THE GROWTH AND BIRTH OF MYTH.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3797, 15 September 1883, Page 4

THE GROWTH AND BIRTH OF MYTH.

(By Edward Clodd, in Knowledge). From the period when tho Apocryphal books, especially those having traces of Persian influence, were written, the doctrine of an archfiend with his army of demons received increasing impetus. It passed on without check into tho Christian religion, and wherever this spread tho heathen gods, like tho (Icons of Brahminism among tho Iranians, wore degraded into demons, and swelled the vast crowd of evil spirits let loose to torment and ruin mankind.

Tliis doctrine of demonology, it should bo remembered, was but tho elaborated form of the ancestral belief in spirits. In tho Christian system it was associated with that belief in magic which lias its roots in fetishism, and from the two arose belief in witchcraft. The universal belief in demons in early and medueval times supplied an easy explanation of disasters and diseases ; the sorcerers and eluirm-workers, tho wizards and enchanters, had passed into service of tho devil. For power to work their spite and malevolence, they had bartered their souls to him, and sealed tho bargain with their blood. It was enough for the ignorant and frightened suffcrers°to accuse some poor, mis-shapen, squinting old woman of casting on them the evil eyo, or of appearing in tho form of a cat, to ficonvo her trial by torture and her condemnation to an unpitied death. The spread of popular terror led to the issue of Papal bulls and to tho passing of statutes in England and in other countries against witchcraft, and it was not until late in the eighteenth century that the laws against that imaginary crime wore repealed. There is no sadder chapter in the annals of this tearful world, than this ghastly story story of witch-finding and witch-burning , . Sprenger computes that during the Christian epoch no less than vine mil/ions of persons, mostly women of tho poor class were burned; victims of tho survival into relatively civilised times of an illusion which had it's source in primitive thought. It was an illusion which had the authority of Scripture on its side; tho Church had no hesitation concerning ifc, such men as Luther, Sir Thomas Browne, and Wesley never doubted it, tho evidence of the bewitched was supported by honest witnesses, and judges disposed to mercy and humanity had no qualms in passing tho dread sentence of the law on tho condemned.

And although, it exists not to-Any, save in bye-places whore gross darkness lurks, it was not destroyed "by argument, by disproof, by direct assault, but only through the growth of the scientific spirit, before ■which liko tho miasnui of the Gampagna on

the planting of the Eucalyptus, it had dispersed. It could not live in an atmosphere thus purified, an atmosphere charged with belief in unchanging causation, and in a definite order unbroken by caprice or fitfulness, whether in tho sweep of a planet or the pulsations of a human heart. Of course tho antecedents of the archfiend himself could not fail to be the subject of curious enquiry in the time whenjiis existence was no matter of doubt. Tho old theologians scraped together enough material about him from the sacred books ot tho Jews and Christians to construct an elaborate, biography of him; but in this rhev would "seem to have explained too much in certain directions and not enough in others, thus provoking a reaction which ultimately discredited their painful research. Their genealogy of him was carried further back than they intended or desired, for the popular notions credited him with both a mother and a grandmother. Their theory of his fall from Heaven gave rise to the droll conception of his lameness and to the legends of which the " devil on two sticks " is"i type. Their infusion of foreign element into his nature aided his pietoriiU presentment in motley form and garb. To "Vedie descriptions of Vrifra's darkness may perchance be traced his mm-kiness and bbiekness ; Greek satyr and German forest-sprite his goat-like body, his horns, his cloven hoofs, his tail; to Thor his red beard and trident, vulgarised into a pitchfork; to dwarfs and goblins his red cloak and nodding plume ; to theories of transformation of men and spirits into animals his manifold metamorphoses, as black cat, wolf, hellhound, and the like. But his description was his doom ; it was by a natural sequence that the legends of medifeval times present him, not, with the Scotch theologians, as a scholar and a swindler, disguising , himself as a parson, but as gullible and stupid, as over-reaching himself, and as befooled by mortals. And, like the Trolls of Scandinavian folklore who burst at sunrise, it needed only the full light thrown upon its origin and development by the researches of comparative mycologists to dissipate this creation of man's fears and fancies info tho vaporous atmosphere where be had his birth.