Saturday, October 8, 2011
Andrew Lang: Custom and Myth
Is there a science of mythology? Victorian scholars were convinced that anything could be reduced to scientific laws. From psychology to penmanship, everything would reveal its secrets if only we could find the proper scientific key to unlock it.
The accomplishments of this scientific attitude were staggering. For the first time, we put medicine on a really scientific footing, and breathtaking discoveries followed one after another. A scientific approach to etymology really did unlock the secrets of language, and some of the secrets of history as well.
But we must candidly admit that some subjects proved more resistant to the scientific approach. Psychology made little progress until it was subsumed under chemistry, and no one has yet succeeded in making a science out of penmanship.
And then there’s mythology. Scholars of the nineteenth century were eager to reduce the nightmarish myths of the primitive imagination to scientific laws that would explain their origin and their meaning. But Andrew Lang demolishes the claims of the scientific mythologists simply by pointing out that no two of them agree. If they really had discovered a science of mythology, they would be able to produce evidence for their theories that would convince impartial observers. When there are as many theories as theorists, we obviously don’t have anything like a science yet.
More than anything else, this book is a work of demolition: it sweeps away the absurd parlor games that passed for a science of mythology. The theory Lang builds up is simpler and more conservative. Rejecting etymology as the master-key to mythology, and the attractive but impossible notion that similar myths prove contact between the most distant cultures, Lang suggests only that similar myths arise under similar circumstances.
Much of the book is devoted to instances of these similar myths and customs. We’re introduced to this thesis with a chapter on the “bull-roarer”:
The common bull-roarer is an inexpensive toy which anyone can make. I do not, however, recommend it to families, for two reasons. In the first place, it produces a most horrible and unexampled din, which endears it to the very young, but renders it detested by persons of mature age. In the second place, the character of the toy is such that it will almost infallibly break all that is fragile in the house where it is used, and will probably put out the eyes of some of the inhabitants. Having thus, I trust, said enough to prevent all good boys from inflicting bull-roarers on their parents, pastors, and masters, I proceed (in the interests of science) to show how the toy is made. Nothing can be less elaborate. You take a piece of the commonest wooden board, say the lid of a packing-case, about a sixth of an inch in thickness, and about eight inches long and three broad, and you sharpen the ends. When finished, the toy may be about the shape of a large bay-leaf, or a ‘fish’ used as a counter (that is how the New Zealanders make it), or the sides may be left plain in the centre, and only sharpened towards the extremities, as in an Australian example lent me by Mr. Tylor. Then tie a strong piece of string, about thirty inches long, to one end of the piece of wood and the bull-roarer (the Australian natives call it turndun, and the Greeks called it ρομβος) is complete. Now twist the end of the string tightly about your finger, and whirl the bull-roarer rapidly round and round. For a few moments nothing will happen. In a very interesting lecture delivered at the Royal Institution, Mr. Tylor once exhibited a bull-roarer. At first it did nothing particular when it was whirled round, and the audience began to fear that the experiment was like those chemical ones often exhibited at institutes in the country, which contribute at most a disagreeable odour to the education of the populace. But when the bull-roarer warmed to its work, it justified its name, producing what may best be described as a mighty rushing noise, as if some supernatural being ‘fluttered and buzzed his wings with fearful roar.’ Grown-up people, of course, are satisfied with a very brief experience of this din, but boys have always known the bull-roarer in England as one of the most efficient modes of making the hideous and unearthly noises in which it is the privilege of youth to delight.
The remarkable thing about this toy is that it’s found all over the world, and rather more often in the context of solemn religious ceremony than as a child’s plaything. The ancient Greeks had it, and the Australians as well. How refreshing it is not to hear our author trying to convince us that the ancient Greeks must have brought it to Australia! No, the explanation Lang adopts is the obvious one: that people in a similar frame of mind were similarly impressed by the mysterious sound made by an exceedingly simple construction, and associated the sound with the awful mysteries of their religion.
