# Journal of American Folk-Lore/Volume 13/Issue 48/Animal Myths and their Origin

ANIMAL MYTHS AND THEIR ORIGIN.
The embryonic stages of man sketch his race origin with impressionistic truthfulness in regard to the chief outlines, if not with photographic accuracy as to all the details. So in the development of the individual mind appear the hereditary vestiges left from the past mental evolution of the race. Since we no longer divorce the mind from the body in working out the descent of man, but recognize the common brotherhood of protoplasm in whatever form it may exist, we know to-day even better than our primitive ancestors guessed our kinship to the plants and animals about us.
The child holds communion with every living thing in his backyard world. The same voices speak to him in the dawn of the twentieth century A.D., as spoke to his cave-dwelling ancestors in the twilight of the twentieth century B.C. To the child the sympathetic wind moans with anguish over some painful cut or bruise or sighs its sad life away in unison with the sobs from his broken heart. The lily gives him its perfume distilled by the fairies who work deep down under the golden dusted anthers, and the song of the wood thrush bears to him a message which no one else may hear or know. When as a child I lay stretched out on the ground watching the ants of my own particular colony in their endless marching to and fro, their varied industries in times of peace, and their remarkable valor and extraordinary strategy in times of war, these insects became to me the ant-people.
If in those days I had read Ovid I should have believed him implicitly when he tells us that in days of old Jupiter transformed the ants in an old oak-tree into the Myrmidons,—that "thrifty race, patient of toil." As Ovid relates, the ants "suddenly grew, and seemed greater and greater, and raised themselves from the ground, and stood with their bodies upright; and laid aside their leanness, and the former number of their feet, and their sable hue, and assumed in their limbs the human shape."
So after all these centuries, in the broad sunlight of modern life, the miracles of transformation believed by the ancients are effected again in the imagination of childhood. In order to test this well-known phenomenon in a surer way than through memory, which so soon grows old, I asked my boy John to tell me what he sees in the clouds and trees, and these are the words of his answer: "Once in a while I imagine that I see forms in the clouds and trees. ​Once I imagined that I saw a man driving a flock of sheep in the clouds. Then when I was sick I thought I saw a baby in a cradle in a tree, and a mother was sitting over the baby. Then on my way to school I thought that a long pile of leaves was a snake. Once when I looked at a tree a long way off, it seemed to be a castle with two birds on the top of it. One night when I was out by a bonfire I saw two bushes that looked like a yak with long hair. One night coming home I saw a tree that seemed to be a man with a horse beside him. That same night I saw a big stone that was the shape of a turtle. At another time when I was sick, every morning I saw some trees close together; they looked like a lot of fairies dancing. Then once in a while I look up at the sky and try to find a wagon with twenty horses. Once I imagined I saw it, but every other time I could not make it out." So we see in the child, as in primitive people, the projection of his own fancies born of fear, or love, or desire, into the things about him which then become personified.
Before trying to unravel the origin of animal myths, it would be well to consider briefly the theories accounting for the origin of the animals themselves. The doctrine of spontaneous generation has been accepted in every age, including our own. From old meat maggots are born, and from the gall the gall-fly springs forth like armed Minerva from the head of Zeus. Anaximander, the first great teacher of abiogenesis, held that eels and other aquatic animals arise in such equivocal manner. Anaximenes, the pupil of Anaximander, gave a much more extended theory, when he taught that the sunlight streaming upon a slime, made up of earth and water, generates organisms. Aristotle also advanced the opinion that frogs, snakes, eels, and smaller organisms are automatically developed from the mud, while Lucretius says, "Plants and trees arise directly out of the earth in the same manner that feathers and hair grow from the bodies of animals. Living beings certainly have not fallen down from heaven, nor, as Anaxagoras supposed, have land animals arisen from the sea. But as even now many animals under the influence of rain, and the heat of the sun, arise from the earth, so under the fresh youthful productive forces of the younger earth they were spontaneously produced in larger numbers."
