Lang Andrew
Modern Mythology
‘The natives of Raiatea have some performances so entirely out of the ordinary course of events as to institute (sic) inquiry relative to a proper solution.
‘On September 20, 1885, I witnessed the wonderful, and to me inexplicable, performance of passing through the “fiery furnace.”
‘The furnace that I saw was an excavation of three or four feet in the ground, in a circular form (sloping upwards), and about thirty feet across. The excavation was filled with logs and wood, and then covered with large stones. A fire was built underneath, and kept burning for a day. When I witnessed it, on the second day, the flames were pouring up through the interstices of the rocks, which were heated to a red and white heat. When everything was in readiness, and the furnace still pouring out its intense heat, the natives marched up with bare feet to the edge of the furnace, where they halted for a moment, and after a few passes of the wand made of the branches of the ti-plant by the leader, who repeated a few words in the native language, they stepped down on the rocks and walked leisurely across to the other side, stepping from stone to stone. This was repeated five times, without any preparation whatever on their feet, and without injury or discomfort from the heated stones. There was not even the smell of fire on their garments.’
*****
Mr. N. J. Tone, in the same periodical (ii. 3,193), says that he arrived just too late to see the same rite at Bukit Mestajam, in Province Wellesley, Straits Settlements; he did see the pit and the fire, and examined the naked feet, quite uninjured, of the performers. He publishes an extract to this effect from his diary. The performers, I believe, were Klings. Nothing is said to indicate any condition of trance, or other abnormal state, in the fire-walkers.
The Fire-walk in Trinidad
Mr. Henry E. St. Clair, writing on September 14. 1896, says: ‘In Trinidad, British West Indies, the rite is performed annually about this time of the year among the Indian coolie immigrants resident in the small village of Peru, a mile or so from Port of Spain. I have personally witnessed the passing, and the description given by Mr. Ponder tallies with what I saw, except that, so far as I can remember, the number of those who took part in the rite was greater than six. In addition, there is this circumstance, which was not mentioned by that gentleman: each of the “passers” carried one or two lemons, which they dropped into the fire as they went along. These lemons were afterwards eagerly scrambled for by the bystanders, who, so far as I can recollect, attributed a healing influence to them.’
Bulgarian Fire-walk
As to the Bulgarian rite, Dr. Schischmanof writes to me:
‘I am sure the observance will surprise you; I am even afraid that you will think it rather fantastic, but you may rely on my information. The danse de feu was described long ago in a Bulgarian periodical by one of our best known writers. What you are about to read only confirms his account. What I send you is from the Recueil de Folk Lore, de Littérature et de Science (vol. vi. p. 224), edited, with my aid and that of my colleague, Mastov, by the Minister of Public Instruction. How will you explain these hauts faits de l’extase religieuse? I cannot imagine! For my part, I think of the self-mutilations and tortures of Dervishes and Fakirs, and wonder if we have not here something analogous.’
The article in the Bulgarian serial is called ‘The Nistinares.’ The word is not Bulgarian; possibly it is Romaic.
The scene is in certain villages in Turkey, on the Bulgarian frontier, and not far from the town of Bourgas, on the Euxine, in the department of Lozen Grad. The ministrants (Nistinares) have the gift of fire-walking as a hereditary talent; they are specially just, and the gift is attributed as to a god in Fiji, in Bulgaria to St. Constantine and St. Helena.
‘These just ones feel a desire to dance in the flames during the month of May; they are filled at the same time with some unknown force, which enables them to predict the future. The best Nistinare is he who can dance longest in the live flame, and utter the most truthful prophecies.’
The Nistinares may be of either sex.
On May 1 the Nistinares hold a kind of religious festival at the house of one of their number. Salutations are exchanged, and presents of food and raki are made to the chief Nistinare. The holy icones of saints are wreathed with flowers, and perfumed with incense. Arrangements are made for purifying the holy wells and springs.
On May 21, the day of St. Helena and St. Constantine, the parish priest says Mass in the grey of dawn. At sunrise all the village meets in festal array; the youngest Nistinare brings from the church the icones of the two saints, and drums are carried behind them in procession. They reach the sacred well in the wood, which the priest blesses. This is parallel to the priestly benediction on ‘Fountain Sunday’ of the well beneath the Fairy Tree at Domremy, where Jeanne d’Arc was accused of meeting the Good Ladies. 169 Everyone drinks of the water, and there is a sacrifice of rams, ewes, and oxen. A festival follows, as was the use of Domremy in the days of the Maid; then all return to the village. The holy drum, which hangs all the year before St. Helena in the church, is played upon. A mock combat between the icones which have visited the various holy wells is held.
