BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME FROM THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND THE GIFT OF SDenrg W. Sage 1891 , ■.. ^.;^..^..6~r-^6~ ri0::z/4^.. 6896-1 BD428 .mm'" ""'™™">"^*-^ '''^"ii™Mim"iil?i™i?.i,.'fi.,,t!W.W,?n»lt!.9y^ by th olin 3 1924 028 931 629 Cornell University Library The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924028931629 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT The Emperor Akbar personally directing the tying-up of a wild Elephant. Tempera painting by Abu'I Fazl. (1597-98.) Photographed for this work from the original in tlie India Museum. c. THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT BY THE COUNTESS EVELYN MARTINENGO CESARESCO "On ne connait rien que par bribes." — M. Bekthelot NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 153-157 FIFTH AVENUE 1909 4' "C'est I'eternel secret qui veut 6tre garde." (A/i rights reserved.) PREFACE AT the Congress held at Oxford in September, 1908, those who heard Count Goblet d'Alviella's address on the " Method and Scope of the History of Religions " must have felt the thrill which announces the stirring of new ideas, when, in a memorable passage, the speaker asked " whether the psychology of animals has not equally some relation to the science of religions ? " At any rate, these words came to me as a confirmation of the belief that the study which has engaged my attention for several years, is rapidly advancing towards recog- nition as a branch of the inquiry into what man is himself. The following chapters on the different answers given to this question when extended from man to animals, were intended, from the first, to form a whole, not complete, indeed, but perhaps fairly comprehensive. I offer them now to the public with my warmest acknowledgments to the scholars whose published works and, in some cases, private hints have made my task possible. I also wish to thank the Editor of the Contemporary Review for his kind- 6 PREFACE ness in allowing me to reprint the part of this book which appeared first in that periodical. Some chapters refer rather to practice than to psychology, and others to myths and fancies rather than to conscious speculation, but all these subjects are so closely connected that it would be difficult to divide their treatment by a hard-and-fast line. With regard to the illustrations, I am glad to bear grateful testimony to the facilities afforded me by the Directors of the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Hague Gallery, the National Museum at Copenhagen, the Egypt Ex- ploration Fund, and by the Secretary of State for India. H.E. Monsieur Camille Barr^re, French Ambassador at Rome, has allowed me to include a photograph of his remarkably fine specimen of a bronze cat ; and I have obtained the sanction of Monsieur Marcel Dieulafoy for the reproduction of one of Madame Dieulafoy's photographs which appeared in his magnificent work on " L'Art Antique de la Perse." Messrs. Macmillan & Co., Limited, and Messrs. Chapman and Hall, Limited, have permitted photographs to be taken of two plates in books published by them. Finally, Dr. C. Waldstein and Mr. E. B. Havell have been most kind in helping me to give the correct description of some of the plates. Sal6, Lago di Garda. February 15, 1909. CONTENTS I PAGE SOUL- WANDERING AS IT CONCERNS ANIMALS . . .II II THE GREEK CONCEPTION OF ANIMALS . . 22 III ANIMALS AT ROME . . . . . -44 IV PLUTARCH THE HUMANE . . . . .62 MAN AND HIS BROTHER . . . . .84 VI THE FAITH OF IRAN , . . . -113 VII ZOROASTRIAN ZOOLOGY . . . • . 14I VIII A RELIGION OF RUTH ..... 166 IX LINES FROM THE ADI GRANTH . . . . 20I 7 8 CONTENTS X PAGE THE HEBREW CONCEPTION OF ANIMALS . • • 205 XI "a people like unto you" . . • .221 XII THE FRIEND OF THE CREATURE . . . • 245 XIII VERSIPELLES ....... 265 XIV THE HORSE AS HERO ...... 281 XV ANIMALS IN EASTERN FICTION .... 306 XVI THE GROWTH OF MODERN IDEAS ABOUT ANIMALS . . 336 INDEX ........ 367 ILLUSTRATIONS THE EMPEROR AKBAR PERSONALLY DIRECTING THE TYING UP OF A WILD ELEPHANT. Tempera painting in the "Akbar Naraah," by Abu'l Fazl (1597-98). India Museum. Photograthed for this work. Frontispiece FACING PAGE DEER WORSHIPPING THE WHEEL OF THE LAW. Tope of Sanchi, drawn by Lieut.-Col. Maisey . . . . .11 From Fergusson's " Tree and Serpent Worship." By permission of the India Office. THE BUDDHISTIC TIGER . . . . . ■ .21 From a painting on silk by Ko-To in the British Museum. Photographed for this work. In Japanese Buddhism the Tiger is the type of Wisdom. ORPHEUS ....... Fresco found at Pompeii. STELE WITH CAT AND BIRD .... Athens Museum. CAPITOLINE SHE-WOLF ..... Bronze statue. Early Etruscan style. The twins are modern. LION BEING LED FROM THE ARENA BY A SLAVE . From the mosaic pavement of a Roman villa at Nennig. BACCHUS RIDING ON A PANTHER .... Mosaic found at Pompeii. BRONZE STATUE OF AN EGYPTIAN CAT From the Collection of H.E. Monsieur Camille Barrere, French Ambassador at Rome REINDEER BROWSING. OLDER STONE AGE Found in a cave at Thayngen in Switzerland. HORSE DRAWING DISC OF THE SUN. OLDER BRONZE AGE Nationcil Museum at Copenhagen. HATHOR COW ........ Found in iqo6 by Dr. ^douard Naville at Deir-el-bahari. By permission of the Egypt Exploration Fund. WILD GOATS AND YOUNG .... Assyrian Relief. British Museum. ASSYRIAN GOD CARRYING ANTELOPE AND WHEAT-EAR British Museum. COUNTING CATTLE ..... Egyptian Fresco. British Museum. (Sotnmer.) 32 40 {Bntckmanii.) 44 ' 47 (Sommer.) 74 82 86 108 (Mansell.) , , 116 {.Mansell.) 128 (Mansell.) 10 ILLUSTRATIONS FACING PAGE KING FIGHTING GRIFFIN (" BAD ANIMAL") .... 142 Relief in Palace of Darius at Persefalis. Photographed by Jane Dieulafoy. From " L'Arl Antique de la Perse." By permission ofM. Marcel Dieulafoy. THE REAL DOG OF IRAN .....•■ 15^ Bronze Statuette found at Susa. Louvre. From Perrot's " History of Art in Ancient Persia." By -permission of Messrs. Chapman & Hall, Ltd. BUDDHA PACIFYING AN INTOXICATED ELEPHANT WHICH HAD BEEN SENT TO DESTROY HIM. THE ELEPHANT STOOPS IN ADORATION . l88 Graeco-Buddhist sculpture from a ruined monastery at Tafct-i-Bahi. India Museum. Photographed for this work. RECLINING BULL . . . . . . • .192 Ancient Southern Indian sculpture. From a photograph in the India Museum. WILD BULLS AND TAMED BULLS ...... 201 Reliefs on two gold cups found in a tomb at Vapheio near Amyclae. Fifteenth century B.C. (possibly earlier). From Schuckhardt s *' Schliemann's Excavations." By permission of Messrs. Macmillan & Co., Lid. THE GARDEN OF EDEN ....... 2o8 By Rubens.^ Hague Gallery. (Bruchmann.) GENESIS VIII. ........ 212 Loggie di Raffaello. In the Vatican. Drawn by N. Consent. DANIEL AND THE LIONS ..... . . 2l6 From an early Christian Sarcophagus in S. Vitale, Ravenna. (Alinari.) "an INDIAN ORPHEUS" ....... 222 Inlaid marble work panel originally surmounting a doorway in the Great Hall of Audience in the Mogul Palace at Delhi (about 1650). Photographed for this work from a painting by a native artist in the India Museum. Imitated from a painting by Raphael. MOSLEM BEGGAR FEEDING DOGS AT CONSTANTINOPLE . . . 226 From life. ST. JEROME EXTRACTING A THORN FROM THE PAW OF A LION . 253 By Hubert van Eyck. Naples Museum. {Anderson.) ST. EUSTACE (OR ST. HUBERT) AND THE STAG .... 256 By Vittore Pisano. National Gallery. (Hanjst&ngl.) "LE MENEUR DES LOU PS " ....... 276 Designed and drawn by Maurice Sand. THE ASSYRIAN HORSE ....... 284 From a relief in the British Museum. (Mamell.) ARABIAN HORSE OF THE SAHARA ... . . 288 From life. THE BANYAN DEER ........ 328 From "St&pa of Eharhut." By General Cunningham. By permission of the India Office. (Griggs.) EGYPTIAN OFFICIAL, WITH HIS WIFE, ENGAGED IN FOWLING IN THE PAPYRUS SWAMP. HIS HUNTING CAT HAS SEIZED THREE BIRDS . 330 Mural painting in British Museum. (Mansell.) ASSYRIAN LION AND LIONESS IN PARADISE PARK British Museum. (Mansell.) The King's reservations for big game were called " paradises," 338 LAMBS ........ Relief on a Iflh century tomb at Ravenna. (Alinari.) "IL BUON PASTORE" ....... 346 Mosaic in the Mausoleum ofGalla Placidia at Ravenna. s o a a o OS o The Place of Animals in Human Thought I SOUL-WANDERING AS IT CONCERNS ANIMALS IN one of these enigmatic sayings which launch the mind on boundless seas, Cardinal Newman remarked that we know less of animals than of angels. A large part of the human race explains the mystery by what is called transmigration, metempsychosis, Samsara, Seelenwanderung ; the last a word so compact and picturesque that it is a pity not to imitate it in English. The intelligibility of ideas depends much on whether words touch the spring of the picture-making wheel of the brain ; " Soul-wandering " does this. Ancient as the theory is, we ought to remember what is commonly forgotten — that somewhere in the distance we catch sight of a time when it was unknown, at least in the sense of a procession of the soul from death to life through animal forms. 12 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT Traces of it are to be found in the Sutras and it is thoroughly developed in the Upanishads, but if the Sutras belong to the thirteenth century and the Upanishads to about the year 700 before Christ, a long road still remains to the Vedas with their fabulous antiquity. In the Vedas it is stated that the soul may wander, even during sleep, and that it will surely have a further existence after death, but there is nothing to show that in this further existence it will take the form of an animal. Man will be substantially man, able to feel the same pleasures as his prototype on earth ; but if he goes to a good place, exempt from the same pains. What, then, was the Vedic opinion of animals ? On the whole, it is safe to assume that the authors of the Vedic chants believed that animals, like men, entered a soul-world in which they pre- served their identity. The idea of funeral sacrifices, as exemplified in these earliest records, was that of sending some one before. The horse and the goat that were immolated at a Vedic funeral were intended to go and announce the coming of the man's soul. Wherever victims were sacrificed at funerals, they were originally meant to do something in the after life ; hence they must have had souls. The origin of the Suttee was the wish that the wife should accompany her husband, and among primitive peoples animals were sacrificed because the dead man might have need of them. Not very long ago an old Irish woman, on being remonstrated with for having killed her dead husband's horse, replied with the words, " Do you think I would let my man go on foot in the SOUL- WANDERING AS IT CONCERNS ANIMALS 13 next world ? " On visiting that wonderfully emotion- awakening relic, the Viking ship at Christiania, I was interested to see the bones of the Chiefs horses and dogs as well as his own. Did the Norsemen, passion- ately devoted to the sea as they were, suppose, that not only the animals, but also the vessel in which they buried their leader, would have a ghostly second existence ? I have no doubt that they did. Apart from what hints may be gleaned from the Vedas, there is an inherent probability against the early Aryans, any more than the modern Hindu, believing that the soul of man or beast comes suddenly to a full stop. To destroy spirit seems to the Asiatic mind as impossible as to destroy matter seems to the biologist. Leaving the Vedas and coming down to the Sutras and Upanishads, we discover the transmigration of souls at first suggested and then clearly defined. Whence came it ? Was it the belief of thbse less civilised nations whom the Aryans conquered, and did they, in accepting it from them, give it a moral complexion by investing it with the highly ethical significance of an upward or downward progress occasioned by the merits or demerits of the soul in a previous state of being ? A large portion of mankind finds it as difficult to conceive a sudden beginning as a sudden end of spirit. We forget difficulties which we are not in the habit of facing ; those who have tried to face this one have generally stumbled over it, Even Dante with his subtle psychophysiological reasoning hardly persuades. The ramifications of a life before stretched 14 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT far: "Whosoever believes in the fabled prior exist- ence of souls, let him be anathema," thundered the Council of Constantinople, a.d. 543. Which shows that many Christians shared Origen's views on this subject. From the moment that soul-wandering became, in India, a well-established doctrine, some three thousand years ago, the conception of the status of animals was perfectly clear. " Wise people," says the Bhagavad Gita, " see the same soul (Atman) in the Brahman, in worms and insects, in the outcasts, in the dog and the elephant, in beasts, cows, gadflies, and gnats." Here we have the doctrine succinctly expounded, and in spite of subtleties introduced by later philosophers (such as that of the outstanding self) the exposition holds good to this day as a state- ment of the faith of India. It also described the doctrine of Pythagoras, which ancient traditions asserted that he brought from Egypt, where no such doctrine ever existed. Pythagoras is still commonly supposed to have borrowed from Egypt ; but it is strange that a single person should continue to hold an opinion against which so much evidence has been produced ; especially as it is surely very easy to explain the tradition by interpreting Egypt to have stood for " the East " in common parlance, exactly as in Europe a tribe of low caste Indians came to be called gypsies or Egyptians. Pythagoras believed that he had been one of the Trojan heroes, whose shield he knew at a glance in the Temple of Juno where it was hung up. After him, Empedocles thought that he had passed through many forms, SOUL-WANDERING AS IT CONCERNS ANIMALS 15 amongst others those of a bird and a fish. Pythagoras and his fire-spent disciple belong to times which seem almost near if judged by Indian computations : yet they are nebulous figures ; they seem to us, and perhaps they seemed to men who lived soon after them, more like mysterious, half Divine bearers of a word than men of flesh and blood. But Plato, who is real to us and who has influenced so profoundly modern thought, Plato took their theory and displayed it to the Western world as the most logical explanation of the mystery of being. The theory of transmigration did not commend itself to Roman thinkers, though it was admirably stated by a Roman poet : — " Omnia mutantur : nihil interit. Errat, et illinc Hue venit, hinc illuc, et quoslibet occupat artus Spiritus, eque feris, humana in corpora transit, Inque feras noster, nee tempore deperit uUo. Utque novis facilis signatur cera figuris, Nee manet ut fuerat, nee formas servat easdem, Sed tamen ipsa eadem est : animam sic semper eandem Esse." This description is as accurate as it is elegant ; but it remains a question whether Ovid had anything deeper than a folk-lorist's interest in transmigration joined to a certain sympathy which it often inspires in those who are fond of animals. The enthusiastic folk-lorist finds himself believing in all sorts of things at odd times. Lucian's admirers at Rome doubtless enjoyed his ridiculous story of a Pythagorean cock which had been a man, a woman, a prince, a subject, a fish, a horse and a frog, and which summed up its i6 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT varied experience in the judgment that man was the most wretched and deplorable of all creatures, all others patiently grazing within the enclosures of Nature while man alone breaks out and strays beyond those safe limits. This story was retold with great gusto by Erasmus, The Romans were a people with inclusive prejudices, and they were not likely to welcome a narrowing of the gulf between themselves and the beasts of the field. Cicero's dictum that, while man looks before and after, analysing the past and forecasting the future, animals have only the perception of the present, does not go to the excess of those later theorists who, like Descartes, reduced animals to automata, but it goes farther than scientific writers on the subject would now allow to be justified. It is worth while asking, what was it that so power- fully attracted Plato in the theory of transmigration ? I think that Plato, who made a science of the moral training of the mind, was attracted by soul-wandering as a scheme of soul-evolution. Instead of looking at it as a matter of fact which presupposed an ethical root (which is the Indian view), he looked upon it as an ethical root which presupposed a matter of fact. He was influenced a little, no doubt, by the desire to get rid of Hades, " an unpleasant place," as he says, "and not true," for which he felt a peculiar antipathy, but he was influenced far more by seeing in soul- wandering a rational theory of the ascent of the soul, a Darwinism of the spirit. " We are plants," he said, " not of earth but of heaven," but it takes the plants of heaven a long time to grow. We ought to admire the Indian mind, which first SOUL- WANDERING AS IT CONCERNS ANIMALS 17 seized the idea of time in relation to development and soared out of the cage of history (veritable or imaginary) into liberal aeons to account for one per- fect soul, one plant that had accomplished its heavenly destiny. But though the Indian seer argues with Plato that virtue has its own reward (not so much an outward reward of improved environment as an inward reward of approximation to perfection), he disagrees with the Greek philosopher with regard to the practical result of all this as it affects any of us personally. Plato found the theory of transmigration entirely consoling; the Indian finds it entirely the reverse. Can the reason be that Plato took the theory as a beautiful symbol while the Indian takes it as a dire reality ? The Hindu is as much convinced that the soul is re-born in different animals as we are that children are born of women. He is convinced of it, but he is not consoled by it. Let us reflect a little : does not one life give us time to get somewhat tired of it ; how should we feel after fifteen hundred lives ? The wandering Jew has never been thought an object of envy, but the wandering soul has a wearier lot ; it knows the sorrows of all creation. " How many births are past I cannot tell, How many yet may be no man may say, But this alone I know and know full well, That pain and grief embitter all the way.' Rather than this — death. How far deeper the gloom revealed by these lines from the folk-songs of ' " Folk Songs of Southern India," by Charles E. Gover, a fascinating but little-known work. 2 i8 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT an obscure Dravidian tribe living in the Nilgiri Hills, than any which cultured Western pessimism can show! Compared with them, the despairing cry of Baudelaire seems almost a hymn of joy : — " 'Tis death that cheers and gives us strength to live, 'Tis life's chief aim, sole hope that can abide, Our wine, elixir, glad restorative Whence we gain heart to walk till eventide. Through snow, through frost, through tempests it can give Light that pervades th' horizon dark and wide ; The inn which makes secure when we arrive Our food an4 sleep, all labour laid aside. It is an Angel whose magnetic hand Gives quiet sleep and dreams of extasy, And strews a bed for naked folk and poor. 