Ovid says in his Tenth Fable, "And although fire is the antagonist of heat, yet a moist vapor creates all things, and the discordant concord is suited for generation; when, therefore, the Earth, covered with mud by the late deluge, was thoroughly heated by the ætherial sunshine and a penetrating warmth, it produced species of creatures ​innumerable; and partly restored their former shapes, and partly gave birth to new monsters."
Coming down to more modern times, we find that Mons. Duret in 1609 published the conceit that many aquatic birds and insects are generated from rotten wood. Myths often lead to science and frequently science becomes mythic. The latter happened when such distinguished zoölogists as Needham and Buffon advanced the theory that an organism may die as an individual, but its constituent molecules reappear as infusorial animalcules. Such organic molecules are on the authority of Buffon the indestructible elements which, now in one form, now in another, pass in endless transmigration through the manifold forms of living things. Moved by such a spirit the natives of Tahiti planted iron nails given them by Captain Cook, in the hope of raising young nails.
Sir Thomas Browne accepted the abiogenesis of animals from "the putrefying juices of bodies," and conceived a scale of more and more noxious generation; "the putrefying materials producing animals of higher mischiefs, according to the advance and higher strain of corruption." At the present time as reflected in Mrs. Bergen's very complete collections of animal and plant lore, there are eleven items concerning the transformation of hairs into either worms or snakes.
So this fancy, which has come to us from ancient days, is still held in all parts of the United States as well as in other countries. Even within the last two or three years, people have asked the editor of the "Scientific American" if the horsehair makes an eel, and the editor has solemnly assured them that it does not. It is an easy step from the conception of the origin of organisms by abiogenesis to their origin from one another by heterogenesis. This is shown in the primitive ideas concerning the gods as represented in the strange Metamorphoses of Ovid. How vivid the picture when Latona, going to drink from a pool, and finding that some rustics have muddied the water, in revenge transforms them into frogs. "Their voice too is now hoarse, and their bloated necks swell out; and their very abuse dilates their extended jaws. Their backs are united to their heads; their necks seem as though cut off; their back-bone is green; their belly, the greatest part of their body, is white; and, as new-made frogs, they leap about in the muddy streams." Equally striking are the lines when jealous Pallas changes her rival Arachne, victorious in the weaving contest, into ​the ugly spider, in which body she is destined to work on at her beautiful web forever, or in that instance where the Father of the Gods, abhorring the fraudulent Cercopians, transforms them into monkeys.
Each race, as De Gubernatis emphasizes, uses the animals most familiar in imputing to the gods their transformations. Thus in India it is the serpent, or perhaps the elephant or ape that plays the title rôle. While in Europe the hero is the fox, in Japan the cat, in the United States the rabbit, and among the American Indians the bird, particularly the American eagle and the serpent. Primitively these disguised gods acted their parts among the clouds, while the arch enemy lived in some foul subterranean cavern.
It is natural that the pastoral Aryans should conceive of the vast all-producing vault of heaven as a cow, the wind as the omnipotent fecundating bull, and the stars as cows which are driven off in flight by the sun's rays. Not only the gods but, as Apuleius relates, the minor spirits, like witches, may by the use of ointments assume the forms of owls, wolves, and other animals. Here must be placed the phenomena of lycanthropy, that terrible aberration in which men suppose themselves transformed into wolves or other animals, and as such do violence to their fellows. Not only in the Middle Ages did these werewolves run riot during bloody lycanthropic epidemics, but the disease still exists with occasional outbreaks.
From the minor mythic creations and men, as subjects of transformation, to the animals and plants themselves in such a role is a natural step. The oft-quoted famous trees of Scotland and the Orkney Islands, whose remarkable fruit, resembling geese, would upon touching the water become feathered and swim off, and the marvellous Tartarian shrub upon whose top grows a lamb, were testified to by many eyewitnesses in the credulous days of Pope Pius II. of the last half of the fifteenth century. In Japan when a tree attains the age of one thousand years, its spirit takes on the human form.
