Folklore; Manners and customs; Mythology; Religion
It would be easy to multiply examples of this stage of thought among
Aryans and savages. But we have probably brought forward enough for
our purpose, and have expressly chosen instances from the most widely
separated peoples. These instances, it will perhaps be admitted,
suggest, if they do not prove, that the Greeks had received from
tradition precisely the same sort of legends about the heavenly bodies
as are current among Eskimo and Bushmen, New Zealanders and Iowas. As
much, indeed, might be inferred from our own astronomical
nomenclature. We now give to newly discovered stars names derived from
distinguished people, as _Georgium Sidus_, or _Herschel_; or, again,
merely technical appellatives, as _Alpha_, _Beta_, and the rest. We
should never think when 'some new planet swims into our ken' of
calling it _Kangaroo_, or _Rabbit_, or after the name of some hero of
romance, as _Rob Roy_, or _Count Fosco_. But the names of stars which
we inherit from Greek mythology--the _Bear_, the _Pleiades_, _Castor_
and _Pollux_, and so forth--are such as no people in our mental
condition would originally think of bestowing. When Callimachus and
the courtly astronomers of Alexandria pretended that the golden locks
of Berenice were raised to the heavens, that was a mere piece of
flattery constructed on the inherited model of legends about the
crown (_Corona_) of Ariadne. It seems evident enough that the older
Greek names of stars are derived from a time when the ancestors of the
Greeks were in the mental and imaginative condition of Iowas, Kanekas,
Bushmen, Murri, and New Zealanders. All these, and all other savage
peoples, believe in a kind of equality and intercommunion among all
things animate and inanimate. Stones are supposed in the Pacific
Islands to be male and female and to propagate their species. Animals
are believed to have human or superhuman intelligence, and speech, if
they choose to exercise the gift. Stars are just on the same footing,
and their movements are explained by the same ready system of
universal anthropomorphism. Stars, fishes, gods, heroes, men, trees,
clouds, and animals, all play their equal part in the confused dramas
of savage thought and savage mythology. Even in practical life the
change of a sorcerer into an animal is accepted as a familiar
phenomenon, and the power of soaring among the stars is one on which
the Australian Biraark, or the Eskimo Shaman, most plumes himself. It
is not wonderful that things which are held possible in daily practice
should be frequent features of mythology. Hence the ready invention
and belief of star-legends, which in their turn fix the names of the
heavenly bodies. Nothing more, except the extreme tenacity of
tradition and the inconvenience of changing a widely accepted name, is
needed to account for the human and animal names of the stars. The
Greeks received from the dateless past of savage intellect the myths,
and the names of the constellations, and we have taken them, without
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