The lives of savages are bound by the most closely-woven fetters of custom. The simplest acts are tabooed, a strict code regulates all intercourse. Married life, especially, moves in the strangest fetters. There will be nothing remarkable in the wide distribution of a myth turning on nuptial etiquette, if this law of nuptial etiquette proves to be also widely distributed. That it is widely distributed we now propose to demonstrate by examples.
The custom of the African people of the kingdom of Futa is, or was, even stricter than the Vedic custom of women wives never permit their husbands to see them unveiled for three years after their marriage. 64
In his Travels to Timbuctoo (i. 94), Caillié says that the bridegroom is not allowed to see his intended during the day. He has a tabooed hut apart, and if he is obliged to come out he covers his face. He remains with his wife only till daybreak like Cupid and flees, like Cupid, before the light. Among the Australians the chief deity, if deity such a being can be called, Pundjel, has a wife whose face he has never seen, probably in compliance with some primæval etiquette or taboo. 65
Among the Yorubas conventional modesty forbids a woman to speak to her husband, or even to see him, if it can be avoided. 66 Of the Iroquois Lafitau says: Ils nosent aller dans les cabanes particulières où habitent leurs épouses que durant lobscurité de la nuit. 67 The Circassian women live on distant terms with their lords till they become mothers. 68 Similar examples of reserve are reported to be customary among the Fijians.
In backward parts of Europe a strange custom forbids the bride to speak to her lord, as if in memory of a time when husband and wife were always of alien tribes, and, as among the Caribs, spoke different languages.
In the Bulgarian Volkslied, the Sun marries Grozdanka, a mortal girl. Her mother addresses her thus:
Grozdanka, mothers treasure mine,
For nine long years I nourished thee,
For nine months see thou do not speak
To thy first love that marries thee.
M. Dozon, who has collected the Bulgarian songs, says that this custom of prolonged silence on the part of the bride is very common in Bulgaria, though it is beginning to yield to a sense of the ludicrous. 69 In Sparta and in Crete, as is well known, the bridegroom was long the victim of a somewhat similar taboo, and was only permitted to seek the company of his wife secretly, and in the dark, like the Iroquois described by Lafitau.
Herodotus tells us (i. 146) that some of the old Ionian colonists brought no women with them, but took wives of the women of the Carians, whose fathers they had slain. Therefore the women made a law for themselves, and handed it down to their daughters, that they should never sit at meat with their husbands, and that none should ever call her husband by his name. In precisely the same way, in Zululand the wife may not mention her husbands name, just as in the Welsh fairy tale the husband may not even know the name of his fairy bride, on pain of losing her for ever. These ideas about names, and freakish ways of avoiding the use of names, mark the childhood of languages, according to Mr. Max Müller, 70 and, therefore, the childhood of Society. The Kaffirs call this etiquette Hlonipa. It applies to women as well as men. A Kaffir bride is not called by her own name in her husbands village, but is spoken of as mother of so and so, even before she has borne a child. The universal superstition about names is at the bottom of this custom. The Aleutian Islanders, according to Dall, are quite distressed when obliged to speak to their wives in the presence of others. The Fijians did not know where to look when missionaries hinted that a man might live under the same roof as his wife. 71 Among the Turkomans, for six months, a year, or two years, a husband is only allowed to visit his wife by stealth.
The number of these instances could probably be increased by a little research. Our argument is that the widely distributed myths in which a husband or a wife transgresses some custom sees the others face or body, or utters the forbidden name might well have arisen as tales illustrating the punishment of breaking the rule. By a very curious coincidence, a Breton sailors tale of the Cupid and Psyche class is confessedly founded on the existence of the rule of nuptial etiquette. 72
In this story the son of a Boulogne pilot marries the daughter of the King of Naz wherever that may be. In Naz a man is never allowed to see the face of his wife till she has borne him a child a modification of the Futa rule. The inquisitive French husband unveils his wife, and, like Psyche in Apuleius, drops wax from a candle on her cheek. When the pair return to Naz, the king of that country discovers the offence of the husband, and, by the aid of his magicians, transforms the Frenchman into a monster. Here we have the old formula the infringement of a taboo, and the magical punishment adapted to the ideas of Breton peasantry. The essential point of the story, for our purpose, is that the veiling of the bride is the custom of women, in the mysterious land of Naz. Cest lusage du pays: les maris ne voient leurs femmes sans voile que lorsquelles sont devenues mères. Now our theory of the myth of Urvasi is simply this: the custom of women, which Pururavas transgresses, is probably a traditional Aryan law of nuptial etiquette, lusage du pays, once prevalent among the people of India.