'Tis the god's prize, the mystic granary. The poor man's purse and his old native land, And of the unknown skies the opening door." Folk-songs are more valuable aids than the higher literature of nations in an inquiry as to what they really believe. The religion of the Dravidian mountaineers is purely Aryan (though their race is not) ; their songs may be taken, therefore, as Aryan documents. They are particularly characteristic of the dual belief as to a future state which is, to this day, widely diffused. How firmly these people believe in transmigration the quatrain quoted above bears witness ; yet they also believe that souls are liable to immediate judg- ment. This contradiction is explained by the theory that a long interval may elapse between death and SOUL-WANDERING AS IT CONCERNS ANIMALS 19 re-incarnation and that during this interval the soul meets with a reward or punishment. To say the truth, the explanation sounds a rather lame one. Is it not more likely that the idea of immediate judgment, wherever it appears, is a relic of Vedic belief which has to be reconciled, as best it can, with the later idea of transmigration.? The Dravidian songs are remarkable for their strong inculcation of regard for animals. In their impressive funeral dirge which is a public confession of the dead man's sins, it is owned that he killed a snake, a lizard and a harmless frog. And that not mere lifetaking was the point condemned, is clearly proved by the further admission that the delinquent put the young ox to the plough before it was strong enough to work. In a Dravidian vision of Heaven and Hell certain of the Blest are perceived milking their happy kine, and it is explained that these are they who, when they saw the lost kine of neighbour or stranger in the hills, drove them home nor left them to perish from tiger or wolf Surely in this, as in the Jewish command which it so closely resembles, we may read mercy to beast as well as to man. It is sometimes said that there is as much cruelty to animals in India as anywhere. Some of this cruelty (as it seems to us) is caused directly by reluctance to take life ; of the other sort, caused by callousness, it can be only said that the human brute grows under every sky. One great fact is admitted : children are not cruel in India: Victor Hugo could not have written his terrible poem about the tormented toad in India. I think it a mistake to attribute the 20 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT Indian sentiment towards animals wholly to transmi- gration ; nevertheless, it may be granted that such a belief fosters such a sentiment. Indeed, if it were allowable to look upon the religion of the many as the morality of the one, it would seem natural to suppose that the theory of transmigration was invented by some creature-loving sage on purpose to give men a fellow-feeling for their humbler relations. Even sb, many a bit of innocent folk-fable has served as "protective colouration" to beast or bird : the legend of the robin who covered up the Babes in the Wood ; the legend of the swallow who did some little service to the crucified Saviour, and how many other such tender fancies. Who invented them, and why ? If Plato had wished simply to find a happy substitute for Hades, he might have found it — had he looked far enough — in the Vedic kingdom of the sun, radiant and eternal, where sorrow is not, where the crooked are made straight, ruled over by Yama the first man to die and the first to live again, death's bright angel, lord of the holy departed — how far from Pluto and the " Tartarean grey." It would not have provided a solution to the mystery of being, but it might have made many converts, for after a happy heaven all antiquity thirsted. It is not sure if the scheme of existence mapped out in soul-wandering is really more consoling for beast than for man. It is a poor compliment to some dogs to say that they have been some men. Then again, it is recognised as easier for a dog to be good than for a man to be good, but after a dog has passed his little life in well-doing he dies with the prospect that his £ ■* ' Q ■« i" Q = W O '3 .5 m « ts -ft* IS s SOUL-WANDERING AS IT CONCERNS ANIMALS 21 Spirit, which by his merits becomes again a man, will be sent down, by that man's transgressions, to the society of jackals. According to the doctrine of soul- wandering, animals are, in brief, the Purgatory of men. Just as prayers for the dead (which means, prayers for the remission to them of a merited period of probation) represent an important branch of Catholic observances, so prayers for the remission of a part of the time which souls would otherwise spend in animal forms constitute the most vital and essential feature in Brahmanical worship. Of course, this is also true of Buddhism, to which many people think that the theory of soul-wandering belongs exclusively, unmindful that the older faith has it as well. The following hymn, used in Thibet, shows how accurately the name of Purgatory applies to the animal incarnations of the soul : — " If we [human beings] have amassed any merit In the three states, We rejoice in this good fortune when we consider The unfortunate lot of the poor [lower] animals, Piteously engulphed in the ocean of misery ; On their behalf, we now turn the Wheel of, Religion." There are grounds for thinking that the purgatorial view of animals was part of the religious beliefs of the highly civilised native races of South America. The Christianised Indians are very gentle in their ways towards animals, while among the savage tribes in Central Peru (which are probably degraded off-shoots from the people of the Incas) the belief still survives that good men become monkeys or 22 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT jaguars, and bad men parrots or reptiles. For the rest, soul-wandering has an enduring fascination for the human mind. In January, 1907, Leandro Improta, a young man well furnished with worldly goods, shot himself in a caf6 at Naples. His pocket was found to contain a letter in which he said that the act was prompted by a desire to study metempsychosis ; much had been written on the subject, but it pleased him better to discover than to talk : " so I determined to die and see whether I shall be re-born in the form of some animal. It would be delightful to return to this world as a lion or a rat." It might not prove delightful after all ! II THE GREEK CONCEPTION OF ANIMALS " ' I ^HE heralds brought a sacred hecatomb to the J. gods through the city and the long-haired Grecians were assembled under the shady grove of far-darting Apollo, but when they had tasted the upper flesh and had drawn it out, having divided the shares, they made a delightful feast." In this description the poet of the Odyssey not only calls up a wonderfully vivid picture of an ancient f&te-day, but also shows the habit of mind of the Homeric Greeks in regard to animal food. They were voracious eaters — although the frequent reference to feasts ought not to make us suppose that meat was their constant diet ; rather the reverse, for then it would not have been so highly rated. But when they had the chance, they certainly did eat with unfastidious copiousness and unashamed enjoyment. It is not pleasant to read about, for it sets one thinking of things by no means far away or old ; for instance, of the disappearance of half-cooked beef at some Continental tables d'Mte. We find that Homer is painfully near us. But in Homeric times the ghost of a scruple had to be laid before the feast could be 23 24 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT enjoyed. Animal food was still closely connected with the idea of sacrifice. Sacrifice lends distinction to subject as well as object; it was some atonement to the animal to dedicate him to the gods. He was covered with garlands and attended by long-robed priests ; his doom was his triumph. The devoted heifer or firstling of the flock was glorified beyond all its kind. Some late sceptic of the Anthology asked what possible difference it could make to the sheep whether it were devoured by a wolf or sacrificed to Herakles so that he might protect the sheep-fold from wolves ? But scepticism is a poof thing. From immolation to apotheosis there is but a step ; how many human victims willingly bowed their heads to the knife ! The sacrificial aspect of the slaughter of domestic animals took a strong hold of the popular imagination. It is still suggested by the procession of garlanded beasts which traverses the Italian village on the approach of Easter : the only time of year when the Italian peasant touches meat. In the tawdry travesty of the Boeuf gras, though the origin is the same, every shred of the old significance is lost, but among simple folk south of the Alps, unformed thoughts which know not whence they come still contribute a sort of religious glamour to that last pageant. Far back, indeed, stretches the procession of the victims, human and animal — for wherever there was animal sacrifice, at some remote epoch, "the goat without horns " was also offered up. The Homeric Greeks had no butchers ; they did the slaying of beasts themselves or their priests did it THE GREEK CONCEPTION OF ANIMALS 25 for them. Agamemnon kills the boar sacrificed to Zeus with his own hands, which are first uplifted in prayer. The commonest meat was the flesh of swine, as may be seen by the pig of ^sop which replied, on being asked by the sheep why he cried out when caught, " They take you for your wool or milk, but me for my life." In Homer, however, there is much talk of fatted sheep, kids and oxen, and there is even mention of killing a cow. The Athenians had qualms about slaughtering the ox, the animal essential to agriculture — though they did it — but the Homeric Greek was not troubled by such thoughts. He was not over nice about anything ; he was his own cook, and he did not lose his appetite while he roasted his bit of meat on the spit. A Greek repast of that age would have shocked the abstemious Indian as much as the Hindu reformer, Keshub Chunder Sen, con- fessed to have been shocked by the huge joints on English sideboards. Putting aside his meat -eating proclivities, for which we cannot throw stones at him, the Greek of the Iliad and of the Odyssey is the friend of his beast. He does not regard it as his long-lost brother, but he sees in it a devoted servant ; sometimes more than human in love if less than human in wit. His point of view, though detached, was appreciative. Practically it was the point- of view of the twentieth century. Homer belongs to the Western world, and in a great measure to the modern Western world. He had no racial fellow-feeling with animals ; yet he could feel for the sparrow that flutters round its murdered young ones and for the vulture that rends the air with cries i 26 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT when the countryman takes its fledglings from the nest. He could shed one immortal tear over the faithful hound that recognises his master and dies. " There lay the dog Argus, full of vermin." If it had not been a living creature, what sight could have more repelled human eyes."* But with dog as with man, the miserable body is as naught beside — what in the man we call the soul. "He fawned with his tail and laid down both his ears, but he could no more come nearer his master." All the sense of disgust is gone and there is something moist, perhaps, in our eyes too, though it is not the ichor of immor- tality. Giving names to animals is the first instinctive confession that they are not things. What sensible man ever called his table Carlo or his inkpot Trilby ? Homer gives his horses the usual names of horses in his day ; this is shown by the fact that he calls more than one horse by the same name. Hector's steeds were Xanthus, ^thon and noble Lampus ; often would Andromache mix wine for them even before she attended to the wants of her husband, or offer them the sweet barley with her own white hands, .^the is the name of Agamemnon's graceful and fleet-footed mare. Xanthus and Balius, offspring of Podarges, are the horses which Achilles received from his father. He bids them bring their charioteer back in safety to the body of the Greeks — and then follows the impressive incident of the warning given to him of his impending fate. The horse Xanthus bends low his head : his long mane, which is collected in a ring, droops till it touches the ground. Hera THE GREEK CONCEPTION OF ANIMALS 27 gives him power of speech and he tells how, though the steeds of Achilles will do their part right well, not all their swiftness, not all their faithful service can save their master from the doom that even now is drawing near. " The furies restrain the voice " : the laws which govern the natural order of things must not be violated. "O Xanthus," cries Achilles, " O Xanthus, why dost thou predict my death."* .... Well do I know myself that it is my fate to perish here, far away from my dear father and mother!" It is the passionate cry of the Greek, the lover of life as none has loved it, the lover of the sweet air gladdened by the sun. Many a soldier may have spoken to his horse, half in jest, as Achilles spoke to Xanthus and Balius : " bring me safely out of the fray." The supernatural and terrible reply comes with the shock of the unforeseen, like a clap of thunder on a calm day. This incident is a departure from the usual Homeric conventionality, for it takes us into the domain of real magic. The belief that animals know things that we know not, and see things that we see not, is scattered over all the earth. Are there not still good people who feel an " eerie " sensation when a cat stares fixedly into vacancy in the twilight.'' " Eerie " sensations count for much in early beliefs, but what counts for more is the observation of actual facts which are not and, perhaps, cannot be ex- plained. The uneasiness of animals before an earth- quake, or the refusal of some animals to go to sea on ships which afterwards come to grief — to refer to only two instances of a class of phenomena the 28 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT existence of which cannot be gainsaid — would be sufficient to convince any savage or any primitive man that animals have foreknowledge. If they know the future on one point, why should they not know it on others ? The primitive man generally starts from something which he deems certain ; he deals in " certainties " far more than in hypotheses, and when he has seized a "certainty" in his own fashion he draws logical deductions from it. Savages and children have a ruthless logic of their own. The prophetic power of animals has important bearings on the subject of divination. In cases of animal portents the later theory may have been that the animal was the passive instrument or medium of a superior power ; but it is not likely that this was the earliest theory. The goddess did not use Xanthus as a mouthpiece : she simply gave him the faculty of speech so that he could say what he already knew. The second-sight of animals was believed to be communicable to man through their flesh, and especially through their blood. Porphyry says plainly that diviners fed on the hearts of crows, vultures, and moles (the heart being the fountain of the blood), because in this manner they partook of the souls of these animals, and received the influence of the gods who accompanied these souls. The blood conveyed the qualities of the spirit. In my opinion the Hebrew ordinance against par- taking of the blood was connected with this idea ; the soul was not to be meddled with. I do not know if attention has been paid to the remarkable juxta- position of the blood prohibition with enchantment THE GREEK CONCEPTION OF ANIMALS 29 in Leviticus xix. 26. The Institutes of Manu clearly indicate that the blood was not to be swallowed because, by doing so, could be procured an illicit mixing up of personality : the most awful of sins, more awful because so much more mysterious than our mediaeval " pact," or selling the soul to the devil. A knowledge of magic is essential to the true comprehension of all sacred writings. That animals formerly talked with human voices was the genuine belief of most early races, but there are few traces of it in Greek literature. A hint of a real folk-belief is to be found, perhaps, in the remark of Clytemnestra, who says of Cassandra, when she will not descend from the car that has brought her, a prisoner, to Agamemnon's palace : — " I wot — unless like swallows she doth use Some strange barbarian tongue from over sea, My words must bring persuasion to her soul." But such hints are not frequent. The stories of "talking beasts " which enjoyed an immense popularity in Greece were founded on as conscious " make- believe " as the Beast tales of the Middle Ages. From the " Battle of the Frogs and Mice " to ^sop's fables, and from these to the comedies of Aristo- phanes, the animals are meant to hold up human follies to ridicule or human virtues to admiration. | The object was to instruct while amusing when it -*- was not to amuse without instructing, .