Meanwhile, in each village, pyres of dry wood, amounting to thirty, fifty, or even a hundred cartloads, have been piled up. The wood is set on fire before the procession goes forth to the hallowing of the fountains. On returning, the crowd dances a horo (round dance) about the glowing logs. Heaps of embers (Pineus acervus) are made, and water is thrown on the ground. The musicians play the tune called ‘L’Air Nistinar.’ A Nistinare breaks through the dance, turns blue, trembles like a leaf, and glares wildly with his eyes. The dance ends, and everybody goes to the best point of view. Then the wildest Nistinare seizes the icon, turns it to the crowd, and with naked feet climbs the pyre of glowing embers. The music plays, and the Nistinare dances to the tune in the fire. If he is so disposed he utters prophecies. He dances till his face resumes its ordinary expression; then he begins to feel the burning; he leaves the pyre, and places his feet in the mud made by the libations of water already described. The second Nistinare then dances in the fire, and so on. The predictions apply to villages and persons; sometimes sinners are denounced, or repairs of the church are demanded in this queer parish council. All through the month of May the Nistinares call out for fire when they hear the Nistinare music playing. They are very temperate men and women. Except in May they do not clamour for fire, and cannot dance in it.
In this remarkable case the alleged gift is hereditary, is of saintly origin, and is only exercised when the Nistinare is excited, and (apparently) entranced by music and the dance, as is the manner also of medicine-men among savages. The rite, with its sacrifices of sheep and oxen, is manifestly of heathen origin. They ‘pass through the fire’ to St. Constantine, but the observance must be far older than Bulgarian Christianity. The report says nothing as to the state of the feet of the Nistinares after the fire-dance. Medical inspection is desirable, and the photographic camera should be used to catch a picture of the wild scene. My account is abridged from the French version of the Bulgarian report sent by Dr. Schischmanof.
Indian Fire-walk
Since these lines were written the kindness of Mr. Tawney, librarian at the India Office, has added to my stock of examples. Thus, Mr. Stokes printed in the Indian Antiquary (ii. p. 190) notes of evidence taken at an inquest on a boy of fourteen, who fell during the fire-walk, was burned, and died on that day. The rite had been forbidden, but was secretly practised in the village of Periyângridi. The fire-pit was 27 feet long by 7½ feet broad and a span in depth. Thirteen persons walked through the hot wood embers, which, in Mr. Stokes’s opinion (who did not see the performance), ‘would hardly injure the tough skin of the sole of a labourer’s foot,’ yet killed a boy. The treading was usually done by men under vows, perhaps vows made during illness. One, at least, walked ‘because it is my duty as Pûjâri.’ Another says, ‘I got down into the fire at the east end, meditating on Draupatî, walked through to the west, and up the bank.’ Draupatî is a goddess, wife of the Pândavas. Mr. Stokes reports that, according to the incredulous, experienced fire-walkers smear their feet with oil of the green frog. No report is made as to the condition of their feet when they emerge from the fire.
Another case occurs in Oppert’s work, The Original Inhabitants of India (p. 480). As usual, a pit is dug, filled with faggots. When these have burned down ‘a little,’ and ‘while the heat is still unbearable in the neighbourhood of the ditch, those persons who have made the vow.. walk.. on the embers in the pit, without doing themselves as a rule much harm.’
Again, in a case where butter is poured over the embers to make a blaze, ‘one of the tribal priests, in a state of religious afflatus, walks through the fire. It is said that the sacred fire is harmless, but some admit that a certain preservative ointment is used by the performers.’ A chant used at Mirzapur (as in Fiji) is cited. 170
In these examples the statements are rather vague. No evidence is adduced as to the actual effect of the fire on the feet of the ministrants. We hear casually of ointments which protect the feet, and of the thickness of the skins of the fire-walkers, and of the unapproachable heat, but we have nothing exact, no trace of scientific precision. The Government ‘puts down,’ but does not really investigate the rite.