In 1678 Father Kircher demonstrated the transformation of orchids into birds, apes, and men, and in 1749 De Maillet published his belief that all the animals on land and the birds of the air are born of creatures who live in the sea. In the mind of this philosopher there must be a likeness between parent and offspring, so the birds arise from flying-fishes, lions from sea-lions, and man himself ​from the husband of the mermaid. There is a myth in Japan, founded upon history, that a princess went into the mountains to care for the silk-worms, and finally her body itself became metamorphosed into such larvæ. In Japan it is supposed that the snake and the tortoise are converted into one another.
Through eleven learned chapters, Sir Thomas Browne discourses on the causes of common errors, from "the common infirmity of human nature, and the erroneous disposition of the people," "false deduction," "credulity and supinity," "obstinate adherence unto antiquity" and "unto authority," to "the last and great promoter of false opinions, the endeavours of Satan." All folk-lorists will agree with the sagacious author of the Pseudodoxia epidemica in the terms of his diagnosis except, perhaps, as to the last one. Three centuries of growth have for the most of us placed his Satanic Majesty within the mythic shades so congenial to his soul, where his chief occupation, whatever else it may be, is scarcely the promotion of " false opinions " among the descendants of Pithecanthropus. Even among modern zoölogists, discoveries amounting to veritable cases of heterogenesis have been gravely recorded. As an example of caution to such enthusiasts is the procedure of Dallinger, who once observed a totally different infusorian Amphileptus emerge from the bell of a Vorticella, and swim away. In a few years this zoölogist happened to see the first-mentioned infusorian eat up a bell-animalcule and then encyst itself within the bell. Thus a hasty theory upon the first observation would have created a case of heterogenesis from a phenomenon which later discovery showed to be perfectly natural and easily explained.
Let us turn now to some zoölogical myths which, while possibly to be regarded as twigs from the wide-branching Aryan tree, still have the appearance, at least of rebirth, in our own times, in answer to that human curiosity which would wrest from every natural phenomenon the secret cause of its being. The fishermen of the west coast of Sweden fancy that the "jelly-fish" are the mothers of the herring. The late Dr. A. W. Malon, superintendent of the fisheries of that coast, decided to find out what had suggested to them such a quaint idea. Allowing his boat to float among the jelly-fish when the water was perfectly quiet, he saw several fishes of the species Motella argenteola swimming among the Medusæ. Often one of the fish would dart into the stomach of a jelly-fish, where it seemed to feel perfectly at home, while the temporary host was not in the least disturbed by this visitor going in and out of its stomach at will.
​Another item of zoölogical folk-lore still extant is the hibernation of swallows in the dark recesses of caves, or at the bottom of ponds and pools. Pliny recognized the fact of the migration of swallows, and does not mention a belief on the part of any one in their hibernation. Following those classic letters constituting the "Natural History of Selborne," we find that Gilbert White, who united the imagination of the poet with the patience and accuracy of the naturalist, was troubled for twenty years with the question of the hibernation of swallows. At one time he believes in migration, but then a report from "a man of great veracity" comes in, and White's mind is turned toward hibernation. So back and forth sways belief until finally he is convinced in favor of hibernation by the following argument: "There is a circumstance respecting the color of swifts which seems not to be unworthy our attention. When they arrive in spring they are all over of a glossy, dark, soot-color, except their chins, which are white; but by being all day long in the sun and air, they become quite weather-beaten and bleached before they depart, and yet they turn glossy again in the spring. Now ; if they pursue the sun into lower latitudes, as some suppose, in order to enjoy a perpetual summer, why do they not return bleached? Do they not rather perhaps retire to rest for a season, and at that juncture molt and change their feathers, since all other birds are known to molt soon after the season of breeding?" In Sweden the swallows remain until late in the fall, when they become gregarious, often appearing in countless numbers near some body of water. In the dead of the night they all disappear, and so the folk believe they are at the bottom of the water, to remain under the ice during the cold weather.