^sop hardly ; asks the most guileless to believe that his stories are of the " all true " category — which is why children rarely quite take them to their hearts. At the same 30 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT time, he shows a close study of the idiosyncrasies of animals, so close that there is little to alter in his characterisation. Out of the mass of stories in the collection attributed to him, one or two only seem to carry us back to a more ingenuous age. The following beautiful little tale of the " Lion's Kingdom" is vaguely reminiscent of the world- tradition of a " Peace in Nature." " The beasts of the field and forest had a lion as their king. He was neither wrathful, cruel, nor tyrannical, but just and gentle as a king could be. He made during his reign a proclamation for a general assembly of all the birds and beasts, and drew up conditions for an universal league in which the Wolf and the Lamb, the Panther and the Kid, the Tiger and the Stag, the Dog and the Hare, should live together in perfect peace and amity. The Hare said, ' Oh, how I have longed to see this day, in which the weak shall take their place with impunity by the side of the strong.' " The temper of a people towards animals can be judged from its sports. It has been well said. Who could imagine Pericles presiding over a " Roman holiday " ? Wanton cruelty to animals seemed to the Greeks an outrage to the gods. The Athenians inflicted a fine on a vivisector of the name of Xeno- crates (he called himself a "philosopher") who had skinned a goat alive. In Greece, from Homeric times downwards, the most favourite sport was the chariot- race which, at first, possessed the importance of a religious event, and always had a dignity above that of a mere pastime. The horses received their THE GREEK CONCEPTION OF ANIMALS 31 full share of honour and glory ; for many centuries the graves of Cimon's mares, with which he had thrice conquered at the Olympian games, were pointed out to the stranger, near his own tomb. In the ancient Greek as in the modern world, while the majority held the views about animals which I have briefly sketched, a small minority held views of quite a different kind. It may be that no outward agency is required to cause the periodical appearance of men who are driven from the common road by the nostalgia of a state in which the human creature had not learnt to shed blood. The earliest tradition agrees with the latest science in testifying that man did not always eat flesh. It seems as if sometimes, in every part of the earth, an irresistible impulse takes hold of him to resume his primal harmlessness. It is natural, however, that students should have sought some more definite explanation for the introduction of the Orphic sect into Greece, where it can be traced to about the time generally given to Buddha — the sixth century B.C. Some have conjectured that dark-skinned, white- robed missionaries from India penetrated into Europe as we know that they pene- trated into China, bringing with them the gospel of the unity of all sentient things. Others agree with what seems to have been thought by Herodotus: that wandering pilgrims brought home treasured secrets from the temple of Ammon or some other of those Egyptian shrines with which the Greeks constantly kept up certain rapports. It may be, now, that these two theories will be abandoned in 32 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT favour of a third which would refer the origin of the Orphists to -^gean times and suppose them to be the last followers of an earlier faith. When they do come into history, it is as poor and ignorant people — like the Doukhobors of to-day — whose obscurity might well account for their having re- mained long unobserved. But this is no reason for concluding that their beginnings were obscure. What is best understood about them is that they abstained rigorously from flesh except during the rare performance of some rite of purification, in which they tasted the blood of a bull which was supposed to procure mystic union with the divine. As happened with the performers of other cruel or horrid rites, the transcendent significance they ascribed to the act paralysed their power of recog- nising its revolting nature. A diseased spiritualism which ignores matter altogether is the real key to such phenomena. It is too soon to say whether any link can be established between the Orphic practices and the so-called " bull-fights " of which traces have been found in Crete. Despised and tabooed though they were in historical Greece, the Orphists are still held to have exercised some sure though undefined influence on the development of the greatest spiritual fact of Hellenic civilisation, the Eleusinian Mysteries. The popular description of Orpheus as founder of the Orphists must be taken for what it is worth. The sect may have either evolved or borrowed the legend. Christianity itself appropriated the myth of Orpheus, pictorially, at least, in those rude tracings in Photo} ORPHEUS, {Fresco at Pompeii.) THE GREEK CONCEPTION OF ANIMALS 33 the Roman catacombs showing the Good Shepherd in that character, which inspired Carlyle to write one of the most impassioned passages in English prose. The sweet lute-player who held entranced lion and lamb till the one forgot his wrath and the other his fear, was the natural symbol of the proto- type of a humane religion. Out of the nebulous patches of Greek enthusiasts who cherished tender feelirrgs towards animals, emerges the intellectual sun of the Samian sage. It is difficult not to connect Pythagoras in some way with the Orphists, nor would such a connexion make it the less probable that he journeyed to the sacred East in search of fuller knowledge. Little, indeed, do we know about this moulder of minds. He passed across the world's stage dark " with excess of light" — an influence rather than a personality. Yet he was as far as possible from being only a dreamer of dreams ; he was the Newton, the Galileo, perhaps the Edison and Marconi of his epoch. And it was this double character of moral teacher and man of science which caused the extraordinary reverence with which he was regarded. Science and religion were not divorced then ; the Prophet could present no creden- tials so valid as an understanding of the laws which govern the universe. Mathematics and astronomy were revelations of divine truth. It was the scientific insight of Pythagoras, the wonderful range and depth of which is borne out more and more by modern discoveries, that lent supreme importance to whatever theories he was known to have held. The doctrine of transmigration had not been treated seriously 3 34 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT while it was only preached by the Orphists, but after it was adopted by Pythagoras it commanded a wide attention, though it never won a large accept- ance. One expounder it had, who was too remark- able an original thinker to be called a mere disciple — the greatly-gifted Empedocles, who denounced the eaters of flesh as no better than cannibals, which was going further than Pythagoras himself had ever gone. Even in antiquity, there were some who suspected that at the bottom of the Pythagorean propaganda was the wish to make men more humane. Without taking that view, it may be granted that a strong love of animals prepares the mind to think of them as not so very different from men. A thing that tends in the same direction is the unfavourable com- parison of some men with some beasts : the sort of sentiment which made Madame de Stael say that the more she knew of men the more she liked dogs. Did not Darwin declare that he would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey who braved his dreaded enemy to save the life of his keeper, or from that old baboon who, descending from the mountains, carried away in triumph his young com- rade from a crowd of astonished dogs, as from various still extant races of mankind ? Darwinism is really the theory of Pythagoras with the supernatural element left out. The homogeneity of living things is one of the very old beliefs from which we strayed and to which we are returning. Among the Greeks, sensitive and meditative minds which did not place faith in the Pythagorean system THE GREEK CONCEPTION OF ANIMALS 35 of life were attracted, nevertheless, by its speculative possibilities which they bent to their own purposes. Thus Socrates borrowed from Pythagoras when he suggested that imperfect and earth-bound spirits might be re-incorporated in animals whose conven- tionally ascribed characteristics corresponded with their own moral natures. Unjust, tyrannical, and violent men would become ■Cvolves, hawks, and kites, while good commonplace people — virtuous Philistines — would take better forms, such as ants, bees, and wasps, all of which live harmoniously in communities. It is pleasant to find that Socrates did justice to that intelligent insect, the undeservedly aspersed wasp. Men who are good in all respects save the highest, may re-assume human forms. Socrates does not explain why it is that humanity progresses so slowly if it is always being recruited from such good material } He passes on from these righteous men to the super-excellent man to whom alone he allots translation into a divine and wholly immaterial sphere ; he it is who departs from this world com- pletely pure of earthly dross ; who cannot be moved by ill-fortune, poverty, disgrace ; who has " overcome the world " in the Pauline sense, who has died while living, in the Indian sense. Though Socrates does not say so, it is this super-excellent man who really convinces him of the immortality of the soul accord- ing to the meaning which we attach to these words. That the more tender and poetic aspects of Pytha- gorean speculations had deeply impressed Socrates can be seen by the fact that they recurred to his mind in the most solemn hour of his life. From 36 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT these he drew the lovely parable with which he gently reproved the friends who were come to take leave of him for their surprise at finding him no wise depressed. He asks if he appears to them inferior in divination to the swans, who, when they perceive that they must die, though given to song before, then sing the most of all, delighted at the prospect of their departure to the deity whose ministers they are. Mankind has said falsely of the swans that they sing through dread of death and from grief. Those who say this do not reflect that no bird sings when it is hungry or cold or afflicted with any other pain, not even the nightingale or swallow or hoopoe, which are said to sing a dirge-like strain, "but neither do they appear to me to sing for grief nor do the swans, but as pertaining to Apollo they are skilled in the divining art, and having a foreknowledge of the bliss in Hades, they express their joy in song on that day rather than at any previous time. But I believe myself to be a fellow-servant of the swans and con- secrated to the same divinity, and that I am no less gifted by my master in the art of divination, nor am I departing with less good grace than they." Socrates would not have been " the wisest of men " if he had dogmatised about the unknowable ; to insist, he says, that things were just as he described them, would not become an intelligent being ; he only claimed an approximate approach to the truth. In appearance Plato went nearer to dogmatic accept- ance of the theory of the transmigration of souls, but probably it was in appearance only. Like his master, he thought it reasonable to suppose that the THE GREEK CONCEPTION OF ANIMALS 37 human soul ascended if it had done well, and de- scended if it had done ill, and of this ascent and descent he took as symbol its attirement in higher or lower corporeal forms till, freed from the corruptible, it joined the incorruptible. The Greeks were the first people to have an insatiable thirst for exact knowledge ; they showed themselves true precursors of the modern world by their re- searches into scientific zoology, which were carried on with zeal long before Aristotle took the subject in hand. We cannot judge of these early researches because they are nearly all lost ; but Aristotle's " History of Animals," even after the revival of learning, was still consulted as a text-book, and perhaps nothing that he wrote contributed more to win for him the fame of "... maestro di color che sanno." The story goes that this work was written by desire of Alexander the Great or, as some say, Philip of Macedon, and that the writer was given a sum which sounds fabulous in order that he might obtain the best available information. What interest most the modern reader are the " sayings by the way " on the moral qualities or the intelligence of animals. " Man and the mule," says Aristotle, " are always tame " — a classification not very complimentary to man. The ox is gentle, the wild boar is violent, crafty the serpent, noble and generous the lion. Except in the senses of touch and taste, man is far surpassed by the other animals — a remark that was endorsed 38 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT by St. Thomas Aquinas, who inferred from the limita- tion of man's senses that he would have made bad use of them if they had been more acute. Aristotle laid down the axiom that man alone can reason, though other animals can remember and learn, but he never pursued this theory as far as it was pushed by Descartes, much less by Malebranche. He be- lieved that the soul of infants differed in no respect from that of animals. All animals present traces of their moral disposition, though these distinctions are more marked in man. Animals understand signs and sounds, and can be taught. The females are less ready to help the males in distress than the males are to help the females. Bears carry off their cubs with them if they are pursued. The dolphin is remarkable, for the love of its young ones ; two dolphins were seen supporting a small dead dolphin on their backs, that was about to sink, as if in pity for it, to keep it from being devoured by wild creatures. In herds of horses, if a mare dies, other mares will bring up the foal, and mares without foals have been known to entice foals to follow them and to show much affection to them, though they die for want of their natural sustenance. Aristotle says that music attracts some animals ; for instance, deer can be captured by singing and playing on the pipe. Animals sometimes show fore- thought, as the ichneumon, which does not attack the asp till it has called others to help it — which reminds one of the dog whose master took him to Exeter, where he was badly treated by the yard-dog of the inn ; on this, he escaped and went to London, whence THE GREEK CONCEPTION OF ANIMALS 39 he returned with a powerful dog-friend who gave the yard-dog a lesson which he must have long re- membered. Hedgehogs are said by Aristotle and other ancient authors to change the entrance of their burrows according as the wind blows from north or south ; a man in Byzantium got no small fame as a weather prophet by observing this habit. He thinks that small animals are generally cleverer than larger ones. A tame woodpecker placed an almond in a crevice of wood so as to be able to break it, which it succeeded in doing with three blows. Aris- totle does not mention the similar ingenuity of the thrush which I have noticed myself ; it brings snails to a good flat stone on which it breaks the shell by knocking it up and down. He admired the skill of the swallow in making her nest. Although he knew of the migrations of birds, and declared that cranes go in winter to the sources of the Nile, " where there is a race of pigmies — no fable, but a fact," he was not free from the erroneous idea (which is to be found in modern folk-lore) that some birds hybernate in caves, out of which they emerge, almost featherless, in the spring. Of the nightingale, he says that it sings ceaselessly for fifteen days and nights when the mountains are thick with leaves. The spider's art and graceful movements receive due praise, as do the cleanly habits of bees, which are said to sting people who use unguents because they dislike bad smells. " Bright and shiny bees " Aristotle asserts to be idle, " like women." Of all animals his favourites are the lion and the elephant. The lion is gentle when he is not hungry 40 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT and he is not jealous or suspicious. He is fond of playing with animals that are brought up with him, and he gets to have a real affection for them. If a blow aimed at a lion fails, he only shakes and frightens his attacker, and then leaves him with- out hurting him. He never shows fear or turns his back on a foe. But old lions that are unable to hunt sometimes enter villages and attack man- kind. This is the first observation of the " man- eating " lion or tiger, and the reason given for his perverse conduct is still believed to be the right one. Aristotle assigned the palm of wisdom to the elephant, a creature abounding in intellect, tame, gentle, teachable, and one which can even learn how to " worship the king " — which is what many of us saw the elephants do at the Delhi Durbar. In a later age, Apollonius of Tyana confirmed from personal observation all Aristotle's praise ; he watched with admiration the crossing of the Indus by a herd of thirty elephants which were being pur- sued by huntsmen ; the light and small ones went first, then the mothers, who held up their cubs with tusk and trunk, and lastly the old and large elephants^ Pliny gave a similar account of the way in which elephants cross rivers, and it is, I believe, still noticed as a fact that the old ones send the young ones before them. The officer whose duty it was to superintend the embarcation of Indian elephants for Abyssinia during the campaign of Sir Robert Napier told me how a very fine old elephant, who perfectly understood the business in hand, drove all the others on board, but after performing this useful service, when it came STELE WITH CAT AND BIRD. Athens Museum. [To face page 40. THE GREEK CONCEPTION OF ANIMALS 41 to be his turn, he refused resolutely to move an inch, and had to be left behind. The sympathy with animals for which Apollonius was remarkable made him feel for these great beasts brought into subjec- tion ; he declares that at night they mourn over their lost liberty with peculiar piteous sounds unlike those which they make usually ; if a