Psychical Parallels
I now very briefly, and ‘under all reserves,’ allude to the only modern parallel in our country with which I am acquainted. We have seen that Iamblichus includes insensibility to fire among the privileges of Græco-Egyptian ‘mediums.’ 171 The same gift was claimed by Daniel Dunglas Home, the notorious American spiritualist. I am well aware that as Eusapia Paladino was detected in giving a false impression that her hands were held by her neighbours in the dark, therefore, when Mr. Crookes asserts that he saw Home handle fire in the light, his testimony on this point can have no weight with a logical public. Consequently it is not as evidence to the fact that I cite Mr. Crookes, but for another purpose. Mr. Crookes’s remarks I heard, and I can produce plenty of living witnesses to the same experiences with D. D. Home:
‘I several times saw the fire test, both at my own and at other houses. On one occasion he called me to him when he went to the fire, and told me to watch carefully. He certainly put his hand in the grate and handled the red-hot coals in a manner which would have been impossible for me to have imitated without being severely burnt. I once saw him go to a bright wood fire, and, taking a large piece of red-hot charcoal, put it in the hollow of one hand, and, covering it with the other, blow into the extempore furnace till the coal was white hot, and the flames licked round his fingers. No sign of burning could be seen then or afterwards on his hands.’
On these occasions Home was, or was understood to be, ‘entranced,’ like the Bulgarian Nistinares. Among other phenomena, the white handkerchief on which Home laid a red-hot coal was not scorched, nor, on analysis, did it show any signs of chemical preparation. Home could also (like the Fijians) communicate his alleged immunity to others present; for example, to Mr. S. C. Hall. But it burned and marked a man I know. Home, entranced, and handling a red-hot coal, passed it to a gentleman of my acquaintance, whose hand still bears the scar of the scorching endured in 1867. Immunity was not always secured by experimenters.
I only mention these circumstances because Mr. Crookes has stated that he knows no chemical preparation which would avert the ordinary action of heat. Mr. Clodd (on the authority of Sir B. W. Richardson) has suggested diluted sulphuric acid (so familiar to Klings, Hirpi, Tongans, and Fijians). But Mr. Clodd produced no examples of successful or unsuccessful experiment. 172 The nescience of Mr. Crookes may be taken to cover these valuable properties of diluted sulphuric acid, unless Mr. Clodd succeeds in an experiment which, if made on his own person, I would very willingly witness.
Merely for completeness, I mention Dr. Dozous’s statement, 173 that he timed by his watch Bernadette, the seer of Lourdes, while, for fifteen minutes, she, in an ecstatic condition, held her hands in the flame of a candle. He then examined her hands, which were not scorched or in any way affected by the fire. This is called, at Lourdes, the Miracle du Cierge.
Here ends my list of examples, in modern and ancient times, of a rite which deserves, though it probably will not receive, the attention of science. The widely diffused religious character of the performance will, perhaps, be admitted as demonstrated. As to the method by which the results are attained, whether by a chemical preparation, or by the influence of a certain mental condition, or by thickness of skin, or whether all the witnesses fable with a singular unanimity (shared by photographic cameras), I am unable even to guess. On May 21, in Bulgaria, a scientific observer might come to a conclusion. At present I think it possible that the Jewish ‘Passing through the Fire’ may have been a harmless rite.
Conclusion as to Fire-walk
In all these cases, and others as to which I have first-hand evidence, there are decided parallels to the Rite of the Hirpi, and to Biblical and ecclesiastical miracles. The savage examples are rites, and appear intended to secure good results in food supplies (Fiji), or general well-being, perhaps by expiation for sins, as in the Attic Thargelia. The Bulgarian rite also aims at propitiating general good luck.
Psychical Research
But how is the Fire-walk done? That remains a mystery, and perhaps no philologist, folk-lorist, anthropologist, or physiologist, has seriously asked the question. The medicamentum of Varro, the green frog fat of India, the diluted sulphuric acid of Mr. Clodd, are guesses in the air, and Mr. Clodd has made no experiment. The possibility of plunging the hand, unhurt, in molten metal, is easily accounted for, and is not to the point. In this difficulty Psychical Research registers, and no more, the well-attested performances of D. D. Home (entranced, like the Nistinares); the well observed and timed Miracle du Cierge at Lourdes – Bernadette being in an ecstatic condition; the Biblical story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace; the researches of Iamblichus; the case of Madame Shchapoff, carefully reported, 174 and other examples. There is no harm in collecting examples, and the question remains, are all those rites, from those of Virgil’s Hirpi to Bulgaria of to-day, based on some actual but obscure and scientifically neglected fact in nature? At all events, for the Soranus-Feronia rite philology only supplies her competing etymologies, folk-lore her modern rural parallels, anthropology her savage examples, psychical research her ‘cases’ at first-hand. Anthropology had neglected the collection of these, perhaps because the Fire-walk is ‘impossible.’
