood the Import of the profound problems conveyed in
the guise of the legendary poems and epic verse of Babylonia
and Assyria. Converted into their own magnificent Hebrew
prose and poetry and in terms of their conception of deity,
Sumero-Babylonian theology and mythology found there their
greatest interpreter and means of transmission to the religions
which became the heirs of the ancient Semitic world. And it
INTRODUCTION
xviii
must be obvious to all unprejudiced minds, who have a clear
view of the whole sphere of Semitic religions, that Hebrew reli-
gion stands entirely apart and reached a higher plane at the
hands of “ Jehovah’s ” prophets. The author was bound to con-
fine himself strictly to mythology in this volume. In the pro-
phetic works of the Hebrew sources much mythology survives,
and use of it may lead to the inference that their place in the
history of religions does not differ essentially from the great
poets and teachers of Babylonia. This is clearly untrue. The
evolution of Hebrew religion is unique in the history of the
Semites.
Some of the views and arguments in this book undoubtedly
invite criticism. The quo warranto for all statements has been
defined in the notes and elucidated in the text. After long
study of the Semitic and Sumerian sources I have become con-
vinced that totemism and demonology have nothing to do with
the origins of Sumerian or Semitic religions. The former can-
not be proved at all} the latter is a secondary aspect of them.
I may fail to carry conviction in concluding that, both in Su-
merian and Semitic religions, monotheism preceded polytheism
and belief in good and evil spirits. The evidence and reasons
for this conclusion, so contrary to accepted and current views,
have been set down with care and with the perception of ad-
verse criticism. It is, I trust, the conclusion of knowledge and
not of audacious preconception.
To the editor of this series. Canon John A. MacCulloch, I am
indebted for his valuable proof-reading and assistance in edi-
torial details. I feel that I have put upon him an unusual
amount of labour in editing my manuscript, and I am grateful
to him for his assistance. My friends, Pere Schell, Professor of
Assyriology at the Sorbonne, Dr. F. Thureau-Dangin, Profes-
sor Zimmern of Leipzig, and many others have constantly kept
me supplied with their books and articles before they were ac-
cessible in ordinary commerce. The works of these three bril-
liant scholars have been of special value in the elucidation of
21
« on: July 08, 2019, 07:30:10 PM »
https://archive.org/details/mythologyofallra06gray/page/n250IRANIAN MYTHOLOGY BY ALBERT J. CARNOY, Ph.D., Litt.D. PROFESSOR OF LINGUISTICS AND OF IRANIAN PHILOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF LOUVAIN RESEARCH PROFESSOR, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA AUTHOR^S PREFACE THE purpose of this essay on Iranian mythology is exactly set forth by its title: it is a reasonably complete account of what is mythological in Iranian traditions, but it is nothing more; since it is exclusively concerned with myths, all that is properly religious, historical, or archaeological has intention- ally been omitted. This is, indeed, the first attempt of its kind, for although there are several excellent delineations of Iranian customs and of Zoroastrian beliefs, they mention the myths only secondarily and because they have a bearing on those customs and beliefs. The consequent inconveniences for the student of mythology, in the strict sense of the term, are obvious, and his difficulties are increased by the fact that, with few exceptions, these studies are either concerned with the religious history of Iran and for the most part refer solely to the older period, or are devoted to Persian literature and give only brief allusions to Mazdean times. Though we must congratu- late the Warners for their Illuminating prefaces to the various chapters of their translation of the Shdhndmah, it is evident that too little has thus far been done to connect the Persian epic with Avestic myths. None the less, the value and the interest presented by a study of Iranian mythology is of high degree, not merely from a specialist's point of view for knowledge of Persian civilization and mentality, but also for the material which it provides for mythologlsts in general. Nowhere else can we so clearly follow the myths In their gradual evolution toward legend and tra- ditional history. We may often trace the same stories from the period of living and creative mythology in the Vedas through the Avestic times of crystallized and systematized myths to 254 AUTHOR'S PREFACE the theological and mystic accounts of the Pahlavi books, and finally to the epico-historic legends of FIrdausi. There is no doubt that such was the general movement in the development of the historic stories of Iran. Has the evolution sometimes operated in the reverse direction? Dr. L. H. Gray, who knows much about Iranian mythology, seems to think so in connexion with the myth of Yima, for in his article on "Blest, Abode of the (Persian)," in the Encyclo- pcedia of Religion and Ethics, ii. 702-04 (Edinburgh, 1909), he presents an interesting hypothesis by which Yima's successive openings of the world to cultivation would appear to allude to Aryan migrations. It has seemed to me that this story has, rather, a mythical character, in conformity with my inter- pretation of Yima's personality; but in any event a single case would not alter our general conclusions regarding the course of the evolution of mythology in Persia. Another point of interest presented by Iranian mythology is that it collects and unites into a coherent system legends from two sources which are intimately connected with the two great racial eleiyients of our civilization. The Aryan myths of the Vedas appear in Iran, but are greatly modified by the influence of the neighbouring populations of the valleys of the Tigris and the Euphrates — Sumerians, Assyrians, etc. Occa- sional comparisons of Persian stories with Vedic myths or Babylonian legends have accordingly been introduced into the account of Iranian mythology to draw the reader's atten- tion to curious coincidences which, in our present state of knowledge, have not yet received any satisfactory explanation. In a paper read this year before the American Oriental Society I have sought to carry out this method of comparison in more systematic fashion, but studies of such a type find no place in the present treatise, which is strictly documentary and presen- tational in character. The use of hypotheses has, therefore, been carefully restricted to what was absolutely required to present a consistent and rational account of the myths and to AUTHOR'S PREFACE 255 permit them to be classified according to their probable nature. Due emphasis has also been laid upon the great number of replicas of the same fundamental story. Throughout my work my personal views are naturally implied, but I have sought to avoid bold and hazardous hypotheses. It has been my endeavour not merely to assemble the myths of Iran Into a consistent account, but also to give a readable form to my expose, although I fear that Iranian mythology is often so dry that many a passage will seem rather Insipid. If this impression is perhaps relieved in many places, that happy result is largely due to the poetic colouring of Darmesteter's translation of the Avesta and of the Warners' version of the Shdhndmah. The editor of the series has also employed his talent in versifying such of my quotations from the Avesta as are in poetry in the original. In so doing he has, of course, adhered to the metre in which these portions of the Avesta are written, and which is familiar to English readers as being that of Longfellow's Hiawatha, as it is also that of the Finnish Kalevala. Where prose Is mixed with verse in these passages Dr. Gray has reproduced the original commingling. While, however, I am thus indebted to him as well as to Darmesteter, Mills, Bartholomae, West, and the Warners for their meritori- ous translations, these versions have been compared in all necessary cases with the original texts. My hearty gratitude Is due to Professor A. V. Williams Jackson, who placed the library of the Indo-Iranian Seminar at Columbia University at my disposal and gave me negatives of photographs taken by him in Persia and used in his Persia Past and Present. It is this hospitality and that of the University of Pennsylvania which have made it possible for me to pursue my researches after the destruction of my library in Louvain. Dr. Charles J. Ogden of New York City also helped me in many ways. For the colour-plates I am indebted to the cour- tesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, where the Persian manuscripts of the Shdhndmah were generously placed 256 AUTHOR'S PREFACE at my service; and the Open Court Publishing Company of Chicago has permitted the reproduction of four illustrations from their issue of The Mysteries of Mithra. A. J. CARNOY. University of Pennsylvania, I November, 1916. TRANSCRIPTION AND PRONUNCIATION THE transcription of Avesta, Pahlavi, and Persian adopted in this study is of a semi-popular character, for it has been felt that the use of the strictly technical transliterations — x for kh, 7 for gh, 6 for th, etc., and the employment of "superior " letters to indicate spurious diphthongs, as vdrya for vairya — would confuse readers who are not professed Iranists. This technical transcription is of value for philologists, not for mythologists. The vowels have in general the Italian value and are short or long, the latter being indicated by the macron. The vowel ^, which, except in a few technical passages in the Notes, is here written <?, is pronounced with the dull sound of the "neutral vowel," much as e in English the man, when uttered rapidly; ^ is a nasalized vowel, roughly like the French nasalized am or an] do has the sound of a in English all (in strict transcription do should be written dp) ; di and du are pronounced as in English aisle and Latin aurum; in ae, ao, eu, eu (properly pu, pu), and di both components are sounded; ere (properly ptp) represents the vocalic r, as in English better (bettr). Sometimes the metre shows that a diphthong is to be monophthongized or that a single long vowel is to be resolved into two short ones (cf. Ch. V, Note 54, Ch. V, Note 13); this depends chiefly on etymology, and no rule can be given to govern all cases of such occurrences. The consonants are pronounced in general as in English. The deviations are: c is pronounced like English ch in church or Italian c in cicerone; g is always hard; t stands midway be- tween t and d; zh is like z in English azure or like French ; in jour; khv represents the Scottish or German ch -\r v; kh, gh, th, 2S8 TRANSCRIPTION AND PRONUNCIATION dh, /, and w are pronounced as in Scottish loch or German achy German Tag, English thin, this, far, and win respectively. In the quotations from the Shdhndmah the Arabic letters d, h, and q occur; d and h are pronounced very emphatically, and q is a. k produced deep in the throat. The transcription employed in the Warner translation of FirdausI differs some- what, but not sufficiently to cause confusion, as when, for instance, following the Persian rather than the Arabic pro- nunciation, they write Zahhak instead of Dahhak, etc. They also use the acute accent instead of the macron to denote long vowels, as i instead of i, etc. INTRODUCTION ETHNOLOGIC ALLY the Persians are closely akin to the Aryan races of India, and their religion, which shows many points of contact with that of the Vedic Indians, was dominant in Persia until the Muhammadan conquest of Iran in the seventh century of our era. One of the most exalted and the most inter- esting religions of the ancient world, it has been for thirteen hundred years practically an exile from the land of its birth, but it has found a home in India, where it is professed by the relatively small but highly influential community of Parsis, who, as their name ("Persians") implies, are descendants of immigrants from Persia. The Iranian faith is known to us both from the inscriptions of the Achaemenian kings (558-330 B.C.) and from the Avesta, the latter being an extensive collection of hymns, discourses, precepts for the religious life, and the like, the oldest portions dating back to a very early period, prior to the dominion of the great kings. The other parts are consider- ably later and are even held by several scholars to have been written after the beginning of the Christian era. In the period of the Sassanlans, who reigned from about 226 to 641 a.d,, many translations of the Avesta and commentaries on it were made, the language employed in them being not Avesta (which Is closely related to the VedIc Sanskrit tongue of India), but Pahlavi, a more recent dialect of Iranian and the older form of Modern Persian. A large number of traditions concerning the Iranian gods and heroes have been preserved only in Pahlavi, es- pecially in the Bundahish, or "Book of Creation." Moreover the huge epic in Modern Persian, written by the great poet Firdausi, who died about 1025 a.d., and known under the name 26o INTRODUCTION of Shdhndmah, or "Book of the Kings," has likewise rescued a great body of traditions and legends which would otherwise have passed into oblivion; and though in the epic these affect a more historical guise, in reality they are generally nothing but humanized myths. This is not the place to give an account of the ancient Per- sian religion, since here we have to deal with mythology only. It will suffice, therefore, to recall that for the great kings as well as for the priests, who were followers of Zor^agter (A vesta Zarathushtra), the great prophet of Iran, no god can be com- pared with Ahura Mazda, the wise creator of all good beings. Under him are the Amesha Spentas, or "Immortal Holy Ones," and the Yazatas, or "Venerable Ones," who are secon- dary deities. The Amesha Spentas have two aspects. In the moral sphere they embody the essential attainments of re- ligious life: "Righteousness" (Asha or Arta), "Good Mind" (Vohu Manah), "Desirable Kingdom" (Khshathra Vairya), "Wise Conduct" and "Devotion" (Spenta Armaiti), "Perfect Happiness" (Haurvatat), and "Immortality" (Ameretat). In their material nature they preside over the whole world as guardians: Asha is the spirit of fire, Vohu Manah is the pro- tector of domestic animals, Khshathra Vairya is the patron of metals, Spenta Armaiti presides over earth, Haurvatat over water, and Ameretat over plants. The Amesha Spentas constitute Ahura Mazda's court, and l^ it is through them that he governs the world and brings men to sanctity. Below Ahura Mazda and the Amesha Spentas come the Yazatas, who are for the most part ancient Aryan divini- ties reduced in the Zoroastrian system to the rank of auxiliary angels. Of these we may mention Atar, the personification of that fire which plays so important a part in the Mazdean cult that its members have now become commonly, though quite erroneously, known as "Fire- Worshippers"; and by the side of the genius of fire is found one of water, Anahita. Mithra is by all odds the most important Yazata. Although PLATE XXXII Iranian Deities on Indo-Scythian Coins I. MiTHRA The Iranian god of light with the solar disk about his head. From a coin of the Indo-Scythian king Huviska. After Stein, Tioroastrian Deities on Indo-Scythian Coins^ No. I. See pp. 287-88. 2. Apam Napat The "Child of Waters." The deity is represented with a horse, thus recalling his Avestic epithet, aurvat-aspa ("with swift steeds"). From a coin of the Indo-Scythian king Kaniska. After Stein, Zoroastrian Deities on Indo-Scythian Coins^ No. III. See pp. 267, 340. ^ y^^^ The moon-god is represented with the characteristic lunar disk. From a coin of the Indo-Scythian king Huviska. After Stein, Xoroastrian Deities on Indo-Scythian Coins^No. IV. See p. 278. 4. Vata or Vayu The wind-god is running forward with hair floating and mantle flying in the breeze. From a coin of the Indo-Scythian king Kaniska. After Stein, Zoroastrian Deities on Indo-Scythian Coins^ No. V. See pp. 299, 302. 5. Khvarenanh The Glory, here called by his Persian name, Farro, holds out the royal symbol. From a coin of the Indo-Scythian king Huviska. After Stein, Zoroastrian Deities on Indo-Scythian Coins ^ No. VI. See pp. 285, 304-05, 311, 324, 332-33, 343. 6. Atar The god of fire is here characterized by the flames which rise from his shoulders. From a coin of the Indo-Scythian king Kaniska. After Stein, Zoroastrian Deities on Indo-Scythian Coins^ No. VII. See pp. ibb-b-j. 7. Vanainti (Uparatat) This goddess, "Conquering Superiority," is modelled on the Greek Nike ("Victory"), and seems to carry in one hand the sceptre of royalty, while with the other she proffers the crown worn by the Iranian kings. From a coin of the Indo-Scythian king Huviska. After Stein, Zoroastrian Deities on Indo-Scythian Coins, No. VlII. 8. Verethraghna On the helmet of the war-god perches a bird which is doubt- less the Vareghna. The deity appropriately carries spear and sword. From a coin of the Indo-Scythian king Kaniska. After Stein, Zoroastrian Deities on Indo-Scythian Coins, l^o. IX. See pp. 271-73. X35??5f;v h VO?tK PUBLIC Illia^^Y ASrOR. LENOX ANB T1LD13N FOWUATl»Nfl INTRODUCTION 261 pushed by Zoroaster into the background, he always enjoyed a very popular cult among the people in Persia as the god of the plighted word, the protector of justice, and the deity who gives victory in battle against the foes of the Iranians and defends the worshippers of Truth and Righteousness (Asha), His cult spread, as is well known, at a later period into the Roman Empire, and he has as his satellites, to help him in his function of guardian of Law, Rashnu ("Justice") and Sraosha ("Discipline"). Under the gods are the spirits called Fravashis, who origi- nally were the manes of ancestors, but in the Zoroastrian creed are genii, attached as guardians to all beings human and divine. It is generally known that the typical feature of Mazdeism is dualism, or the doctrine of two creators and two creations. Ahura Mazda (Ormazd), with his host of Amesha Spentas and Yazatas, presides over the good creation and wages an inces- sant war against his counterpart Angra Mainyu (Ahriman) and the latter's army of noxious spirits. The Principle of Evil has created darkness, suffering, and sins of all kinds; he is anxious to hurt the creatures of the good creation; he longs to enslave the faithful of Ahura Mazda by bringing them into falsehood or into some impure contact with an evil being; he is often called Druj ("Deception"). Under him are marshalled the daevas ("demons"), from six of whom a group has been formed explicitly antithetic to the Amesha Spentas. Among the demons are Aeshma ("Wrath, Violence"), Aka Manah ("Evil Mind"), Biishyasta ("Sloth"), Apaosha ("Drought"), and Nasu ("Corpse"), who takes hold of corpses and makes them im- pure, to say nothing of the Yatus ("sorcerers") and the Pai- rikas (Modern Persian pari^ "fairy"), who are spirits of seduc- tion. The struggle between the good and the evil beings, in which man takes part by siding, according to his conduct, with Ahura Mazda or with his foe, is to end with the victory of the former at the great renovation of the world, when a flood of 262 INTRODUCTION molten metal will, as an ordeal, purify all men and bring about the complete exclusion of evil. Dualism, having impregnated all Iranian beliefs, profoundly influenced the mythology of Iran as well or, more exactly, it was in their mythology that the people of ancient Persia found the germ that developed into religious dualism. IRANIAN MYTHOLOGY CHAPTER I WARS OF GODS AND DEMONS THE mythology of the Indians and the Iranians has given a wide extension to the conception of a struggle between light and darkness, this being the development of myths dating back to Indo-European times and found among all Indo- European peoples. Besides the cosmogonic stories in which monstrous giants are killed by the gods of sky or storm we have the myths of the storm and of the fire. In the former a heavenly being slays the dragon concealed in the cloud, whose waters now flow over the earth; or the god delivers from a monster the cows of the clouds that are imprisoned in some mountain or cavern, as, for example, in the legends concerning Herakles and Geryoneus or Cacus.^ In the second class of myths the fire of heaven, produced in the cloud or in an aerial sea, is brought to earth by a bird or by a daring human being like Prometheus. All these myths tell of a struggle against powers of darkness for light or for blessings under the form of rain. They were eminently susceptible of being systematized in a dualistic form, and the strong tendency toward symbolism, observable both in old Indian (Vedic) and old Iranian conceptions, re- sulted in the association of moral ideas with the cosmic struggle, thus easily leading to dualism. The recent discoveries in Boghaz Kyoi and elsewhere in the Near East have shown that the Indo-Iranians were in con- tact with Assyro-Babylonian culture at an early date, and there
