moral: they are tales told for the sake of the telling and repeated for the pleasure of hearing, like fairy-tales.

In

A fundamental article in the totem faith is that the human kin and the animal kind are one flesh, one blood, members of the same clan, bound by the sacred tie of blood to respect and assist each other. Then the question naturally arises, if the human and the animal members are brothers, how is it that they wear such different shapes? and the answer obviously is that they were not always different: once upon a time they were the same, and then something occurred to make them different. Thus, " the Cray-fish clan of the Choctaws were originally cray-fish and lived underground, coming up occasionally through the mud to the surface. Once a party of Choctaws smoked them out, and, treating them kindly, taught them the Choctaw language, taught them to walk on two legs, made them cut off their toe-nails and pluck the hair from their bodies, after which they adopted them into the tribe. But the rest of their kindred, the cray-fish, are still living underground."1 course of time, as we have seen, it comes to be believed that the totem-god is the father of his worshippers, and the question again arises, how can human beings be descended from an animal forefather? and the answer is on the same principle as before. "Thus the Turtle clan of the Iroquois are descended from a fat turtle, which, burdened by the weight of its shell in walking, contrived by great exertions to throw it off, and thereafter gradually developed into a man.”2 again, in consequence of the development of anthropomorphism, it comes to be believed that the proper and original shape of the gods is human; and then the belief that the family is descended from a god in animal form requires explanation; and the obvious inference is that as the god's real and normal shape is human, he must have transformed himself temporarily on this occasion and for some especial purpose: thus Zeus changes himself into a swan to win Leda, into a bull to win Europa.

Later,

In art and ritual the gradual process by which the originally animal or vegetation god became eventually human in form can be clearly traced, with all the intermediate steps. 1 Frazer, Totemism, 4.

2 Ibid. 3.

The god appears occasionally on Egyptian monuments in purely animal form; the skin of the animal totem, a branch of the god-tree, some actual ears of wheat or maize, are worshipped as very god. Then the semi-human nature of the god is expressed by clothing a human image in an animal skin, or placing a human figure (of dough, etc.) on a tree, or clothing a tree or a sheaf of ears in human dress, or a human being in a sheaf or leaves. Then, when the animal or plant origin of the god has been altogether forgotten, the god is simply "associated" in art with the plant or animal: Demeter wears a garland of wheat-ears, Chicomecoatl carries maize-stalks in her hand, Apollo stands beside a dolphin; and finally, even these symbols are dropped. The same evolution is abundantly illustrated in mythology: the Turtle of the Iroquois corresponds to the purely animal form of the Egyptian gods; Zeus, who is at one time human and at another animal, corresponds to the misch-bild, the human body with animal head, which is the most common Egyptian mode of representing the gods, or to the half-human, halfvegetable deity represented by a sheaf wrapped in human raiment. The "association" of a deity with a plant appears in the myth of the Red Maize clan of the Omahas, who say that "the first man of the clan emerged from the water with an ear of red maize in his hand." 2 Finally, even the "association" disappears in the myth of the Pima Indians about the maize-spirit: "one day, as she lay asleep, a raindrop fell on her naked bosom, and she became the ancestress of the maize-growing Pueblo Indians." 3

In course of time, the clan may forget that their animal god was their ancestor, and then a fresh reason is required to account for the alliance between the human kin and the animal kind, and so "some families in the islands Leti, Moa, and Lakor reverence the shark, and refused to eat its flesh, because a shark once helped one of their ancestors at sea."4 Or the clan may remember that it was descended from an animal, but—owing to the general disappearance of animalworship-forget that the animal was a god, in which case

1 Αρτεμις ἕστηκεν ἀμπεχομένη δέρμα ελάφου, Paus. viii. c. 37.

2 Frazer, op. cit. 6.

3 Payne, New World, i. 414 note 4.

Frazer, op. cit. 7.

“transformation" still appears as a feature in the story, but it is no longer due to divine agency: "the Kalang, who have claims to be considered the aborigines of Java, are descended from a princess and a chief who had been transformed into a dog."1

Now, we began by noting that, though many myths are ætiological, i.e. designed to explain something, many are not, but are rather like fairy-tales; and it is evident that we are now, after starting with the former, rapidly approaching the latter class: the transformation of the Kalang chief reminds us of the enchanters and enchantresses of the Arabian Nights; the helpful Papuan shark belongs to the same order of creatures as Arion's dolphin and the "friendly animals" of numerous nursery tales. What then are the relations between the two classes ?