6
About twenty years ago, the widow of an Irish farmer, in Derry, killed her deceased husbands horse. When remonstrated with by her landlord, she said, Would you have my man go about on foot in the next world? She was quite in the savage intellectual stage.
7
At the solemn festival suppers, ordained for the honour of the gods, they forget not to serve up certain dishes of young whelps flesh. (Pliny, H. N. xxix. 4.)
8
Nov. 1880.
9
Ah, once again may I plant the great fan on her corn-heap, while she stands smiling by, Demeter of the threshing floor, with sheaves and poppies in her hands (Theocritus, vii. 155-157).
10
Odyssey, xi. 32.
11
Rev. de lHist. des Rel., vol. ii.
12
Pausanias, iii. 15. When the boys were being cruelly scourged, the priestess of Artemis Orthia held an ancient barbaric wooden image of the goddess in her hands. If the boys were spared, the image grew heavy; the more they were tortured, the lighter grew the image. In Samoa the image (sharks teeth) of the god Taema is consulted before battle. If it felt heavy, that was a bad omen; if light, the sign was good the god was pleased (Turners Samoa, p. 55).
13
Kamilaroi and Kurnai, p. 268.
14
Fison, Journal Anthrop. Soc., Nov. 1883.
15
Taylors New Zealand, p. 181.
16
This is not the view of le Père Lafitau, a learned Jesuit missionary in North America, who wrote (1724) a work on savage manners, compared with the manners of heathen antiquity. Lafitau, who was greatly struck with the resemblances between Greek and Iroquois or Carib initiations, takes Serviuss other explanation of the mystica vannus, an osier vessel containing rural offerings of first fruits. This exactly answers, says Lafitau, to the Carib Matoutou, on which they offer sacred cassava cakes.
17
The Century Magazine, May 1883.
18
Κωνος ξυλαριον ου εξηπται το σπαρτιον και εν ταις τελεταις εδονειτο ινα ροιζη. Lobeck, Aglaophamus (i. p. 700).
19
De Corona, p. 313.
20
Savage Africa. Captain Smith, the lover of Pocahontas, mentions the custom in his work on Virginia, pp. 245-248.
21
Brough Smyth, i. 60, using evidence of Howitt, Taplin, Thomas, and Wilhelmi.
22
Kamilaroi and Kurnai, p. 214.
23
Περι ορχησεως, c. 15.
24
Cape Monthly Magazine, July 1874.
25
Wallace, Travels on the Amazon, p. 349.
26
New Zealand, Taylor, pp. 119-121. Die heilige Sage der Polynesier, Bastian, pp. 36-39.
27
A crowd of similar myths, in one of which a serpent severs Heaven and Earth, are printed in Turners Samoa.
28
The translation used is Jowetts.
29
Theog., 166.
30
Apollodorus, i. 15.
31
Primitive Culture, i. 325.
32
Pauthier, Livres sacrés de lOrient, p. 19.
33
Muirs Sanskrit Texts, v. 23. Aitareya Brahmana.
34
Hesiod, Theog., 497.
35
Paus. x. 24.
36
Bleek, Bushman Folklore, pp. 6-8.
37
Theal, Kaffir Folklore, pp. 161-167.
38
Brough Smith, i. 432-433.
39
i. 338.
40
Rel. de la Nouvelle-France (1636), p. 114.
41
Codrington, in Journal Anthrop. Inst. Feb. 1881. There is a Breton Märchen of a land where people had to bring the Dawn daily with carts and horses. A boy, whose sole property was a cock, sold it to the people of this country for a large sum, and now the cock brings the dawn, with a great saving of trouble and expense. The Märchen is a survival of the state of mind of the Solomon Islanders.
42
Selected Essays, i. 460.
43
Ibid. i. 311.
44
Ueber Entwicklungsstufen der Mythenbildung (1874), p. 148.
45
ii. 127.
46
G. D. M., ii. 127, 129.
47
Gr. My., i. 144.
48
De Abst., ii. 202, 197.
49
Rel. und Myth., ii. 3.
50
Ursprung der Myth., pp. 133, 135, 139, 149.
51
Contemporary Review, Sept. 1883.
52
Rev. de lHist. rel. i. 179.
53
That Pururavas is regarded as a mortal man, in relations with some sort of spiritual mistress, appears from the poem itself (v. 8, 9, 18). The human character of Pururavas also appears in R. V. i. 31, 4.
54
Selected Essays, i. 408.
55
The Apsaras is an ideally beautiful fairy woman, something between the high gods and the lower grotesque beings, with lotus eyes and other agreeable characteristics. A list of Apsaras known by name is given in Meyers Gandharven-Kentauren, p. 28. They are often regarded as cloud-maidens by mythologists.
56
Selected Essays, i. p. 405.