THE ORIGIN OF DEATH
Yama
This excursus on ‘The Fire-walk’ has been introduced, as an occasion arose, less because of controversy about a neglected theme than for the purpose of giving something positive in a controversial treatise. For the same reason I take advantage of Mr. Max Müller’s remarks on Yama, ‘the first who died,’ to offer a set of notes on myths of the Origin of Death. Yama, in our author’s opinion, is ‘the setting sun’ (i. 45; ii. 563). Agni (Fire) is ‘the first who was born;’ as the other twin, Yama, he was also the first who died (ii. 568). As ‘the setting sun he was the first instance of death.’ Kuhn and others, judging from a passage in the Atharva Veda (xviii. 3, 13), have, however, inferred that Yama ‘was really a human being and the first of mortals.’ He is described in the Atharva as ‘the gatherer of men, who died the first of mortals, who went forward the first to that world.’ In the Atharva we read of ‘reverence to Yama, to Death, who first approached the precipice, finding out the path for many.’ ‘The myth of Yama is perfectly intelligible, if we trace its roots back to the sun of evening’ (ii. 573). Mr. Max Müller then proposes on this head ‘to consult the traditions of real Naturvölker’ (savages). The Harvey Islanders speak of dying as ‘following the sun’s track.’ The Maoris talk of ‘going down with the sun’ (ii. 574). No more is said here about savage myths of ‘the first who died.’ I therefore offer some additions to the two instances in which savages use a poetical phrase connecting the sun’s decline with man’s death.
The Origin of Death
Civilised man in a scientific age would never invent a myth to account for ‘God’s great ordinance of death.’ He regards it as a fact, obvious and necessarily universal; but his own children have not attained to his belief in death. The certainty and universality of death do not enter into the thoughts of our little ones.
For in the thought of immortality
Do children play about the flowery meads.
Now, there are still many childlike tribes of men who practically disbelieve in death. To them death is always a surprise and an accident – an unnecessary, irrelevant intrusion on the living world. ‘Natural deaths are by many tribes regarded as supernatural,’ says Dr. Tylor. These tribes have no conception of death as the inevitable, eventual obstruction and cessation of the powers of the bodily machine; the stopping of the pulses and processes of life by violence or decay or disease. To persons who regard Death thus, his intrusion into the world (for Death, of course, is thought to be a person) stands in great need of explanation. That explanation, as usual, is given in myths.
Death, regarded as Unnatural
But before studying these widely different myths, let us first establish the fact that death really is regarded as something non-natural and intrusive. The modern savage readily believes in and accounts in a scientific way for violent deaths. The spear or club breaks or crushes a hole in a man, and his soul flies out. But the deaths he disbelieves in are natural deaths. These he is obliged to explain as produced by some supernatural cause, generally the action of malevolent spirits impelled by witches. Thus the savage holds that, violence apart and the action of witches apart, man would even now be immortal. ‘There are rude races of Australia and South America,’ writes Dr. Tylor, 175 ‘whose intense belief in witchcraft has led them to declare that if men were never bewitched, and never killed by violence, they would never die at all. Like the Australians, the Africans will inquire of their dead “what sorcerer slew them by his wicked arts.”’ ‘The natives,’ says Sir George Grey, speaking of the Australians, ‘do not believe that there is such a thing as death from natural causes.’ On the death of an Australian native from disease, a kind of magical coroner’s inquest is held by the conjurers of the tribe, and the direction in which the wizard lives who slew the dead man is ascertained by the movements of worms and insects. The process is described at full length by Mr. Brough Smyth in his Aborigines of Victoria (i. 98-102). Turning from Australia to Hindustan, we find that the Puwarrees (according to Heber’s narrative) attribute all natural deaths to a supernatural cause – namely, witchcraft. That is, the Puwarrees do not yet believe in the universality and necessity of Death. He is an intruder brought by magic arts into our living world. Again, in his Ethnology of Bengal (pp. 199, 200), Dalton tells us that the Hos (an aboriginal non-Aryan race) are of the same opinion as the Puwarrees. ‘They hold that all disease in men or animals is attributable to one of two causes: the wrath of some evil spirit or the spell of some witch or sorcerer. These superstitions are common to all classes of the population of this province.’ In the New Hebrides disease and death are caused, as Mr. Codrington found, by tamates, or ghosts. 