man approaches, however, they cease their wailing out of respect for him. He speaks of their attachment to their keeper, how they eat bread from his hand like a dog and caress him with their trunks. He saw an elephant at Taxila which was said to have fought against Alexander the Great three hundred and fifty years before. Alexander named it Ajax, and it bore golden bracelets on its trunk with the words: "Ajax. To the Sun from Alexander son of Jove." The people decked it with garlands and anointed it with precious salves. Several classical writers bore witness to the pleasure which elephants took in music ; they could be made to dance to the pipe. It was also said that they could write. Their crowning merit — that of helping away wounded comrades, which is vouched for by no less an authority than Mr. F. C. Selous — does not seem to have been observed in ancient times. In Greek mythology the familiar animals of the gods occupy a place half-way between legend and natural history. Viewed by one school as totems, as the earlier god of which the later is only an appen- dix, to more conservative students they may appear to be, in the main, the outgrowth of the same fondness for coupling man and beast and fitting man with a beast-companion suited to his character, which gave 42 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT St. Mark his lion and St. John his eagle. The panther of Bacchus is the most attractive of the divine menagerie, because Bacchus, in this connexion, is generally shown as a child and the friendships of beasts and children are always pleasing. The affection of Bacchus for panthers has been attributed to the fact that he wore a panther-skin, but there seems no motive for deciding that the one tradition was earlier than the other ; the rationale of a myth is often evolved long after the myth itself Perhaps, after all, the stories of gods and animals often originated in the simple belief that gods, like men, had a weakness for pets ! In the Pompeian collections at Naples there are several designs of Bacchus and his panther ; one of them shows the panther and the ass of Silenus lying down together ; in another, a very fine mosaic, the winged genius of Bacchus careers along astride of his favourite beast ; in a third, a chubby little boy, with no signs of godhead about him, clambers on to the back of a patient panther, which has the long-suffering look of animals that are accustomed to be teased by children. It may be noticed that children and animals, both somewhat neglected in the older art, attained the highest popularity with the artists of the age of Pompeii. Children were represented in all sorts of attitudes, and all known animals, from the cat to the octopus and the elephant to the grasshopper, were drawn not only with general correctness but with a keen insight into their humours and temperaments. It is said that a panther was once caught in Pam- THE GREEK CONCEPTION OF ANIMALS 43 phylia which had a gold chain round its neck with the inscription in Armenian letters : " Arsaces the king to the Nyscean god." Oriental nations called Bacchus after Nysa, his supposed birthplace. It was concluded that the king of Armenia had given its freedom to this splendid specimen to do honour to the god. The panther became very tame and was fondled by every one, but when the spring came it ran away, chain and all, to seek a mate in the mountains and never more came back. Ill ANIMALS AT ROME ROME, the eternal, begins with a Beast-story. However much deeper in the past the spade may dig than the reputed date of the humanitarian She-wolf, her descendant will not be expelled from the grotto on the Capitol, nor will it cease to be the belief of children (the only trustworthy autho- rities when legends are concerned) that the grandeur that was Rome would have never existed but for the opportune intervention of a friendly beast ! The fame of the She-wolf shows how eagerly mankind seizes on some touch of nature, fact or fable, that seems to make all creatures kin. Rome was as proud of her She- wolf as she was of ruling the world. It was the "luck" of Rome; even now, something of the old sentiment exists, for I remem- ber that during King Edward's visit old-fiashioned Romans were angry because this emblem was not to be seen in the decorations. The story did not make such large demands on credulity as sceptics pretend. The wolf is not so much the natural enemy of man as the cat is of the mouse : yet cats have been known to bring up fami- lies of mice or rats which they treated with affection. 44 »; ^ p, K 3 ANIMALS AT ROME 45 In recent times a Russian bear was stated to have carried away to the woods a little girl whom it fed with nuts and fruits. The evidence seemed good, though the story did sound a little as if it were sug- gested by Victor Hugo's " Epopee du Lion." But in India there are stories of the same sort — stories actually of She- wolves — which appear to be impossible to set aside. In a paper read before the Bombay Natural History Society, the well-known Parsi scholar, Jivanji Jamsedji Modi, described how he had seen one such " wolf-boy " at the Secundra Orphanage : the boy had remained with wolves up to six years old when he was discovered and captured, not without vigorous opposition from his vulpine protectors. The historical record of Rome as regards animals is not a bright one. The cruelty of the arena does not stain the first Roman annals; the earliest certified instance of wild-beast baiting belongs to 186 B.C., and after the practice was introduced it did not reach at once the monstrous proportions of later times. Still, one does not imagine that the Roman of republican times was very tender-hearted towards animals. Cato related, as if he took a pride in it, that when he was Consul he left his war-horse in Spain to spare the public the cost of its conveyance to Rome. " Whether such things as these," says Plutarch, who tells the story, " are instances of greatness or littleness of soul, let the reader judge for himself! " When the infatuation for the shows in the arena was at its height, the Romans felt an enormous interest in animals : indeed, there were moments when they thought of nothing else. It was an interest which went along with indifference to 46 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT their sufferings ; it may be said to have been worse than no interest at all, but it existed and to ignore it, as most writers have done, is to make the explicable inexplicable. If the only attraction of these shows had been their cruelty we should have to conclude that the Romans were all afBicted with a rare though not unknown form of insanity. Much the same was true of the gladiatorial shows. Up to a certain point, what led people to them was what leads people to a football match or an assault-at-arms. Beyond that point — well, beyond it there entered the element that makes the tiger in man, but for the most part it was incon- scient. When we see Pola or Verona or Ntmes ; when we tread the crowded streets to the Roman Colosseum or traverse the deserted high-road to Spanish Italica ; most of all, when we watch coming nearer and nearer across the wilderness between Kairouan and El Djem the magnificent pile that stands outlined against the African sky — we all say the same thing: "What a wonderful race the Romans were ! " It is an exclama- tion that forces itself to the lips of the most ignorant as to those of the scholar or historical student. At such moments, it may be true, that the less we think of the games of the arena the better ; the remembrance of them forms a disturbing element in the majesty of the scene. But they cannot be put out of mind entirely, and if we do think of them, it is desirable that we should think of them correctly. It so happens that it is possible to reconstruct them into a lifelike picture. There exists one, though, as far as I know, only one, faithful, vivid, and complete contemporary representa- LION BEING LED FROM THE ARENA BY A SLAVE. {Nennig Mosaic.) [To face page 47. ANIMALS AT ROME 47 tion of the Roman Games. This is the superb mosaic pavement which was discovered in the middle of the last century by a peasant striking on the hard surface with his spade, at the village of Nennig, not far from the Imperial city of Treves. The observer of this mosaic perceives at once that the games were of the nature of a "variety" entertainment. There was the music which picturesque-looking performers played on a large horn and on a sort of organ. (The horn closely resembles the prehistoric horns which are preserved in the National Museum at Copenhagen, where they were blown with inspiring effect before the members of the Congress of Orientalists in 1908.) There was the bloodless contest between a short and tall athlete, armed differently with stick and whip. In the central division, because the most important, is shown the mortal earnest of the gladiatorial fight, strictly controlled by the Games-master. In the sexagion above this is a hardly less deadly struggle between a man and a bear : the bear has got the man under him but is being whipped off so that the " turn " may not end too quickly, and, perhaps, also to give the more expensive victim another chance. To the right hand, a gladiator who has run his lance through the neck of a panther, holds up his hand to boast the victory and claim applause : the dying panther tries vainly to free itself from the weapon. To the left is a fight between a leopard and an unfortunate wild ass, which has already received a terrible wound in its side and is now having its head drawn down between the fore-paws of the leopard. I hear that in beast-fights organised by Indian princes, these unequal combatants are still pitted against each 48 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT other. Lastly, the Nennig Mosaic depicts a fat lion that has also conquered a wild ass, of which the head alone seems to remain : it has been inferred, though I think rashly, that the lion has eaten up all the rest ; at any rate he now seems at peace with the world and is being led back to his cage by a slave. Everything is quiet, orderly, and a model of good management. The custodian of the little museum told me that the (surprisingly few) visitors to Nennig were in the habit of remarking of this representation of the Roman Games that it made them understand for the first time how the cultivated Romans could endure such sights. Unhappily, conventional pro- priety joined to the sanction of authority will make the majority of mankind endure anything that causes no danger or inconvenience to themselves. Except with a few, at whom their generation looks askance, the sense of cruelty more than any other moral sense is governed by habit, by convention. It is even subject to latitude and longitude ; in Spain I was surprised to find that almost all the English and American women whom I met had been to, at least, one bull-fight. Insensibility spreads like a pestilence ; new or revived forms of cruelty should be stopped at once or no one can say how far they will reach or how difficult it will be to abolish them. One might have supposed that the sublime self- sacrifice of the monk who threw himself between two combatants — which brought the tardy end of gladia- torial exhibitions in Christian Rome — would have saved the world for ever from that particular bar- barity; but in the fourteenth century we actually ANIMALS AT ROME 49 find gladiatorial shows come to life again and in full favour at Naples ! This little-known fact is attested in Petrarch's letters. Writing to Cardinal Colonna on December i, 1343, the truly civilised poet denounces with burning indignation an "infernal spectacle " of which he had been the involuntary witness. His gay friends (there has been always a singular identity between fashion and barbarism) seem to have entrapped him into going to a place called Carbonaria, where he found the queen, the boy-king, and a large audience assembled in a sort of amphitheatre. Petrarch imagined that there was to be some splendid entertainment, but he had hardly got inside when a tall, handsome young man fell dead just below where he was standing, while the audience raised a shout of applause. He escaped from the place as fast as he could, horror-struck by the brutality of spectacle and spectators, and spurring his horse, he turned his back on the " accursed spot " with the determination to leave Naples as soon as possible. How can we wonder, he asks, that there are murders in the streets at night when in broad daylight, in the presence of the king, wretched parents see their sons stabbed and killed, and when it is considered dishonourable to be unwilling to present one's throat to the knife just as if it were a struggle for fatherland or for the joys of Heaven ? Very curious was the action of the Vatican in this matter; Pope John XXII. excommunicated every one who took part in the games as actor or spectator, but since nobody obeyed the prohibition, it was rescinded by his successor, Benedict XII., to prevent 4 so THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT the scandal of a perpetual disregard of a Papal ordinance. So they went on cutting each other's throats with the tacit permission of the Church until King Charles of the Peace succeeded in abolishing the "sport." The action of the Church in respect to bull-fights has been much the same ; local opinion is generally recognised as too strong for opposition. The French bishops, however, did their best to prevent their introduction into the South of France, but they failed completely. I have strayed rather far from the Roman shows, but the savagery of Christians in the fourteenth century (and after) should make us wonder less at Roman callousness. All our admiration is due to the few finer spirits who were repelled by the slaughter of man or beast to make a Roman's holiday. Cicero said that he could never see what there was pleasurable in the spectacle of a noble beast struck to the heart by its merciless hunter or pitted against one of our weaker species ! For a single expression of censure such as this which has come down to us, there must have been majiy of which we have no record. Of out-spoken censure there was doubtless little because violent condem- nation of the arena would have savoured of treason to the State which patronised and supported the games just as Queen Elizabeth's ministers supported bull-baiting. Rome must have been one vast zoological garden, and viewing the strange animals was the first duty of the tourist. Pausanias was deeply impressed by ANIMALS AT ROME 51 the " Ethiopian bulls which they call rhinoceroses " and also by Indian camels in colour like leopards. He saw an all-white deer, and very much surprised he was to see it, but, to his subsequent regret, he forgot to ask where it came from. He was reminded of this white deer when he saw white blackbirds on Mount Cyllene in Arcadia. I remember a white blackbird which stayed in the garden of my old English home for more than two years : a wretched " sportsman " lay in wait for it when it wandered into a neighbouring field and shot it. The feasibility of the transport of the hosts of animals destined to the arena will always remain a mystery. At the inauguration of the Colosseum, five thousand wild beasts and six thousand tame ones were butchered, nor was this the highest figure on a single occasion. Probably a great portion of the animals was sent by the Governors of distant pro- vinces who wished to stand well with the home authorities. But large numbers were also brought over by speculators who sold them to the highest or the most influential bidder. One reason why Cassius murdered Julius Caesar was that Caesar had secured some lions which Cassius wished to present to the public. Every one who aimed at political power or even simply at being thought one of the " smart set " (the odious word suits the case) spent king's ransoms on the public games. For vulgar ostentation the wealthy Roman world eclipsed the exploits of the modern millionaire. If any one deem this impossible, let him read, in the Satyricon of Petronius, the account of the fetes to be given by a leader of fashion of the 52 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT name of Titus. Not merely gladiators, but a great number of freedmen would take part in them : it would be no wretched mock combat but a real carnage! Titus was so rich that he could afford such liberality. Contempt is poured upon the head of a certain Nobarnus who offered a spectacle of gladiators hired at a low price and so old and decrepit that a breath threw them over. They all ended by wounding them- selves to stop the contest. You might as well have witnessed a mere cock-fight! I should think that not more than one animal in three survived the voyage. This would vastly increase the total number. The survivors often arrived in such a pitiable state that they could not be presented in the arena, or that they had to be presented immediately to prevent them from dying too soon. Symmachus, last of the great nobles of Rome, who, blinded by tradition, thought to revive the glories of his beloved city by reviving its shame, graphically describes the anxieties of the preparations for one of these colossal shows on which he is said to have spent what would be about ;^8o,ooo of our money. He began a year in advance: horses, bears, lions, Scotch dogs, crocodiles, chariot-drivers, hunters, actors, and the best gladiators were recruited from all parts. But when the time drew near, nothing were ready. Only a few of the animals had come, and these were half dead of hunger and fatigue. The bears had not arrived and there was no news of the lions. At the eleventh hour the croco- diles reached Rome, but they refused to eat and had to be killed all at once in order that they might not die of hunger. It was even worse with the gladiators, ANIMALS AT ROME 53 who were intended to provide, as in all these beast shows, the crowning entertainment. Twenty-nine of the Saxon captives whom Symmachus had chosen on account of the well-known valour of their race, strangled one another in prison rather than fight to the death for the amusement of their conquerors. And Symmachus, with all his real elevation of mind, was moved to nothing but disgust by their sublime choice! Rome in her greatest days had