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DEDICATION THIS LITTLE RECORD OF THE PAST IS REVERENTLY DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF THE ARMENIAN HOSTS WHICH FOUGHT IN THE LAST WAR FOR FREEDOM AND OF THE GREAT ARMY OF MARTYRS WHO WERE ATROCIOUSLY TORTURED TO DEATH BY THE TURKS https://archive.org/details/mythologyofallra71gray/page/n15THE MYTHOLOGY OF ALL RACES Volume VII ARMENIAN PLATE I Illumination from an Armenian Gospel manu- script in the Library of the Kennedy School of Missions, Hartford, Connecticut. THE MYTHOLOGY OF ALL RACES IN THIRTEEN VOLUMES CANON JOHN ARNOTT MacCULLOCH, D.D., Editor GEORGE FOOT MOORE, A.M., D.D., LL.D., Consulting Editor ARMENIAN BY MARDIROS H. ANANIKIAN B.D., S.T.M., LATE PROFESSOR OF THE HISTORY AND LANGUAGES OF TURKEY, KENNEDY SCHOOL OF MISSIONS, HART- FORD, CONNECTICUT. VOLUME VII ARCHAEOLOGICAL INSTITUTE OF AMERICA MARSHALL JONES COMPANY • BOSTON M DCCCC XXV n Copyright, 1925 By Marshall Jones Company Copyrighted in Great Britain All rights reserved Printed June, 1925 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BOUND BY THE BOSTON BOOKBINDING COMPANY CONTENTS Armenia ARMENIAN MYTHOLOGY BY MARDIROS H. ANANIKIAN B.D., S.T.M. AUTHOR’S PREFACE THE ancient religion of Armenia was derived from three main sources: National, Iranian, and Asianic. The Asi- anic element, including the Semitic, does not seem to have ex- tended beyond the objectionable but widely spread rites of a mother goddess. The National element came from Eastern Europe and must have had a common origin with the Iranian. But it, no doubt, represents an earlier stage of development than the Vedas and the Avesta. It is for the well-informed scholar of Indo-European religion to pronounce a judge- ment as to the value of the material brought together in this study. The lexical, folk-loristic, and literary heritage of the Armenians has much yet to disclose. No one can be more pain- fully conscious than the author of the defects of this work. He had to combine research with popular and connected ex- position, a task far above his ability. The ancient material was not so scanty as broken. So analogy, wherever it could be found within the family, was called upon to restore the nat- ural connections. Among the numerous writers on Armenian mythology, three names stand high: Mgrdich Emin of Moscow, Prof. Heinrich Gelzer of Jena, and Father Leo Alishan of Venice. Emin laid the foundation of the scientific treatment of Arme- nian mythology in the middle of the nineteenth century, and his excellent contribution has become indispensable in this field. To Heinrich Gelzer, primarily a scholar of Byzantine history, we owe the latest modern study of the Armenian Pantheon. As for Alishan, he was a poet and an erudite, but had hardly any scientific training. So his Ancient Faith of Armenia is a 6 AUTHOR’S PREFACE naive production abounding in more or less inaccessible ma- terial of high value and in sometimes suggestive but more often strange speculations. Manug Abeghian will rightly claim the merit of having given to Armenian folk-lore a systematic form, while A. Aharonian’s thesis on the same subject is not devoid of interest. Unfortunately Stackelberg’s article, written in Russian, was accessible to the author only in an Armenian resume. Sandalgian’s Histone Documentaire de VArmeme , which appeared in 1917 but came to the author’s notice only recently, contains important chapters on ancient Armenian religion and mythology. The part that interprets Urartian inscriptions through ancient Greek and Armenian has not met with general recognition among scholars. But his treatment of the classic and mediaeval material is in substantial accord with this book. The main divergences have been noted. Grateful thanks are due to the editors as well as the publish- ers for their forbearance with the author’s idiosyncrasies and limitations. Also a hearty acknowledgement must be made here to my revered teacher and colleague, Prof. Duncan B. Mac- donald of the Hartford Theological Seminary, to Prof. Lewis Hodous of the Kennedy School of Missions, and to Dr. John W. Chapman of the Case Memorial Library for many fertile suggestions. Prof. Macdonald, himself an ardent and able folk-lorist, and Prof. Hodous, a student of Chinese religions, carefully read this work and made many helpful suggestions. Hartford, Connecticut, April 23, 1922. M. H. ANANIKIAN Publisher’s Note The death of Professor Ananikian occurred while this vol- ume was in preparation. He did not see the final proofs. INTRODUCTION THE POLITICAL BACKGROUND L ONG before the Armenians came to occupy the lofty pla- teau, south of the Caucasus, now known by their name, it had been the home of peoples about whom we possess only scanty information. It matters little for our present purpose, whether the older inhabitants consisted of different ethnic types, having many national names and languages, or whether they were a homogeneous race, speaking dialects of the same mother tongue and having some common name. For the sake of convenience we shall call them Urartians, as the As- syrians did. The Urartians formed a group of civilized states mostly centreing around the present city of Van. Although they left wonderful constructions and many cuneiform inscrip- tions, we depend largely on the Assyrian records for our in- formation concerning their political history. It would seem that the Urartians belonged to the same non- Aryan and non-Semitic stock of peoples as the so-called Hit- tites who held sway in the Western Asiatic peninsula long before Indo-European tribes such as Phrygians, Mysians, Lydians, and Bithynians came from Thrace, and Scythians and Cimmerians from the north of the Black Sea to claim the pen- insula as their future home. The Urartians were quite warlike and bravely held their own against the Assyrian ambitions until the seventh century b.c., when their country, weakened and disorganized through continual strife, fell an easy prey to the Armenian conquerors (640-600). 8 INTRODUCTION The coming of the Armenians into Asia Minor, according to the classical authorities, forms a part of the great exodus from Thrace. By more than one ancient and intelligent writer, they are declared to have been closely related to the Phrygians whom they resembled both in language and costume, and with whom they stood in Xerxes’ army, ac- cording to Herodotus. 1 Slowly moving along the southern shores of the Black Sea, they seem to have stopped for a while in what was known in antiquity as Armenia Minor, which, roughly speaking, lies southeast of Pontus and just north- east of Cappadocia. Thence they must have once more set out to conquer the promised land, the land of the Urartians, where they established themselves as a military aristocracy in the mountain fastnesses and the fortified cities, driving most of the older inhabitants northward, reducing the remainder to serfdom, taxing them heavily, employing them in their in- ternal and external wars, and gradually but quite effectively imposing upon them their own name, language, religion, and cruder civilization. It is very natural that such a relation should culminate in a certain amount of fusion between the two races. This is what took place, but the slow process be- came complete only in the middle ages when the Turkish (Seljuk) conquest of the country created a terrible chaos in the social order. Very soon after the Armenian conquest of Urartu, even be- fore the new lords could organize and consolidate the land into anything like a monarchy, Armenia was conquered by Cyrus (558-529 b.c.), then by Darius (524-485 b.c.). After the meteoric sweep of Alexander the Great through the eastern sky, it passed into Macedonian hands. But in 190 b.c., under Antiochus the Great, two native satraps shook off the Seleucid yoke. One of them was Artaxias, who with the help of the fugitive Hannibal, planned and built Artaxata, on the Araxes, as his capital. Under the dynasty of this king, who became a INTRODUCTION 9 legendary hero, the country prospered for a while and attained with Tigranes the Great (94-54 b.c.) an ephemeral greatness without precedent until then and without any parallel ever since. In 66 a.d. a branch of the Parthian (Arsacid) Dynasty was established in Armenia under the suzerainty and protec- tion of Rome. The first king of this house was Tiridates I, formerly the head of the Magi of his country, who may have done much in Armenia for the establishment of Zoroastrianism. It was under Tiridates II, a scion of this royal house, that, in the beginning of the fourth century of our era, Christianity, long present in the country, and often persecuted, achieved its fuller conquest. ARMENIAN MYTHOLOGY CHAPTER I THE RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT HE URARTIANS believed in a supreme being, the god of heaven, whose name was Khaldi. If not the whole, at least a large part of the population called itself Khaldian, a name which survived the final downfall of the Urartian state in a province situated northwest of Armenia where evidently the old inhabitants were driven by the Armenian conquerors. In their ancient non-Aryan pantheon, alongside of Khaldi stood Theispas, a weather-god or thunderer of a very wide repute in Western Asia, and Artinis, the sun-god. These three male deities came to form a triad, under Babylonian influence. From the fact that in one Babylonian triad composed of Sin (the moon), Shamas (the sun) and Ramman (a weather-god), Sin is the lord of the heavens, scholars have concluded that Khaldi may have been also (or become) a moon-god. Whether this be the case or not, the Urartian pantheon contains a secondary moon-god called Shelartish. Besides these no less than forty-six secondary, mostly local, deities are named in an official (sacrificial?) list. The original Khaldian pan- theon knew no female deity. Thus it stands in glaring contrast with Asianic (Anatolian) religions in which the mother goddess occupies a supreme position. But in the course of time, Ishtar of Babylon, with her singularly pervasive and migratory char- acter, found her way into Urartu, under the name of Sharis . 1 One may safely assume that at least in the later stage of its political existence, long before the arrival of the Armenians 12 ARMENIAN MYTHOLOGY on the scene, Urartu had made some acquaintance with the Indo-Iranians and their Aryan manners and beliefs. For the Medes had begun their national career long before 935 b.c., and a little later the Scythians had established themselves in Manna, an Eastern dependency of Urartu. 2 As an undeniable evidence of such influences we may point to the fact that in Manna, Khaldi had become identified with Bag-Mashtu (Bag-Mazda) a sky-god and probably an older form of the Iranian Ahura Mazda. It is in the midst of such a religion and civilization that the Armenians came to live. Their respect for it is attested by the fact that the ancient Urartian capital, Thuspa (the present Van), was spared, and that another (later) capital, Armavira in the North, became a sacred city for them, where according to the national legend even royal princes engaged in the art of divination through the rustling leaves of the sacred poplar (Armen. Saus ). On the other hand the vestiges of Armenian paganism conclusively show that the newcomers lent to the Urartians infinitely more than they borrowed from them. The Thracians and Phrygians, with whom the Armenians were related, had in later times a crude but mystic faith and a simple pantheon. Ramsay, in his article on the Phrygians 3 assumes that the chief deity whom the Thracian influx brought into Asia- Minor was male, and as the native religion was gradually adopted by the conquerors, this god associated himself with, and usurped certain functions of, the Asianic goddess. At all events the Phrygians, who had a sky-god called Bagos Papaios, must have had also an earth-goddess Semele (Persian Zamin) who no doubt became identified with some phase of the native goddess (Kybele, Ma, etc.). The confusion of the earth- goddess with the moon seems to have been a common phenome- non in the nearer East. Dionysos or Sabazios represented the principle of fertility of nature, without any marked reference THE RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT 13 to the human race. He was a god of moisture and vegetation. The com that sustains life, and the wine and beer that gladden the heart, were his gifts. These things sprang from the bosom of mother earth, through his mysterious influence, for the earth and he were lovers. Further the Thracians and Phrygians at the winter solstice, held wild orgies (Bacchanalia), when naked women, wrought into frenzy by music and dance, and driven by priests, wan- dered in bands through fields and forests, shouting the name of the deity or a part of it (like Saboi), and by every bar- barous means endeavouring to awaken the dead god into repro- ductive activity . 4 He was imagined as passing rapidly through the stages of childhood, adolescence and youth. And as he was held to be incarnate in a bull, a buck, a man, or even in an in- fant, the festival reached its climax in the devouring of warm and bloody flesh just torn from a live bull, goat, or a priest. Sabazios under the name of Zagreus was thus being cut to pieces and consumed by his devotees. In this sacramental meal, the god no doubt became incarnate in his votaries and blessed the land with fertility . 5 We have no clear traces of such repulsive rites in what has been handed down to us from the old religion of the Ar- menians in spite of their proverbial piety. Whatever they have preserved seems to belong to another stratum of the Phrygo-Thracian faith . 6 A careful examination of this ancient material shows among the earliest Armenians a religious and mythological develop- ment parallel to that observed among other Indo-European peoples, especially the Satem branch of the race. Their language contains an important fund of Indo- European religious words such as Tiu (Dyaus = Zeus = Tiwaz), “ day-light,” and Di-kh (pi. of Di , i.e. Deiva = Deus, etc.), “ the gods.” When the ancient Armenians shouted, “ Ti (or Tir), forward,” they must have meant this ancient Dyaus 14 ARMENIAN MYTHOLOGY Pitar who was also a war-god, and not Tiur y their much later very learned but peaceful scribe of the gods. Even the name of V aruna appears among them in the form of Vran (a cog- nate of ovpavos) and in the sense of “ tent,” “ covering.” It is not impossible that astwads , their other word for “ God,” which in Christian times supplanted the heathen Di-kh , “ Gods,” was originally an epithet of the father of the gods and men, just like the Istwo of Teutonic mythology, of which it may well be a cognate . 7 The Perkunas of the Lithuanians and the Teutonic Fjor- gynn, one as a god of heaven and of weather, and the other as a goddess of the earth, are still preserved in the Armenian words erkin, “heaven,” and erkir ( erkinr ?) “earth .” 8 The word and goddess, idrd y erd , “ earth,” seems to survive in the Armenian ard , “ land,” “ field.” Another ancient Armenian word for Mother-earth is probably to be found in armat y which now means “ root.” But in its adjectival form armti-kh y “cereals,” it betrays a more original meaning which may shed some light upon the much disputed Vedic aramati and Avestic armaiti. The word ho\m y “ wind,” may have originally meant “ sky,” as cognate of Himmel. The Vedic and Avestic vata (Teut. V otan?) is represented in Armenian by aud y “ air,” “ weather,” “ wind,” while Vayu himself seems to be represented by more than one mythological name. Even the Vedic Aryaman and the Teutonic Irmin may probably be recognized in the name of Armenak, the better-known eponymous hero of the Armenians, who thus becomes identical with the ancient Dyaus-Tiwaz. To these may be added others whom we shall meet later. And in the Vahagn myths we see how, as in India and Teutonic lands, a violent storm-god has supplanted the grander figure of the heaven-god. The oak (which in Europe was sacred to the sky-god) and water played an important part in the Armenian rites of the THE RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT i5 sacred fire. The sacred fire was, as in Europe, often extin- guished in water. This religion was quite agricultural. In view of the general agreement of the Slavic and old Armenian data on this point, one may well ask whether the Thraco- Phrygian mysteries just described were not a localized development of the lightning worship so characteristic of the Slavic family to which the Thraco-Phrygians and the Arme- nians probably belonged . 9 In fact, according to Tomaschek 10 the lightning-god had a very prominent place in the Thracian religion. Lightning worship, more or less confused with the worship of a storm-god, was widely spread through Indo-European cults, and it is attested in the Thracian family not only by the name of Hyagnis, a Phrygian satyr (see chapter on Vahagn) and Sbel Thiourdos, but also by the title of “ Bull ” that belonged to Dionysos and by such Greek myths as make him wield the lightning for a short time in the place of Zeus . 11 Soon after their coming into Urartu the Armenians fell under very strong Iranian influences, both in their social and their religious life. Now began that incessant flow of Iranian words into their language, a fact which tempted the philol- ogists of a former generation to consider Armenian a branch of Iranian. When Xenophon met the Armenians on his fa- mous retreat, Persian was understood by them, and they were sacrificing horses to the sun (or, perhaps to Mithra). But we find in the remnants of Armenian paganism no religious literature and no systematic theology, or cult of a purely Zoro- astrian type. It would seem that the reformed faith of Iran penetrated Armenia very slowly and as a formless mass of popular beliefs which sometimes entered into mesalliances in their new home . 12 In fact the names of the Zoroastrian gods and spirits found in Armenia bear a post-classic and pre- Sassanian stamp. Finally the contact with Syria and with Hellenistic culture 1 6
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Amazon links will be limited.