The swallow as the harbinger of spring has been regarded as a propitious omen from Aryan times up to the present. But in the gloom of winter this bird disappears, and then, like all forms of the evil one, works in darkness. It is the old antithesis of the Veda, which has reappeared in Hellenic myths, the sagas of the Northmen, and the folk-lore of the present. The powers of day are in eternally recurrent warfare against those of night. The solar hero, bold, strong, and beautiful, at dawn breaks away from the foul hosts who, having captured him in the evening twilight, have kept him imprisoned in the dungeons of the nether world. Under the spell of this myth the folk have given erroneous interpretations of many natural phenomena. The belief in the hibernation of the swallows may be the atavistic reappearance of the ancestral Aryan conception of this swallowing up of the light by darkness.
​Besides Jonah, with his adventures in the belly of the whale, another instance of such atavism may be that of the viper temporarily swallowing its young in times of danger. Sir Thomas Browne relates this ancient supposition, while Cuvier denies that the viper has such a habit. However, Cuvier quotes M. Palisot de Beauvois as having seen a rattlesnake, in Martinique, when about to be struck, open its mouth and receive its young, and then later, when the danger had passed, disgorge them unharmed. There is a current superstition in Japan that the harmless snake Uwavami thus protects its young. Most zoölogical authorities conclude that none of the snakes have this power. In the Bahaman story of De Big Worrum, this dragon-like animal swallows many people, including at the last two boys, whose father follows them and cuts open "de worrum" with his lance, thus liberating all the people, who made "a big city right dere."
In line with the temporary disappearance of animals is this item from Swedish folk-lore. The birds of the crow family, particularly the raven and the magpie, are "Odin's birds." Since Odin was deposed as the God "Allfather," upon the introduction of the Christian religion, he became gradually identified with the biblical Satanas. So the crows are now consecrated to the Devil, though still often called "Odin's birds." It is the popular impression that these birds visit "Blokulla," the headquarters of Satanas Odin, one week in every year, when they must appear before this potentate to be inspected and to give him their tribute in feathers. The fattest bird must remain as a choice piece for Satan's broth, and the others return deprived of a considerable portion of their feathers. This visit to Blokulla coincides with the regular molting season in the summer. While the members of the crow family are vociferous and active during the other weeks of the year, they keep silent in their retreats during the first days of their molting. When again showing themselves they have only partially developed the new growth of feathers and look much worse than before the molting took place. The week of their retirement is thus noticed by the people, who explain it in accordance with tradition.
Considering again the transformations of ancient mythology, we find the toad an animal famous in the lore of the folk. The toad ​was at times a beautiful maiden resting under a curse, only to be released by marriage. At other times in the forbidding shape of this animal some good and powerful fairy would do deeds of love, or again Satan would transfer his foul spirit therein, to lay a spell on people, and do them other evil. However bad a name this devil's host has been given, there are some who appreciate his good qualities, for the people of Jersey and of various parts of France believe that the toad absorbs the poisonous gases from the air. The live body, the different parts of the body, the secretions and various "oils " from this amphibian constitute items in folk-medicine. In Japan the oil of toads is considered a poison. Pliny says that "authors quite vie with one another in relating marvellous stories about these poisonous animals; such, for instance, as that if they are brought into the midst of a concourse of people, silence will instantly prevail; as also that by throwing into boiling water a small bone that is found in their right side, the vessel will immediately cool, and the water refuse to boil again until the bone has been removed." So the toad has been feared and despised, and used as a synonym of contempt; or on the other hand venerated, and the killing of it considered wicked and unlucky.