176 In New Caledonia, according to Erskine, death is the result of witchcraft practised by members of a hostile tribe, for who would be so wicked as to bewitch his fellow-tribesman? The Andaman Islanders attribute all natural deaths to the supernatural influence of e rem chaugala, or to jurn-win, two spirits of the jungle and the sea. The death is avenged by the nearest relation of the deceased, who shoots arrows at the invisible enemy. The negroes of Central Africa entertain precisely similar ideas about the non-naturalness of death. Mr. Duff Macdonald, in Africana, writes: ‘Every man who dies what we call a natural death is really killed by witches.’ It is a far cry from the Blantyre Mission in Africa to the Eskimo of the frozen North; but so uniform is human nature in the lower races that the Eskimo precisely agree, as far as theories of death go, with the Africans, the aborigines of India, the Andaman Islanders, the Australians, and the rest. Dr. Rink 177 found that ‘sickness or death coming about in an accidental manner was always attributed to witchcraft, and it remains a question whether death on the whole was not originally accounted for as resulting from magic.’ Père Paul le Jeune, writing from Quebec in 1637, says of the Red Men: ‘Je n’en voy mourir quasi aucun, qui ne pense estre ensorcelé.’ 178 It is needless to show how these ideas survived into civilisation. Bishop Jewell, denouncing witches before Queen Elizabeth, was, so far, mentally on a level with the Eskimo and the Australian. The familiar and voluminous records of trials for witchcraft, whether at Salem or at Edinburgh, prove that all abnormal and unwonted deaths and diseases, in animals or in men, were explained by our ancestors as the results of supernatural mischief.
It has been made plain (and the proof might be enlarged to any extent) that the savage does not regard death as ‘God’s great ordinance,’ universal and inevitable and natural. But, being curious and inquisitive, he cannot help asking himself, ‘How did this terrible invader first enter a world where he now appears so often?’ This is, properly speaking, a scientific question; but the savage answers it, not by collecting facts and generalising from them, but by inventing a myth. That is his invariable habit. Does he want to know why this tree has red berries, why that animal has brown stripes, why this bird utters its peculiar cry, where fire came from, why a constellation is grouped in one way or another, why his race of men differs from the whites – in all these, and in all other intellectual perplexities, the savage invents a story to solve the problem. Stories about the Origin of Death are, therefore, among the commonest fruits of the savage imagination. As those legends have been produced to meet the same want by persons in a very similar mental condition, it inevitably follows that they all resemble each other with considerable closeness. We need not conclude that all the myths we are about to examine came from a single original source, or were handed about – with flint arrow-heads, seeds, shells, beads, and weapons – in the course of savage commerce. Borrowing of this sort may – or, rather, must – explain many difficulties as to the diffusion of some myths. But the myths with which we are concerned now, the myths of the Origin of Death, might easily have been separately developed by simple and ignorant men seeking to discover an answer to the same problem.
Why Men are Mortal
The myths of the Origin of Death fall into a few categories. In many legends of the lower races men are said to have become subject to mortality because they infringed some mystic prohibition or taboo of the sort which is common among untutored peoples. The apparently untrammelled Polynesian, or Australian, or African, is really the slave of countless traditions, which forbid him to eat this object or to touch that, or to speak to such and such a person, or to utter this or that word. Races in this curious state of ceremonial subjection often account for death as the punishment imposed for breaking some taboo. In other cases, death is said to have been caused by a sin of omission, not of commission. People who have a complicated and minute ritual (like so many of the lower races) persuade themselves that Death burst on the world when some passage of the ritual was first omitted, or when some custom was first infringed. Yet again, Death is fabled to have first claimed us for his victims in consequence of the erroneous delivery of a favourable message from some powerful supernatural being, or because of the failure of some enterprise which would have resulted in the overthrow of Death, or by virtue of a pact or covenant between Death and the gods. Thus it will be seen that death is often (though by no means invariably) the penalty of infringing a command, or of indulging in a culpable curiosity. But there are cases, as we shall see, in which death, as a tolerably general law, follows on a mere accident. Some one is accidentally killed, and this ‘gives Death a lead’ (as they say in the hunting-field) over the fence which had hitherto severed him from the world of living men. It is to be observed in this connection that the first of men who died is usually regarded as the discoverer of a hitherto ‘unknown country,’ the land beyond the grave, to which all future men must follow him. Bin dir Woor, among the Australians, was the first man who suffered death, and he (like Yama in the Vedic myth) became the Columbus of the new world of the dead.
