Ea was not only the god of the deep, but also "lord of life," king of the river and god of creation. Like Osiris "he fertilized parched and sunburnt wastes through rivers and irrigating canals, and conferred upon man the sustaining 'food of life'.... The goddess of the dead commanded her servant to 'sprinkle the Lady Ishtar with the water of life'" (op. cit., p. 44).

In Chapter III. of Mr. Mackenzie's book, from which I have just quoted, there is an interesting collection of quotations clearly showing that the conception of the vitalizing properties of the body moisture of gods is not restricted to Egypt, but is found also in Babylonia and India, in Western Asia and Greece, and also in Western Europe.

It has been suggested that the name Ishtar has been derived from Semitic roots implying "she who waters," "she who makes fruitful".[110]

Barton claims that: "The beginnings of Semitic religion as they were conceived by the Semites themselves go back to sexual relations ... the Semitic conception of deity ... embodies the truth—grossly indeed, but nevertheless embodies it—that 'God is love'" (op. cit. p. 107). [This statement, however, is very misleading—see Appendix C, p. 75.]

Throughout the countries where Semitic[111] influence spread the primitive Mother-Goddesses or some of their specialized variants are found. But in every case the goddess is associated with many distinctive traits which reveal her identity with her homologues in Cyprus, Babylonia, and Egypt.

Among the Sumerians "life comes on earth through the introduction of water and irrigation".[112] "Man also results from a union between the water-gods."

The Akkadians held views which were almost the direct antithesis of these. To them "the watery deep is disorder, and the cosmos, the order of the world, is due to the victory of a god of light and spring over the monster of winter and water; man is directly made by the gods".[113]

"The Sumerian account of Beginnings centres around the production by the gods of water, Enki and his consort Nin-ella (or Dangal), of a great number of canals bringing rain to the desolate fields of a dry continent. Life both of vegetables and animals follows the profusion of the vivifying waters.... In the process of life's production besides Enki, the personality of his consort is very conspicuous. She is called Nin-Ella, 'the pure Lady,' Damgal-Nunna, the 'great Lady of the Waters,' Nin-Tu, 'the Lady of Birth'" (p. 301). The child of Enki and Nin-ella was the ancestor of mankind.[114]

"In later traditions, the personality of that Great Lady seems to have been overshadowed by that of Ishtar, who absorbed several of her functions" (p. 301).

Professor Carnoy fully demonstrates the derivation of certain early so-called "Aryan" beliefs from Chaldea. In the Iranian account of the creation "the great spring Ardvi Sura Anahita is the life-increasing, the herd-increasing, the fold-increasing who makes prosperity for all countries (Yt. 5, 1) ... that precious spring is worshipped as a goddess ... and is personified as a handsome and stately woman. She is a fair maid, most strong, tall of form, high-girded. Her arms are white and thick as a horse's shoulder or still thicker. She is full of gracefulness" (Yt. 5, 7, 64, 78). "Professor Cumont thinks that Anahita is Ishtar ... she is a goddess of fecundation and birth. Moreover in Achaemenian inscriptions Anahita is associated with Ahura Mazdah and Mithra, a triad corresponding to the Chaldean triad: Sin-Shamash-Ishtar. [Greek: Anaitis] in Strabo and other Greek writers is treated as [Greek: Aphrodite]" (p. 302).

But in Mesopotamia also the same views were entertained as in Egypt of the functions of statues.

"The statues hidden in the recesses of the temples or erected on the summits of the 'Ziggurats' became imbued, by virtue of their consecration, with the actual body of the god whom they represented." Thus Marduk is said to "inhabit his image" (Maspero, op. cit. p. 64).

This is precisely the idea which the Egyptians had. Even at the present day it survives among the Dravidian peoples of India.[115] They make images of their village deities, which may be permanent or only temporary, but in any case they are regarded not as actual deities but as the "bodies" so to speak into which these deities can enter. They are sacred only when they are so animated by the goddess. The ritual of animation is essentially identical with that found in Ancient Egypt. Libations are poured out; incense is burnt; the bleeding right fore-leg of a buffalo constitutes the blood-offering.[116] When the deity is reanimated by these procedures and its consciousness restored by the blood-offering it can hear appeals and speak.

The same attitude towards their idols was adopted by the Polynesians. "The priest usually addressed the image, into which it was imagined the god entered when anyone came to inquire his will."[117]

But there are certain other aspects of these Indian customs that are of peculiar interest. In my Ridgeway essay (op. cit. supra) I referred to the means by which in Nubia the degradation of the oblong Egyptian mastaba gave rise to the simple stone circle. This type spread to the west along the North African littoral, and also to the Eastern desert and Palestine. At some subsequent time mariners from the Red Sea introduced this practice into India.

[It is important to bear in mind that two other classes of stone circles were invented. One of them was derived, not from the mastaba itself, but from the enclosing wall surrounding it (see my Ridgeway essay, Fig. 13, p. 531, and compare with Figs. 3 and 4, p. 510, for illustrations of the transformed mastaba-type). This type of circle (enclosing a dolmen) is found both in the Caucasus-Caspian area as well as in India. A highly developed form of this encircling type of structure is seen in the famous rails surrounding the Buddhist stupas and dagabas. A third and later form of circle, of which Stonehenge is an example, was developed out of the much later New Empire Egyptian conception of a temple.]

But at the same time, as in Nubia, and possibly in Libya, the mastaba was being degraded into the first of the three main varieties of stone circle, other, though less drastic, forms of simplification of the mastaba were taking place, possibly in Egypt itself, but certainly upon the neighbouring Mediterranean coasts. In some respects the least altered copies of the mastaba are found in the so-called "giant's graves" of Sardinia and the "horned cairns" of the British Isles. But the real features of the Egyptian serdab, which was the essential part, the nucleus so to speak, of the mastaba, are best preserved in the so-called "holed dolmens" of the Levant, the Caucasus, and India. [They also occur sporadically in the West, as in France and Britain.]

Such dolmens and more simplified forms are scattered in Palestine,[118] but are seen to best advantage upon the Eastern Littoral of the Black Sea, the Caucasus, and the neighbourhood of the Caspian. They are found only in scattered localities between the Black and Caspian Seas. As de Morgan has pointed out,[119] their distribution is explained by their association with ancient gold and copper mines. They were the tombs of immigrant mining colonies who had settled in these definite localities to exploit these minerals.

Now the same types of dolmens, also associated with ancient mines,[120] are found in India. There is some evidence to suggest that these degraded types of Egyptian mastabas were introduced into India at some time after the adoption of the other, the Nubian modification of the mastaba which is represented by the first variety of stone circle.[121]

I have referred to these Indian dolmens for the specific purpose of illustrating the complexities of the processes of diffusion of culture. For not only have several variously specialized degradation-products of the same original type of Egyptian mastaba reached India, possibly by different routes and at different times, but also many of the ideas that developed out of the funerary ritual in Egypt—of which the mastaba was merely one of the manifestations—made their way to India at various times and became secondarily blended with other expressions of the same or associated ideas there. I have already referred to the essential elements of the Egyptian funerary ritual—the statues, incense, libations, and the rest—as still persisting among the Dravidian peoples.

But in the Madras Presidency dolmens are found converted into Siva temples.[122] Now in the inner chamber of the shrine—which represents the homologue of the serdab—in place of the statue or bas-relief of the deceased or of the deity, which is found in some of them (see Plate I), there is the stone linga-yoni emblem in the position corresponding to that in which, in the later temple in the same locality (Kambaduru), there is an image of Parvati, the consort of Siva.

The earliest deities in Egypt, both Osiris and Hathor, were really expressions of the creative principle. In the case of Hathor, the goddess was, in fact, the personification of the female organs of reproduction.[123] In these early Siva temples in India these principles of creation were given their literal interpretation, and represented frankly as the organs of reproduction of the two sexes. The gods of creation were symbolized by models in stone of the creating organs. Further illustrations of the same principle are witnessed in the Indonesian megalithic monuments which Perry calls "dissoliths".[124]

The later Indian temples, both Buddhist and Hindu, were developed from these early dolmens, as Mr. Longhurst's reports so clearly demonstrate. But from time to time there was an influx of new ideas from the West which found expression in a series of modifications of the architecture. Thus India provides an admirable illustration of this principle of culture contact. A series of waves of megalithic culture introduced purely Western ideas. These were developed by the local people in their own way, constantly intermingling a variety of cultural influences to weave them into a distinctive fabric, which was compounded partly of imported, partly of local threads, woven locally into a truly Indian pattern. In this process of development one can detect the effects of Mycenaean accretions (see for example Longhurst's Plate XIII), probably modified during its indirect transmission by Phoenician and later influences; and also the more intimate part played by Babylonian, Egyptian, and, later, Greek and Persian art and architecture in directing the course of development of Indian culture.