We had hoped use of amazon links in our board/message index for every subject would in itself sponsor us..sadly NO
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kk5-ynRPfssA History of Britain - The Humans Arrive (1 Million BC - 8000 BC) https://www.google.com/search?q=doggerland between Britain and Europe Mainland https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDB2IHCRLgoA History of Britain - Stone Age Builders (8000 BC - 2200 BC) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ic9547oRt7QA History of Britain - Bronze and Iron (2200 BC - 600 BC) https://archive.org/details/mythologyofallra31gray/page/n17THE MYTHOLOGY OF ALL RACES Volume III CELTIC PLATE I Brug na Boinne The tumulus at New Grange is the largest of a group of three at Dowth, New Grange, and Knowth, County Meath, on the banks of the Boyne in the plain known to Irish tales as Brug na Boinne, the traditional burial-place of the Tuatha De Danann and of the Kings of Tara. It was also associated with the Tuatha De Danann as their immortal dwelling-place, e. g. of Oengus of the Brug (see pp. 50-51, 66-67, 1 76 - 77 )- The tumuli are perhaps of the neolithic age (for plans see Plate VI, A and B). THE MYTHOLOGY OF ALL RACES IN THIRTEEN VOLUMES LOUIS HERBERT GRAY, A.M., PH.D., Editor GEORGE FOOT MOORE, A.M., D.D., LL.D., Consulting Editor CELTIC BY JOHN ARNOTT MACCULLOCH, HON. D. D. (ST. ANDREWS) SLAVIC BY JAN MACHAL, ph.d. WITH A CHAPTER ON BALTIC MYTHOLOGY BY THE EDITOR VOLUME III BOSTON MARSHALL JONES COMPANY M DCCCC XVIII mm r-3 Copyright, 1918 By Marshall Jones Company Entered at Stationers’ Hall, London All rights reserved plate facing page I Brug na Boinne — Coloured Frontispiece II Gaulish Coins 8 1. Horse and Wheel-Symbol 2. Horse, Conjoined Circles and S-Symbol 3. Man-Headed Horse and Wheel 4. Bull and S-Symbol 5. Bull 6. Sword and Warrior Dancing Before it 7-8. Swastika Composed of Two S-Symbols (?) 9-10. Bull’s Head and two S-Symbols; Bear Eating a Serpent 11. Wolf and S-Symbols III Gaulish Coins 14 1. Animals Opposed, and Boar and Wolf (?) 2. Man-Headed Horse and Bird, and Bull Ensign 3. Squatting Divinity, and Boar and S-Symbol or Snake 4. Horse and Bird 5. Bull and Bird 6. Boar 7. Animals Opposed IV God with the Wheel 20 V Smertullos 40 VI A. Plan of the Brug na Boinne 50 B. Plan of the Brug na Boinne 50 VII Three-Headed God 56 VIII Squatting God 72 IX A. Altar from Saintes 86 B. Reverse Side of the same Altar 86 X Incised Stones from Scotland 94 1. The “Picardy Stone” 2. The “Newton Stone” X ILLUSTRATIONS PLATE FACING PAGE XI Gauls and Romans in Combat 106 XII Three-Headed God II2 XIII Sucellos jjg XIV Dispater and Aeracura (?) 120 XV Epona 124 XVI Cernunnos .... 128 XVII Incised Stones from Scotland 134. 1. The “Crichie Stone” 2. An Incised Scottish Stone XVIII Menhir of Kernuz 140 XIX Bulls and S-Symbols 132 1, 6. Carvings of Bulls from Burghhead 2-5. S-Symbols XX A. Altar from Notre Dame. Esus 158 B. Altar from Notre Dame. Tarvos Trigaranos . 158 XXI Altar from Treves . . . .• 166 XXII Page of an Irish Manuscript 176 XXIII Artio 186 XXIV Boars 188 XXV Horned God 204 XXVI Sucellos 208 XXVII Zadusnica 237 XXVIII Djadek 244 XXIX Setek 244 XXX Lesni Zenka 261 XXXI Svantovit 279 XXXII Festival of Svantovit 281 XXXIII Radigast 286 XXXIV Idealizations of Slavic Divinities 288 1. Svantovit 2. Ziva 3. Cernobog and Tribog XXXV Veles 300 XXXVI Ancient Slavic Sacrifice 305 XXXVII The Sacred Oak of Romowe. . . 305 CELTIC MYTHOLOGY BY JOHN ARNOTT MACCULLOCH, Hon. D.D. (St. Andrews.^ RECTOR OF ST. SAVIOUR’S, BRIDGE OF ALLAN, STIRLINGSHIRE, AND HONORARY CANON OF CUMBRAE CATHEDRAL TO DR. JAMES HASTINGS Editor of the Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, the Dictionary of the Bible , etc. WITH THE GRATITUDE AND RESPECT OF THE AUTHOR AUTHOR’S PREFACE r j a former work * I have considered at some length the re- ligion of the ancient Celts; the present study describes those Celtic myths which remain to us as a precious legacy from the past, and is supplementary to the earlier book. These myths, as I show, seldom exist as the pagan Celts knew them, for they have been altered in various ways, since romance, pseudo-history, and the influences of Christianity have all affected many of them. Still they are full of interest, and it is not difficult to perceive traces of old ideas and mythical conceptions beneath the surface. Transformation allied to rebirth was asserted of various Celtic divinities, and if the myths have been transformed, enough of their old selves re- mained for identification after romantic writers and pseudo- historians gave them a new existence. Some mythic incidents doubtless survive much as they were in the days of old, but all alike witness to the many-sided character of the life and thought of their Celtic progenitors and transmitters. Romance and love, war and slaughter, noble deeds as well as foul, wordy boastfulness but also delightful poetic utterance, glamour and sordid reality, beauty if also squalid conditions of life, are found side by side in these stories of ancient Ireland and Wales. The illustrations are the work of my daughter, Sheila Mac- Culloch, and I have to thank the authorities of the British Museum for permission to copy illustrations from their publica- tions; Mr. George Coffey for permission to copy drawings and photographs of the Tumuli at New Grange from his book New Grange ( Brugh na Boinne) and other Inscribed Tumuli in Ire- land; the Librarians of Trinity College, Dublin, and the Bod- * The Religion of the Ancient Celts, Edinburgh, 1911. 6 AUTHOR’S PREFACE leian Library, Oxford, for permission to photograph pages from well-known Irish MSS.; and Mr. R. J. Best for the use of his photographs of MSS. In writing this book it has been some relief to try to lose oneself in it and to forget, in turning over the pages of the past, the dark cloud which hangs over our modern life in these sad days of the great war, sad yet noble, because of the freely offered sacrifice of life and all that life holds dear by so many of my countrymen and our heroic allies in defence of liberty. J. A. MACCULLOCH. Bridge of Allan, Scotland, May, 16, 1916. hi — 1 INTRODUCTION I N all lands whither the Celts came as conquerors there was an existing population with whom they must eventually have made alliances. They imposed their language upon them — the Celtic regions are or were recently regions of Celtic speech — but just as many words of the aboriginal vernacular must have been taken over by the conquerors, or their own tongue modified by Celtic, so must it have been with their mythology. Celtic and pre-Celtic folk alike had many myths, and these were bound to intermingle, with the result that such Celtic legends as we possess must contain remnants of the aboriginal mythology, though it, like the descendants of the aborigines, has become Celtic. It would be difficult, in the existing condition of the old mythology, to say this is of Celtic, that of non-Celtic origin, for that mythology is now but fragmentary. The gods of the Celts were many, but of large cantles of the Celtic race — the Celts of Gaul and of other parts of the continent of Europe — scarcely any myths have survived. A few sentences of Classical writers or images of divinities or scenes depicted on monuments point to what was once a rich mythology. These monuments, as well as in- scriptions with names of deities, are numerous there as well as in parts of Roman Britain, and belong to the Romano-Celtic period. In Ireland, Wales, and north-western Scotland they do not exist, though in Ireland and Wales there is a copious literature based on mythology. Indeed, we may express the condition of affairs in a formula: Of the gods of the Conti- nental Celts many monuments and no myths; of those of the Insular Celts many myths but no monuments. The myths of the Continental Celts were probably never III — 2 8 INTRODUCTION committed to writing. They were contained in the sacred verses taught by the Druids, but it was not lawful to write them down ; 1 they were tabu, and doubtless their value would have vanished if they had been set forth in script. The influences of Roman civilization and religion were fatal to the oral mythol- ogy taught by Druids, who were ruthlessly extirpated, while the old religion was assimilated to that of Rome. The gods were equated with Roman gods, who tended to take their place; the people became Romanized and forgot their old beliefs. Doubtless traditions survived among the folk, and may still exist as folk-lore or fairy superstition, just as folk- customs, the meaning of which may be uncertain to those who practise them, are descended from the rituals of a vanished paganism; but such existing traditions could be used only with great caution as indexes of the older myths. There were hundreds of Gaulish and Romano-British gods, as an examination of the Latin inscriptions found in Gaul and Britain 2 or of Alfred Holder’s Altceltischer Sprachschatz 3 will show. Many are equated with the same Roman god, and most of them were local deities with similar functions, though some may have been more widely popular; but we can never be sure to what aspect of the Roman divinity’s personality a parallel was found in their functions. Moreover, though in some cases philology shows us the meaning of their names, it would avail little to speculate upon that meaning, tempting as this may be — a temptation not always successfully resisted. This is also true of the symbols depicted on monuments, though here the function, if not the myth, is more readily suggested. Why are some deities horned or three-headed, or why does one god carry a wheel, a hammer, or an S-symbol? Horns may suggest divine strength or an earlier beast-god, the wheel may be the sun, the hammer may denote creative power. Other symbols resemble those of Classical divinities, and here the meaning is more ob- vious. The three Matres , or “Mothers,” with their symbols of fertility were Earth Mothers; the horned deity with a bag of PLATE II Gaulish Coins 1. Coin of the Nervii, with horse and wheel- symbol (cf. Plates III, 4, IV, XV). 2. Gaulish coin, with horse, conjoined circles, and S-symbol (cf. Plates III, 3, IV, XIX, 2-5). 3. Coin of the Cenomani, with man-headed horse (cf. Plate III, 2) and wheel. 4. Coin of the Remi (?), with bull (cf. Plates III, 5, IX, B, XIX, 1, 6, XX, B, XXI), and S-symbol. 5. Coin of the Turones, with bull. 6. Armorican coin, showing sword and warrior dancing before it (exemplifying the cult of weapons; cf. pp. 33-34). 7. 8. Gaulish coins, with swastika composed of two S-symbols (?). 9, 10. Gaulish coin, showing bull’s head and two S-symbols; reverse, bear (cf. Plate XXIII) eating a serpent. 11. Coin of the Carnutes, showing wolf (cf. Plate III, 1) and S-symbols. 9 io ii INTRODUCTION 9 grain was a god of plenty. Such a goddess as Epona was a divinity of horses and mules, and she is represented as riding a horse or feeding foals. But what myths lie behind the repre- sentation of Esus cutting down a tree, whose branches, extend- ing round another side of the monument, cover a bull and three cranes — Tarvos Trigaranos? Is this the incident depicted on another monument with a bull’s head among branches on which two birds are perched ? 4 Glimpses of myths are seen in Classical references to Celtic gods. Caesar, whose information (or that of his source) about the gods of Gaul is fragmentary, writes: “They worship chiefly the god Mercury. Of him there are many simulacra ; 5 they make him inventor of all arts and guide of journeys and marches, and they suppose him to have great power over the acquiring of money and in matters of merchandise. After him come Apollo, Mars, Jupiter, and Minerva. Concerning these they hold much the same opinions as other nations — Apollo repels diseases, Minerva teaches the beginnings of arts and crafts, Jupiter sways celestial affairs, Mars directs wars .” 6 There is no evidence that all the Gauls worshipped a few gods. Many local deities with similar functions but different names is the evidence of the inscriptions, and these are grouped col- lectively by Caesar and assimilated to Roman divinities. There are many local Mercuries, Minervas, Apollos, and the like, each with his Celtic name attached to that of the Roman god. Or, again, they are nameless, as in the case of the Yorkshire inscription, “To the god who invented roads and paths” — an obvious Mercury. Caesar adds, “The Gauls declare that they are descended from Dispater, and this, they say, has been handed down by the Druids.” 7 If, as the present writer has tried to show elsewhere , 8 Dispater is the Roman name of a Celtic god, whether Cernunnos, or the god with the hammer, or Esus, or all three, who ruled a rich underworld, then this myth resembles many told elsewhere of the first men emerging from the earth, the autochthones. The parallel Celtic myth IO INTRODUCTION has not survived. In Ireland, if it ever existed there, it gave place to stories of descent from fictitious personages, like Mile, son of Bile, invented by the early scribes, or from Biblical patriarchs. Apollonius, writing in the third century b. c., reports a Celtic myth about the waters of Eridanus. Apollo, driven by his father’s threats from heaven because of the son whom Karonis bore to him, fled to the land of the Hyperboreans; and the tears which he shed on the way formed the tossing waters . 9 Some Greek myth is here mingled with a local legend about the origin of a stream and a Celtic god, possibly Belenos, who had a neighbouring temple at Aquileia. In an island of the Hyperboreans (a Celtic people dwelling beyond the Rhipaean Mountains whence Boreas blew) was a circular temple where Apollo was worshipped. Every year near the vernal equinox the god appeared in the sky, harping and dancing, until the rising of the Pleiades . 10 It is natural that this “circular temple” should have been found in Stonehenge. Lucian (second century a. d.) describes a Gaulish god Og- mios, represented as an old man, bald-headed and with wrinkled and sun-burnt skin, yet possessing the attributes of Hercules — the lion’s skin, the club, the bow, and a sheath hung from his shoulder. He draws a multitude by beautiful chains of gold and amber attached to their ears, and they follow him with joy. The other end of the chains is fixed to his tongue, and he turns to his captives a smiling countenance. A Gaul explained that the native god of eloquence was regarded as Hercules, because he had accomplished his feats through elo- quence; he was old, for speech shows itself best in old age; the chains indicated the bond between the orator’s tongue and the ears of enraptured listeners . 11 Lucian may have seen such a representation or heard of a Gaulish myth of this kind, and as we shall see, an Irish god Ogma, whose name is akin to that of Ogmios, was a divine warrior and a god of poetry and speech. Ogma is called INTRODUCTION ii grianainech (“sun-faced,” or “shining-faced”), perhaps a par- allel to Lucian’s description of the face of Ogmios. The head of Ogmios occurs on Gaulish coins, and from one of his eyes pro- ceeds a ray or nail. This has suggested a parallel with the Ulster hero Cuchulainn in his “distortion,” when the Ion laith (? “champion’s light”) projected from his forehead thick and long as a man’s fist. Another curious parallel occurs in the Tain Bo Cualnge , or “Cattle-Spoil of Cualnge,” where, among the Ulster forces, is a strong man with seven chains on his neck, and seven men dragged along at the end of each, so that their noses strike the ground, whereupon they reproach him. Is this a distorted reminiscence of the myth of Ogmios ? A British goddess Sul, equated with Minerva at Bath, is mentioned by Solinus (third century a. d.) as presiding over warm springs. In her temple perpetual fires burned and never grew old, for where the fire wasted away it turned into shining globes . 12 The latter statement is travellers’ gossip, but the “eternal fires” recall the sacred fire of St. Brigit at Kildare, tended by nineteen nuns in turn, a day at a time, and on the twentieth by the dead saint herself. The fire was tabu to males, who must not even breathe on it . 13 This breath tabu in connexion with fire is found among Parsis, Brahmans, Slavs, in Japan, and formerly in Rugen. The saint succeeded to the myth or ritual of a goddess, the Irish Brigit, or the Brigindo or Brigantia of Gaulish and British inscriptions, who was like- wise equated with Minerva. A tabued grove near Marseilles is mythically described by Lucan, who wrote in the first century of our era, and doubtless his account is based on local legends. The trees of the grove were stained with the blood of sacrifices, and the hollow cav- erns were heard to roar at the movement of the earth; the yew trees bent down and rose again; flames burned but did not consume the wood; dragons entwined surrounded the oaks. Hence people were afraid to approach the sacred grove, and the priest did not venture within its precincts at midnight or 12