In Mexico it is believed that if a toad jumps on one's stomach it so chills the person that he dies, and if a toad spits on people it poisons them. With regard to the toad's venom Gilbert White said "that it is a strange matter that the venom of toads has not been settled. That they are not noxious to some animals is plain, for ducks, buzzards, owls, stone curlews, and snakes eat them with impunity." In 1825 Dr. John Davy affirmed and tried to prove before the Royal Society that the toad is venomous. Even at the present time it is a current superstition that this animal is poisonous, either through its saliva or its urine. While neither of these secretions is harmful, yet the toad, in common with other Amphibia, secretes from cutaneous glands a milk-white, mucilaginous, foul-smelling fluid of a toxic nature. Injected subcutaneously into an animal, this secretion, like strychnine, affects the nerve centres, causing convulsions, and when applied to the surface of a tender skin it may produce erysipelas. Although innoxous to members of its own species, it is fatal to closely related forms. The poison from a toad kills the frog, and vice versa. In the toad these toxic glands are particularly aggregated along the neck to form the parotoids, and they are also found ​upon the anterior and posterior limbs. That there is any causal connection between toads and warts is doubtful. Victims of the poisonous secretions of this animal coincidently may have developed warts, or perhaps only the suggestion of its warty skin, on the law of like begetting like, may have given rise to the notion. Since a knowledge of cutaneous glands is not widely distributed, the natural inference would be, once the idea is entertained, that either the saliva or urine of the toad is the cause of the warts, or other misfortunes suffered.
Another curious myth concerning toads, along with frogs, earth-worms, and other animals, is that they come down in showers. After larval development, the young toads leave the water in large numbers and migrate, hiding by day and usually only at night hop- ping from place to place. At this time, if rain fall, the toads come out from concealment, and thus being seen by the people in such large numbers in a locality where but few, if any, had been observed previously, the supposition of the toad-shower naturally arose. In spite of this zoological explanation the mythologist may turn to Ovid and read that the Curetes, the ancient inhabitants of Crete, sprang from earth after a shower, and thus interpret these animal showers as but other instances of the release of the imprisoned light from its enemy darkness.
The origin of myths of spontaneous generation, or of transformation, either comes from erroneous observation or as a result of imperfect induction from phenomena carefully and properly observed. In the history of zoölogy before the days of careful dissection and microscopic analysis, it was the general custom to relate any wonderful story about animals with the expectation of unquestioned acceptance of the tale. Then later on as skeptics arose and expressed their doubts, it became essential to collect the animal itself in proof of the statements. With the animal or its principle parts as a voucher, the narrative necessarily must be believed, just as the picture of this morning's battle in South Africa, printed in the last edition of to-day's paper, is given to a credulous public as incontestable evidence of the truthfulness of everything depicted!
The field of animal myths is so large that in the short time at my disposal only a few cases within one section have been considered. A large province of our general territory, that of totemism, must be dismissed with but a word. The totem, as the sign manual of the clan, is generally taken to indicate a descent from the animal or plant referred to, and the friendly ghost of the ancestor hovers ​about the tepee, to guard the faithful clansman who has kept the vows of respect for the spirit of the totem and total abstinence from its body. Tylor has shown that at least among the Haidas and the Tlingit of the Pacific coast totemism is chiefly social, having to do only with hospitality and the prohibition of marriage between members of the same clan, and does not imply the hypothesis of the totem as an ancestor, but rather alludes to the totemic species as having been so closely associated with the real human ancestor that ever afterwards it should be just as closely associated with his descendants. So according to Tylor the theory of Lang, Frazer, and others that the totems represent the gods themselves therein incarnated is erroneous.
All of the fascinating fiction in which the characters are animals cleverly endowed by the story-teller with human attributes must also be left aside. Regarding the various familiar theories for the origin of these tales, we may believe that they are derived as a common heritage from our cave-dwelling and perhaps arboreal ancestors; that they were first expressed as literature of which we have record, in the Aryan Veda, then handed down from generation to generation, modified ever and anon in adaptation to new environment and often taking short cuts from one race to another through borrowing. On the other hand, we may accept the independent origin of the stories in widely separated regions and that the striking resemblances one to another are the natural results of the common inventiveness of the human mind. Indeed, it is an easy and sensible conclusion to these much discussed doctrines to accept both theories as not necessarily antagonistic and as working together in the development of folk-lore. At the base of any of these hypotheses there is a common human ancestry and an evolution of the myths concomitantly with that of the mind and body of man.