Savage Death-Myths
Let us now examine in detail a few of the savage stories of the Origin of Death. That told by the Australians may be regarded with suspicion, as a refraction from a careless hearing of the narrative in Genesis. The legend printed by Mr. Brough Smyth 179 was told to Mr. Bulwer by ‘a black fellow far from sharp,’ and this black fellow may conceivably have distorted what his tribe had heard from a missionary. This sort of refraction is not uncommon, and we must always guard ourselves against being deceived by a savage corruption of a Biblical narrative. Here is the myth, such as it is: – ‘The first created man and woman were told’ (by whom we do not learn) ‘not to go near a certain tree in which a bat lived. The bat was not to be disturbed. One day, however, the woman was gathering firewood, and she went near the tree. The bat flew away, and after that came Death.’ More evidently genuine is the following legend of how Death ‘got a lead’ into the Australian world. ‘The child of the first man was wounded. If his parents could heal him, Death would never enter the world. They failed. Death came.’ The wound in this legend was inflicted by a supernatural being. Here Death acts on the principle ce n’est que le premier pas qui coûte, and the premier pas was made easy for him. We may continue to examine the stories which account for death as the result of breaking a taboo. The Ningphos of Bengal say they were originally immortal. 180 They were forbidden to bathe in a certain pool of water. Some one, greatly daring, bathed, and ever since Ningphos have been subject to death. The infringement, not of a taboo, but of a custom, caused death in one of the many Melanesian myths on this subject. Men and women had been practically deathless because they cast their old skins at certain intervals; but a grandmother had a favourite grandchild who failed to recognise her when she appeared as a young woman in her new skin. With fatal good-nature the grandmother put on her old skin again, and instantly men lost the art of skin-shifting, and Death finally seized them. 181
The Greek Myth
The Greek myth of the Origin of Death is the most important of those which turn on the breaking of a prohibition. The story has unfortunately become greatly confused in the various poetical forms which have reached us. As far as can be ascertained, death was regarded in one early Greek myth as the punishment of indulgence in forbidden curiosity. Men appear to have been free from death before the quarrel between Zeus and Prometheus. In consequence of this quarrel Hephæstus fashioned a woman out of earth and water, and gave her to Epimetheus, the brother of the Titan. Prometheus had forbidden his brother to accept any gift from the gods, but the bride was welcomed nevertheless. She brought her tabooed coffer: this was opened; and men – who, according to Hesiod, had hitherto lived exempt from ‘maladies that bring down Fate’ – were overwhelmed with the ‘diseases that stalk abroad by night and day.’ Now, in Hesiod (Works and Days, 70-100) there is nothing said about unholy curiosity. Pandora simply opened her casket and scattered its fatal contents. But Philodemus assures us that, according to a variant of the myth, it was Epimetheus who opened the forbidden coffer, whence came Death.
Leaving the myths which turn on the breaking of a taboo, and reserving for consideration the New Zealand story, in which the Origin of Death is the neglect of a ritual process, let us look at some African myths of the Origin of Death. It is to be observed that in these (as in all the myths of the most backward races) many of the characters are not gods, but animals.
The Bushman story lacks the beginning. The mother of the little Hare was lying dead, but we do not know how she came to die. The Moon then struck the little Hare on the lip, cutting it open, and saying, ‘Cry loudly, for your mother will not return, as I do, but is quite dead.’ In another version the Moon promises that the old Hare shall return to life, but the little Hare is sceptical, and is hit in the mouth as before. The Hottentot myth makes the Moon send the Hare to men with the message that they will revive as he (the Moon) does. But the Hare ‘loses his memory as he runs’ (to quote the French proverb, which may be based on a form of this very tale), and the messenger brings the tidings that men shall surely die and never revive. The angry Moon then burns a hole in the Hare’s mouth. In yet another Hottentot version the Hare’s failure to deliver the message correctly caused the death of the Moon’s mother (Bleek, Bushman Folklore). 182 Compare Sir James Alexander’s Expedition, ii. 250, where the Namaquas tell this tale. The Fijians say that the Moon wished men to die and be born again, like herself. The Rat said, ‘No, let them die, like rats;’ and they do. 183