Incidentally, in the course of the discussions in the foregoing pages, I have referred to the profound influence of Egyptian, Babylonian and Indian ideas in Eastern Asia. Perry's important book (op. cit. supra) reveals their efforts in Indonesia. Thence they spread across the Pacific to America.

In the "Migrations of Early Culture" (p. 114) I called attention to the fact that among the Aztecs water was poured upon the head of the mummy. This ritual procedure was inspired by the Egyptian idea of libations, for, according to Brasseur de Bourbourg, the pouring out of the water was accompanied by the remark "C'est cette eau que tu as recue en venant an monde".

But incense-burning and blood-offering were also practised in America. In an interesting memoir[125] on the practice of blood-letting by piercing the ears and tongue, Mrs. Zelia Nuttall reproduces a remarkable picture from a "partly unpublished MS. of Sahagun's work preserved in Florence". "The image of the sun is held up by a man whose body is partly hidden, and two men, seated opposite to each other in the foreground, are in the act of piercing the helices or external borders of their ears." But in addition to these blood-offerings to the sun, two priests are burning incense in remarkably Egyptian-like censers, and another pair are blowing conch-shell trumpets.



But it was not merely the use of incense and libations and the identities in the wholly arbitrary attributes of the American pantheon that reveal the sources of their derivation in the Old World. When the Spaniards first visited Yucatan they found traces of a Maya baptismal rite which the natives called zihil, signifying "to be born again". At the ceremony also incense was burnt.[126]

The forehead, the face, the fingers and toes were moistened. "After they had been thus sprinkled with water, the priest arose and removed the cloths from the heads of the children, and then cut off with a stone knife a certain bead that was attached to the head from childhood."[127]

[The custom of wearing such a bead during childhood is found in Egypt at the present day.]

In the case of the girls, their mothers "divested them of a cord which was worn during their childhood, fastened round the loins, having a small shell that hung in front ('una conchuela asida que les venia a dar encima de la parte honesta'—Landa). The removal of this signified that they could marry."[128]

This use of shells is found in the Soudan and East Africa at the present day.[129] The girdle upon which the shells were hung is the prototype of the cestus of Hathor, Ishtar, Aphrodite, Kali and all the goddesses of fertility in the Old World. It is an admirable illustration of the fact that not only were the finished products, the goddesses and their fantastic repertory of attributes, transmitted to the New World, but also the earliest and most primitive ingredients out of which the complexities of their traits were compounded.

In Chapter III ("The Birth of Aphrodite") I shall explain what an important part the invention of this girdle played in the development of the material side of civilization and the even vaster influence it exerted upon beliefs and ethics. It represents the first stage in the evolution of clothing; and it was responsible for originating the belief in love-philtres and in the possibility of foretelling the future.

It would lead me too far from my main purpose in this book to discuss the widespread geographical distribution and historical associations of the customs of baptism and pouring libations among different peoples. I may, however, refer the reader to an article by Mr. Elsdon Best, entitled "Ceremonial Performances Pertaining to Birth, as Performed by the Maori of New Zealand in Past Times" (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. XLIV, 1914, p. 127), which sheds a clear light upon the general problem.

The whole subject of baptismal ceremonies is well worth detailed study as a remarkable demonstration of the spread of culture in early times.

[107: Donald A. Mackenzie, "Myths of Babylonia and Assyria," p. 44 et seq.]

[108: Dr. Alan Gardiner has protested against the assertions of "some Egyptologists, influenced more by anthropological theorists than by the unambiguous evidence of the Egyptian texts," to the effect that "the funerary rites and practices of the Egyptians were in the main precautionary measures serving to protect the living against the dead" (Article "Life and Death (Egyptian)," Hastings' Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics). I should like to emphasize the fact that the "anthropological theorists," who so frequently put forward these claims have little more justification for them than "some Egyptologists". Careful study of the best evidence from Babylonia, India, Indonesia, and Japan, reveals the fact that anthropologists who make such claims have in many cases misinterpreted the facts. In an article on "Ancestor Worship" by Professor Nobushige Hozumi in A. Stead's "Japan by the Japanese" (1904) the true point of view is put very clearly: "The origin of ancestor-worship is ascribed by many eminent writers to the dread of ghosts and the sacrifices made to the souls of ancestors for the purpose of propitiating them. It appears to me more correct to attribute the origin of ancestor-worship to a contrary cause. It was the love of ancestors, not the dread of them" [Here he quotes the Chinese philosophers Shiu-ki and Confucius in corroboration] that impelled men to worship. "We celebrate the anniversary of our ancestors, pay visits to their graves, offer flowers, food and drink, burn incense and bow before their tombs, entirely from a feeling of love and respect for their memory, and no question of 'dread' enters our minds in doing so" (pp. 281 and 282). [See, however, Appendix B, p. 74.]]

[109: For, as I have already explained, the idea so commonly and mistakenly conveyed by the term "soul-substance" by writers on Indonesian and Chinese beliefs would be much more accurately rendered simply by the word "life," so that the stealing of it necessarily means death.]

[110: Barton, op. cit. p. 105.]

[111: The evidence set forth in these pages makes it clear that such ideas are not restricted to the Semites: nor is there any reason to suppose that they originated amongst them.]

[112: Albert J. Carnoy, "Iranian Views of Origins in Connexion with Similar Babylonian Beliefs," Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. XXXVI, 1916, pp. 300-20.]

[113: This is Professor Carnoy's summary of Professor Jastrow's views as expressed in his article "Sumerian and Akkadian Views of Beginnings".]

[114: Jastrow's interpretation of a recently-discovered tablet published by Langdon under the title The Sumerian Epic of Paradise, the Flood and the Fall of Man.]

[115: I have already (p. 43) mentioned the fact that it is still preserved in China also.]

[116: Henry Whitehead (Bishop of Madras), "The Village Deities of Southern India," Madras Government Museum, Bull., Vol. V, No. 3, 1907; Wilber Theodore Elmore, "Dravidian Gods in Modern Hinduism: A Study of the Local and Village Deities of Southern India," University Studies: University of Nebraska, Vol. XV, No. 1, Jan., 1915. Compare the sacrifice of the fore-leg of a living calf in Egypt—A. E. P. B. Weigall, "An Ancient Egyptian Funeral Ceremony," Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, Vol. II, 1915, p. 10. Early literary references from Babylonia suggest that a similar method of offering blood was practised there.]

[117: William Ellis, "Polynesian Researches," 2nd edition, 1832, Vol. I, p. 373.]

[118: See H. Vincent, "Canaan d'apres l'exploration recente," Paris, 1907, p. 395.]

[119: "Les Premieres Civilizations," Paris, 1909, p. 404: Memoires de la Delegation en Perse, Tome VIII, archeol.; and Mission Scientifique au Caucase, Tome I.]

[120: W. J. Perry, "The Relationship between the Geographical Distribution of Megalithic Monuments and Ancient Mines," Memoirs and Proceedings of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, Vol. 60, Part I, 24th Nov., 1915.]

[121: The evidence for this is being prepared for publication by Captain Leonard Munn, R.E., who has personally collected the data in Hyderabad.]

[122: Annual Report of the Archaeological Department, Southern Circle, Madras, for the year 1915-1916. See for example Mr. A. H. Longhurst's photographs and plans (Plates I-IV) and especially that of the old Siva temple at Kambaduru, Plate IV (b).]

[123: As I shall show in "The Birth of Aphrodite" (Chapter III).]

[124: W. J. Perry, "The Megalithic Culture of Indonesia".]

[125: "A Penitential Rite of the Ancient Mexicans," Archaeological and Ethnological Papers of the Peabody Museum, Harvard University, Vol. I, No. 7, 1904.]

[126: Bancroft, op. cit. Vol. II, pp. 682 and 683.]

[127: Op. cit. p. 684.]

[128: Ibid.]

[129: See J. Wilfrid Jackson, op. cit. supra.]

Summary.