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« on: July 04, 2019, 10:15:31 PM »
https://archive.org/details/mythologyofallra21gray THE MYTHOLOGY OF ALL RACES Volume II EDDIC NORDIC PLATE I Wayland Smith’s Cave or Forge Wayland Smith is the Volund of the Eddie poem V olundarkvitha. The Volund story had its origin among the Saxon tribes, but spread all over the Teu- tonic area. It was known to the Anglo-Saxons, and ‘ Welandes Smiththan ’ is mentioned in a document dating from a few years before the Norman Conquest. The name had been given to the remains of a cham- bered tumulus or ‘Long Barrow’ (or, as some re- gard it, a chambered dolmen) at Ashbury, Berkshire. For the legend connected with this, see p. 271, and Sir W. -Scott’s Kenilworth , chapter xiii and note 2. The Anglo-Saxon poem, Deor's Lament, refers to the Volund story, and in a document of the year 903 a.d. mention is made of a place in Buckingham- shire called ‘ Welandes Stocc.’ The phrase ‘ Welan- des geweorc ’ was also used by the Anglo-Saxons to denote weapons and ornaments of exceptional value. THE MYTHOLOGY OF ALL RACES IN THIRTEEN VOLUMES CANON JOHN ARNOTT MacCULLOCH, D.D., Editor GEORGE FOOT MOORE, A.M., D.D., LL.D., Consulting Editor EDDIC BY JOHN ARNOTT MacCULLOCH HON. D.D., ST. ANDREWS VOLUME II ARCHAEOLOGICAL INSTITUTE OF AMERICA MARSHALL JONES COMPANY • BOSTON M DCCCC XXX Copyright, 1930 By Marshall Jones Company Copyrighted in Great Britain All rights reserved Printed February 1930 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY THE PLIMPTON PRESS • NORWOOD • MASSACHUSETTS TO MY WIFE 15380 CONTENTS PAGE Author’s Preface xi Introduction 3 Chapter I The Gods: A General Survey 15 II The Vanir 25 III Euhemerism 31 IV The Greater Gods — Odin 37 V The Greater Gods — Thor 68 VI The Greater Gods — Tyr 97 VII The Vanir Group — Njord 101 VIII The Vanir Group — Frey 108 IX The Vanir Group — Freyja 120 X Balder 127 XI Loki 139 XII Lesser Gods 151 XIII Mimir 167 XIV AIgir 171 XV Frigg 174 XVI Lesser Goddesses 178 XVII Ran 190 XVIII Nature 192 XIX Animals 216 XX The Alfar or Elves 219 XXI VyETTIR 228 XXII The Fylgja 233 XXIII The Norns 238 XXIV Valkyries 248 15380 viii CONTENTS PAGE Chapter XXV Swan-maidens 258 XXVI Dwarfs 264 XXVII Giants 275 XXVIII Trolls 285 XXIX The Nightmare Spirit 288 XXX Werwolves 291 XXXI Magic 295 XXXII The Other World 303 XXXIII Cosmogony and the Doom of the Gods . 324 Notes 349 Bibliography 387 ILLUSTRATIONS PLATE FACING PAGE I Wayland Smith’s Cave — Coloured . . Frontisfiece II Borg in Iceland 4 III The Three Odins and Gangleri 12 IV The Golden Horns 16 V Details of the Larger Horn 22 VI Details of the Smaller Horn 32 VII Odin 46 VIII Swedish Grave-stone 60 IX Representations of Thor 68 X Thor and the Midgard-serpent 76 XI Thor’s Hammer Amulets 84 XII Altar to Mars Thingsus 98 XIII Scenes from the Larger Golden Horn 106 XIV Frey 114 XV Ancient Wagon 122 XVI The Oseberg Ship 130 XVII Sculptured Stone from Gotland 138 XVIII Loki and Sigyn 146 XIX Heimdall 152 XX Bronze Trumpet 160 XXI Vidarr 168 XXII Images and Grave-plate 176 XXIII Icelandic Temple 184 XXIV Sun Symbols 196 XXV Sun Carriage 198 XXVI Sun Symbol 200 XXVII Rock-carvings and Bronze Razors 204 XXVIII Sea-giantess 210 XXIX Wolf-headed Monster 218 XXX Carved Post from the Oseberg Ship 230 XXXI Runic Stone and Gundestrupp Silver Bowl .... 238 XXXII The Gundestrupp Bowl 246 XXXIII Ritual Vessel on Wheels 254 ix X ILLUSTRATIONS PLATE FACING PAGE XXXIV The Franks’ Casket 266 XXXV The Franks’ Casket 272 XXXVI Runic Monument with Troll-wife 286 XXXVII Spear-head, Sword, and Bear’s Tooth 296 XXXVIII Entrance to a Giant’s Chamber — Coloured . . . 306 XXXIX Bronze Age Barrow 310 XL Helga-fell and Sacred Birch-tree 316 XLI Holy Well and Royal Barrows 320 XLII The Bewcastle Cross 324 XLIII Detailed Carving on the Bewcastle Cross .... 326 XLIV The Ruthwell Cross 332 XLV The Dearham Cross 336 XL VI Magic Symbols: Detail from the Smaller Golden Horn 338 XLVII Anglo-Saxon Draughtsmen 346 PREFACE W HEN this Series was first projected, Professor Axel Olrik, Ph. D., of the University of Copenhagen, was asked to write the volume on Eddie Mythology, and no one more competent than he could have been chosen. He agreed to undertake the work, but his lamented death occurred before he had done more than sketch a plan and write a small part of it. Ultimately it was decided that I should write the volume, and the result is now before the reader. Throughout the book, the names of gods, heroes, and places are generally given without accents, which are meaningless to most readers, and the spelling of such names is mainly that which accords most nearly with the Old Norse pronunciation. £ Odin,’ however, is preferred to the less usual £ Othin,’ and so with a few other familiar names, the spelling of which is now stereotyped in English. Several of the illustrations are from material which had been collected by Professor Olrik, with which the publisher supplied me. The coloured illustrations and those in pen and ink draw- ing are by my daughter. I have to thank the authorities of the British Museum for permission to use their photographs of the Franks’ Casket and of Anglo-Saxon draughtsmen; the Director of the Universitetets Oldsaksamling, Oslo, for photographs of the Oseberg Ship; Mr. W. G. Collingwood, F.S.A., for per- mission to reproduce his sketches of Borg and Helga-fell; and Professor G. Baldwin Brown, LL.D., of the Chair of Fine Art, University of Edinburgh, for photographs of the Dearham, Bewcastle, and Ruthwell Crosses. J. A. MacCULLOCH The Bridge of Allan Scotland October 8, 1929 EDDIC MYTHOLOGY BY JOHN ARNOTT MacCULLOCH INTRODUCTION T HE Teutonic peoples in the early centuries of our era were found over a considerable part of central Europe, north of the Rhine and the Danube. They also stretched farther northwards and had occupied Denmark and a great part of the Scandinavian peninsula from prehistoric times. In the fifth century began those movements of the Teutonic tribes which led to their occupation of the Roman empire. Ethnology divides the Teutons into three groups — the High Germans in middle and upper Germany, Switzerland, and Austria 5 the Low Germans, including the North Germans, Flemings, Dutch, Frisians, and Anglo-Saxons; and the Scandinavians of Den- mark, Sweden, Norway and Iceland. The religious beliefs of this widespread people are known to us imperfectly, and while all of them must have had a common religious heritage, one of the chief problems of religion and mythology is to decide how far all the various tribes had the same deities, the same beliefs and customs, the same myths. Very different views are advocated as solutions of this problem. What is known from classical observers regarding Teutonic reli- gion, from archaeological remains, from notices in the lives and writings of Christian missionaries, from survivals in folk- custom and folk-belief, from ecclesiastical laws, is of the high- est importance. From these sources we gather that, on many matters, there was much similarity of belief and practice, but there are many others on which it is impossible to come to a definite conclusion. While we may speak within limits of Teutonic mythology, strict exactitude should rather speak of Eddie mythology — the myths found in the Eddas , for detailed myths can hardly be 4 INTRODUCTION said to have survived elsewhere. These myths belong to Ice- land and Norway, possibly also to Sweden and Denmark. How far any of them belonged to other branches of the Teutonic people is a matter of conjecture. Here and there we have cer- tain lines of evidence which suggest a common heritage of myth. Certain myths, however, belong solely to the Scandinavian regions where the Eddie material was native, just as do also the beliefs in certain gods and goddesses. The purpose of this book is to give an account of Eddie mythology, showing wherever possible its connexions with that of other branches of the Teutonic stock. What, then, are the Eddas, and where and when were they composed? According to one manuscript of a work composed by Snorri Sturluson (1178—1241), which came into possession of Bryn- jolf Sveinsson, bishop of Skalholt in the seventeenth century, the work itself is called ‘ Eddad It deals, as we shall see, with Norse mythology. Sveinsson was also owner of a manuscript containing poems, many of which were cited by Snorri and used by him in compiling his work. From this connexion these poems now came to be called Edda or ‘ the Elder Edda / in distinction from the prose work which was styled ‘ the Younger Eddad The collection of poems was also called Scemundar Edda , from the belief that they were the work of Ssemund the Wise, an Icelandic priest and collector of old poetry, who lived in the second half of the eleventh century and died in 1133 a.d. It is now generally known as ‘ the Poetic Eddad Different derivations of the word Edda have been suggested. By many scholars it is now conceded that the word is the genitive of ‘ Oddi the name of a homestead in Iceland, which was a seat of learning, and where Snorri was educated and lived for many years, and where Ssemund had also dwelt for some time, if tradition speaks true. Hence Snorri’s book would be ‘ of Oddi ’ or ‘ the book of Oddi.’ Another derivation much favoured is that Edda is from opr, ‘song,’ ‘poem,’ and that PLATE II Borg in Iceland Borg, Iceland, the home of the poet Egil Skalla- grimsson and of Snorri Sturluson, author of the Prose Edda (see p. 4). The farm of the same name is in the centre of the picture. In the foreground is the family tomb, partly destroyed, where Egil in his poem saw Hel stand and wait his coming. From W. G. Collingwood’s Sagasteads 0} Iceland. INTRODUCTION 5 the title, as given to Snorri’s work, signified its contents and their purpose, viz., £ Poetics ’ or £ treatise of Poetics.’ Snorri Sturluson was one of the most learned men of his time — a historian, a lover of poetry, of antiquities, of the tradi- tions of the past, an able and gifted writer. His position in Ice- land was one of great influence, and eventually he became chief judge and president of the legislative assembly there. He wrote or composed the Heimskringla — a series of sagas or stories of the lives of the kings of Norway down to 1177. The first part of the work, the Ynglinga-saga , is based on the old poem Ynglinga-tal , and shows how Odin and other deities were kings and chiefs, and how the Norwegian kings were descended from the Ynglings at Upsala. Snorri’s Edda is justly styled £ a manual of Poetics.’ There had developed in the North not only special rules for the composition of poetry but a special poetic language. In the latter innumerable periphrases or £ kennings ’ ( kenningur ) had come into use, and without them poetry was now little thought of. Fortunately the poems of the Poetic Edda are remarkably free of such kennings, and in many other ways differ from the poetry of the skalds or court poets. The following examples of kennings may be given — battle was £ storm of Odin ’j a ship was £ steed of the billows ’j the earth was £ flesh of Ymir ’j gold was £ Sif’s hair.’ Thousands of such kennings, many of them even more elaborate than these, and mostly based on the old pagan mythology, were in use in the composition of verse. Obviously a knowledge of kennings demanded much study and implied a wide acquaintance with mythology. To give to young poets a full account of the old myths and to illustrate the kennings enumerated from the verses of other skalds, was Snorri’s purpose in compiling his Edda. It consists of three parts. The first of these, Gyljaginning , £ Beguiling of Gylfi,’ is a methodical account of the old gods and goddesses, the myths in which some of them figure, the cosmog- ony, and the final Doom of the gods. It is written with much 6 INTRODUCTION liveliness, spirit, humour, and pathos, and it is a wonderful monument of medieval literature. The name of this section of the work is due to the framework in which it is set. Gylfi was king of Sweden, wise and skilled in cunning and magic. He wondered whether the Aisir or gods were so cunning by nature or whether this was a gift from the powers which they wor- shipped. It should be observed that here and elsewhere in Snorri’s Edda , though not uniformly, as also in a Prologue to the work, he adopts the euhemeristic theory of the gods — they were mortal kings, magicians and the like. Gylfi, in the form of an old man called Gangleri, set out for Asgard, the seat of the gods. The yTisir, knowing who he really was and foreseeing his coming, prepared deceptions for him. He arrived and was well received, and was presented to three lords who sat on as many seats, one above the other. Their names were Har, 4 High,’ Jafnhar, 4 Equally High,’ and Thridi, 4 Third’ — all forms of Odin. Gylfi now began his questions. The answers are the myths of which Gyljaginning is full. When all had been re- counted, Gylfi heard great noises, and, looking round, found himself out of doors on a level plain. Hall and castle and Aisir had vanished. He had been deceived by glamour. In this part of his book Snorri uses some of the Eddie poems — Volusia, Grimnismal , V ajthrudnismal , with occa- sional use of four others. These he sometimes expands in reduc- ing them to prose. He also uses poems of an Eddie character now lost, save for fragments quoted by him, poems by the court poets, and, in all likelihood, much oral tradition. The result is a full and systematic account of Norse mythology as it was pos- sible to reconstruct it in Snorri’s day. The second part, the Skaldska-parmal, 4 Poetry of skalds,’ is preceded by the Bragarcedur — an account of the origin of the poetic mead, told by Bragi to Aigir, also a visitor to Asgard and the vEisir. In the Skaldskaparmal , by means of innumerable quotations from skaldic verse, the use of kennings for many sub- jects is shown. Much of it deals with the gods and several INTRODUCTION 7 myths are told. An example of the method used may be cited. ‘ How should one periphrase Njord? By calling him God of the Vanir, Kinsman of the Vanir, Van, Father of Frey and Freyja, God of wealth-giving.’ Then follows a verse by a skald illustrating some of these kennings. The third part, the Hattatal , 1 Enumeration of Metres,’ con- tains three songs of praise in which each of over a hundred stanzas is in a different metre, the oldest kinds being given last. Between them are definitions, comments and notes. It may seem strange that, in a Christian age, Snorri should have composed a work full of pagan myths, regarded from a fairly tolerant point of view. But his enthusiasm as a lover of the past, an antiquary, a folk-lorist, and a poet, explains much. If there were objectors to this telling of heathen lore, the pur- pose of it — the guidance of youthful poets and the preservation of the glories of poetic tradition — would serve as its best apology in a cultured age. The manuscript of the Poetic Edda owned by Sveinsson had been written c. 1300. It is now known as Codex Regius and is in the Royal Library at Copenhagen. It contains twenty-nine poems. Another manuscript in the Arnamagnasan collection at Copenhagen has six of the poems of Codex Regius and a sev- enth, Baldrs Draumar , which the latter lacks. Other manu- scripts contain four poems now included in the Eddie collection — Rigsthula , Hyndluljod , and Svipdagsmal , which consists of two poems, Grougaldr and F jolsvinnsmal. Another poem, Grottasongr , given in Snorri’s Edda , is usually joined with these. Thus the Poetic Edda consists of thirty-four poems. Almost certainly many other poems of a similar kind and differ- ing from the poetry current in Norway must have existed, but are now lost. A few fragments of such poems are found in Snorri’s Edda. What we do possess is a collection of mythical and heroic poems, which, taken together with Snorri’s work, give us a connected though far from complete view of Norse mythology and heroic legend. Such collections of poems as are 8 INTRODUCTION found in the Edda must have been made previous to 1300 a.d. and most probably in Iceland. Iceland had been colonized from Norway in the ninth century as a result of Harold the Fair-haired’s victory over the Norse nobles, which gave him rule over the whole land. In Iceland there grew up a vigorous civilization and intellectual life, which was abundantly fostered by the links with the world overseas, through the roving habits of the Icelanders. This manifold life was enhanced by the coming of Christianity to Iceland. The Scandinavian peoples had remained outside the Christian fold long after the conversion of the other Teutonic peoples, though not unaffected by currents from Christian civilization. Den- mark received Christianity in the tenth century ; from there it passed to Sweden and by 1075 was firmly established there. Norway was Christianized during the tenth and eleventh cen- turies, and in the same period Iceland also became Christian. Very different opinions are held regarding the date and place of composition of the Eddie poems. Probably many of them belong to the pagan period, i.e., before 1000 a . d . None of them were composed before 800 a . d ., and only a few belong to so late a time as the twelfth century. The bulk of the mythological poems, i.e., those dealing with the divinities, were composed before 1000 a . d . Some scholars believe that the poems were written by Norsemen in the Western Isles of Britain and under Celtic influences, or, like Sophus Bugge, that the bulk of them are based on tales and poems heard by the Norsemen from Irishmen and Englishmen, and that these poems and tales were in turn based on Graeco-Roman myths and Jewish-Christian legends. 1 Others hold that Norway was their place of origin. Others, again, maintain that they were Icelandic, part of the product of the busy intellectual life of that island. It is quite possible that both Norway and Iceland shared in their produc- tion. Two of the heroic poems, Atlamal and Atlakvitha were ascribed to Greenland in the thirteenth century manuscript. The authors of the Eddie poems are quite unknown.
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https://archive.org/details/mythologyofallra41gray/page/n21THE MYTHOLOGY OF ALL RACES Volume IV FINNO-UGRIC PLATE I Grave-Houses in Russian Karelia (See page 32.) Water-colour by V. Soldan-Brofeldt. FINNO-UGRIC, SIBERIAN BY UNO HOLMBERG, PH.D. DOCENT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FINLAND, HELSINGFORS VOLUME IV ARCHAEOLOGICAL INSTITUTE OF AMERICA MARSHALL JONES COMPANY • BOSTON M DCCCC XXVII I Copyright, 1927 By Marshall Jones Company Copyrighted in Great Britain All rights reserved Printed January, 1927 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY THE PLIMPTON PRESS • NORWOOD • MASSACHUSETTS BOUND BY THE BOSTON BOOKBINDING COMPANY EDITOR’S NOTE I N place of a preface, Dr. Holmberg has asked me to say that much in his account of Finno-Ugric and Siberian Mythology is the result of personal acquaintance with various tribes. In the summer of 1911 he lived among the heathen Votiaks. In the summer of 1912 he travelled in Siberia (Dis- trict Turuchansk) among the Siberian Arctic peoples. And in the summer of 1913 he lived among the Cheremias. J. A. MacCULLOCH Editor CONTENTS FINNO-UGRIC PAGE Editor’s Note v Introduction xv Chapter I The Belief in Souls 3 II Death and Burial 17 III Memorial Feasts for a Particular Dead Person 37 IV General Memorial Feasts 60 V The Fife Beyond 72 VI Animal Worship 83 VII The Seides of the Lapps 100 VIII Family Gods 113 IX Heroes 139 X Household Spirits 159 XI Forest Spirits 175 XII Water Spirits 19 1 XIII Gods of Sky and Air 217 XIV Fire 235 XV Deities of the Earth and Vegetation . . . 239 XVI Deities of Birth 252 XVII Sacrifices to Nature Gods among the Volga Finns 262 XVIII The Shaman 282 SIBERIAN Introduction 299 Chapter I World Pictures 306 II The Origin of the Earth 313 III The Pillar of the World 333 IV The World Mountain 341 1 ^ 9 9 9 JLt "xj> O (J CONTENTS PAGE viii V The Tree of Life 349 VI Destruction of the World 361 VII The Creation of Man 371 VIII The Fall of Man 381 IX The Origin of the Mosquito 386 X The Heaven God 390 XI The Sons of God 402 XII The Great Mother 413 XIII The Stars 417 XIV Thunder 439 XV Fire 449 XVI The Wind 457 XVII The Earth 459 XVIII The “Masters” of Nature 463 XIX Dreams, Sickness and Death 472 XX The Realm of the Dead 483 XXI Shamanism and Totemism 496 Notes, Finno-Ugric 527 Notes, Siberian 545 Bibliography, Finno-Ugric 563 Bibliography, Siberian 581 ILLUSTRATIONS FULL PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS late facing page I Grave-houses in Russian Karelia — Coloured . Frontispiece II A Karsikko or Memorial Tree 26 III I. Lapp Grave 36 2. Graves of the Northern Ostiaks Erected over the Ground 36 IV At the Grave. Ingermanland 56 V Sacrificial Tree of the Dead among the Eastern Votiaks — Coloured 58 VI Bear Worship of the Voguls 84 VII Masker’s Frolic at the Vogul Bear Feast 96 VIII The Holy Rastekaise Mountain in Utsjoki — Coloured 104 IX 1. Lapp Seides Made of Tree-stumps or Posts, roughly Carved in Human Form 1 10 2. The Rastekaise Mountain with two Sacred Stones 1 10 X 1. Samoyed Stone Family-god Clothed and Lifted on a Tree Trunk 114 2. Family Gods of the Ostiaks 114 XI Votiak Kuala or Sanctuary of the Family-gods .... 118 XII 1. Votiak Case for the Vorsud or “ Luck-protector ” . 122 2. Votiak Village or Great Kuala 122 XIII Vorsud Case Venerated by the Votiaks — Coloured 126 XIV 1. Remains of an old Votiak Sacrificial Kuala .... 130 2. Vorsud Case of the Votiaks, with other Sacrificial Apparatus 130 XV. I. The Little Kudo or Dwelling of the Kudo-spirit within a Cheremiss Hut or “ Great Kudo ” . . 136 2. Cheremiss Kudo 136 XVI 1. Ostiak Holy Place with Images of Gods or Spirits 140 2. Ostiak Place of Sacrifice 140 XVII 1. Votiak Sacred Grove or Lud with Surrounding Fence and Gate 146 2. Storehouse of the Ostiak Idols near Vasyagan ... 146 X ILLUSTRATIONS PLATE FACING PAGE XVIII I. Votiak Lud-kuala, formerly a Storeplace for Offerings, Sacrificial Vessels, etc. 150 2. Votiak Lud-kuala, Birsk District 150 XIX 1. The Image of the Samoyed “ Master of the For- est ”, Carved on a Tree-trunk 156 2. Cheremiss Horse-sacrifice to the Keremet-spirit in Time of Sickness 156 XX The Aino Episode in Kalevala — Coloured . .. 192 XXI I. Votiak Sacrifice to the River Buj after the Break- ing-up of the Ice 200 2. Votiak Sacrifice to the River Buj after the Break- ing-up of the Ice 200 XXII The Eastern Votiaks Sacrifice a White Goose to the Ilcaven God 204 XXIII Ostiak Sacrifice of a White Animal to the Heaven- god 208 XXIV The “World-pillar” of the Lapps 212 XXV Sacrificial Meal among the Russian Karelians . . 216 XXVI Old Sacrificial Grotto of the Thunder-god among the Finnish Lapps 220 XXVII Drawings on a Lapp Drum 224 XXVIII Drawings on a Torne-Lapp Drum 228 XXIX Ostiak Sacrifice 232 XXX Cheremiss Sacrifice to the Field-gods 242 XXXI The “Feeding” of the Sickle among the Chere- miss — Coloured 248 XXXII The Sacrifice-grove among the Cheremiss — Col- oured 262 XXXIII Cheremiss Sacrificial Loaves, Bowls and Coins at the Festival to Nature-gods . 268 XXXIV Cheremiss Sacrificial Prayer 272 XXXV A Cheremiss Priest Praying to the Accompaniment of a Stringed Instrument — Coloured . . 276 XXXVI Cheremiss Priests at the Festival to Nature-gods . . 280 XXXVII 1. Lapp Shaman’s Bowl-drum. Front, Back and Side Views 284 2. Lapp Shaman’s Sieve-drum. Front, Back and Side Views 284 XXXVIII The Living Sacrifice-tree Bound with the Sacrifice Girdle — Coloured 288 ILLUSTRATIONS xi PLATE FACING PAGE XXXIX Samoyed Shaman 294 XL An old Turkish Image and Memorial Stone in North Mongolia 302 XLI Boat-gods and Boats of the Yenisei Ostiaks . . . 308 XLII Tortoise-shell Shaped Stone Representing the World-bearing Tortoise 338 XLIII Old Turkish Memorial Image and Landscape in North Mongolia 352 XLIV Old Turkish Memorial Image in North Mongolia 372 XLV Phallus before a Mongol Monastery 396 XLVI I. Dolgan Shaman Pillars Representing the Nine Storeys of Heaven 400 2. Yakut Trees Representing the Storeys of Heaven 400 XLVII Hides of Buriat Offerings 410 XLVIII Shaman Drums from the Minusinsk District ... 432 XLIX Shaman Drums from the Minusinsk District . . . 444 L Mongol Shaman with his Drum 452 LI Mongol Stone Heap (obo) 458 LII Dress and Drum of a Mongol Shaman 462 LIII Shattered Tomb of a Yakut Shaman 466 LIV Mongol Seer Prophesying from a Shoulder-blade . 470 LV Yenisei Ostiak Shaman with Drum. Front and Back Views 476 LVI Buriat Shaman-tomb and Ongons 482 LVII 1. Buriat Shaman with his Hobby-horses .... 488 2. Hides of Buriat Shaman-animals 488 LVIII Dress of a Yakut Shaman. Back View 494 LIX I. Breast Cloth of a Yakut Shaman 504 2. Lebed-Tatar Shaman 504 3. Drum of a Lebed-Tatar Shaman 504 LX 1. Dress of a Yakut Shaman (Bird Type). Front View 508 2. Dress of a Yakut Shaman (Bird Type). Back View 508 LXI Dress of a Tungus Shaman (Bird Type). Front and Back Views 512 LXII Dress of a Yenisei Ostiak Shaman (Animal Type). Back View 518 LXIII Drum of a Yakut Shaman, Showing Inner and Outer Sides 522 ILLUSTRATIONS xii ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT FIGURE PAGE 1 Ostiak Grave-house with Coffin of the Deceased . . . . 31 2 Graveyard in Russian Karelia 33 3 Lapp Christmas Custom 67 4 Lapp Seide-stone 101 5 Lapp Sacrificial Posts 108 6 Sun Ring 225 7 Moon Ring 227 8 Lapp Sacrificial Board of the Thunder God 230 9 Drawing of Heaven on Shaman Drums 250 10 Sacrificial Bread 267 1 1 Sacrificial Accessories 274 12 Shaman Hammer 289 13 Dolgan Shaman-pillars with Figures of Birds . . . 334 14 Two-headed Birds of Iron which Hang on the Dress and Drum of the Yenisei-Ostiak Shaman 335 15 A Kalmuck World-picture 347 16 Signs of a Twelve-divisioned Period 437 17 The Tungus Thunder-bird 439 18 North-Siberian Tombs 480 19 Koori and Bucu, Spirit-birds of a Golde Shaman . .. 509 20 Dolgan Shaman-attributes and the World-tree with the Two-headed Lord of the World 51 1 21 Head-dress of a Yenisei-Ostiak Shaman (Reindeer or Stag T ) ; P e ) 5 U 22 Head-dress of the Soyot Shaman (Bird Type) 513 23 Tungus Shaman-boot (Bird Type) 513 24 Tatar Shaman (Bird Type) in Minusinsk District ... 515 25 Left Boot of Yenisei-Ostiak Shaman (Bear Type) with all the Bones of the Bear’s Left Legs 517 26 Shaman Drum with Bird-shaped Hand-grip 5 20 27 Hobby-horse of a Buriat Shaman 521 28 Relics of a Buriat Shaman Found in the Earth 521 MAP Finno-Ugrians, Siberians FACING PAGE . . 2 FINNO-UGRIC MYTHOLOGY BY UNO HOLMBERG DOCENT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FINLAND, HELSINGFORS INTRODUCTION I N THE course of thousands of years the Finno-Ugric race, which once possessed a common home and a single lan- guage, was divided, for reasons which we no longer know, into a number of smaller peoples} and these, intermingled with alien stocks, and influenced by divergent civilizations, are found as widely separated from each other as are the Baltic and the River Ob, or as the Arctic Ocean and the Danube. The nearest to the Finns, both in linguistic and in geographi- cal aspects, are the Esthonians (about 1,250,000 in number), who live south of the Gulf of Finland} the Livonians, an almost extinct people who dwell on the northernmost point of Courland and give Livonia its name} the Votes (about 1000) and the Vepses (about 26,000), the former of whom inhabit western Ingermanland (now part of the Russian Government of Petrograd) in the vicinity of the city of Narva, while the latter are to be found south-west of Lake Onega. Among the Finns themselves, who number about 3,500,000, various lin- guistic groups are distinguishable: Tavastlanders in the west, Karelians in the east and along the Finno-Russian boundary, between Lake Ladoga and the White Sea, the Russian Kare- lians, the most northerly of whom seem to be mentioned in the old Norse sagas under the name of Bjarmar} the Ingrians of Ingermanland are also included among the Karelian stocks. In the seventeenth century Finnish Karelian families migrated as far as the Russian Governments of Novgorod and Tver} and some of the Finns are found in Scandinavia. At the beginning of our era all the peoples mentioned above — i.e., the so-called Baltic Finns — may still have spoken approxi- mately the same language. XVI INTRODUCTION From many borrowed words we may infer that at an early period Finnish influence prevailed among the Lapps, who, about 30,000 in number, inhabit a wide region which extends from Trondhjem in Norway to the White Sea in the east, and who thus belong to Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. Anthropologically, however, the Lapps appear to belong to a race different from the Finnish, although their language is held to be Finno-Ugric. Of the remaining Finno-Ugric peoples, those most nearly related to the Baltic Finns are the Mordvins, who number about 1,400,000, and whose language falls into two distinct dialects — Moksha and Erzya. The Mordvins are divided into a multitude of small clans through- out the vast region in inner and eastern Russia south of the great curve of the Volga, and along that river and its tribu- taries in the Governments of Tambov, Nizhniy-Novgorod, Pensa, Simbirsk, Saratov, Kazan, Samara, Ufa, and Orenburg. At an earlier date, however, the Mordvins appear to have in- habited a more uniform region, and one which was so far to the west that they were in contact with the Lithuanian peoples, as is shown by the Lithuanian loan-words in their language. Next to the Mordvins, the nearest kindred of the Finns are the Cheremiss, who number about 400,000 and dwell for the most part along the central Volga in the Governments of Vyatka, Kazan, Nizhniy-Novgorod, and Kostroma. From the character of the regions which they inhabit, the Russians usually designate those living to the left of the Volga as “ Meadow Cheremiss,” and those to its right as “ Hill Cheremiss.” During the last century a portion of the Chere- miss also colonized a large district to the east on the Kama in the Governments of Ufa and Perm; and these are generally termed “ Eastern Cheremiss.” Near to the Volga Finns is the dwelling-place of the Votiaks (about 450,000 