The bull-roarer has, of all toys, the widest diffusion, and the most extraordinary history. To study the bull-roarer is to take a lesson in folklore. The instrument is found among the most widely severed peoples, savage and civilised, and is used in the celebration of savage and civilised mysteries. There are students who would found on this a hypothesis that the various races that use the bull-roarer all descend from the same stock. But the bull roarer is introduced here for the very purpose of showing that similar minds, working with simple means towards similar ends, might evolve the bull-roarer and its mystic uses anywhere. There is no need for a hypothesis of common origin, or of borrowing, to account for this widely diffused sacred object.
This obviousness, I think, is the chief source of the book’s charm. Freed from any obligation to uphold an almost certainly impossible theory, Mr. Lang can just tell stories; and we can join him in marveling at how much one human mind is like another, whether the minds are Greek or Australian.
Custom and Myth is available at Project Gutenberg.
Thursday, April 28, 2011
P. H. Ditchfield: Books Fatal to Their Authors
There’s nothing about this book that marks it as particularly well done, nothing in its style that sets it apart as a work of exceptional genius. You might think it would be a stirring plea for the liberty of the press, but it’s not: it contents itself with being a modest literary entertainment. It has little organization: the unfortunate authors are grouped in broad categories according to the type of production—theology, history, satire, and so on—and then arranged, as far as I can tell, according to the order in which their names popped into the author’s head.
I don’t know why it should be so entertaining to read one anecdote after another of authors who lost their fortunes and their lives. To describe it makes it sound dreary and painful, but it isn’t, and I’m not sure why not. Probably the answer is in the style. The author is not a master of literary craft, but his breezy detachment is exactly the right tone. The most you ever get of polemic is this, right near the beginning of the chapter on theology:
Liberty of conscience was a thing unknown in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; and while we prize that liberty as a priceless possession, we can but admire the constancy and courage of those who lived in less happy days. We are not concerned now in condemning or defending their opinions or their beliefs, but we may at least praise their boldness and mourn their fate.
After that, there’s really very little of either praising or mourning. The book couldn’t have been a stirring defense of the liberty of the press without being dreary and painful; as it is, you’ll probably think, along with Mr. Ditchfield, that most of these writers had it coming to them.
A moment later, you’ll be ashamed of yourself for thinking so. Why should a man be drawn and quartered for writing what we know is the truth? But your first reaction was valuable: you’ve felt what it was like to be alive in that era (whatever era it was), when of course it was dangerous to say that the earth went around the sun, and only a fool would tempt the Inquisition, or whatever authority was responsible at the moment for suppressing falsehood, which is always defined so as to include immoderate truth. It’s a point of view that’s completely foreign to us in the liberal democracies, but we need to see the world that way for a little while if we’re going to understand most of the intellectual history of civilization.
Here, for example, is the fate of one unfortunate historian, who was only ruined (rather than killed) by his book:
The historian of the Dutch war of 1672 endured much distress by reason of his truthfulness. This was John Baptist Primi, Count of Saint-Majole. His book was first published in Italian, and entitled Historia della guerra d’Olanda nell’ anno 1672 (In Parigi, 1682), and in the same year a French translation was issued. The author alludes to the discreditable Treaty of Dover, whereby Charles II., the Sovereign of England, became a pensioner of France, and basely agreed to desert his Dutch allies, whom he had promised to aid with all his resources. The exposure of this base business was not pleasing to the royal ears. Lord Preston, the English ambassador, applied to the Court for the censure of the author, who was immediately sent to the Bastille. His book was very vigorously suppressed, so that few copies exist of either the Italian or French versions.
The “Secret Treaty of Dover,” by the way, was not common knowledge until 1830, according to the infallible Wikipedia—long after the last base wretch who had anything to do with it was dead. It seems that timely and vigorous suppression of the truth can spare a crooked politician considerable embarrassment. For that reason, the Bastille seems to have been practically a distinguished authors’ club in the 1600s and 1700s, to judge by the number of writers Mr. Ditchfield mentions who ended up there.
As entertainment, this book has some distinct advantages. It’s easy to dip into for a few spare minutes, and there’s no overall plot or argument you have to keep straight in your mind. You can put the book down for a few weeks and then pick it up again without feeling lost and bewildered. On the other hand, it’s a distinctly literary entertainment: you don’t have to feel guilty for enjoying it. A book that makes you feel smarter for having read it, but that demands no real intellectual effort, is a book that belongs in every bathroom.
Books Fatal to Their Authors can be found at Project Gutenberg.