In these pages I have ranged over a very wide field of speculation, groping in the dim shadows of the early history of civilization. I have been attempting to pick up a few of the threads which ultimately became woven into the texture of human beliefs and aspirations, and to suggest that the practice of mummification was the woof around which the web of civilization was intimately intertwined.

I have already explained how closely that practice was related to the origin and development of architecture, which Professor Lethaby has called the "matrix of civilization," and how nearly the ideas that grew up in explanation and in justification of the ritual of embalming were affected by the practice of agriculture, the second great pillar of support for the edifice of civilization. It has also been shown how far-reaching was the influence exerted by the needs of the embalmer, which impelled men, probably for the first time in history, to plan and carry out great expeditions by sea and land to obtain the necessary resins and the balsams, the wood and the spices. Incidentally also in course of time the practice of mummification came to exert a profound effect upon the means for the acquisition of a knowledge of medicine and all the sciences ancillary to it.

But I have devoted chief attention to the bearing of the ideas which developed out of the practice and ritual of embalming upon the spirit of man. It gave shape and substance to the belief in a future life; it was perhaps the most important factor in the development of a definite conception of the gods: it laid the foundation of the ideas which subsequently were built up into a theory of the soul: in fact, it was intimately connected with the birth of all those ideals and aspirations which are now included in the conception of religious belief and ritual. A multitude of other trains of thought were started amidst the intellectual ferment of the formulation of the earliest concrete system of biological theory. The idea of the properties and functions of water which had previously sprung up in connexion with the development of agriculture became crystallized into a more definite form as the result of the development of mummification, and this has played an obtrusive part in religion, in philosophy and in medicine ever since. Moreover its influence has become embalmed for all time in many languages and in the ritual of every religion.

But it was a factor in the development not merely of religious beliefs, temples and ritual, but it was also very closely related to the origin of much of the paraphernalia of the gods and of current popular beliefs. The swastika and the thunderbolt, dragons and demons, totemism and the sky-world are all of them conceptions that were more or less closely connected with the matters I have been discussing.

The ideas which grew up in association with the practice of mummification were responsible for the development of the temple and its ritual and for a definite formulation of the conception of deities. But they were also responsible for originating a priesthood. For the resuscitation of the dead king, Osiris, and for the maintenance of his existence it was necessary for his successor, the reigning king, to perform the ritual of animation and the provision of food and drink. The king, therefore, was the first priest, and his functions were not primarily acts of worship but merely the necessary preliminaries for restoring life and consciousness to the dead seer so that he could consult him and secure his advice and help.

It was only when the number of temples became so great and their ritual so complex and elaborate as to make it a physical impossibility for the king to act in this capacity in all of them and on every occasion that he was compelled to delegate some of his priestly functions to others, either members of the royal family or high officials. In course of time certain individuals devoted themselves exclusively to these duties and became professional priests; but it is important to remember that at first it was the exclusive privilege of Horus, the reigning king, to intercede with Osiris, the dead king, on behalf of men, and that the earliest priesthood consisted of those individuals to whom he had delegated some of these duties.

In conclusion I should like to express in words what must be only too apparent to every reader of this statement. It claims to be nothing more than a contribution to the study of some of the most difficult problems in the history of human thought. For one so ill-equipped for a task of such a nature as I am to attempt it calls for a word of explanation. The clear light that recent research has shed upon the earliest literature in the world has done much to destroy the foundations upon which the theories propounded by scholars have been built up. It seemed to be worth while to attempt to read afresh the voluminous mass of old documents with the illumination of this new information.

The other reason for making such an attempt is that almost every modern scholar who has discussed the matters at issue has assumed that the fashionable doctrine of the independent development of human beliefs and practices was a safe basis upon which to construct his theories. At best it is an unproven and reckless speculation. I am convinced it is utterly false. Holding such views I have attempted to read the evidence afresh.

APPENDIX A.

On re-reading the discussion of the significance of the ka I realize that, in striving after brevity and conciseness—to keep the size of my statement within the limits of the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, generously elastic though it is—I have left the argument in a rather nebulous form.

It must not be imagined that a concrete-minded people like the ancient Egyptians entertained highly abstract and ethereal ideas about "the soul". They recognized that all the expressions of consciousness and personality could cease during sleep; and at the same time the phenomena of dreams seemed to afford evidence that these absent elements of the individual's being were enjoying real experiences elsewhere. Thus there was an alter ego, identified by this matter-of-fact people with the twin (placenta) which was born with the child and was clearly concerned with its physical and intellectual nourishment—for it was obviously connected by its stalk to the embryo like a tree to its roots, and it seemed to be composed of blood, which was regarded as the vehicle of mind. But this intellectual "twin" kept pace in its growth with the physical body. When a statue was made to represent the latter the ka could dwell in the real body or the statue.

The identification of the placenta with the moon helped the growth of the conception that this "birth-promoter" could not only bring about a re-birth in the life to come, but also facilitate a transference to the sky-world. The placenta had already been superintending the deceased's welfare upon earth and would continue to do so when he rejoined his ka in the sky world.

The complexity of the conception is due to the fact that the simple early belief in "a double" was gradually elaborated, as one new idea after another became added to it, and rationalized to blend with the former complex in an increasingly involved synthesis. It was only when the elaborate scaffolding of material factors was cleared away that a more ethereal conception of "the soul" was sublimated.

APPENDIX B.

I should like to emphasize the fact that my protest (on p. 63) was directed against the claim that the custom of offering food and drink to the dead was inspired primarily to prevent them from troubling the living. Its original purpose was to sustain and reanimate the dead; but, of course, when its real meaning was forgotten, it was explained in a great variety of ways by the people who made a practice of presenting offerings to the dead without really knowing why they did so.

Dr. Alan Gardiner himself has made a statement which casual readers (i.e., those who do not discriminate between the motive for the invention of a procedure and the reasons subsequently given for its continuance) might regard as a contradiction of my quotation from his writings on p. 62. Thus he says: "Any god could doubtless attack human beings, but savage and malicious deities, like Seth [Set], the murderer of Osiris, or Sakhmet, [Sekhet], the 'lady of pestilence' (nb-t 'idw), were doubtless most to be feared." [This attitude of the malignant goddesses is revealed in a most obtrusive form in the village deities of the Dravidians of Southern India.] "The dead were specially to be feared; nor was it only those dead who were unhappy or unburied that might torment the living, for the magician sometimes warns them that their tombs are endangered" (Article "Magic (Egyptian)," Hastings' Encycl. Ethics and Religion, p. 264).

But it is important to bear in mind, as the same scholar has explained elsewhere ["Life and Death (Egyptian)," Hastings' Encycl., p. 23]: "Nothing could be farther from the truth [than the statement that 'the funerary rites and practices of the Egyptians were in the main precautionary measures serving to protect the living against the dead']; it is of fundamental importance to realize that the vast stores of wealth and thought expended by the Egyptians on their tombs—that wealth and that thought which created not only the pyramids, but also the practice of mummification and a very extensive funerary literature—were due to the anxiety of each member of the community with regard to his own individual future welfare, and not to feelings of respect, or fear, or duty felt towards the other dead."

It was only in response to certain binding obligations that the living observed all those costly and troublesome rules which were believed to insure the welfare of the deceased. But this recognition of the primary and real purpose of the food offerings as sustenance for the dead or the gods must not be allowed to blind us to the fact that there is widespread throughout the world a real fear of the dead and ghosts, and that in many places food-offerings are made for the specific purpose "of appeasing the fairies".

Mr. Donald Mackenzie tells me that offerings of milk and porridge are made at the stone monuments in Scotland, and children carry meal in their pockets to protect themselves from the fairies. For the dead went to Fairyland.

Beliefs of a similar kind can be collected from most parts of the world: but the point I specially want to emphasize is that they are secondary rationalizations of a custom which originally had an utterly different significance.

APPENDIX C.

Prof. Barton's statement (supra, p. 64) is typical of a widespread misapprehension, resulting from the confusion between sexual relations and the giving of life. At first primitive people did not realize that the manifestations of the sex instinct had anything whatever to do with reproduction. They were aware of the fact that women gave birth to children; and the organ concerned in this process was regarded as the giver of life, the creator. The apotheosis of these powers led to the conception of the first deity. But it was only secondarily that these life-giving attributes were brought into association with the sexual act and the masculine powers of fertilization. Much confusion has been created by those writers who see manifestations of the sexual factor and phallic ideas in every aspect of primitive religion, where in most cases only the power of life-giving plays a part.