in number), who, with their kinsfolk, the Siryans (to the number of about 300,000), constitute the so- called Permian linguistic stock. The former live chiefly in INTRODUCTION xvii the Governments of Vyatka and Kazan, but have in part later migrated across the Kama into the Governments of Perm, Ufa and Samara. The latter dwell north of the Votiaks in the vast expanse along the rivers and streams of north-eastern Russia. All the peoples whom we have thus far mentioned form a single great linguistic group, from which the so-called Ugrian stock seems to have separated at an early date. To them belong the Voguls (about 5000 in number) on both sides of the Ural in the Governments of Perm and Tobolsk, and also the Ostiaks (of whom there are about 19,000) on the Ob and its tributaries. Their nearest congeners are the Hungarians, or Magyars, who number about 10,500,000, and who, break- ing off from the parent stock in the migrations of the peoples, wandered to their present land of Hungary toward the close of the ninth century. Of all these Finno-Ugric peoples only the Hungarians, the Finns, and the Esthonians have been in a position to attain a superior degree of civilization. Some — especially the Lapps, the Ostiaks, and the Voguls — who live principally by fishing and the chase, or else are nomads wholly dependent on the reindeer for food and raiment, stand on the humble level of primitive folk. The same statement holds true of the Samo- yeds, whose vast territory lies on the tundras along the Arctic Ocean, stretching from the region of Archangel in the west to Cape Chelyuskin, the northern-most promontory of Siberia, in the east. As their language clearly shows, they have been in closest relation to the Finno-Ugric peoples. In conformity with their principal dialects, several groups of Samoyeds are usually distinguished, the most numerous being the Yuraks, of whom there are about 12,000, and who dwell furthest to the west, between Archangel and the mouth of the Yenisei. East of them are the Yenisei Samoyeds and the Awam Samoyeds, who are but few in number and are a dying race. The tundras between the Ob and the Yenisei, as well as the forest regions INTRODUCTION xviii in the northern part of the Government of Tomsk and the ad- joining portions of the Governments of Tobolsk and Yenisei, are the home of the so-called Ostiak Samoyeds, of whom there are about 4000 ; and the northern slopes of the lofty Sayan Mountains are the habitat of the scanty remnants of the Ka- mass stock, which, though once so numerous, is gradually be- coming either extinct or Tatarized. Of the remaining Finno-Ugric peoples only the northern Siryans are nomads relying upon the reindeer for support; for all the others agriculture constitutes the principal means of livelihood, even though it is very primitive in many places. In different regions and at various periods the Finno-Ugric stocks have been subject to heterogeneous civilizing influences, as is shown, among other evidences, by their language. The eastern branches have long lived in contact with the Turco- Tatars, the chief focus of civilization in the east having ap- parently been the Bolgar kingdom on the Volga, for the Turkish people which established itself on the central por- tion of that river about 600 a.d. sustained far-reaching con- nexions with all the nations that dwelt about it. Their de- scendants are the Chuvashes, the greater part of whom inhabit the Governments of Kazan, Simbirsk, Ufa, Saratov, etc.; and among them the investigator may find traces of the relatively high pagan civilization of the Volga Bolgars, as well as of their ancient religious concepts and customs. In 922 the Bol- gars embraced Islam; but in 1236 the Tatars put an end to their power and for a time remained the ruling race in eastern Russia. Through this people Arabo-Muhammadan civiliza- tion made its way in some measure among the eastern Finno- Ugric stocks; but despite this, the ancient paganism of the Bolgars has left deep traces, particularly as regards the reli- gious concepts and customs of the Cheremiss. At a later period Russian folk-belief also penetrated everywhere side by side with Russian colonization. The Baltic Finns and Lapps, on the other hand, received INTRODUCTION xix their deepest impress from the Teutonic race; and the Scan- dinavian Lapps, in particular, borrowed from their neighbours a host of religious beliefs and usages which actually cast light on the ancient Scandinavian religion as well. The Baltic Finns, moreover, came in close contact with the Lithuanians, traces of whose language, as already noted, are likewise found among the Mordvins; and these latter, at a time subsequent to that of their separation from the Baltic Finns, were influ- enced by some Indo-European people from whom they actu- ally received their name for “ God ” (Pas, Pavas; cf. Sanskrit Bhagas, Old Persian Baga, Old Church Slavic Bogu). The ancestors of the Finno-Ugric peoples, however, were in con- tact with the forefathers of the Indo-European stocks at a very remote period, as is shown also by certain mythological desig- nations; while numerous borrowed words demonstrate that the Magyars have been subjected to Turco-Tatar, Slavic, and (later) Teutonic influences. Though all the Finno-Ugric peoples have now come into contact with Christianity, this religion is held only superficially in many places among the stocks that live in Russia. The an- cient sacrificial customs still survive, despite the fact that in some localities the saints’ days of the Christian Church are substituted for the pagan days of sacrifice. Occasionally — as among the Siryans, the Russian Karelians, and the Orthodox Esthonians — certain saints have begun to take the place of ancient gods in receiving propitiation by means of sacrificial gifts. A like custom prevailed among the Finns during the Roman Catholic period, and even later. At a very early date the Magyars, the Baltic Finns, and the Siryans were led to ac- cept the Christian faith; but among the Volga Finns mission- ary activity did not begin until after the fall of Kazan in 1552, and first began to bear visible fruit in the eighteenth century. Even at the present day there are some thousands of unbap- tized Cheremiss and Votiaks, part of whom (at least among the former) cling with great tenacity to the beliefs and cus-
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« on: July 02, 2019, 10:50:49 PM »
https://archive.org/details/mythologyofallra31gray/page/214With Russians it's not meant RF/Muscovy, but (pre-) Kyvian-RUS /Ukraine-Rus see also http://www.reddit.com/r/russiawarinukraine/comments/39l326/current_europeans_emerged_from_the_ukraine_says/https://www.reddit.com/r/russiawarinukraine/comments/37tryg/muscovy_the_name_of_the_grand_duchy_of_moscow/SLAVIC MYTHOLOGY BY JAN MACHAL, Ph.D. PROFESSOR OF SLAVIC LITERATURES, BOHEMIAN UNIVERSITY, PRAGUE WITH A CHAPTER ON BALTIC MYTHOLOGY BY THE EDITOR EDITOR’S PREFACE F OR obvious reasons it has not been possible to have the col- laboration of the author of this Slavic Mythology in seeing his work through the press. This duty has, therefore, devolved upon me, though the task has been lightened by constant refer- ence to his Bajeslovi slovanske (Prague, 1907), on which his present study is largely based. Since the author supplied no Notes, and as they seemed to me desirable, I have added them. All responsibility for them is mine, not his; but I trust that they will not be displeasing to him. Professor Machal wrote, at my request, a chapter on the mythology of the Prussians, Letts, and Lithuanians. As this has not been received, I have endeavoured to supply it; but since I hope to prepare a study of the religion of these peoples to be published on another occasion, I have restricted myself rigidly to their mythology, discussing neither their religion, their ethnology, nor their history. That Professor Machal did not so limit his scope is to me a source of pleasure; for in those systems of religion where practically nothing is as yet accessible in Eng- lish it seems preferable to treat the theme without meticulous adherence to a theoretical norm. The excellent translation of Professor Machal’s study has been made by his colleague, Professor F. Krupicka, to whom he desires to express his gratitude for his assistance in this regard. LOUIS H. GRAY. November 6, 1916. PRONUNCIATION T HE vowels are pronounced generally as in Italian. In the Lithuanian diphthong ai the first element predominates almost to the suppression of the second. Russian e has the sound of the English word yea or of ye in yes; Lithuanian e (often written ie ) is pronounced like yea, but with a slight a-sound added ( yd a ), and u is equivalent to uo a (very like English whoa a ) ; Lettish ee is simply e (English a in fate) ; Polish ie is like Eng- lish ye in yes; Russian iy is practically the i in English pique. The Slavic i and u have only an etymological value, and are not pronounced; in the present study they are omitted when final, so that Perunu, e.g., is here written Perun. J is like y (for convenience the Russian letters often tran- scribed ja, etc., are here given as ya, etc.); of the liquids and nasals, r and / between consonants have their vowel-value, as in English betterment, apple-tree ( bettrment , appltree ) ; r is pro- nounced in Polish like the z in English azure, and in Bohemian like r followed by the same sound of z; Polish t is a guttural (more accurately, velar) l; n has the palatal value of ni in English onion. The sibilant/ is like sh in English shoe (in Lithuanian this sound is often written sz), and z (Lithuanian z) is like z in azure. Of the consonants c (often written cz in Lithuanian) has the value of ch in church; ch that of the German or Scottish ch in ach, loch; c that of the German z ( ts ). The consonant-groups in the present study are pronounced as follows: cz like ch in church; dz and dj like / in judge; rz like z in azure; sj like sh in shoe; and szcz like shch in fresh-chosen. INTRODUCTION S INCE those records of ancient Slavic life which have sur- vived are very superficial, it is not surprising that only scanty and fragmentary knowledge of Slavonic religions has come down to us. The native chroniclers, imbued with Chris- tian civilization, dealt shallowly and, it would seem, reluctantly with the life of their pagan ancestors; and while writers of other nationalities have left much more thorough accounts of the religions of the Slavic peoples, yet, being ignorant of the Slavic dialects and insufficiently familiar with the lives and customs of the Slavs, their documents are either very confused or betray a one-sided Classical or Christian point of view. It must further be borne in mind that the extant data treat of the period immediately preceding the introduction of Chris- tianity, when the Slavic nations, inhabiting a wide-spread region and already possessed of some degree of civilization, had made considerable progress from their primeval culture. Hence no inferences may be drawn from the mythology of one Slavic nation as to the religion of the Slavs as a whole. The most ample evidence, relatively speaking, is found regarding the religion of the Elbe Slavs, who adopted Christi- anity as late as the twelfth century. Thietmar, Bishop of Merseburg, gives the earliest accounts of their religion (976- 1018), 1 and the description of the rites of the Slavic tribe of the Lutici by Adam of Bremen, in his Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum (eleventh century), 2 is founded chiefly on Thietmar’s report. Helmold, a German chronicler of the twelfth century, who had seen the countries of the Elbe Slavs 222 INTRODUCTION with his own eyes, transmitted important evidence of their religion in his Chronica Slavorum ; 3 and in like manner the Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus, writing in the same cen- tury, spoke of the idolatry of the Elbe Slavs, 4 his statements being confirmed by the Danish Knytlingasaga . 5 Further de- tailed accounts of Slavic paganism may be found in the lives of St. Otto, a bishop of Bamberg, who was renowned as a missionary among the Pomeranian Slavs. 6 The most important evidence for Russian religion is con- tained in the Chronicle of Nestor (noo); 7 further fragments of pagan customs are preserved in the old Russian epic Slovo o pluku Igor eve (“Song of Igor’s Band”), which dates from the twelfth century; 8 and to these two main sources for a knowledge of the pagan period in Russia may be added some old religious writings directed against the heathenism which still lingered among the folk. Mention of the religions of the eastern and southern Slavs is made in the works of the Greek historian Procopius of Caesarea (sixth century) 9 and of the Arabian travellers al- Mas‘udl 10 and Ibrahim ibn Vasifshah 11 (tenth and twelfth centuries respectively), while allusions to ancient Slavic pagan rites and idolatry are found in the mediaeval encyclopaedias which were translated from Greek and Byzantine originals. The main source for the religion of the Czechs is the Chronicle of Cosmas (ob. 1125), 12 supplemented by the Homiliary of the Bishop of Prague (twelfth century.) 13 The chronicler Dtugosz (fifteenth century) records fairly detailed accounts of the old Polish religion, although they are not very reliable; 14 and allu- sions of a more specific character occur in some fragments of old Polish literature, particularly in Polish-Latin homilies. 15 These poor and scanty accounts of the mythology of the ancient Slavs are supplemented by old traditions which still live among the people, these legends being very rich and con- taining ample survivals of the past, since even after their conversion to Christianity the common folk clung to their INTRODUCTION 223 pagan beliefs. Thus ancient national tales, preserved to this very day, contain distinct traces of the early faith, and these traditions, verified by old evidence, are of such prime impor- tance that they will form the basis of our description of Slavic mythology. ' SLAVIC MYTHOLOGY PART I THE GENII SLAVIC MYTHOLOGY CHAPTER I BELIEF IN SOUL AND GENII I N Slavic belief the soul is a being quite distinct from the body, which it is free to leave even during life, so that there are many stories of human souls coming forth from the bodies of sleeping persons and either dwelling in trees or, in the shape of white birds, fluttering about in the world and finally return- ing to their normal habitations. It is inadvisable to go to bed thirsty, lest the soul, wearied by its search for water, may weaken the body. If a man faints, his soul leaves his body and uneasily flutters about the world; but when it returns, consciousness is likewise restored. Some individuals have lain like dead for three days, during which time their souls dwelt in the other world and beheld all that might be seen either in heaven or in paradise. A soul which leaves the body when asleep and flies about in the world is called Vjedogonja or Zduh, Zduhacz (“Spirit”) by the Serbs; and not only the souls of sleeping persons, but even those of fowls and domestic animals, such as cats, dogs, oxen, etc., may be transformed into Zduhaczs. These genii, regardless of nationality, sex, or age, assemble on mountain-tops, where they battle either singly or in troops, the victors bringing to their countrymen a rich har- vest and success in breeding cattle; but if a man’s soul perishes in this fight, he will never awake. In Montenegro a distinction is drawn between Zduhaczs of land and sea, the former causing drought, and the latter rain, so that the weather depends on which of these two wins. A sudden storm points to a battle 228 SLAVIC MYTHOLOGY among such Zduhaczs; but in all other respects these genii are considered good and sensible and stand in high repute. The Montenegrins personify the soul as Sjen or Sjenovik (“Shadow”), this being a genius which has charge of houses, lakes, mountains, and forests, and which may be a man or a domestic animal, a cat, a dog, or — more especially — a snake. It is a general Slavic belief that souls may pass into a Mora, a living being, either man or woman, whose soul goes out of the body at night-time, leaving it as if dead. Sometimes two souls are believed to be in such a body, one of which leaves it when asleep; and a man may be a Mora from his birth, in which case he has bushy, black eyebrows, growing together above his nose. The Mora, assuming various shapes, ap- proaches the dwellings of men at night and tries to suffocate them; she is either a piece of straw, or a white shadow, or a leather bag, or a white mouse, a cat, a snake, a white horse, etc. First she sends refreshing slumber to men and then, when they are asleep, she frightens them with terrible dreams, chokes them, and sucks their blood. For the most part she torments children, though she also throws herself upon ani- mals, especially horses and cows, and even injures and withers trees, so that various means are employed to get rid of her. In Russia the Moras, or Kikimoras, play the role of house- hold gods ( penates ). They are tiny female beings who live behind the oven; and at night they make various noises, whining and whistling, and troubling sleeping people. They are very fond of spinning, hopping from place to place all the time; and they tangle and tear the tow of women who rise from the spinning-wheel without making the sign of the cross. They are invisible and do not grow old; but manifestation of their presence always portends trouble. Among the Slavs, as well as among many other peoples, there is a wide-spread belief that certain persons can assume the form of wolves during their lifetime, like the English werewolf, the French loupgarou , the Lithuanian vilkakis, etc., BELIEF IN SOUL AND GENII 229 such a man being termed Vlkodlak (Vukodlak, Vrkolak, Volkun, etc.)