gloried in these shows : how could a man be a patriot who set his face against customs which followed the Roman eagles round the world.? How many times since then has patriotism been held to require the extinction of moral sense ! Sometimes the humanity of beasts put to shame the inhumanity of man. There was a lion, com- memorated by Statius, which had "unlearnt murder and homicide," and submitted of its own accord to a master "who ought to have been under its feet." This lion went in and out of its cage and gently laid down unhurt the prey which it caught : it even allowed people to put their hands into its mouth. It was killed by a fugitive slave. The Senate and people of Rome were in despair, and Imperial Caesar, who witnessed impassible the death of thousands of animals sent hither to perish from Africa, from Scythia, from the banks of the Rhine, had tears in his eyes for a single lion ! In later Roman times a tame lion was a favourite pet : their masters led them about wherever they went, whether much to the gratification of the friends on whom they called is not stated. Another instance of a gentle beast was that of a 54 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT tiger into whose cage a live doe had been placed for him to eat. But the tiger was not feeling well and, with the wisdom of sick animals, he was observing a diet. So two or three days elapsed, during which the tiger made great friends with the doe and when he recovered his health and began to feel very hungry, instead of devouring his fellow-lodger he beat with his paws against the bars of the cage in sign that he wanted food. These stories were, no doubt, true, and there may have been truth also in the well- known story of the lion which refused to attack a man who had once succoured him. Animals have good memories. One pleasanter feature of the circus was the exhibition of performing beasts. Though the exhibitors of such animals are now sometimes charged with cruelty, it cannot be denied that the public who goes to look at them is composed of just the people who are most fond of animals. All children delight in them because, to their minds, they seem a confirmation of the strong instinctive though oftenest unexpressed belief, which lurks in every child's soul, that between man and ani- mals there is much less difference than is the correct, "grown-up" opinion; this is a part of the secret lore of childhood which has its origins in the childhood of the world. The amiable taste for these exhibitions — in appearance, at least, so harmless — strikes one as incongruous in the same persons who revelled in slaughter. Such a taste existed, however, and when St. James said that there was not a single beast, bird or reptile which had not been tamed, he may have been thinking of the itinerant showmen's ANIMALS AT ROME 55 " learned " beasts which perambulated the Roman empire. Horses and oxen were among the animals com- monly taught to do tricks. I find no mention of monkeys as performing in the arena, though Apuleius says that in the spring fStes of Isis, the forerunners of the Roman carnival, he saw a monkey with a straw hat and a Phrygian tunic — we can hardly keep ourselves from asking : what had it done with the grind-organ ? But in spite of this startlingly modern apparition, monkeys do not seem to have been popular in Rome ; I imagine even, that there was some fixed prejudice against them. The cleverest of all the animal performers were, of course, the dogs, and one showman had the ingenious idea of making a dog act a part in a comedy. The effects of a drug were tried on him, the plot turning on the suspicion that the drug was poisonous, while, in fact, it was only a narcotic. The dog took the piece of bread dipped in the liquid, swallowed it, and began to reel and stagger till he finally fell flat on the ground. He gave himself a last stretch and then seemed to expire, making no sign of life when his apparently dead body was dragged about the stage. At the right moment, he began to move very slightly as if waking out of a deep sleep ; then he raised his head, looked round, jumped up and ran joyously to the proper person. The piece was played at the theatre of Marcellus in the reign of old Vespasian, and Csesar himself was delighted. I wonder that no manager of our days has turned the incident to account ; I never yet saw an audience serious enough not to become 56 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT young again at the sight of four-footed comedians. Even the high art-loving public at the Prince Regent's theatre at Munich cannot resist a murmur of discreet merriment when the pack of beautiful stag-hounds led upon the stage in the hunting scene in "Tannhauser" gravely wag their tails in time with the music ! The pet lions were only one example of the aberra- tions of pet-lovers in ancient Rome. Malte^le lap-dogs became a scourge : Lucian tells the lamentajble tale of a needy philosopher whom a fashionable jady cajoles into acting as personal attendant to her incomparable Mirrhina. The Maltese dog was an old fad ; Theo- phrastus, in the portrait of an insufferable dligant, mentions that, when his pet dog dies, he inscribes " pure Maltese " on its tombstone. Many were the birds that fell victims to the desire to keep them in richly ornamented cages in which they died of hunger, says Epictetiis, sooner than be slaves. The canary which takes more kindly to captivity was unknown till it was brought to Italy in the sixteenth century. Parrots there were, but Roman parrots were not long-lived: they shared the common doom : "To each his sufferings, all are pets" The parrots of Corinna and of Melior which ought to have lived to a hundred or, at any rate, to have had the chance of dying of grief at the loss of their possessors (as a parrot did that I once knew), enjoyed fame and fortune for as brief a span as Lesbia's sparrow. Melior's parrot not only had brilliant green feathers but also many accomplishments which are described by its master's friend, the poet Statius. On one occasion, it sat up half the night at a banquet, hopping from one ANIMALS AT ROME 57 guest to another and talking in a way that excited great admiration ; it even shared the good fare and on the morrow it died — which was less than surprising. I came across an old-fashioned criticism of this poem in which Statius is scolded for showing so much genuine feeling about ... a parrot ! The critic was right in one thing — the genuine feeling is there ; those who have known what a companion a bird may be, will appreciate the little touch : " You never felt alone, dear Melior, with its open cage beside you ! " Now the cage is empty ; it is " la cage sans oiseaux " which Victor Hugo prayed to be spared from seeing. Some translator turned this into " a nest without birds," because he thought that a cage without birds sounded unpoetical, but Victor Hugo took care of truth and left poetry to take of itself. And whatever may be the ethics of keeping cage birds, true it is that few things are more dismal than the sight of the little mute, tenantless dwelling which was yesterday alive with fluttering love. We owe to Roman poets a good deal of informa- tion about dogs, and especially the knowledge that the British hound was esteemed superior to all others, even to the famous breed of Epirus. This is certified by Gratius Faliscus, a contemporary of Ovid. He described these animals as remarkably ugly, but incomparable for pluck. British bull-dogs were used in the Colosseum, and in the third century Nemesi- anus praised the British greyhound. Most of the valuable dogs were brought from abroad ; it is to be inferred that the race degenerated in the climate of Rome, as it does now. Concha, whose epitaph was S8 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT written by Petronius, was born In Gaul. While Martial's too elaborate epitaph on "The Trusty Lydia" is often quoted and translated, the more sympathetic poem of Petronius has been overlooked. He tells the perfections of Concha in a simple, affectionate manner; like Lydia, she was a mighty huntress and chased the wild boar fearlessly through the dense forest. Never did chain hamper her liberty and never a blow fell on her shapely, snow-white form. She reposed softly, stretched on the breast of her master or mistress, and at night a well-made bed refreshed her tired limbs. If she lacked speech, she could make herself understood better than any of her kind — yet no one had reason to fear her bark. A hapless mother, she died when her little ones saw the light, and now a narrow marble slab covers the earth where she rests. Cicero's tribute to canine worth is well known : " Dogs watch for us faithfully ; they love and worship their masters, they hate strangers, their powers of tracking by scent is extraordinary ; great is their keenness in the chase : what can all this mean but that they were made for man's advantage ? " It was as natural to the Roman mind to regard man as the lord of creation as to regard the Roman as the lord of man. For the rest, his normal conception of animals differed little from that of Aristotle. Cicero says that the chief distinction between man and animals, is that animals look only to the present, paying little attention to the past and future, while man looks before and after, weighs causes and effects, draws analogies and views the whole path of life, ANIMALS AT ROME 59 preparing things needful for passing along it. Expressed in the key of antique optimism instead of in the key of modern pessimism, the judgment is the same as that of Burns in his lines to the field mouse : " Still thou art blest, compared wi' me ! The present only touches thee : But, och ! I backward cast my e'e On prospects drear ! And forward, tho' I canna see, I guess and fear." And of Leopardi in the song of the Syrian shepherd to his flock : — "O flock that liest at rest, O blessed thou That knowest not thy fate, however hard, How utterly I envy thee ! " Cicero's more virile mind would have spurned this craving to renounce the distinguishing human privilege for the bliss of ignorance. Wherever we fix the limits of animal intelligence, there is no question of man's obligation to treat sen- tient creatures with humanity. This was recog- nised by Marcus Aurelius when he wrote the golden precept : " As to animals which have no reason . . . do thou, since thou hast reason, and they have none, make use of them with a generous and liberal spirit." Here we have the broadest application of the narrowest assumption. From the time, at least, that Rome was full of Greek teachers, there were always some partisans of a different theory altogether. What Seneca calls " the illustrious but unpopular school of Pythagoras " had a little following which made up 6o THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT by its sincere enthusiasm for the fewness of its members. Seneca's own master Sotio was of this school, and his teaching made a deep impression on the most illustrious of his pupils, who sums up its chief points with his usual lucidity : Pythagoras gave men a horror of crime and of parricide by telling them that they might unawares kill or devour their own fathers ; all sentient beings are bound together in a universal kinship and an endless transmutation causes them to pass from one form to another; no soul perishes or ceases its activity save in the moment when it changes its envelope. Sotio took for granted that the youths who attended his classes came to him with minds unprepared to receive these doctrines, and he aimed more at making them accept the conse- quences of the theory than the theory itself. What if they believed none of it? What if they did not believe that souls passed through different bodies and that the thing we call death is a transmigration ? That in the animal which crops the grass or which peoples the sea, a soul resides which once was human? That, like the heavenly bodies, every soul traverses its appointed circle ? That nothing in this world perishes, but only changes scene and place? Let them remember, nevertheless, that great men have believed all this : " Suspend your judgment, and in the meantime, respect whatever has life." If the doctrine be true, then to abstain from animal flesh is to spare oneself the committal of crimes ; if it be false, such abstinence is commendable frugality ; "all you lose is the food of lions and vultures." Sotio himself was a thorough Pythagorean, but ANIMALS AT ROME 6i there was another philosopher of the name of Sestius who was an ardent advocate of abstinence from animal food without believing in the transmigration of souls. He founded a sort of brotherhood, the members of which took the pledge to abide by this rule. He argued that since plenty of other wholesome food existed, what need was there for man to shed blood ? Cruelty must become habitual when people devour flesh to indulge the palate : " let us reduce the elements of sensuality." Health would be also the gainer by the adoption of a simpler and less various diet. Sotio used these arguments of one whom he might have called an unbeliever, to reinforce his own. Seneca does not say if many of his schoolfellows were as much impressed as he was by this teaching. For a year he abstained from flesh, and when he got accustomed to it, he even found the new diet easy and agreeable. His mind seemed to grow more active. That he was allowed to eat what he liked without encountering interference or ridicule- shows the con- siderable freedom in which the youth of Rome was brought up : this made them men. But at the beginning of the reign of Tiberius there went forth an edict against foreign cults, and abstinence from flesh was held to show a leaning towards religious novelties. For this reason the elder Seneca advised his son to give up vegetarianism. Seneca honestly confesses that he went back to better fare without much urging ; yet he always remained frugal, and he seems never to have felt quite sure that his youthful experiment did not agree best with the counsels of perfection. IV PLUTARCH THE HUMANE PLUTARCH was the Happy Philosopher — and there were not many that were happy. A life of travel, a life of teaching, an honoured old age as the priest of Apollo in his native village in Boeotia : what kinder fate than this ? He was happy in the very obscurity which seems to have surrounded his life at Rome, for it saved him from spite and envy. He was happy, if we may trust the traditional effigies, even in that thing which likewise is a good gift of the gods, a gracious outward presence exactly corre- sponding with the soul within. A painter who wished to draw a type of illimitable compassionateness would choose the face attributed to Plutarch. Finally, this gentle sage is happy still after eighteen hundred years in doing more than any other writer of antiquity to build up character by diffusing the radiance of noble deeds. Nevertheless, were he to come back to life he would have one disappointment, and that would be to find how few people read his essays on kindness to animals : they would stand a better chance of being read if they were printed alone, but to arrive at them you must dive in the formid- able depths of the Moralia : a very storehouse of 62 PLUTARCH THE HUMANE 63 interesting things, but hardly attractive to the general in a hurried age. Some of ilfe treasures have been revealed by Dr. Oakesmith in his admirable mono- graph on " The Religion of Plutarch." The mine of nobly humane sentiment remains, however, almost unexplored. «^ , The essays devoteS to animals are three in number, with the titles : " Whether terrestrial or aquatic animals are the more intelligent?" "That animals have the use of Reason"; "On the habit of eating flesh." The two first are in the form of dialogues, and the third is a familiar discourse, a conference, such as those which now form a popular feature of the Roman season. Through these studies there runs a vein of transparent sincerity : we feel that they were composed not to show the author's cleverness or to startle by paradoxes, but with the real wish to make the young men for whom they were intended a little more humane. Plutarch did not take up the claims of animals because good " copy " could be made out of them. As his wish is to persuade, he does not ask for the impossible. It is the voice of the highly civilised Greek addressing the young barbarians of Rome : for to the Greek's inmost mind the Roman must have always remained somewhat of a barbarian. There is great restraint : though Plutarch must have loathed the games of the arena, he speaks of them with guarded deprecation. He makes one of his characters say that the chase (which he did not himself like) was useful in keeping people from worse things, " such as the combats of gladiators." He is genuinely anxious by all means to persuade some, and for this 64 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT reason he refrains from scaring away his hearers or readers by extreme demands. Though he has a strong personal repugnance to flesh-eating, he does not insist on every one sharing it. Anyhow, he says, Be as humane as you can ; cause as little suffering as is possible ; no doubt it is not easy, all at once, to eradicate a habit which has taken hold of our sensual nature, but, at least, let us deprive it of its worst features. Let us eat flesh if we must, but for hunger, not for self-indulgence ; let us kill animals but still be compassionate — not heaping up outrages and tortures "as, alas, is done every day." He mentions how swans were blinded and then fattened with unnatural foods, which is only a little worse than things that are done now. What is certain is, that extreme and habitual luxury in food has spelt deca- dence from the banquets of Babylon downwards. Plutarch goes on to ask whether it is impossible to amuse ourselves without all these excesses .'' Shall we expire on the spot, are the resources of men totally exhausted, if the table be not supplied with pdtds de foies gras ? Is life not worth living without slaughter to make a feast, slaughter to find a pastime ; cannot we exist without asking of certain animals that they show courage, and fight in spite of themselves, or that they massacre other animals which have not the natural energy to defend themselves ? Must we for our sport tear the mother from the