We must remember that the origin of myth was in the pliocene, when the ancestors of the races of apes and of the races of men were one and the same race. Individuals then had common needs, common hunger, and the consequent thirst for blood. When in the struggle for existence they held one another throat by throat, it was possible to read each other's simple thoughts. So these ape-men instinctively realized their intimate relationship not only with one another but with the animals and plants and other elements of nature surrounding them. It was the easiest explanation of any manifestation of force in whatever form it appeared to project their own impulses and powers into that form.
Then when all men were animals, and all animals were climbing through forests, or roaming over plains, their mental pictures were ​mainly concrete. In outwitting his foes, instead of throttling them the diverging elementary man began to make plans of strategy. From the concrete face to face expression of cause he began to project the force concerned farther and farther away, until, many ages after the genesis of reason, these forces took form in the gods who dwelt beyond the clouds, and the myths of cosmogony and transformation arose. Then love was born and faith and hope. Figments of the imagination gave birth to legends, and these grew into myths, which were told to the children in the starlight. Ideals were conceived worthy the ages of intense effort required for their later attainment. Civilization had begun and the first men with their first notions had faded away into the unremembered and undreamed of past.
Charles L. Edwards.
* ↑ Address delivered at the Eleventh Annual Meeting of the American Folk-Lore Society, New Haven, Conn., December 28, 1899.
* ↑ Book vii. fable 6.
* ↑ This, and the three following citations from Osborn, From the Greeks to Darwin.
* ↑ Clodd, Myths and Dreams.
* ↑ Ed. Simon Wilkin, book ii. chapter vii. 1836.
* ↑ Op. cit., Memoirs of the American Folk-Lore Society, vol. vii. 1899.
* ↑ Book vi. fable 3.
* ↑ Book vi. fable 1.
* ↑ Book xiv. fable 2.
* ↑ Zoölogical Mythology, New York, 1872.
* ↑ Mrs. Etsu I. Sugimoto.
* ↑ Brinton, The Myths of the New World.
* ↑ De Gubernatis l. c.
* ↑ Bohn's ed. pp. 62, 63.
* ↑ From Mrs. Etsu I. Sugimoto.
* ↑ Mundus Subterraneus, Amsterdam, 1678.
* ↑ Telliamed, Basle, 1749.
* ↑ Mrs. Etsu I. Sugimoto.
* ↑ L. c.
* ↑ Parker, Elementary Biology, p. 103, 1891.
* ↑ From Dr. Josua Lindahl.
* ↑ Natural History, book x. chap. 34. Bohn's ed. 1855.
* ↑ From Dr. Josua Lindahl.
* ↑ L. c., book iii. chap. xvi.
* ↑ Transl. by Griffith, vol. ix. pp. 344, 356.
* ↑ Crotalus horridus.
* ↑ Mrs. Etsu I. Sugimoto.
* ↑ Edwards, C. L., "Bahama Songs and Stories," Memoirs of the American Folk-Lore Society, vol. iii. p. 72, 1895.
* ↑ Dr. Josua Lindahl.
* ↑ Corvus corax.
* ↑ Pica candata.
* ↑ Blokulla—in Swedish spelled Blakulla and pronounced Blow-cullah—is equivalent to the German Hartz, the rendezvous of the witches in Easter week.
* ↑ Rolland, Faune Populaire de la France, tome iii. p. 51, Paris, 1881.
* ↑ In Gilbert White's time the toad was a specific for cancer.
* ↑ L. c.
* ↑ Natural History, book xxxii. chap. 18.
* ↑ Wiedersheim Lehrb. d. Vergleich Anat. d. Wirblethiere, p. 25, Jena, 1886; Packard, Zoölogy, p. 475, New York, 1883.
* ↑ E. D. Cope, in Standard Natural History, vol. iii. p. 328, Boston, 1885. See, also, Gilbert White, Natural History of Selborne.
* ↑ J. G. Frazer, Encyc. Brit. xxiii. 471.
* ↑ Journ. of the Anthropological Inst. Aug.–Nov. 1898.