* A child born feet foremost or with teeth will become a Vlkodlak; and a man may undergo transformation into such a being by magic power, this happening most fre- quently to bride and bridegroom as they go to the church to be married. A person turned into a Vlkodlak will run about the village in the shape of a wolf and will approach human dwellings, casting plaintive glances at people, but without harming anyone; and he will retain his wolf-like shape until the same person who has enchanted him destroys the charm. Among the Jugo-Slavs (“Southern Slavs”) there still lingers an old tradition, dating from the thirteenth century, of a Vukodlak who followed the clouds and devoured the sun or the moon, thus causing an eclipse; and accordingly, on such an occasion, drums were beaten, bells rung, and guns fired, all this being supposed to drive the demon away. The Vlkodlak can transform himself not only into a wolf, but also into hens and such animals as horses, cows, dogs, and cats. At night he attacks cattle, sucks the milk of cows, mares, and sheep, strangles horses, and causes cattle to die of plague; he may even assail human beings, frightening, beating, and strangling them. The Slavs in Istria believe that every single family has its own Vukodlak, who tries to harm the house; but the house also possesses a good genius, the Krsnik (Kresnik, Karsnik), who protects it from the Vukodlak and battles with him. In popular tradition the Vlkodlak is frequently identified with the Vampire, and similar stories are told concerning both beings. The Slavs universally believe that the soul can leave the body in the form of a bird (a dove, a duck, a nightingale, a swallow, a cuckoo, an eagle, a raven) or else as a butterfly, a fly, a snake, a white mouse, a hare, a small flame, etc. For this reason, whenever a man dies, the window or the door is left open, thus freely enabling the soul to come and go so long as the corpse remains in the house. The soul flutters about the 230 SLAVIC MYTHOLOGY cottage in the shape of a fly, sitting down, from time to time, upon the stove and witnessing the lamentations of the mourners as well as the preparations for the funeral; and in the court- yard it hovers around as a bird. That the soul of the dead might suffer neither hunger nor thirst, various kinds of food or drink were put into the coffin or the grave; and besides other presents, small coins were given to the deceased, thus enabling him to buy a place of his own beyond the tomb. At the banquet celebrated after the burial a part of the meal was put aside for the soul, which, though invisible, was partaking of the feast; and during the first night after the funeral the soul returned to the house to see it once more and to refresh itself. Accordingly a jug of water was placed under the icons, and on the following day it was in- spected to ascertain whether the soul had drunk or not, this practice sometimes being continued for six weeks. In Bulgaria the head of the grave is sprinkled with wine the day after the funeral, in order that the soul may not feel thirsty; while in Russia and in other Slav countries wheat is strewn or food is put upon the place of burial. For forty days the soul dwells on earth, seeking for places which the deceased used to frequent when alive; it enters his own house or those of other persons, causing all sorts of trouble to those who had been enemies to the departed, and it is either invisible or else appears in the form of an animal. Bulgarian tradition speaks of the soul as approaching the body on the fortieth day, trying to enter it and to live anew; but being frightened by the disfigured and decaying corpse, it flies away into the world beyond the grave. The belief that the soul remains for forty days in the places where it had lived and worked is universal among the Slavs. According to Russian tradition it then flies upward to the sun, or the moon, or the stars, or else it wanders away into forests, or waters, or moun- tains, or clouds, or seas, etc. The souls of the deceased often appear as jack-o’-lanterns in — 15 BELIEF IN SOUL AND GENII 231 flickering about in churchyards or morasses, leading people astray in swamps and ponds, or strangling and stupefying them. Woe to him who ridicules them or whistles at them, for they will beat him to death; but if a wanderer courteously asks their guidance, they will show him the road that he must follow. In Slavic belief the souls of the departed maintained, on the whole, friendly relations with the living, the only exceptions being the ghosts of those who had been either sorcerers or grievous sinners in their lifetime, or who had committed'suicide or murder, or who had been denied Christian burial. The souls of sorcerers, whether male or female, are loath to part with their bodies and cannot leave in the usual way by door or window, but wish to have a board in the roof removed for them. After death their souls take the shapes of unclean animals and enter houses at night, worrying the inmates and seeking to hurt them, the same enmity toward the liv- ing being shown by the souls of those who have committed suicide, since they endeavour to revenge themselves for not having been properly buried. In ancient times the bodies of suicides, as well as criminals, drowned persons, and all who had met with a violent death or were considered magicians, were refused interment in the churchyard, their corpses being buried without Christian rites in forests or swamps, or even thrown into pits. The lower classes believed that the souls of such persons caused bad harvests, droughts, diseases, etc.; and, therefore, a stake was nan through their hearts, or their heads were cut off, despite the efforts of the ecclesiastical and secular authorities to put an end to this sort of superstition. The belief in Vampires (deceased people who in their lifetime had been sorcerers, bad characters, or murderers, and whose bodies are now occupied by an unclean spirit), which may be traced back as far as the eleventh century, is still widely cur- rent among the Slav population. The name, which also appears as Upir, Upior, etc., is probably derived from the Turkish uber hi — 16 232 SLAVIC MYTHOLOGY (“enchantress ”) ; but other designations are likewise used, such as Wieszczy and Martwiec (Polish), Vedomec (Slovenian), Kriivnik (Bulgarian), Oboroten (Russian), etc. The Southern Slavs believe that any person upon whom an unclean shadow falls, or over whom a dog or a cat jumps, may become a Vampire; and the corpse of such a being does not decay when buried, but retains the colour of life. A Vampire may suck the flesh of his own breast or gnaw his own body, and he encroaches even upon the vitality of his nearest rela- tions, causing them to waste away and finally die. At night the Vampires leave their graves and rock to and fro upon wayside crosses, wailing all the time. They assume
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« on: June 25, 2019, 11:36:09 PM »
These form the base books. Btw I've noticed from 1750-1850 and then up to World War 1, and after that up to1 930 were the best books on research n whtever subject. Scholars were eager to research, not like nowadays... The thirteen volumes of this magnificent series were issued under the editorship of Louis H. Gray, J. A. MacCulloch, and G. F. Moore between 1916 and 1932. Some of the treatments have not been surpassed. Vols. 2, 4-5, 7-8, 13 are edited by J.A. Macculloch and G.F. Moore, and have imprint: Boston, Archaeological Institute of America, Marshall Jones Company Bibliography at end of each volume I. Greek and Roman, by W.S. Fox. 1916.-- https://archive.org/details/mythologyofallra11gray_0/page/n9II. Eddic, by J.A. Macculloch. 1930.-- Nordic https://archive.org/details/mythologyofallra21gray/page/n11III. Celtic, by J.A. Macculloch; Slavic by Jan Ma?chal. 1918.-- https://archive.org/details/mythologyofallra31gray/page/n9https://archive.org/details/mythologyofallra31gray/page/214IV. Finno-Ugric, Siberian, by Uno Holmberg. 1927.-- https://archive.org/details/mythologyofallra41gray/page/n11 https://archive.org/details/mythologyofallra41gray/page/296V. Semitic, by S.H. Langdon. 1931.-- https://archive.org/details/mythologyofallra51gray/page/n5VI. Indian, by A.B. Keith; Iranian, by A.J. Carnvy. 1917.-- https://archive.org/details/mythologyofallra06gray/page/n12https://archive.org/details/mythologyofallra06gray/page/n250VII. Armenian, by M.H. Ananikian; African, by Alice Werner. 1925.-- https://archive.org/details/mythologyofallra71gray/page/n10https://archive.org/details/mythologyofallra71gray/page/101VIII. Chinese, by J.C. Ferguson; Japanese, by Masaharu Anesaki. 1928.-- https://archive.org/details/mythologyofallra08gray/page/n14IX. Oceanic, by R.B. Dixon. 1916.-- https://archive.org/details/mythologyofal09gray/page/n14X. North American, by H.B. Alexander. 1916.-- https://archive.org/details/mythologyofallra10gray/page/n8XI. Latin-American, by H.B. Alexander. 1920.-- https://archive.org/details/mythologyofallra111gray/page/n10XII. Egyptian, by W.M. Mu?ller; Indo-Chinese, by J.G. Scott. 1918.-- https://archive.org/details/mythologyofallra12gray/page/n22https://archive.org/details/mythologyofallra12gray/page/246XIII. Complete index to volumes I-XII. 1932 https://archive.org/details/mythologyofallra131gray/page/n8
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« on: June 25, 2019, 11:23:44 PM »
From Wikipedia: Uno Harva Uno Nils Oskar Harva was a Finnish religious scholar, who founded the discipline in Finland together with Rafael Karsten. A major figure in North Eurasian ethnology and study of religion, Harva is best known for his body of work on Finno-Ugric and Altaic religions. He is considered to be one of the foremost 20th-century European interpreters of shamanism... Read More https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uno%20HarvaBorn August 30, 1882 Ypäjä Died August 13, 1949 (aged 66) Turku Nationality Finnish Other names Uno Holmberg Occupation Theology, Sociology
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« on: June 25, 2019, 03:41:59 PM »
SIBERIAN MYTHOLOGY https://archive.org/details/mythologyofallra41gray/page/296BY UNO HOLMBERG PH.D. DOCENT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FINLAND, HELSINGFORS INTRODUCTION MOST dominant among the Siberian peoples is the great Altaic race, the original dwelling-place of which ap- pears to have been in the vicinity of the Altai Mountains, but which at the present time is distributed over an enormous stretch of territory in Central and North Asia, the Near East and Eastern Europe. The languages spoken by these scattered peoples are divided into three large groups: Turco-Tatar, Mongolian, and Mandshu-Tungus. Besides the Turks proper, or Osmans, the closely related Turkomans to the east of the Caspian Sea and in the Stavropol Government, and the Eastern Turkish tribes in East Turkes- tan, the Turco-Tatar group comprises further, the Tatars around the Volga, whence pioneers have migrated as far as to Western Siberia, the Tatars in the Crimea and other dis- tricts in Russia, the Bashkirs in the central Ural districts, the Nogaiyes in the Crimea and Northern Caucasia and other Tatar tribes up to south of the Caspian Sea, the Kirghis in Russia and Turkestan, the Altai Tatars in the neighbourhood of the Altai, where they form a number of smaller groups with dif- ferent dialects, — Soyots, Karagass, the Abakan, Cholym, and Baraba Tatars, — the Teleuts, the Lebed Tatars and the Ku- mandines, and also the .Yakuts by the River Lena in North Siberia, and the Chuvash from the bend of the Volga in Russia. The Mongolians, whose original home was by Lake Baikal, and from whom Mongolia derives its name, have assimilated different Turkish tribes, which have appropriated the Mongo- lian language. In the course of raids of conquest the Mon- golians have also overflowed to other districts, amongst others, INTRODUCTION 300 to Afghanistan, where they are now termed Moghols. Closely related to the Mongolians are the Kalmucks to the south of the Altai, in the southern stretches of the Tientshan Mountains and by the Volga in Russia, whither inner disturbances caused them to wander in the seventeenth century. Further, the Buriats around the Caspian Sea belong to the Mongolian group. The Mandshu-Tungus stocks, which are composed of many closely related lesser groups with different languages, appear to have migrated from the districts around the Amur River. At the present time tribes belonging to these stocks dwell over wide stretches in North-East Siberia, reaching from the Yenisei Valley to the Pacific Ocean, and from Northern China and Lake Baikal to the Arctic Ocean. The Tungus stocks dwelling in the Amur Valley include the Goldes, the Orotchones, the Manegres, etc., and also the more distantly related Solones, Mandshus and Dahurs, of which the last-named have for the most part appropriated the Mongolian language. The Tungus dwelling on the shores of the Northern Arctic Ocean and the Pacific are called Lamutes. The Dolgans dwelling around the Khatanga River, and at present wholly under the influence of the Yakut language and culture, appear also to have been originally Tungus. The primary cause of the present widely scattered state of the Altaic race would seem to be found in their restless, migra- tory mode of life, and their lust for war. Tribes belonging to this race first appeared in Europe with the great migration of the Huns, whose barbaric advance-guards are described al- ready by Ptolemaios in the second century. When these re- turned to Asia after their martial exploits, certain Turkish tribes