Chapter II.

DRAGONS AND RAIN GODS.[130]

An adequate account of the development of the dragon-legend would represent the history of the expression of mankind's aspirations and fears during the past fifty centuries and more. For the dragon was evolved along with civilization itself. The search for the elixir of life, to turn back the years from old age and confer the boon of immortality, has been the great driving force that compelled men to build up the material and the intellectual fabric of civilization. The dragon-legend is the history of that search which has been preserved by popular tradition: it has grown up and kept pace with the constant struggle to grasp the unattainable goal of men's desires; and the story has been constantly growing in complexity, as new incidents were drawn within its scope and confused with old incidents whose real meaning was forgotten or distorted. It has passed through all the phases with which the study of the spreading of rumours or the development of dreams has familiarized students of psychology. The simple original stories, which become blended and confused, their meaning distorted and reinterpreted by the rationalizing of incoherent incidents, are given the dramatic form with which the human mind invests all stories that make a strong appeal to its emotions, and then secondarily elaborated with a wealth of circumstantial detail. This is the history of popular legends and the development of rumours. But these phenomena are displayed in their most emphatic form in dreams.[131] In his waking state man restrains his roving fancies and exercises what Freud has called a "censorship" over the stream of his thoughts: but when he falls asleep, the "censor" dozes also; and free rein is given to his unrestrained fancies to make a hotch-potch of the most varied and unrelated incidents, and to create a fantastic mosaic built up from fragments of his actual experience, bound together by the cement of his aspirations and fears. The myth resembles the dream because it has developed without any consistent and effective censorship. The individual who tells one particular phase of the story may exert the controlling influence of his mind over the version he narrates: but as it is handed on from man to man and generation to generation the "censorship" also is constantly changing. This lack of unity of control implies that the development of the myth is not unlike the building-up of a dream-story. But the dragon-myth is vastly more complex than any dream, because mankind as a whole has taken a hand in the process of shaping it; and the number of centuries devoted to this work of elaboration has been far greater than the years spent by the average individual in accumulating the stuff of which most of his dreams have been made. But though the myth is enormously complex, so vast a mass of detailed evidence concerning every phase and every detail of its history has been preserved, both in the literature and the folk-lore of the world, that we are able to submit it to psychological analysis and determine the course of its development and the significance of every incident in its tortuous rambling.

In instituting these comparisons between the development of myths and dreams, I should like to emphasize the fact that the interpretation of the myth proposed in these pages is almost diametrically opposed to that suggested by Freud, and pushed to a reductio ad absurdum by his more reckless followers, and especially by Yung.

The dragon has been described as "the most venerable symbol employed in ornamental art and the favourite and most highly decorative motif in artistic design". It has been the inspiration of much, if not most, of the world's great literature in every age and clime, and the nucleus around which a wealth of ethical symbolism has accumulated throughout the ages. The dragon-myth represents also the earliest doctrine or systematic theory of astronomy and meteorology.

In the course of its romantic and chequered history the dragon has been identified with all of the gods and all of the demons of every religion. But it is most intimately associated with the earliest stratum of divinities, for it has been homologized with each of the members of the earliest Trinity, the Great Mother, the Water God, and the Warrior Sun God, both individually and collectively. To add to the complexities of the story, the dragon-slayer is also represented by the same deities, either individually or collectively; and the weapon with which the hero slays the dragon is also homologous both with him and his victim, for it is animated by him who wields it, and its powers of destruction make it a symbol of the same power of evil which it itself destroys.

Such a fantastic paradox of contradictions has supplied the materials with which the fancies of men of every race and land, and every stage of knowledge and ignorance, have been playing for all these centuries. It is not surprising, therefore, that an endless series of variations of the story has been evolved, each decked out with topical allusions and distinctive embellishments. But throughout the complex tissue of this highly embroidered fabric the essential threads of the web and woof of its foundation can be detected with surprising constancy and regularity.

Within the limits of such an account as this it is obvious that I can deal only with the main threads of the argument and leave the interesting details of the local embellishments until some other time.

The fundamental element in the dragon's powers is the control of water. Both in its beneficent and destructive aspects water was regarded as animated by the dragon, who thus assumed the role of Osiris or his enemy Set. But when the attributes of the Water God became confused with those of the Great Mother, and her evil avatar, the lioness (Sekhet) form of Hathor in Egypt, or in Babylonia the destructive Tiamat, became the symbol of disorder and chaos, the dragon became identified with her also.

Similarly the third member of the Earliest Trinity also became the dragon. As the son and successor of the dead king Osiris the living king Horus became assimilated with him. When the belief became more and more insistent that the dead king had acquired the boon of immortality and was really alive, the distinction between him and the actually living king Horus became correspondingly minimized. This process of assimilation was advanced a further stage when the king became a god and was thus more closely identified with his father and predecessor. Hence Horus assumed many of the functions of Osiris; and amongst them those which in foreign lands contributed to making a dragon of the Water God. But if the distinction between Horus and Osiris became more and more attenuated with the lapse of time, the identification with his mother Hathor (Isis) was more complete still. For he took her place and assumed many of her attributes in the later versions of the great saga which is the nucleus of all the literature of mythology—I refer to the story of "The Destruction Of Mankind".

The attributes of these three members of the Trinity, Hathor, Osiris, and Horus, thus became intimately linked the one with the other; and in Susa, where the earliest pictorial representation of a real dragon developed, it received concrete form (Fig. 1) as a monster compounded of the lioness of Hathor (Sekhet) with the falcon (or eagle) of Horus, but with the human attributes and water-controlling powers which originally belonged to Osiris. In some parts of Africa the earliest "dragon" was nothing more than Hathor's cow or the gazelle or antelope of Horus (Osiris) or of Set.



But if the dragon was compounded of all three deities, who was the slayer of the evil dragon?

The story of the dragon-conflict is really a recital of Horus's vendetta against Set, intimately blended and confused with different versions of "The Destruction of Mankind".[132] The commonplace incidents of the originally prosaic stories were distorted into an almost unrecognizable form, then secondarily elaborated without any attention to their original meaning, but with a wealth of circumstantial embellishment, in accordance with the usual methods of the human mind that I have already mentioned. The history of the legend is in fact the most complete, because it is the oldest and the most widespread, illustration of those instinctive tendencies of the human spirit to bridge the gaps in its disjointed experience, and to link together in a kind of mental mosaic the otherwise isolated incidents in the facts of daily life and the rumours and traditions that have been handed down from the story-teller's predecessors.

In the "Destruction of Mankind," which I shall discuss more fully in the following pages (p. 109 et seq.), Hathor does the slaying: in the later stories Horus takes his mother's place and earns his spurs as the Warrior Sun-god:[133] hence confusion was inevitably introduced between the enemies of Re, the original victims in the legend, and Horus's traditional enemies, the followers of Set. Against the latter it was Osiris himself who fought originally; and in many of the non-Egyptian variants of the legend it is the rain-god himself who is the warrior.

Hence all three members of the Trinity were identified, not only with the dragon, but also with the hero who was the dragon-slayer.

But the weapon used by the latter was also animated by the same Trinity, and in fact identified with them. In the Saga of the Winged Disk, Horus assumed the form of the sun equipped with the wings of his own falcon and the fire-spitting uraeus serpents. Flying down from heaven in this form he was at the same time the god and the god's weapon. As a fiery bolt from heaven he slew the enemies of Re, who were now identified with his own personal foes, the followers of Set. But in the earlier versions of the myth (i.e. the "Destruction of Mankind"), it was Hathor who was the "Eye of Re" and descended from heaven to destroy mankind with fire; she also was the vulture (Mut); and in the earliest version she did the slaughter with a knife or an axe with which she was animistically identified.

But Osiris also was the weapon of destruction, both in the form of the flood (for he was the personification of the river) and the rain-storms from heaven. But he was also an instrument for vanquishing the demon, when the intoxicating beer or the sedative drink (the potency of which was due to the indwelling spirit of the god) was the chosen means of overcoming the dragon.

This, in brief, is the framework of the dragon-story. The early Trinity as the hero, armed with the Trinity as weapon, slays the dragon, which again is the same Trinity. With its illimitable possibilities for dramatic development and fantastic embellishment with incident and ethical symbolism, this theme has provided countless thousands of story-tellers with the skeleton which they clothed with the living flesh of their stories, representing not merely the earliest theories of astronomy and meteorology, but all the emotional conflicts of daily life, the struggle between light and darkness, heat and cold, right and wrong, justice and injustice, prosperity and adversity, wealth and poverty. The whole gamut of human strivings and emotions was drawn into the legend until it became the great epic of the human spirit and the main theme that has appealed to the interest of all mankind in every age.