To begin with-granted that the tendency to ask the reason why, the desire "rerum cognoscere causas" (provided the things be interesting), is characteristic of man generally -it is clear that curiosity would be inevitably aroused by the totemistic beliefs that human beings are descended from animals and that animals help men: some explanation would eventually be felt to be necessary, and as a matter of fact explanations of the kind already illustrated are forthcoming. It is clear also that when the beliefs were dead and forgotten, the stories which had been invented to account for them would, if they survived, ipso facto be dissevered from the beliefs; and would now appear no longer as reasons or explanations, but as statements of facts which occurred

once upon a time,"-incidents, anecdotes. And, as still happens with anecdotes, there was nothing to prevent them from being appropriated to (or by) the wrong persons: the original dolphin-myth was attached to the historic Arion, whilst the totem-dolphin, the original of the myth, was absorbed by the god Apollo. But a single incident does not make a story. "There was once a man and he was changed into a dog," is not a statement of sufficient interest to live long in the memory; but it may have the requisite interest if either I believe that the man in question was an ancestor of my own, or if I know something about the man, other1 Frazer, op. cit. 6.

So

wise, e.g. if I know him as the hero of other incidents. that, granted that the incidents which compose myths are explanations which have survived the beliefs they were invented to explain, we have yet to learn why they came to be grouped together—a point of first-rate importance, because they would not have survived if they had not been combined together. We cannot suppose that they were first dissevered from the beliefs on which they originally depended for their existence, and then were subsequently combined so as to obtain a renewed existence, because they would probably have perished in the interval. We must therefore suppose that they were combined into tales ere yet the beliefs or institutions which gave them their first lease of life had perished. This means that the various parts of one institution, for instance, must have had each its separate explanation, and that these explanations were combined into one whole, the unity of which corresponded to the unity of the institution. An illustration will make this clearer, and we will choose one which shall serve to remind us that the relations of men to their totem-animal and to their animal kindred are not the only things for which early man required an explanation, and are not by any means the only source of the incidents to be found in myths and fairy-tales.

Ceremonies may continue to be performed as a matter of custom and tradition long after their original purpose and object have been forgotten; but they will not continue to be performed unless some reason or other is forthcoming, and usually the reason which commends itself is some inference from the nature of the ceremony itself, which is indeed an incorrect inference but is so easy and so readily understood that various people can arrive at it for themselves, and all can appreciate it at once. The explanations which thus come to be given of religious ritual form an important class of aetiological myths, and have the further interest for us that they afford instances of myths which from the beginning were tales and not merely single incidents: a single rite might consist of a series of acts, each of which demanded its own explanation; and the unity of the rite might produce a unity of interest and action in the resulting myth. For an instance we must obviously turn to a complex ritual, and

we will take the ritual which resulted from the syncretism of the wine-god Dionysus and a vegetation spirit. It is probable that the festival of Dionysus at Thebes and elsewhere 1 began with a procession in which a branch, or something else originally representative of the vegetation spirit, was carried round the cultivated fields adjacent to the city, in the same way as the ears of maize were carried at the feast of the Mexican Chicomecoatl, or branches by the European Aryans generally on similar occasions-the purpose being the same in all cases, namely, to place the crops under the blessing of the vegetation spirit. The branch or image or what not was carried by a man dressed up as a woman, just as the eipeovn was carried by youths dressed up as womenperhaps, as previously hinted, because the worship of the vegetation spirit was originally confined to women. This is the first act of the ceremony: the carrying of the symbol of the god by a man dressed as a woman. Then, by a custom common in Europe and exactly paralleled in Mexico, a human figure was attached to the top of a tree-trunk previously felled and prepared, and the trunk was hoisted by ropes into an upright position. This, as we have seen, is an indication of the presence of the anthropomorphic vegetation or treespirit in the tree. The image was then pelted with stones until it fell, when it was torn in pieces by the crowd of women celebrating the festival. Stoning was the mode adopted of killing first the animal and afterwards the plant totem, because by means of it the whole community could share jointly and equally in the responsibility of killing the god. In the third and final act of the ritual, the woman who in the scramble secured the head of the image raced off with it, and nailed it to the door or roof of the chief house of the town or of the temple, just as the branch is fastened, after its procession round the fields, to the door or roof of the landlord's house, in northern Europe, and just as the eipeovn was similarly attached to the temple of Apollo.

Now there came a time when the original meaning of all

1 For what follows I am largely indebted to Mr. A. G. Bather's original and exhaustive paper on "The Problem of the Baccha," Journal of Hellenic Studies, 1894, vol. xiv. ii. 244-64.

2 Supra, p. 215.