remained behind, the remains of which are the Bolgars, or, to call them by their present name, the Chuvashes by the Volga. Early in history, Turkish peoples in Asia have built up powerful empires, attaining a certain, though short-lived, prosperity. Their chiefs have ruled everywhere in Asia. An important centre of development seems to have existed INTRODUCTION 301 at some period south of Lake Baikal on the Selenga River and its tributary, the Orkhon, where a number of ancient Turkish inscriptions on the gravestones of departed chiefs have been discovered. These inscriptions, translated in 1893 by Prof. Vilhelm Thomsen, originate from the Turk dynasty (Chinese, Tu-kiu, 680-745' A.D.) and the subsequent period of pros- perity among the Uigurs (745-840). The Uigurs came at that time into contact with missionaries from Syria, who preached the Nestorian and Manichean doctrines, and also with Buddhist missionaries from China. When, later, a part of the Uigurs moved to the districts around the Tientshan, where they took up agriculture and commerce, an important centre of culture arose in East Turkestan (900-1200 a.d.). Through the Uigurs other Mongolian tribes came into con- tact with the Christian Faith. The influence of Syrian culture is evident in the Syrian characters of Uigurean literature, re- mains of which were dug up in excavations commenced in 1905 at the town of Turfan in East Turkestan. During the period of Manicheanism, and probably during a still earlier period, ancient Persian culture affected the religious views of the Mon- golians and the Turco-Tatars dwelling at Sajan and the Altai, as will be seen from certain mythological names Mon- golian Hormusda, Kalmuck Hormustan — Persian Ahura- Mazdaj Buriat Arima = Persian Ahriman; Altai-Tatar and Kirghis Kudai (“ God ”) = Persian Hudaij Altai-Tatar Aina (“ an evil spirit dwelling under the earth ”) = Persian Aênanh). Great upheavals and new groupings of tribes took place when the great Mongolian ruler Temudjin, or as he is more often called, Jenghiz Khan or Chingiskan (1162-1227), ac- complished his ambitious schemes of conquest. These migra- tions of tribes pressed also the Turks farther west, gradually even to Europe. After the Mongolian conquest, different Tatar tribes remained behind in Russia, represented by the Tatars at present dwelling there. Jenghiz Khan himself was 302 INTRODUCTION extremely liberal in religious matters, tolerating all the dif- ferent religious sects. His successors, notably Kubilai (1260- 1294), whose capital became Pekin, were, however, more in- clined towards Buddhism, which seems also to have exercised a great influence over the Mongolians. But with the fall of the Mongol dynasty in China in 1368, Buddhism appears to have gone out of fashion, and paganism blossomed anew, until Buddhism again, in the shape of Lamaism, won over in the seventeenth century fervent disciples among both Mongolians and Kalmucks, the last-named setting up during their war in Thibet the Dalai Lama as their spiritual leader. Eager mis- sionaries arose also in the ranks of the people, and gradually, by fines and other punishments, the pagan sacrifices were over- come. For political reasons, however, many old folk-customs were tolerated by giving them a new meaning. At the present day, the orthodox people abhor their old shamanistic religion, the “ Black Religion,” which has almost entirely been sup- planted by Lamaism, the “Yellow Religion,” with Thibetan books of devotion. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Buriats south and east of the Baikal, and a part of the Tungus dwelling there, have also been led to accept the “Yellow Religion.” The older Buddhistic culture, which penetrated from China, has left among the Central Asian tribes a number of myths, in which the Buddhist names of the gods appear borrowed from the Sanscrit and not from the Thibetan. Of the tribes belonging to the Turco-Tatar group, the ma- jority, have gradually declared for Islam, which had already in the eighth century penetrated to a Turkish tribe, forcing its way via Turan into the Near East. Only the Soyotes in Mon- golia and the Uigurs, the latter lapsing little by. little into Chinamen, are Buddhists 5 the Yakuts, part of the Tungus in Trans-Baikal and the Chuvashes, being, like many of the Tatars in the Minusinsk District and on the Volga, members of the Russian Orthodox Church, -t— ? -..... PLATE XL An Old Turkish Image and Memorial Stone with Inscription in North Mongolia (See page 301.) After photograph by-S. P&lsi. INTRODUCTION 303 Traces of the religion conformed to at one time by the whole of the Altaic race, shamanism, have adhered to many of the converted tribes, such as the Yakuts, Buriats, part of the Kirghis, etc. In its primitive state, this religion still flourishes among the Tungus and the tribes related to them among the more Northern Yakuts, among the Buriats west of the Baikal, and among a few small Tatar tribes at the Altai. An important field of investigation is moreover found among all the peoples who, in different ways, have been in close contact with the Altaic race. The peoples, related to the Finns, on the River Ob, the Ostiaks and Voguls, have been at least in their southern districts influenced by the Tatars. The Tungus, again, have transmitted many of their beliefs and customs to the eastern Samoyeds and to some Old Asian tribes, such as, for example, the nearly extinct Yenisei Ostiaks and the Yukagires. Asiatic shamanism exists still among the Chukchee, Koriaks and the Kamchadales. The Kamchadales have, however, to a great part become Russianised in recent times. Among the Tungus tribes by the Amur River, and equally among the East Mongolians, Chinese culture also has in some degree left traces. Concerning the means of existence of the Altaic races, with which the religious beliefs stand in connection, the tribe most completely adhering to its primitive mode of life is the Tungus. They exist in the great primeval forests by hunting, or wander about with reindeer, riding on the backs of these j on the banks of rivers and on the sea-coasts, fishing is also an important means of existence On the same plane of civilization are also the other North Siberian peoples. The tribes dwelling on the great steppes of Central Asia have from prehistoric times been nomads 5 part of the Soyots near the Altai are reindeer-nomads. For the majority the horse and the sheep are the domestic animals of most importance. In some districts, chiefly in the south, agriculture has recently been taken up. The oldest information concerning the Mongolian and INTRODUCTION 304 Tatar religions, is found in accounts of travels by. certain Euro- peans, sent out in the thirteenth century to Central Asia. One of these was the Franciscan monk, Johannes de Plano Carpini, sent by Pope Innocent IV to the land of the Mongolians. He journeyed over the Volga as far as to Karakorum on the Orkhon, the capital founded by Ögedei, the son of Jenghiz Khan, in which town he remained over one winter. His experiences he describes in his Historia Mongolorwn. An- other important book of travel of the same period was written by the Franciscan Vilhelm Rubruquis (Ruysbroeck), who travelled in 1253-12$$ as the ambassador of the French King, Louis IX, in nearly the same districts as did Carpini. Of the accounts mentioned above, a critical edition appeared in Recueil de voyages et de mémoires fubliê far la sociêtê de Géo graf hiey tome IV, Paris, 1839. The well-known travel- ler, Marco Polo, sojourned also for a longer period among the Mongolians, going out in 1271 as the Pope’s ambassador to visit Kubilai-Khan; serving the latter at one time in the capacity of governor, until in 1292 he was accorded permission to return to his native country. His De regiombus orientalibusy touch- ing in some degree also on the religion of the Mongolians, has been translated into many languages. A few older frag- ments of knowledge concerning Mongolian religious beliefs are to be found in certain Chinese, Mohammedan, and Mongolian sources, amongst others, in the Mongolian Chronicle of Ssanang Ssetsen, translated into German by the Academician I. J. Schmidt {Geschichte der Ost-Mongolen und ihres Fur- stenhMses,i%2y). The oldest reports are, however, so few and insignificant, that it is not possible to build up any clear representation of the ancient religion of the Altaic race by their aid alone. But as the majority of the scattered peoples have retained the old traditions handed down by their ancestors nearly to the present day, even in many cases right on to our time, it has still been possible to gather together an imposing mass of material for I INTRODUCTION 305 iff. ' investigation. The foundation of these, at present compara- I tively large, collections, was already laid in the seventeenth I century, and later, after the Russian migration to Siberia. Among some of the tribes, notably the Buriats and Yakuts, native investigators have played an important part in this work. Some of the northern tribes, in particular the Tungus living in their inaccessible primeval forests, are, however, up to the % present day, still very little known. •'v i. - •' | i SIBERIAN MYTHOLOGY CHAPTER I WORLD PICTURES HE VARIOUS streams of civilization, coming at dif- ferent times and from different sources, which have crossed and recrossed Central Asia, have brought with them differing conceptions of the world we live in and the universe. The newest arrivals, usurping as they: do the supreme authority, have either altogether brushed aside the old beliefs, or, finding in them some point of contact, have assimilated them. Matters being thus, it is often extremely difficult to decide which fea- tures represent older views, and what the original world pic- ture of the Altaic race was like. To obtain some idea of how primitive peoples form their idea of the world, we will examine the strange, but to them quite natural, conception of the world of the Yenisei Ostiaks. According to their ideas, the world is divided into three parts: Above, the sky; in the middle, the earth peopled by men; below, the kingdom of the dead; but all these parts are united by the u Holy Water,” which, beginning in Heaven, flows across the earth to Hades. This water is the great Yenisei River.1 The Samoyeds also, who have learned to speak of different storeys in the sky, declare the Yenisei River to flow from the lake in the sixth storey of Heaven. In their tales, the Yenisei Ostiaks describe how the shaman rows his boat in Heaven and how he returns along the river at such terrific speed that the wind whistles through him.2 It may, be diffi- cult for us to understand these pictures, but to the Yenisei 308 SIBERIAN MYTHOLOGY Ostiak nothing can be more natural. Do they not know from experience that the earth is slanting, that the rushing river which is the dwelling-place of this fisher tribe comes from “ above ” and flows “ down ” into the depths of Hades? The south, like many other North Siberian peoples, they call u that above,” the north “ that below.” The Yenisei is to them the centre of the world, as on its banks or tributaries they place all the peoples known to them, and thus would they draw a map of the world, had they a Ptolemy amongst them. The peoples living in Central Asia imagine the world some- times as a circular disc, sometimes as a square. In an Altaic tale in which a Lama creates the earth with his staff, the world is said to have been originally circular but later to have altered, so that it is now square.8 Thus do the Yakuts also imagine the world. In their folk-poetry the four corners of both Heaven and Earth are often mentioned. The winds, for ex- ample, are said to arise in the four corners of the sky.4 Georgi relates how the Tungus made a picture of the earth which was in the form of a little square of iron plate.5 This idea, common to many peoples, is closely connected with the four cardinal points. Even in the world pictures of the civilized peoples of Southern Asia it is quite general. In a certain Yakut tale, which speaks of the octagonal earth, the points of the compass have been doubled.6 Side by side with this idea of a square world, the idea of a circular one is equally common. It is often pictured as round, and as such it appears also to the eye. Similarly shaped is the sky stretching over the earth. In the hero tales of the Yakuts the outer edge of the earth is said to touch the rim of a hemispherical sky. A certain hero rode out once to the place where earth and sky touched. Simi- larly, in some districts, the Buriats conceive the sky to be shaped like a great overturned cauldron, rising and falling in constant motion. In rising, an opening forms between the sky and the edge of the earth. A hero, who happened at such PLATE XLI Boat-Gods and Boats of the Yenisei Ostiaks (See page 308.) After photograph by U. Holmberg. ! ?..r. WORLD PICTURES 309 a time to place his arrow between the edge of the earth and the rim of the sky was enabled thus to penetrate outside the world.7 Between Heaven and Hades, the earth peopled by men forms the centre of the universe. Often the earth is called “ The Middle Place.” Sometimes this “ Middle Place ” is, in a more confined sense, the country of the people using the term. Mongolia, among other regions, is a world-centre of this description. The Chinese also call their country “ the Central Empire,” Examples of this belief, born in. the begin- ning from the anthropocentric view of the world peculiar to man, are to be found also among the ancient civilized peoples. From the fact that Mongolia is a plateau in which number- less rivers flowing in different directions have their sources, the Mongols derive their belief that they live on the peak of a world, imagined to be like a great mound, other peoples liv- ing on its sides below them. In addition to the simplified idea that the world is three- storeyed : Heaven, Earth and Hades, Altaic folk-poetry speaks often of a many-storeyed world. Especially is the sky believed to contain hemispheres, one higher than another 5 generally three, seven, or nine are spoken of, but sometimes even more. Most common is the conception of a seven- storeyed Heaven, obviously derived from the Babylonian pic- ture of Heaven, in which the sun and the moon and five planets are situated in hemispheres placed one over the other. As the complement to these seven heavens, an equal number of storeys are pictured down below. Where the sky is regarded as nine-storeyed, Hades is also divided into nine gradually de- scending parts. That a belief of this description has actually sprung from a belief in layers of stars, appears from an Altai Tatar tale, in which the sun and moon are placed in different storeys of the sky. The Moon old man lives in the sixth and the Sun mother in the seventh Heaven.8 The primitive peoples of Siberia do not, however, know the reasons for this 310 SIBERIAN MYTHOLOGY division, neither can they explain the significance of any Heaven. The most northern peoples place in the different storeys of Heaven, landscapes from the earth — mountains, lakes, tundras, snowfields, etc. The Samoyeds relate in their shaman tales that there is a lake in the first storey of Heaven, a fiat plain in the second, the third is covered with numerous heights like little volcanoes, the fourth is formed like a roof of little icicles, the sixth contains a great lake, from which springs the Yenisei. Of the remaining storeys, of which there are in some districts altogether nine, they have very little knowledge.9 The Yakuts believe that in the lower regions of the sky there are also animals, kept by the inhabitant spirits as food.
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Topics - Prometheus