little ones which she suckles or hatches } Plutarch implores us not to imitate the children of whom Bion speaks, who amused themselves by throwing stones at the frogs, but the frogs were not at all amused — they PLUTARCH THE HUMANE 65 simply died. "When we take our recreation, those who help in the fun ought to share in it and be amused as well." Thus does the kind Greek philosopher exhort us " Never to blend our pleasure or our pride With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels." 1 Did Wordsworth know that his thought had been expressed so long before? It matters little; the counsels of mercy never grow old. With good sense and in that spirit of compromise which is really the basis of morality, Plutarch argued that cruelty to animals does not lie in the use but in the abuse of them ; it is not cruel to kill them if they are incompatible with our own existence ; it is not cruel to tame and train to our service those made by nature gentle and loving towards man which become the companions of our toil according to their natural aptitude. " Horse and ass are given to us," as Prometheus says, "to be submissive servants and fellow-workers ; dogs to be guardians and watchers, goats and sheep to give us milk and wool." (Cow's milk seems to have been rarely drunk, as is still the case in the Mediterranean islands and in Greece.) " The Stoics," says Plutarch, " made sensibility towards animals a preparation to humanity and com- passion because the gradually formed habit of the lesser affections is capable of leading men very far." In the " Lives " he insists on the same point : " Kindness and beneficence should be extended to creatures of every species, and these still flow from 5 66 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT the breast of a well-natured man as streams that issue from the living fountain. A good man will take care of his horses and dogs not only when they are young, but when old and past service. . . . We certainly ought not to treat living creatures like shoes or household goods, which, when worn out with use, we throw away, and were it only to learn benevolence to human kind, we should be merciful to other creatures. For my own part I would not sell even an old ox." Here I may say that Plutarch should have thanked Fate which made him a philosopher and not a farmer. For how, alas, can the farmer escape from becoming the accomplice of that which the Italian poet apostro- phizes in the words — " Natura, illaudabil maraviglia, Che per uccider partorisci e nutri ! " How can well-cared -for old age be the lot of more than a very few of the animals that serve us so faith- fully ? The exception must console us for the rule. The beautiful story of one such exception is told by both Plutarch and Pliny the Elder. When Pericles was building the Parthenon a great number of mules were employed in drawing the stones up the hill of the Acropolis. Some of them became too old for the work, and these were set at liberty to pasture at large. But one old mule gravely walked every day to the stone-yard and accompanied, or rather led, the pro- cession of mule-carts to and fro. The Athenians were delighted with its devotion to duty, and decided that it should be supported at the expense of the PLUTARCH THE HUMANE 67 State for the rest of its days. According to Pliny, the mule of the Parthenon lived till it had attained its eightieth year, a record that seems startling even having regard to the proverbial longevity of pen- sioners. Plutarch does not mention it, perhaps, because he had some doubts about its accuracy. In other respects the story may be accepted as literally true ; and does it not do us good to think of it, as we look at the most glorious work of man's hands bathed in the golden afterglow ? Does it not do us good to think that at the zenith of her greatness Athens "... Mother of arts And eloquence, native to famous wits " stooped — nay, rose — to generous appreciation of the willing service of an old mule .'' In dealing with animal psychology Plutarch makes a strong point of the inherent improbability that, while feeling and imagination are the common share of all animated beings, reason should be apportioned only to a single species. " How can you say such things ? Is not every one convinced that no being can feel without also possessing understanding, that there is not a single animal which has not a sort of thought and reason just as he comes into the world with senses and instinct ? " Nature, which is said to make all things from one cause and to one end, has not given sensibility to animals simply in order that they should be capable of sensations. Since some things are good for them, and others bad, they would not exist for a single instant if they did not know how to seek the good and shun the bad. 68 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT The animal learns by his senses what things are good and what are bad for him, but when, in consequence of these indications, of his senses, it is a question of taking and seeking what is useful and of avoiding and flying from what is harmful, these same animals would have no means of action if Nature had not made them up to a certain point capable of reason, of judgment, of memory, and of attention. Because, if you completely deprived them of the spirit of conjecture, memory, foresight, preparation, hope, fear, desire, grief, they would cease to derive the slightest utility from the eyes or ears which they possess, Plutarch might have added that a mindless animal would resemble not a child or a savage, but an idiot. He does point out that they would be better off with no senses at all than with the power of feeling and no power of acting upon it. But, he adds, could sensa- tion exist without intelligence? He quotes a line from I do not know what poet : — " The spirit only hears and sees — all else Is deaf and blind." If we look with our eyes at a page of writing with- out seizing the meaning of a word of it, because our thoughts are preoccupied, is it not the same as if we had never seen it .■* But even were we to admit that the senses suffice to their office, would that explain the phenomena of memory and foresight? Would the animal fear things, not present, which harm him, or desire things, not present, which are to his advan- tage? Would he prepare his retreat or shelter or devise snares by which to catch other animals ? Only PLUTARCH THE HUMANE 69 one theory can be applied to mind in man and mind in animals. It will be seen from this summary that Plutarch traversed the whole field of speculation on animal intelligence which has not really extended its boundaries since the time when he wrote, though it is possible that we are now on the verge, if not of new discoveries, at least of the admission of a new point of view. The study of the dual element in man, the endeavour to establish a line of demarcation between the conscious and subliminal self, may lead to the inquiry, how far the conscious self corresponds with what was meant, when speaking of animals, by "reason," and the subliminal self with what was meant by " instinct " ? But the use of a new terminology would not alter the conclusion : call it reason, consciousness, spirit ; some of it the " paragon of animals " shares with his poor relations. The case is put in a homely way but not without force by the heroine of a forgotten novel by Lamar- tine : the speaker is an old servant who is in despair at losing her goldfinch : " Ah ! On dit que les betes n'ont pas Time," she says. " Je ne veux pas offenser le bon Dieu, mais si mon pauvre oiseau n'avait pas d'ime, avec quoi done n'aurait-il tant aimee ? Avec les plumes ou avec les pattes, peut-^tre ? " Plutarch reviews — to reject — the "Automata" argument, which had already some supporters. Cer- tain naturalists, he says, try to prove that animals feel neither pleasure nor anger nor yet fear ; that the nightingale does not meditate his song, that the bee has no memory, that the swallow makes no prepara- 70 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT tions, that the lion never grows angry, nor is the stag subject to fear. Everything, according to these theorists, is merely delusive appearance. They might as well assert that animals cannot see or hear ; that they only appear to see or hear ; that they have no voice, only the semblance of a voice ; in short, that they are not alive but only seem to live. The moral aspects of any problem are those which to a moralist seem the most important, and Plutarch did not seek to deny the force of the objection : If virtue be the true aim of reason, how can Nature have bestowed reason on creatures which cannot direct it to its true object? But he denied the postulate that animals have no ethical potentialities. If the love of men for their children is granted to be the corner-stone of all human society, shall we say that there is no merit in the affection of animals for their offspring ? He sums up the matter by remark- ing that the limitation of a faculty does not show that it does not exist. To pretend that every being not endowed at birth with perfect reason is, by its nature, incapable of reason of any kind, would be to ignore the fact that although reason is a natural gift the degree in which it is possessed by any individual depends on his training and on his teachers. Perfect reason is possessed by none because none has perfect rectitude and moral excellence. Animals exhibit examples of sociability, courage, resource, and again, of cowardice and viciousness. Why do we not say of one tree that it is less teachable than another, as we say that a sheep is less teachable than a dog ? It is, of coilrse, because PLUTARCH THE HUMANE 71 plants cannot think, and where the faculty of thought is wholly wanting, there cannot be more or less quick- ness or slowness, more or less of good qualities or of bad. Yet it must be allowed that man's intelligence is amazingly superior to that of animals. But what does that prove ? Do not some animals leave man far behind in the keenness of their sight and the sharpness of their hearing ? Shall we say, therefore, that man is blind or deaf? We have some strength in our hands and in our bodies although we are not elephants or camels. In the same way, we should be careful not to infer that animals lack all reasoning faculties from the fact that their intelligence is duller and more defective than man's. " Boatfuls " of true stories can be cited to show the docility and special aptitudes of the different children of creation. And a very amusing occupation it is, says Plutarch, for young people to collect such stories. In the course of his work, he sets them a good example, for he brings together a real " boatful " of anecdotes of clever beasts, but at this point he contents himself with observing that madness in dogs and other ani- mals would be alone sufficient to show that they had some mind : otherwise, how could they go out of it ? The stoics who taught the strictest humanity to animals rejected, nevertheless, the supposition that animals had reason, for how, they asked, can such a theory be reconciled with the idea of eternal justice ? Would it not make abstinence from their flesh imperative and entail consequences which would make our life impracticable ? If we were to give 72 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT up using animals for our own purposes, we should be reduced ourselves almost to the condition of brutes. " What works would be left for us to do by land or sea, what industries to cultivate, what embellishments of our way of living, if we regarded animals as reasonable beings and our fellow-creatures, and hence adopted the rule (which, clearly, would be only proper) to do them no harm and to study their convenience." Many a sensitive modern soul has pondered over this crux without finding a satisfactory solution. Plutarch says that Empedocles and Heraclites admitted the injustice, and laid it to the door of Nature which permits or ordains a state of war and necessity, in which nothing is accomplished without the weaker going to the wall. For himself, he would propose to those " who, instead of disputing, gently follow and learn " the better way out of the difficulty — which was introduced by the Sages of Antiquity, then long lost, and found again by Pythagoras. This better way is to use animals as our helpers but to refrain from taking life. Plutarch here evades a stumbling-block which he does not remove. The dialogue, as it has come down to us, breaks off suddenly after one final objection : how can beings have reason which have no notion of God ? Some scholars imagine that Plutarch hurried the dialogue to a close because this query completely baffled him ; others (and they are the majority) attribute the abrupt finish to the loss of the concluding part. Would Plutarch have contented himself with citing the analogy of young children PLUTARCH THE HUMANE 73 who, although not without the elements of reason, know very little of theology, or would not he rather have contended with Celsus, that animals do possess religious knowledge ? If he took the last course, it may well be that the disappearance of the end of the dialogue was not accidental. At Ravenna there is a terrible mosaic, alive with wrath and energy, which shows a Christ we know not (for He looks like a grand Inquisitor) thrusting into the flames heretical books. As I looked at it, I thought how many valuable classical works, vaguely suspected on the score of faith or morals, must have shared the fate of "unorthodox'' polemics in the merry bonfires which this mosaic holds up for imitation ! The argument " that it sounds unnatural to ascribe reason to creatures ignorant of God," suggests famili- arity with a passage in Epictetus (Plutarch's con- temporary), where he says that man alone was made to have the understanding which recognises God — a recognition which he elsewhere explains by the hypothesis that every man has in him a small portion of the divine. Having this intuitive sense, man is bound, without ceasing, to praise his Creator, and, since others are blind and neglect to do it, Epictetus will do it on behalf of all : "for what else can I do, a lame old man, than sing hymns to God .■* If I was a nightingale, I should do the part of a nightingale ; if I were a swan, I would do like a swan ; but now I am a rational creature, and I ought to praise God : this is my work ; I do it, nor will I desert this post so long as I am allowed to keep it, and I exhort you to join in this song." 74 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT The words are among the sweetest and most solemn that ever issued from human lips ; yet those who care to pursue the subject farther may submit that there was some one before Epictetus, who called upon the beasts, the fishes and the fowls to join him in blessing the name of the Lord, and there was some one after him who commanded the birds of the air to sing the praises of their Maker and Preserver! It is strange that, despite the hard-and- fast line which the moulders of the Catholic Faith were at pains to trace between man and beast, if we would find the most emphatic assertion of their common privilege of praising God, we must leave the Pagan world and take up the Bible and the " Fioretti " of St. Francis ! Of the anecdotes with which Plutarch enlivens his pages, he says himself that he puts on one side fable and mythology, and limits his choice to the "all true" category, and if he appears to be at times a little credulous, one may well believe that he is always candid. Just as in his "Lives" he tried to ennoble his readers by making noble deeds interest- ing, so in his writings on animals, he tried to make , people humane by making his dumb clients interest- ing. He did not start with thinking the task an easy one, for he was convinced that man is more cruel than the most savage of wild beasts. But he aims at pouring, if not a full draught of mercy, at least some drops, into the heart that never felt a pang, the mind that never gave a thought. Many of his stories are taken straight from the common street life of the Rome of his day, as that of the Photo] BACCHUS RIDING ON A PANTHEK. Naples Museum. (Mosaic foti lid at Potnpcii.) [Sommer. [To face pa(lc 74. PLUTARCH THE HUMANE 75 elephant which passed every day along a certain street where the schoolboys teased it by pricking its trunk with their writing stylets (men may come and go, but the small boy is a fixed quantity !). At last, the elephant, losing patience, picked up one of his tormentors and hoisted him in the air ; a cry of horror rose from the spectators, no one doubted that in another moment the child would be dashed to the ground. But the elephant set the offender down very gently and walked away, thinking, no doubt, that a good fright had been a sufficient punish- ment. The Syrian elephant, of whom Plutarch tells how he made his master understand that in his absence he had been cheated of half his rations, was not cleverer than some of his kind on service in India, who would not begin to eat till all three cakes which formed their rations were set before each of them — a fact that was told me by the officer whose duty it was to preside at their dinner. Plutarch speaks of counting oxen that knew when the number of turns was finished which constituted their daily task at a saw-mill : they refused to per- form one more turn than the appointed figure. As an instance of the discrimination of animals, he tells how Alexander's horse, Bucephalus, when unsaddled, would allow the grooms to mount him, but when he had on all his rich caparisons, no one on earth could get on his back except his royal master. There is no doubt that animals take notice of dress. I have been told that when crinolines were worn, all the dogs barked at any woman not provided with one. Plutarch was among the earliest to ob- 76 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT serve that animals discover sooner than man when ice will not bear, which he thinks that they find out by noticing if there is any sound of running water. He says truly that to draw such an inference presupposes not only sharp ears, but a real power of weighing cause and effect. Plutarch mentions foxes as particularly clever in this respect, but dogs possess the same gift. The French Ambassador at Rome — who, like