An ancient Chinese philosopher, Wang Fu, writing in the time of the Han Dynasty, enumerates the "nine resemblances" of the dragon. "His horns resemble those of a stag, his head that of a camel, his eyes those of a demon, his neck that of a snake, his belly that of a clam, his scales those of a carp, his claws those of an eagle, his soles those of a tiger, his ears those of a cow."[134] But this list includes only a small minority of the menagerie of diverse creatures which at one time or another have contributed their quota to this truly astounding hotch-potch.

This composite wonder-beast ranges from Western Europe to the Far East of Asia, and as we shall see, also even across the Pacific to America. Although in the different localities a great number of most varied ingredients enter into its composition, in most places where the dragon occurs the substratum of its anatomy consists of a serpent or a crocodile, usually with the scales of a fish for covering, and the feet and wings, and sometimes also the head, of an eagle, falcon, or hawk, and the forelimbs and sometimes the head of a lion. An association of anatomical features of so unnatural and arbitrary a nature can only mean that all dragons are the progeny of the same ultimate ancestors.



But it is not merely a case of structural or anatomical similarity, but also of physiological identity, that clinches the proof of the derivation of this fantastic brood from the same parents. Wherever the dragon is found, it displays a special partiality for water. It controls the rivers or seas, dwells in pools or wells, or in the clouds on the tops of mountains, regulates the tides, the flow of streams, or the rainfall, and is associated with thunder and lightning. Its home is a mansion at the bottom of the sea, where it guards vast treasures, usually pearls, but also gold and precious stones. In other instances the dwelling is upon the top of a high mountain; and the dragon's breath forms the rain-clouds. It emits thunder and lightning. Eating the dragon's heart enables the diner to acquire the knowledge stored in this "organ of the mind" so that he can understand the language of birds, and in fact of all the creatures that have contributed to the making of a dragon.

It should not be necessary to rebut the numerous attempts that have been made to explain the dragon-myth as a story relating to extinct monsters. Such fantastic claims can be made only by writers devoid of any knowledge of palaeontology or of the distinctive features of the dragon and its history. But when the Keeper of the Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities in the British Museum, in a book that is not intended to be humorous,[135] seriously claims Dr. Andrews' discovery of a gigantic fossil snake as "proof" of the former existence of "the great serpent-devil Apep," it is time to protest.

Those who attempt to derive the dragon from such living creatures as lizards like Draco volans or Moloch horridus[136] ignore the evidence of the composite and unnatural features of the monsters.

"Whatever be the origin of the Northern dragon, the myths, when they first became articulate for us, show him to be in all essentials the same as that of the South and East. He is a power of evil, guardian of hoards, the greedy withholder of good things from men; and the slaying of a dragon is the crowning achievement of heroes—of Siegmund, of Beowulf, of Sigurd, of Arthur, of Tristam—even of Lancelot, the beau ideal of mediaeval chivalry" (Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. viii., p. 467). But if in the West the dragon is usually a "power of evil," in the far East he is equally emphatically a symbol of beneficence. He is identified with emperors and kings; he is the son of heaven the bestower of all bounties, not merely to mankind directly, but also to the earth as well.

Even in our country his symbolism is not always wholly malevolent, otherwise—if for the moment we shut our eyes to the history of the development of heraldic ornament—dragons would hardly figure as the supporters of the arms of the City of London, and as the symbol of many of our aristocratic families, among which the Royal House of Tudor is included. It is only a few years since the Red Dragon of Cadwallader was added as an additional badge to the achievement of the Prince of Wales. But, "though a common ensign in war, both in the East and the West, as an ecclesiastical emblem his opposite qualities have remained consistently until the present day. Whenever the dragon is represented, it symbolizes the power of evil, the devil and his works. Hell in mediaeval art is a dragon with gaping jaws, belching fire."

And in the East the dragon's reputation is not always blameless. For it figures in some disreputable incidents and does not escape the sort of punishment that tradition metes out to his European cousins.

[130: An elaboration of a Lecture delivered in the John Rylands Library on 8 November, 1916.]

[131: In his lecture, "Dreams and Primitive Culture," delivered at the John Rylands Library on 10 April, 1918, Dr. Rivers has expounded the principles of dream-development.]

[132: Vide infra, p. 109 et seq.]

[133: Hence soldiers killed in battle and women dying in childbirth receive special consideration in the exclusive heaven of (Osiris's) Horus's Indian and American representatives, Indra and Tlaloc.]

[134: M. W. de Visser, "The Dragon in China and Japan," Verhandelingen der Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen te Amsterdam, Afdeeling Letterkunde, Deel XIII, No. 2, 1913, p. 70.]

[135: E. A. Wallis Budge, "The Gods of the Egyptians," 1904, vol. i, p. 11]

[136: Gould's "Mythical Monsters," 1886.]

The Dragon in America and Eastern Asia.

In the early centuries of the Christian era, and probably also even for two or three hundred years earlier still, the leaven of the ancient civilizations of the Old World was at work in Mexico, Central America and Peru. The most obtrusive influences that were brought to bear, especially in the area from Yucatan to Mexico, were inspired by the Cambodian and Indonesian modifications of Indian beliefs and practices. The god who was most often depicted upon the ancient Maya and Aztec codices was the Indian rain-god Indra, who in America was provided with the head of the Indian elephant[137] (i.e. seems to have been confused with the Indian Ganesa) and given other attributes more suggestive of the Dravidian Naga than his enemy, the Aryan deity. In other words the character of the American god, known as Chac by the Maya people and as Tlaloc by the Aztecs, is an interesting illustration of the effects of such a mixture of cultures as Dr. Rivers has studied in Melanesia.[138] Not only does the elephant-headed god in America represent a blend of the two great Indian rain-gods which in the Old World are mortal enemies, the one of the other (partly for the political reason that the Dravidians and Aryans were rival and hostile peoples), but all the traits of each deity, even those depicting the old Aryan conception of their deadly combat, are reproduced in America under circumstances which reveal an ignorance on the part of the artists of the significance of the paradoxical contradictions they are representing. But even many incidents in the early history of the Vedic gods, which were due to arbitrary circumstances in the growth of the legends, reappear in America. To cite one instance (out of scores which might be quoted), in the Vedic story Indra assumed many of the attributes of the god Soma. In America the name of the god of rain and thunder, the Mexican Indra, is Tlaloc, which is generally translated "pulque of the earth," from tlal[l]i, "earth," and oc[tli], "pulque, a fermented drink (like the Indian drink soma) made from the juice of the agave".[139]

The so-called "long-nosed god" (the elephant-headed rain-god) has been given the non-committal designation "god B," by Schellhas.[140]



I reproduce here a remarkable drawing (Fig. 11) from the Codex Troano, in which this god, whom the Maya people called Chac, is shown pouring the rain out of a water-jar (just as the deities of Babylonia and India are often represented), and putting his foot upon the head of a serpent, who is preventing the rain from reaching the earth. Here we find depicted with childlike simplicity and directness the Vedic conception of Indra overcoming the demon Vritra. Stempell describes this scene as "the elephant-headed god B standing upon the head of a serpent";[141] while Seler, who claims that god B is a tortoise, explains it as the serpent forming a footstool for the rain-god.[142] In the Codex Cortes the same theme is depicted in another way, which is truer to the Indian conception of Vritra, as "the restrainer"[143] (Fig. 12).



The serpent (the American rattlesnake) restrains the water by coiling itself into a sac to hold up the rain and so prevent it from reaching the earth. In the various American codices this episode is depicted in as great a variety of forms as the Vedic poets of India described when they sang of the exploits of Indra. The Maya Chac is, in fact, Indra transferred to the other side of the Pacific and there only thinly disguised by a veneer of American stylistic design.