all persons of superior intelli- gence, is very fond of animals — told me the follow- ing story. One winter day, when he was French Minister at Munich, he went alone with his gun and his dog to the banks of the Isar. Having shot a snipe, he ordered the dog to go on to the ice to fetch it, but, to his surprise, the animal, which had never disobeyed him, refused. Annoyed at its obstinacy, he went himself on to the ice, which im- mediately gave way, and had he not been a good swimmer he might not be now at the Palazzo Farnese. The two creatures that have been most praised for their wisdom are the elephant and the ant, but of the ant's admirers from Solomon to Lord Avebury, not one was ever so enthusiastic as Plutarch. Horace, indeed, had discoursed of her foresight : " She carries in her mouth whatever she is able, and piles up her heap, by no means ignorant or careless of the future ; then, when Aquarius saddens the inverted year, never does she creep abroad, wisely making use of the stores which were provided beforehand." But such a tribute sounds cold beside Plutarch's praise of her as the tiny mirror in which the greatest marvels of Nature are reflected, a drop of the purest water, PLUTARCH THE HUMANE 77 containing every Virtue, and, above all, what Homer calls "the sweetness of loving qualities." Ants, he declares, show the utmost solicitude for their com- rades, alive and dead. They exhibit their ingenuity by biting off the ends of grains to prevent them from sprouting and so spoiling the provender. He speaks, though not from his own observation, of the beautiful interior arrangements of ant-hills which had been examined by naturalists who divided the mount into sections, "A thing I cannot approve of!" Tender-hearted philosopher, who had a scruple about upsetting an ant-hill ! Of other insects, he most admires the skill of spiders and bees. It is said that the bees of Crete, when rounding a certain promontory, carried tiny stones as ballast to avoid being blown away by the wind. I have seen more than once a tiny stone hanging from the spider- threads which crossed and re-crossed an avenue — it seemed to me that these were designed to steady the suspension bridge. Plutarch insists that animals teach themselves even things outside the order of their natural habits, a fact which will be confirmed by all who have observed them closely. Just as no two animals have the same disposition, so does each one, though in greatly vary- ing degree, display some little arts or accomplish- ments peculiar to itself. Plutarch mentions a trained elephant that was seen practising its steps when it thought that no one was looking. But he allots the palm of self-culture to an incomparable magpie that belonged to a barber whose shop faced the temple called the Agora of the Greeks. The bird 78 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT could imitate to perfection any sort of sound, cry or tune ; it was renowned in the whole quarter. Now it happened one morning that the funeral of a wealthy citizen went past, accompanied by a very fine band of trumpeters which performed an elaborate piece of music. After that day, to every one's surprise, the magpie grew mute 1 Had it become deaf or dumb or both ! Endless were the surmises, and what was not the general amazement when, at last, it broke its long silence by bursting forth with a flood of brilliant notes the exact reproduction of the diffi- cult trills and cadences executed by the funeral band ! Evidently it had been practising it in its head all that while, and only produced it when it had got it quite perfect. Several Romans and several Greeks witnessed the facts and could vouch for the truth of the narrative. The swallow's nest and the nightingale's song make Plutarch pause and wonder ; he believes, with Aristotle, that the old nightingales teach the young ones, remarking that nightingales reared in captivity never sing so well as those that have profited by the parental lessons. He gives a word to the dove of Deucalion which returned a first time to the ark because the deluge continued, but disappeared when it was set free again, the waters having subsided. Plutarch confesses, however, that this is " mythical," and though he admits that birds deserved the name by which Euripides calls them of " Messengers of the gods," he is inclined to attribute their warnings to the direct intervention of an over-ruling deity of whom they are the inconscient agents. PLUTARCH THE HUMANE 79 It is a pleasure to find that Plutarch had a high appreciation of the hedgehog — the charming "urchin" which represents to many an English child an epi- tome of wild nature, friendly yet untamed, familiar yet mysterious. He does not say that it milks cows — a calumny which is an article of faith with the British ploughman — but he relates that when the grapes are ripe, the mother urchin goes under the vines and shakes the plants till some of the grapes fall off; then, rolling herself over them, she attaches a number of grapes to her spines and so marches back to the hole where she keeps her nurslings. " One day," says Plutarch, " when we were all to- gether, we had the chance of seeing this with our own eyes — it looked as if a bunch of grapes was shuffling along the ground, so thickly covered was the animal with its booty." Dogs that threw themselves on their masters' pyre, dogs that caused the arrest of assassins or thieves, dogs that remained with and protected the bodies of their dead masters, clever dogs, devoted dogs, magnanimous dogs — these will be all found in Plu- tarch's gallery. How high-minded, he says, it is in the dog when, as Homer advises, you lay down your stick, even an angry dog ceases to attack you. He praises the affectionate regard which many have shown in giving decent burial to the dogs they cherished, and recalls how Xantippus of old, whose dog swam by his galley to Salamis when the Athenians were forced to abandon their city,, buried the faithful creature on a promontory which " to this day" is known as the Dog's Grave. Very desolate 8o THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT was the case of the other animals that ran up and down distraught when their masters embarked, like the poor cats and dogs which helped the English soldiers in the block-houses to while away the weary hours, and which, by superior orders, were left to their fate, though their comrades in khaki were anxious enough to carry them away. As a proof of the affection of the Greeks for their dogs Plutarch might have spoken of the not uncommon representa- tion of them on the Stelce in the family group which brings together all the dearest ties between life and death. One animal is missing from Plutarch's portrait gallery — the cat, to which he only concedes the ungracious allusion "that man had not the excuse of hunger for eating flesh, like the weasel or cat." Can we make good the omission from other sources ? There is a general notion that cats " were almost un- known to Greek and Roman antiquity " — these are the words of so well-informed a writer as M. S. Reinach. Yet instances exist of paintings of cats on Greek vases of the fifth century, and I was interested to see in the Museum at Athens a well-carved cat on a stele. Aristotle, who, like Plutarch, mentions cats in con- nexion with weasels (both, he says, catch birds), reckons the time they live at six years, less than half the life of an average modern cat ; this may indicate that though known, they were not then acclimatised in Europe, .^sop has four fables of cats: I. A cat dressed as a physician offers his services to an aviary of birds ; they are declined. PLUTARCH THE HUMANE 8i 2. A cat seeks an excuse for eating a cock ; he fails to find the excuse, but eats the cock all the same. 3. A cat pretends to be dead so that mice may come near her. 4. A cat falls in love with a hand- some young man and induces Venus to change her into a lovely maiden. But on a mouse coming into the room, she scampers after it. Venus, being dis- pleased, changes her back into a cat. This belongs to a large circle of folk-tales, and probably all these fables came from the East. Herodotus tells as a "very marvellous thing" that cats are apt to rush back into a burning house, and that the Egyptians try to save them, even at the risk of their lives, but rarely succeed : hence great lamen- tation. Also, that if a cat die in a house all the dwellers in it shave their eyebrows ; "the cats, when they are dead, they carry for burial to the city of Bubastis." The Egyptian name for light (and for cat) is Mau, and the inference is irresistible, that the Egyptians supposed the cat to be constantly apostrophizing the sacred light of which she was the symbol. Nothing shows the strength of tradi- tion better than the existence of an endowment at Cairo for the feeding and housing of homeless cats. If the cat in Europe had been a rarity so great as most people think, it would have been more highly prized. It seems nearer the truth to say that it was not admired. Its incomplete domestication which attracts us, did not attract the ancient world. Tame only so far as it suits their own purposes, cats patronize man, looking down upon him from a higher 6 82 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT plane, which, if only the house-top, they make a golden bar. "Chat mysterieux, Chat seraphique, chat etrange . . . Peut-etre est-il fee, est-il dieu ? " Greeks and Romans preferred a plain animal to this half-elf, half-god. The Greek comic writer, Anaxandrides, said to the Egyptians : " You weep if you see a cat ailing, but I like to kill and skin it." The fear lest cats should be profanely treated in Europe led the Egyptians to do all they could to prevent their exportation ; they even sent missions to the Medi- terranean to ransom the cats borne into slavery and carry them back to Egypt. But these missions could not have reached the cats that had been taken inland, and as the animal increases rapidly, it may have been fairly common from early times. There is no doubt, however, that the number went up with a bound when Egypt became Christian, and every monk who came to Europe brought shoals of cats, the date corre- sponding with that of the first invasion of the rat in the trail of the Huns. Antiquity regarded the cat, before all things, as a little beast of prey. Nearly every reference to it gives it this character. In the stele at Athens the cat is supposed to be looking at a bird-cage to which the man is pointing ; the man holds a bird in his left hand, presumably the pet of the child who stands by him. It seems as if the cat meditated if it had not performed some fell deed. Seneca observed that young chickens feel an instinctive fear of the cat but BRONZE STATUE OF AN EGYPTIAN CAT. \iColkclion of H.E. Monsieur Camille Barrire, French Ambassador at Route.) [To Jace page 82, PLUTARCH THE HUMANE 83 not of the dog. The fine mosaic at Pompeii shows a tabby kitten in the act of catching a quail. Only one ancient poet, by a slight magician-like touch, calls up a different vision : Theorcitus makes the voluble Praxinoe say to her maid : " Eunce, pick up your work, and take care, lazy girl, how you leave it lying about again ; the cats find it just the bed they like." There — at last — is the cat we know ! But after all, it is an Egyptian cat : a cat sure of her privileges, a cat who relies on her goddess prototype, and has but a modicum of respect for the chattering little Syracusan woman in whose house she condescends to reside. Such were not cats of ancient Greece and Rome, who, from being un- appreciated, fell back to the morals of the simple ravager. V MAN AND HIS BROTHER TRADITIONAL beliefs are like the coco de mer which was found floating, here and there, on the sea, or washed up on the shore, and which gave birth to the strangest conjectures ; it was supposed to tell of undiscovered continents or to have dropped from heaven itself. Then, one day, some one saw this peculiar cocoanut quietly growing on a tall palm- tree in an obscure islet of the Indian Ocean, All we gather of primitive traditions is the fruit. Yet the fruit did not grow in the air, it grew on branches and the branches grew on a trunk and the trunk had a root. To get to the root of even the slightest of our own prejudices — let alone those of the savage — we should have to travel back far into times when history was not. Lucretius placed at the beginning of the ages of mankind a berry-eating race, innocent of blood. The second age belonged to the hunter who killed animals, at first, and possibly for a long time, for their skins, before he used their flesh as food. In the third age animals were domesticated ; first the sheep, because that was gentle and easily tamed (which one may see 84 MAN AND HIS BROTHER 85 by the moufflons at Monte Carlo), then, by degrees, the others. This classification was worthy of the most far- seeing mind of antiquity. Had not human originally meant humane we should not have been here to tell the tale. The greater traditions of a bloodless age are enshrined in sacred books ; minor traditions of it abound in the folk-lore of the world. Man was home-sick of innocence ; his conscience, which has gone on getting more blunted, not more sensitive, revolted at the " daily murder." So mankind called upon heaven to provide an excuse for slaughter. The Kirghis of Mongolia say that in the beginning only four men and four animals were made : the camel, the ox, the sheep, and the horse, and all were told to live on grass. The animals grazed, but the men pulled up the grass by the roots and stored it. The animals complained to God that the men were pulling up all the grass, and that soon there would be none left. God said : "If I forbid men to eat grass, will you allow them to eat you ? " Fearing starvation, the animals consented. From the first chapter of Genesis to the last of the " Origin of Species " there is one long testimony to our vegetarian ancestor, but beyond the fact that he existed, what do we know about him ? We may well believe that he lived in a good climate and on a plenteous earth. Adam and Eve or their re- presentatives could not have subsisted in Greenland. I think that the killing of wild animals, and especially the eating of them, began when man found himself confronted by extremes of cold and length of winter 86 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT nights. The skins of animals gave him the only possibility of keeping warm or even of living at all, if he was to brave the outer air, while their flesh may have been often the only food he could find. He was obliged to eat them to keep alive, as Arctic explorers have been obliged to eat their sledge-dogs. Not preference, but hard necessity, made him carnivorous. These speculations are confirmed by the doings of the earliest man of whom we have any sure know- ledge ; not the proto-man who must have developed, as I have said, under very different climatic conditions. Perhaps he sat under the palm-trees growing on the banks of the Thames, but though the palm-trees have left us their fruit, man, if he was there, left nothing to speak of his harmless sojourn. By tens of thou- sands of yearfe the earliest man with whom we can claim acquaintance is the reindeer hunter of Quar- tenary times. He hunted and fed upon the reindeer, but he had not tamed them. He wore reindeer skins, but he could not profit by reindeer milk ; no children were brought up by hand, possibly to the advantage of the children. It is likely, by the by, that the period of human lactation was very long. The horse also was killed for food at a time infinitely removed from the date of his first service to man. The reindeer hunter was a most intelligent observer of animals. He was an artist and a very good one. The best of his scratchings on reindeer horn and bone of horses and reindeer in different attitudes are admirable for freedom, life, and that intuition of character which makes the true animal painter. For REINDEER BROWSING. Older Stone Age. HORSE DRAWING DISC OF THE SUN. Older Bronze Age. ^o face fage 86. MAN AND HIS BROTHER 87 a time which makes one dizzy to look down upon, no such draughtsman appeared as the pre-historic cave dweller. The men of the age of Polished Stone and of the early ages of metals produced nothing similar in the way of design. They understood beauty of form and ornament or, rather, perhaps, they still shared in that Nature's own unerring touch ; it took millenniums of civilisation for man to make one ugly pot or pan. But these men had not the gift or even the idea of sitting down to copy a grazing or running animal. We need not go far, however, to find a man who, living under nearly the same conditions as the reindeer hunter of Southern France, has developed the same artistic aptitude. I shall always recall with pleasure my visit to a Laplander's hut ; it was in the broad daylight of Arctic midnight — no one slept in the hut, except an extraordinarily small baby in a canoe-shaped cradle. The floor was spread with handsome furs, and its aspect was neither untidy nor comfortless. I reflected that this was how the cave dweller arranged his safe retreat. Much more strongly was he brought to my mind by the domestic objects of every sort made of reindeer horn and adorned with drawings. As I write I have one of them before me, a large horn knife, the sheath of which ends with the branch- ing points. It is beautifully decorated with graffiti, showing the good and graceful creature without whom the Laplander cannot live. The school of art is dis- tinctly Troglodite. A theory has been started that the man of the Quartenary age drew his horses and his reindeer 88 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT solely as a magical decoy from the idea that the pictures " called " the game as whistling {i.e., imitating the sound of the wind) " calls " the wind. I do not know that the Lapps, though practised in magic, have any such purpose in view. It is said that it would be absurd to attribute a motive of mere artistic pleasure to the Troglodite. Why? Some races have as natural a tendency to artistic effort as the bower- bird has to decorate its nest. Conditions of climate may have given the hunter periods of enforced idle- ness, and art, in its earliest form, was, perhaps, always an escape from ennui, a mode of passing