But the Aztec god Tlaloc is merely the Chac of the Maya people transferred to Mexico. Schellhas declares that the "god B," the "most common figure in the codices," is a "universal deity to whom the most varied elements, natural phenomena, and activities are subject". "Many authorities consider God B to represent Kukulkan, the Feathered Serpent, whose Aztec equivalent is Quetzalcoatl. Others identify him with Itzamna, the Serpent God of the East, or with Chac, the Rain God of the four quarters and the equivalent of Tlaloc of the Mexicans."[144]

From the point of view of its Indian analogies these confusions are peculiarly significant, for the same phenomena are found in India. The snake and the dragon can be either the rain-god of the East or the enemy of the rain-god; either the dragon-slayer or the evil dragon who has to be slain. The Indian word Naga, which is applied to the beneficent god or king identified with the cobra, can also mean "elephant," and this double significance probably played a part in the confusion of the deities in America.

In the Dresden Codex the elephant-headed god is represented in one place grasping a serpent, in another issuing from a serpent's mouth, and again as an actual serpent (Fig. 13). Turning next to the attributes of these American gods we find that they reproduce with amazing precision those of Indra. Not only were they the divinities who controlled rain, thunder, lightning, and vegetation, but they also carried axes and thunderbolts (Fig. 13) like their homologues in the Old World. Like Indra, Tlaloc was intimately associated with the East and with the tops of mountains, where he had a special heaven, reserved for warriors who fell in battle and women who died in childbirth. As a water-god also he presided over the souls of the drowned and those who in life suffered from dropsical affections. Indra also specialized in the same branch of medicine.

In fact, if one compares the account of Tlaloc's attributes and achievements, such as is given in Mr. Joyce's "Mexican Archaeology" or Professor Seler's monograph on the "Codex Vaticanus," with Professor Hopkins's summary of Indra's character ("Religions of India") the identity is so exact, even in the most arbitrary traits and confusions with other deities' peculiarities, that it becomes impossible for any serious investigator to refuse to admit that Tlaloc and Chac are merely American forms of Indra. Even so fantastic a practice as the representation of the American rain-god's face as composed of contorted snakes[145] finds its analogy in Siam, where in relatively recent times this curious device was still being used by artists.[146]

"As the god of fertility maize belonged to him [Tlaloc], though not altogether by right, for according to one legend he stole it after it had been discovered by other gods concealed in the heart of a mountain."[147] Indra also obtained soma from the mountain by similar means.[148]

In the ancient civilization of America one of the most prominent deities was called the "Feathered Serpent," in the Maya language, Kukulkan, Quiche Gukumatz, Aztec Quetzalcoatl, the Pueblo "Mother of Waters". Throughout a very extensive part of America the snake, like the Indian Naga, is the emblem of rain, clouds, thunder and lightning. But it is essentially and pre-eminently the symbol of rain; and the god who controls the rain, Chac of the Mayas, Tlaloc of the Aztecs, carried the axe and the thunderbolt like his homologues and prototypes in the Old World. In America also we find reproduced in full, not only the legends of the antagonism between the thunder-bird and the serpent, but also the identification of these two rivals in one composite monster, which, as I have already mentioned, is seen in the winged disks, both in the Old World and the New.[149] Hardly any incident in the history of the Egyptian falcon or the thunder-birds of Babylonia, Greece or India, fails to reappear in America and find pictorial expression in the Maya and Aztec codices.

[Illustration: Fig. 13.

A photographic reproduction of the 36th page of the Dresden Maya Codex.

Of the three pictures in the top row one represents the elephant-headed god Chac with a snake's body. He is pouring out rain. The central picture represents the lightning animal carrying fire down from heaven to earth. On the right Chac is shown in human guise carrying thunder-weapons in the form of burning torches.

In the second row a goddess sits in the rain: her head is prolonged into that of a bird, holding a fish in its beak. The central picture shows Chac in his boat ferrying a woman across the water from the East. The third illustration depicts the familiar conflict between the vulture and serpent.

In the third row Chac is seen with his axe: in the central picture he is standing in the water looking up towards a rain-cloud; and on the right he is shown sitting in a hut resting from his labours.]

What makes America such a rich storehouse of historical data is the fact that it is stretched across the world almost from pole to pole; and for many centuries the jetsam and flotsam swept on to this vast strand has made it a museum of the cultural history of the Old World, much of which would have been lost for ever if America had not saved it. But a record preserved in this manner is necessarily in a highly confused state. For essentially the same materials reached America in manifold forms. The original immigrants into America brought from North-Eastern Asia such cultural equipment as had reached the area east of the Yenesei at the time when Europe was in the Neolithic phase of culture. Then when ancient mariners began to coast along the Eastern Asiatic littoral and make their way to America by the Aleutian route there was a further infiltration of new ideas. But when more venturesome sailors began to navigate the open seas and exploit Polynesia, for centuries[150] there was a more or less constant influx of customs and beliefs, which were drawn from Egypt and Babylonia, from the Mediterranean and East Africa, from India and Indonesia, China and Japan, Cambodia and Oceania. One and the same fundamental idea, such as the attributes of the serpent as a water-god, reached America in an infinite variety of guises, Egyptian, Babylonian, Indian, Indonesian, Chinese and Japanese, and from this amazing jumble of confusion the local priesthood of Central America built up a system of beliefs which is distinctively American, though most of the ingredients and the principles of synthetic composition were borrowed from the Old World.

Every possible phase of the early history of the dragon-story and all the ingredients which in the Old World went to the making of it have been preserved in American pictures and legends in a bewildering variety of forms and with an amazing luxuriance of complicated symbolism and picturesque ingenuity. In America, as in India and Eastern Asia, the power controlling water was identified both with a serpent (which in the New World, as in the Old, was often equipped with such inappropriate and arbitrary appendages, as wings, horns and crests) and a god, who was either associated or confused with an elephant. Now many of the attributes of these gods, as personifications of the life-giving powers of water, are identical with those of the Babylonian god Ea and the Egyptian Osiris, and their reputations as warriors with the respective sons and representatives, Marduk and Horus. The composite animal of Ea-Marduk, the "sea-goat" (the Capricornus of the Zodiac), was also the vehicle of Varuna in India whose relationship to Indra was in some respects analogous to that of Ea to Marduk in Babylonia.[151] The Indian "sea-goat" or Makara was in fact intimately associated both with Varuna and with Indra. This monster assumed a great variety of forms, such as the crocodile, the dolphin, the sea-serpent or dragon, or combinations of the heads of different animals with a fish's body (Fig. 14). Amongst these we find an elephant-headed form of the makara, which was adopted as far east as Indonesia and as far west as Scotland.



I have already called attention[152] to the part played by the makara in determining the development of the form of the elephant-headed god in America. Another form of the makara is described in the following American legend, which is interesting also as a mutilated version of the original dragon-story of the Old World.

In 1912 Hernandez translated and published a Maya manuscript[153] which had been written out in Spanish characters in the early days of the conquest of the Americas, but had been overlooked until six years ago. It is an account of the creation, and includes the following passages: "All at once came the water [? rain] after the dragon was carried away. The heaven was broken up; it fell upon the earth; and they say that Cantul-ti-ku (four gods), the four Baccab, were those who destroyed it.... 'The whole world', said Ah-uuc-chek-nale (he who seven times makes fruitful), 'proceeded from the seven bosoms of the earth.' And he descended to make fruitful Itzam-kab-uin (the female whale with alligator-feet), when he came down from the central angle of the heavenly region" (p. 171).

Hernandez adds that "the old fishermen of Yucatan still call the whale Itzam: this explains the name of Itzaes, by which the Mayas were known before the founding of Mayapan".

The close analogy to the Indra-story is suggested by the phrase describing the coming of the water "after the dragon was carried away". Moreover, the Indian sea-elephant makara, which was confused in the Old World with the dolphin of Aphrodite, and was sometimes also regarded as a crocodile, naturally suggests that the "female whale with the alligator-feet" was only an American version of the old Indian legend.

All this serves, not only to corroborate the inferences drawn from the other sources of information which I have already indicated, but also to suggest that, in addition to borrowing the chief divinities of their pantheon from India, the Maya people's original name was derived from the same mythology.[154]

It is of considerable interest and importance to note that in the earliest dated example of Maya workmanship (from Tuxtla, in the Vera Cruz State of Mexico), for which Spinden assigns a tentative date of 235 B.C., an unmistakable elephant figures among the four hieroglyphs which Spinden reproduces (op. cit., p. 171). A similar hieroglyphic sign is found in the Chinese records of the Early Chow Dynasty (John Ross, "The Origin of the Chinese People," 1916, P. 152).

The use of the numerals four and seven in the narrative translated by Hernandez, as in so many other American documents, is itself, as Mrs. Zelia Nuttall has so conclusively demonstrated,[155] a most striking and conclusive demonstration of the link with the Old World.

Indra was not the only Indian god who was transferred to America, for all the associated deities, with the characteristic stories of their exploits,[156] are also found depicted with childlike directness of incident, but amazingly luxuriant artistic phantasy, in the Maya and Aztec codices.

We find scattered throughout the islands of the Pacific the familiar stories of the dragon. One mentioned by the Bishop of Wellington refers to a New Zealand dragon with jaws like a crocodile's, which spouted water like a whale. It lived in a fresh-water lake.[157] In the same number of the same Journal Sir George Grey gives extracts from a Maori legend of the dragon, which he compares with corresponding passages from Spenser's "Faery Queen". "Their strict verbal and poetical conformity with the New Zealand legends are such as at first to lead to the impression either that Spenser must have stolen his images and language from the New Zealand poets, or that they must have acted unfairly by the English bard" (p. 362). The Maori legend describes the dragon as "in size large as a monstrous whale, in shape like a hideous lizard; for in its huge head, its limbs, its tail, its scales, its tough skin, its sharp spines, yes, in all these it resembled a lizard" (p. 364).

Now the attributes of the Chinese and Japanese dragon as the controller of rain, thunder and lightning are identical with those of the American elephant-headed god. It also is associated with the East and with the tops of mountains. It is identified with the Indian Naga, but the conflict involved in this identification is less obtrusive than it is either in America or in India. In Dravidian India the rulers and the gods are identified with the serpent: but among the Aryans, who were hostile to the Dravidians, the rain-god is the enemy of the Naga. In America the confusion becomes more pronounced because Tlaloc (Chac) represents both Indra and his enemy the serpent. The representation in the codices of his conflict with the serpent is merely a tradition which the Maya and Aztec scribes followed, apparently without understanding its meaning.

In China and Japan the Indra-episode plays a much less prominent part, for the dragon is, like the Indian Naga, a beneficent creature, which approximates more nearly to the Babylonian Ea or the Egyptian Osiris. It is not only the controller of water, but the impersonation of water and its life-giving powers: it is identified with the emperor, with his standard, with the sky, and with all the powers that give, maintain, and prolong life and guard against all kinds of danger to life. In other words, it is the bringer of good luck, the rejuvenator of mankind, the giver of immortality.

But if the physiological functions of the dragon of the Far East can thus be assimilated to those of the Indian Naga and the Babylonian and Egyptian Water God, who is also the king, anatomically he is usually represented in a form which can only be regarded as the Babylonian composite monster, as a rule stripped of his wings, though not of his avian feet.

In America we find preserved in the legends of the Indians an accurate and unmistakable description of the Japanese dragon (which is mainly Chinese in origin). Even Spinden, who "does not care to dignify by refutation the numerous empty theories of ethnic connections between Central America" [and in fact America as a whole] "and the Old World," makes the following statement (in the course of a discussion of the myths relating to horned snakes in California): "a similar monster, possessing antlers, and sometimes wings, is also very common in Algonkin and Iroquois legends, although rare in art. As a rule the horned serpent is a water spirit and an enemy of the thunder bird. Among the Pueblo Indians the horned snake seems to have considerable prestige in religious belief.... It lives in the water or in the sky and is connected with rain or lightning."[158]

Thus we find stories of a dragon equipped with those distinctive tokens of Chinese origin, the deer's antlers; and along with it a snake with less specialized horns suggesting the Cerastes of Egypt and Babylonia. A horned viper distantly akin to the Cerastes of the Old World does occur in California; but its "horns" are so insignificant as to make it highly improbable that they could have been in any way responsible for the obtrusive role played by horns in these widespread American stories. But the proof of the foreign origin of these stories is established by the horned serpent's achievements.

It "lives in the water or the sky" like its homologue in the Old World, and it is "a water spirit". Now neither the Cobra nor the Cerastes is actually a water serpent. Their achievements in the myths therefore have no possible relationship with the natural habits of the real snakes. They are purely arbitrary attributes which they have acquired as the result of a peculiar and fortuitous series of historical incidents.

It is therefore utterly inconceivable and in the highest degree improbable that this long chain of chance circumstances should have happened a second time in America, and have been responsible for the creation of the same bizarre story in reference to one of the rarer American snakes of a localized distribution, whose horns are mere vestiges, which no one but a trained morphologist is likely to have noticed or recognized as such.

But the American horned serpent, like its Babylonian and Indian homologues, is also the enemy of the thunder bird. Here is a further corroboration of the transmission to America of ideas which were the chance result of certain historical events in the Old World, which I have mentioned in this lecture.

In the figure on page 94 I reproduce a remarkable drawing of an American dragon. If the Algonkin Indians had not preserved legends of a winged serpent equipped with deer's antlers, no value could be assigned to this sketch: but as we know that this particular tribe retains the legend of just such a wonder-beast, we are justified in treating this drawing as something more than a jest.

"Petroglyphs are reported by Mr. John Criley as occurring near Ava, Jackson County, Illinois. The outlines of the characters observed by him were drawn from memory and submitted to Mr. Charles S. Mason, of Toledo, Ohio, through whom they were furnished to the Bureau of Ethnology. Little reliance can be placed upon the accuracy of such drawing, but from the general appearance of the sketches the originals of which they are copies were probably made by one of the middle Algonquin tribes of Indians.[159]

"The 'Piasa' rock, as it is generally designated, was referred to by the missionary explorer Marquette in 1675. Its situation was immediately above the city of Alton, Illinois."

Marquette's remarks are translated by Dr. Francis Parkman as follows:—

"On the flat face of a high rock were painted, in red, black, and green, a pair of monsters, each 'as large as a calf, with horns like a deer, red eyes, a beard like a tiger, and a frightful expression of countenance. The face is something like that of a man, the body covered with scales; and the tail so long that it passes entirely round the body, over the head, and between the legs, ending like that of a fish.'"

Another version, by Davidson and Struve, of the discovery of the petroglyph is as follows:—

"Again they (Joliet and Marquette) were floating on the broad bosom of the unknown stream. Passing the mouth of the Illinois, they soon fell into the shadow of a tall promontory, and with great astonishment beheld the representation of two monsters painted on its lofty limestone front. According to Marquette, each of these frightful figures had the face of a man, the horns of a deer, the beard of a tiger, and the tail of a fish so long that it passed around the body, over the head, and between the legs. It was an object of Indian worship and greatly impressed the mind of the pious missionary with the necessity of substituting for this monstrous idolatry the worship of the true God."

A footnote connected with the foregoing quotation gives the following description of the same rock:—

"Near the mouth of the Piasa creek, on the bluff, there is a smooth rock in a cavernous cleft, under an overhanging cliff, on whose face 50 feet from the base, are painted some ancient pictures or hieroglyphics, of great interest to the curious. They are placed in a horizontal line from east to west, representing men, plants and animals. The paintings, though protected from dampness and storms, are in great part destroyed, marred by portions of the rock becoming detached and falling down."

Mr. McAdams, of Alton, Illinois, says, "The name Piasa is Indian and signifies, in the Illini, the bird which devours men". He furnishes a spirited pen-and-ink sketch, 12 by 15 inches in size and purporting to represent the ancient painting described by Marquette. On the picture is inscribed the following in ink: "Made by Wm. Dennis, April 3rd, 1825". The date is in both letters and figures. On the top of the picture in large letters are the two words, "FLYING DRAGON". This picture, which has been kept in the old Gilham family of Madison county and bears the evidence of its age, is reproduced as Fig. 3.



He also publishes another representation with the following remarks:—

"One of the most satisfactory pictures of the Piasa we have ever seen is in an old German publication entitled 'The Valley of the Mississippi Illustrated. Eighty illustrations from Nature, by H. Lewis, from the Falls of St. Anthony to the Gulf of Mexico,' published about the year 1839 by Arenz & Co., Dusseldorf, Germany. One of the large full-page plates in this work gives a fine view of the bluff at Alton, with the figure of the Piasa on the face of the rock. It is represented to have been taken on the spot by artists from Germany.... In the German picture there is shown just behind the rather dim outlines of the second face a ragged crevice, as though of a fracture. Part of the bluff's face might have fallen and thus nearly destroyed one of the monsters, for in later years writers speak of but one figure. The whole face of the bluff was quarried away in 1846-47."

The close agreement of this account with that of the Chinese and Japanese dragon at once arrests attention. The anatomical peculiarities are so extraordinary that if Pere Marquette's account is trustworthy there is no longer any room for doubt of the Chinese or Japanese derivation of this composite creature. If the account is not accepted we will be driven, not only to attribute to the pious seventeenth-century missionary serious dishonesty or culpable gullibility, but also to credit him with a remarkably precise knowledge of Mongolian archaeology. When Algonkin legends are recalled, however, I think we are bound to accept the missionary's account as substantially accurate.

Minns claims that representations of the dragon are unknown in China before the Han dynasty. But the legend of the dragon is much more ancient. The evidence has been given in full by de Visser.[160]

He tells us that the earliest reference is found in the Yih King, and shows that the dragon was "a water animal akin to the snake, which [used] to sleep in pools during winter and arises in the spring." "It is the god of thunder, who brings good crops when he appears in the rice fields (as rain) or in the sky (as dark and yellow clouds), in other words when he makes the rain fertilize the ground" (p. 38).

In the Shu King there is a reference to the dragon as one of the symbolic figures painted on the upper garment of the emperor Hwang Ti (who according to the Chinese legends, which of course are not above reproach, reigned in the twenty-seventh century B.C.). In this ancient literature there are numerous references to the dragon, and not merely to the legends, but also to representations of the benign monster on garments, banners and metal tablets.[161] "The ancient texts ... are short, but sufficient to give us the main conceptions of Old China with regard to the dragon. In those early days [just as at present] he was the god of water, thunder, clouds, and rain, the harbinger of blessings, and the symbol of holy men. As the emperors are the holy beings on earth, the idea of the dragon being the symbol of Imperial power is based upon this ancient conception" (op. cit., p. 42).

In the fifth appendix to the Yih King, which has been ascribed to Confucius, (i.e. three centuries earlier than the Han dynasty mentioned by Mr. Minns), it is stated that "K'ien (Heaven) is a horse, Kw'un (Earth) is a cow, Chen (Thunder) is a dragon." (op. cit., p. 37).[162]

The philosopher Hwai Nan Tsze (who died 122 B.C.) declared that the dragon is the origin of all creatures, winged, hairy, scaly, and mailed; and he propounded a scheme of evolution (de Visser, p. 65). He seems to have tried to explain away the fact that he had never actually witnessed the dragon performing some of the remarkable feats attributed to it: "Mankind cannot see the dragons rise: wind and rain assist them to ascend to a great height" (op. cit., p. 65). Confucius also is credited with the frankness of a similar confession: "As to the dragon, we cannot understand his riding on the wind and clouds and his ascending to the sky. To-day I saw Lao Tsze; is he not like the dragon?" (p. 65).

This does not necessarily mean that these learned men were sceptical of the beliefs which tradition had forged in their minds, but that the dragon had the power of hiding itself in a cloak of invisibility, just as clouds (in which the Chinese saw dragons) could be dissipated in the sky. The belief in these powers of the dragon was as sincere as that of learned men of other countries in the beneficent attributes which tradition had taught them to assign to their particular deities. In the passages I have quoted the Chinese scholars were presumably attempting to bridge the gap between the ideas inculcated by faith and the evidence of their senses, in much the same sort of spirit as, for instance, actuated Dean Buckland last century, when he claimed that the glacial deposits of this country afforded evidence in confirmation of the Deluge described in the Book of Genesis.

The tiger and the dragon, the gods of wind and water, are the keystones of the doctrine called fung shui, which Professor de Groot has described in detail.[163]

He describes it "as a quasi-scientific system, supposed to teach men where and how to build graves, temples, and dwellings, in order that the dead, the gods, and the living may be located therein exclusively, or as far as possible, under the auspicious influences of Nature". The dragon plays a most important part in this system, being "the chief spirit of water and rain, and at the same time representing one of the four quarters of heaven (i.e. the East, called the Azure Dragon, and the first of the seasons, spring)." The word Dragon comprises the high grounds in general, and the water streams which have their sources therein or wind their way through them.[164]

The attributes thus assigned to the Blue Dragon, his control of water and streams, his dwelling on high mountains whence they spring, and his association with the East, will be seen to reveal his identity with the so-called "god B" of American archaeologists, the elephant-headed god Tlaloc of the Aztecs, Chac of the Mayas, whose more direct parent was Indra.

It is of interest to note that, according to Gerini,[165] the word Naga denotes not only a snake but also an elephant. Both the Chinese dragon and the Mexican elephant-god are thus linked with the Naga, who is identified both with Indra himself and Indra's enemy Vritra. This is another instance of those remarkable contradictions that one meets at every step in pursuing the dragon. In the confusion resulting from the blending of hostile tribes and diverse cultures the Aryan deity who, both for religious and political reasons, is the enemy of the Nagas becomes himself identified with a Naga!

I have already called attention (Nature, Jan. 27, 1916) to the fact that the graphic form of representation of the American elephant-headed god was derived from Indonesian pictures of the makara. In India itself the makara (see Fig. 14) is represented in a great variety of forms, most of which are prototypes of different kinds of dragons. Hence the homology of the elephant-headed god with the other dragons is further established and shown to be genetically related to the evolution of the protean manifestations of the dragon's form.

The dragon in China is "the heavenly giver of fertilizing rain" (op. cit., p. 36). In the Shu King "the emblematic figures of the ancients are given as the sun, the moon, the stars, the mountain, the dragon, and the variegated animals (pheasants) which are depicted on the upper sacrificial garment of the Emperor" (p. 39). In the Li Ki the unicorn, the phoenix, the tortoise, and the dragon are called the four ling (p. 39), which de Visser translates "spiritual beings," creatures with enormously strong vital spirit. The dragon possesses the most ling of all creatures (p. 64). The tiger is the deadly enemy of the dragon (p. 42).

The dragon sheds a brilliant light at night (p. 44), usually from his glittering eyes. He is the giver of omens (p. 45), good and bad, rains and floods. The dragon-horse is a vital spirit of Heaven and Earth (p. 58) and also of river water: it has the tail of a huge serpent.

The ecclesiastical vestments of the Wu-ist priests are endowed with magical properties which are considered to enable the wearer to control the order of the world, to avert unseasonable and calamitous events, such as drought, untimely and superabundant rainfall, and eclipses. These powers are conferred by the decoration upon the dress. Upon the back of the chief vestment the representation of a range of mountains is embroidered as a symbol of the world: on each side (the right and left) of it a large dragon arises above the billows to represent the fertilizing rain. They are surrounded by gold-thread figures representing clouds and spirals typifying rolling thunder.[166]

A ball, sometimes with a spiral decoration, is commonly represented in front of the Chinese dragon. The Chinese writer Koh Hung tells us that "a spiral denotes the rolling of thunder from which issues a flash of lightning".[167] De Visser discusses this question at some length and refers to Hirth's claim that the Chinese triquetrum, i.e., the well-known three-comma shaped figure, the Japanese mitsu-tomoe, the ancient spiral, represents thunder also.[168] Before discussing this question, which involves the consideration of the almost world-wide belief in a thunder-weapon and its relationship to the spiral ornament, the octopus, the pearl, the swastika and triskele, let us examine further the problem of the dragon's ball (see Fig. 15).



De Groot regards the dragon as a thunder-god and therefore, like Hirth, assumes that the supposed thunder-ball is being belched forth and not being swallowed by the dragon. But de Visser, as the result of a conversation with Mr. Kramp and the study of a Chinese picture in Blacker's "Chats on Oriental China" (1908, p. 54), puts forward the suggestion that the ball is the moon or the pearl-moon which the dragon is swallowing, thereby causing the fertilizing rain. The Chinese themselves refer to the ball as the "precious pearl," which, under the influence of Buddhism in China, was identified with "the pearl that grants all desires" and is under the special protection of the Naga, i.e., the dragon. Arising out of this de Visser puts the conundrum: "Was the ball originally also a pearl, not of Buddhism but of Taoism?"

In reply to this question I may call attention to the fact that the germs of civilization were first planted in China by people strongly imbued with the belief that the pearl was the quintessence of life-giving and prosperity-conferring powers:[169] it was not only identified with the moon, but also was itself a particle of moon-substance which fell as dew into the gaping oyster. It was the very people who held such views about pearls and gold who, when searching for alluvial gold and fresh-water pearls in Turkestan, were responsible for transferring these same life-giving properties to jade; and the magical value thus attached to jade was the nucleus, so to speak, around which the earliest civilization of China was crystallized.