the time. That the early hunter dealt in magic is likely enough ; he is supposed, though not on altogether conclusive grounds, to have been a fetich-worshipper, and fetich- worship is akin to some kinds of magic. But it does not follow that all his art had this connexion. How animals appeared to his eyes we know ; what he thought about them he has not told us. The Eskimo, the modern pre-historic man who is believed to be a better-preserved type than even the Lapp, may be asked to speak for him. The Eskimo can say that he had a friendly feeling towards all living things, notwithstanding that he fed on flesh, and that wild beasts sometimes fed on him. Not that he had ever talked of wild beasts, for he had no tame ones. He had not a vocabulary of rude terms about animals. He was inclined to credit every species with many potential merits. The Eskimo is afraid — very much afraid — of bears. Yet he is the first to admit that the bear is capable of acting like the finest of fine gentlemen. A woman was in a MAN AND HIS BROTHER 89 fright at seeing a bear and so gave him a partridge ; that bear never forgot the trifling service, but brought her newly killed seals ever after. Another bear saved the life of three men who wished to reward him. He politely declined their offer, but if, in winter time, they should see a bald-headed bear, will they induce their companions to spare him? After so saying, he plunged into the sea. Next winter a bear was sighted and they were going to hunt him, when these men, remembering what had happened, begged the hunters to wait till they had had a look at him. Sure enough it was " their own bear " ! They told the others to prepare a feast for him, and when he had refreshed himself, he lay down to sleep and the children played around him. Presently he awoke and ate a little more, after which he went down to the sea, leapt in, and was never seen again. Even such lovely imaginings, we may believe, without an excessive stretch of fancy, gilded the mental horizon of the Troglodite. He had long left behind the stage of primal innocence, but no supernatural chasm gaped between him and his little brothers. The reindeer hunters were submerged by what is more inexorable than man — Nature. The reindeer vanished, and with him the hunter, doomed by the changed conditions of climate. He vanished as the Lapp is vanishing ; the poignantly tragic scene which was chronicled by two lines in the newspapers during the early summer of 1906 — the suicide of a whole clan of Lapps whose reindeer were dead and who had nothing to do but to follow them — 90 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT may have happened in what we call fair Provence. Thousands of men paid with their lives for its becoming a rose garden. The successors of the reindeer hunters, Turanian like them, but far more progressive, were the lake dwellers, the dolmen builders, with their weaving and spinning, their sowing and reaping, their pottery and their baskets, their polished flints and their domestic animals. Man's greatest achievement, the domestication of animals, had been reached in the unrecorded ages that divide the rough and the polished stone. Man, " excellent in art," had mastered the beast whose lair is in the wilds ; "he tames the horse of shaggy mane, he puts the yoke upon its neck ; he tames the tireless mountain bull." The great mind of Sophocles saw and saw truly that these were the mighty works of man ; the works which made man, man. We know that when the Neolithic meat-eater of what is now Denmark threw away the bones after he had done his meal, these bones were gnawed by house-dogs. A simple thing, but it tells a wondrous tale. Did these dogs come with their masters from Asia, or had they been tamed in their Northern home ? The answer depends on whether the dog is descended from jackal or wolf In either case it is unlikely that the most tremendous task of domestication was the first. Not everywhere has man domesticated animals, though we may be sure that he took them every- where with him after he had domesticated them. If man walked on dry land across the Atlantic as MAN AND HIS BROTHER 91 some enthusiastic students of sub-oceanic geography now believe that he did, he led no sheep, no horses, no dogs. In America, when it was discovered, there was only one domestic animal, and in Australia there was none. Of native animals, the American buffalo could have been easily tamed. It may be said that in Australia there was no suitable animal, but the dog's ancestor could not have seemed a suitable animal for a household protector ; a jackal is not a promising pupil, still less a wolf, unless there was some more gentle kind of wolf than any which now survives. Might not a good deal have been made out of the kangaroo ? Possibly the whole task of domestication was the work of one patient, in- telligent and widely-spread race, kindred of the Japanese, who in making forest trees into dwarfs show the sort of qualities that would be needed to make a wild animal not only unafraid (that is nothing), but also a willing servant. The Neolithic man's eschatology of animals and of himself was identical. He contemplated for both a future life which reproduced this one. "The belief in the deathlessness of souls," said Canon Isaac Taylor, " was the great contribution of the Turanian race to the religious thought of the world." This appears to claim almost too much. Would any race have had the courage to start upon its way had it conceived death as real .■* " It is a modest creed and yet Pleasant if one considers it, To own that death itself must be Like all the rest, a mockery." 92 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT It is a creed which springs from the very instinct of life. Two pelicans returning to their nest found their two young ones dead from sunstroke. The careful observer who was watching them has recorded that they did not seem to recognise the inert, fluffy heap as what was their fledglings ; they hunted for them for a long while, moving the twigs of the nest, and at last threw one of the dead birds out of it. So the primitive man in presence of the dead knows that this is not he and he begins to ask : where is he ? But if every race in turn has asked that question, it was asked with more insistence by some peoples than by others, and above all, it was answered by some with more assurance. The Neolithic Turanians had nothing misty in their vision of another world. It was full of movement and variety : the chase, the battle, the feast, sleep and awakening, night and day — these were there as well as here. Animals were essential to the picture, and it never struck the Neolithic man that there was any more difficulty about their living again than about his living again. If he philosophised at all, it was probably after the fashion of the Eskimo who holds the soul to be the " owner " of the body : the body, the flesh, dies and may be devoured, but he who kills the body does not kill its "owner." Vast numbers of bones have been found near the dolmens in Southern France. The steed of the dead man galloped with him into the Beyond. The faithful dog trotted by the little child, comrade and guardian. In the exquisite Hebrew idyll Tobias has his dog as well as the angel to accompany him MAN AND HIS BROTHER 93 on his adventurous earthly journey. The little Neolithic boy had only the dog and his journey was longer ; but to some grieving fathers would it not be a rare comfort to imagine their lost darlings guarded by loving four-footed friends along the Path of Souls ? The Celtic conquerors of the dolmen-builders took most of their religious ideas. When successful aid in mundane matters was what was chiefly sought in religion, a little thing might determine conversion en masse. If the divinities of one set of people seemed on some occasion powerless, it was natural to try the divinities of somebody else. When success crowned the experiment, the new worship was formally adopted. This is exactly what happened in the historic case of Clovis and " Clothilde's God," and it doubtless happened frequently before the dawn of history. Druidism is believed to have arisen in this way in a grafting of the new on the old. The Celts had the same views about the next world as the dolmen-builders. They are thought to have taken them from the conquered with the rest of their religious system, but to me it seems unlikely that they had not already similar views when they arrived from Asia. In the early Vedas goats and horses were sacrificed to go before and announce the coming of the dead ; Vedic animals kept their forms, the renewed body was perfect and incor- ruptible, but it was the real body. A celebrated racehorse was deified after death. Such beliefs have a strong affinity to the theory that animals (or slaves) killed at the man's funeral will be useful to him in 94 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT the after-life. However derived, our European ancestors embraced that theory to the full. Only a few years ago a second Viking ship was found at Oseberg, in Norway, ''in which were the remains of ten horses, four dogs, a young ox, and the head of an old ox. Three more horses were found outside. The dogs had on their own collars with long chains. There were also sledges with elabo- rately carved animals' heads. It was a queen's grave ; her distaff and spinning-wheel told of simple womanly tasks amidst so much sepulchral splendour. In those late times the law by which religious forms grow more sumptuous as the faith behind them grows less, may have come into operation. Lavish but meaningless tributes may have taken the place of a provision full of meaning for real wants. So the sacrifices to the gods may have been once intended to stock the pastures of heaven. It cannot be doubted that the victim was never killed in the mind of the original sacrificer, it was merely trans- ferred to another sphere. The worser barbarity comes in when the true significance of the act is lost and when it is repeated from habit. After animals were domesticated they were not killed at all for a long time — still less were they eaten. Of this there can be no shadow of doubt. The first domestic animals were far too valuable possessions for any one to think of killing them. As soon would a showman kill a performing bull which had cost him a great deal of trouble to train. Besides this, and more than this, the natural man, who is much better than he is painted, has a natural MAN AND HIS BROTHER 95 horror of slaying the creature that eats out of his hand and gives him milk and wool and willing service. There are pastoral tribes now in South Africa which live on the milk, cheese and butter of their sheep, but only kill them as the last necessity. In East Africa the cow is never killed, and if one falls ill, it is put into a sort of infirmary and carefully tended. We all know the divinity which hedges round the Hindu cow. The same compunction once saved the labouring ox. When I was at Athens for the Archaeological Congress of 1905, Dr. R. C. Bosanquet, at that time head of the British school, told me that he had observed among the peasants in Crete the most intense reluctance to kill the ox of labour. In several places in Ancient Greece all sorts of devices were resorted to in order that the sacrificial knife might seem to kill the young bull accidentally, and the knife — the guilty thing — was afterwards thrown into the sea. This last custom is important ; it marks the moment when the slaughter of domestic animals, even for sacrificial purposes, still caused a scruple. The case stands thus : at first they were not killed at all ; then, for a long time, they were killed only for sacrifice. Then they were killed for food, but far and wide relics of the original scruple may be detected as in the common invocation of divine permission which every Moslem butcher utters before killing an animal. Animal and human sacrifices are one phenomenon of early manners, not two. The people who sacri- ficed domestic animals to accompany their dead 96 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT generally, if not always, also sacrificed slaves for the same purpose, and the sacrifice of fair maidens at the funerals of heroes was to give them these as companions in another world. I am not aware that Gift Sacrifice ever led to cannibalism nor, in its primitive forms, did it lead to eating the flesh of the animal victim which was buried or burnt with the body of the person whom it was intended to honour. This is what was done by the dolmen-builders. The earlier reindeer hunters had no domestic animals to sacrifice, and it is un- likely that they sacrificed men. At all events, they were not cannibals. On the other hand, cannibalism is closely con- nected with Pact Sacrifice, which there is a tendency now to regard as antecedent to Gift Sacrifice, especi- ally among those scholars who think that the whole human race has passed through a stage of Totemism. Psychologically the Totemist's sacrifice of a reserved animal to which all the sanctity of human life is ascribed, resembles the sacrifice by some African tribes of a human victim — as in both cases not only is a pact of brotherhood sealed, but also those who partake of the flesh are supposed to acquire the physical, moral, or supersensual qualities attributed to the victim. Indeed, it would be possible to argue that the Totem was a substitute for a human victim, and a whole new theory of Totemism might be evolved from that postulate, but it is wiser to observe such affinities without trying to derive one thing from another which commonly proves a snare and a delusion. It is sufficient to note that among MAN AND HIS BROTHER 97 fundamental human ideas is the belief that man grows like what he feeds upon. The sacrifice of the Totem, though found scattered wherever Totemism prevails, is not an invariable or even a usual accompaniment of it. When it does occur, the Totem is not supposed to die, any more than the victim was supposed to die in the primitive Gift Sacrifice. It changes houses or goes to live with " our lost others," or returns to eternal life in the " lake of the dead." The death of the soul is the last thing that is thought of The majority of Totemists do not kill their Totems under any circumstances, and when the Toterri is a wild beast they believe that it shows a like respect for the members of its phratry. If one dies they deplore its loss ; in some parts of East Africa where the Totem is a hyena not even the chief is mourned for with equal ceremony. Totemism is the adoption of an animal (or plant) as the visible badge of an invisible bond. The word Totem is an American Indian word for " badge," and the word Taboo a Polynesian term meaning an interdiction. The Totemist generally says that he is descended from his Totem : hence the men and the beasts of each Totem clan are brothers. But the beast is something more than a brother, he is the perpetual reincarnation of the race- spirit. Numerical problems never trouble the natural human mind ; all the cats of Bubastis were equally sacred, and all the crows of Australia are equally sacred to the clans who have a crow for Totem. To the mass of country folks every cow is the cow, every 7 98 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT mouse is the mouse ; the English villager is practically as much convinced of this as the American Indian or the Australian native is convinced that every Totem is the Totem. Men and women of the same Totem are taboo: they cannot intermarry. But I need not speak of Totemism here as a social institution. My business with it is limited to its place in the history of ideas about animals. In Totemism we find represented not one idea, but an aggregation of most of the fundamental ideas of mankind. This is why the attempt to trace it to one particular root has failed to dispose of the question of its origin in a final and satisfactory manner. For a time there seemed to be a general disposition to accept what is called the " Nickname theory " by which Totemism was attributed to the custom of giving animal nicknames. We have a peasant called Nedrott (in the Brescian dialect " duck ") ; I myself never heard his real name — his wife is " la Nedrott " and his children are " i Nedrotti." It is alleged that his father or grand- father had flat feet. But I never heard of a con- fusion between the Nedrotti and their nicknamesakes. It may be said that this would be sure to happen were they less civilised. How can we be sure that it would be sure to happen ? An eminent scholar who objects to the nickname theory on the ground that it assigns too much importance to "verbal misunderstanding," proposes as an alternative the "impregnation theory." A woman, on becoming aware of approaching motherhood, mentally connects the MAN AND HIS BROTHER 99 future offspring with an animal or plant which happens to catch her eye at that moment. This is conceivable, given the peculiar notions of some savages on generation, but if all Totemism sprang from such a cause, is it not strange that in Australia there are only two Totems, the eagle-hawk and crow ? As a mere outward fact, the Totem is what its name implies, a badge or sign ; just as the wolf was the badge of Rome, or as the lion is taken to re- present the British Empire. The convenience of adopting a common badge or sign may have appeared to men almost as soon as they settled into separate clans or communities. Besides public Totems there exist private and secret Totems, and this suggests that the earliest communities may have consisted of a sort of freemasonry, a league of mutual help of the nature of a secret society. Around the outward and so to speak heraldic fact of Totemism are gathered the impressions and beliefs which make it a rule of life, a morality and a religion. The time may come when the desire to give a reason for an emotion will be recognised as one of the greatest factors in myth-making. The Totemist thinks that he spares his Totem because it is his Totem. But man is glad to find an excuse for sparing something. Altruism is as old as the day when the first bird took a succulent berry to its mate or young ones instead of eating it. Where men see no difference between themselves and animals, what more natural than that they should wish to spare them? When it was found difficult or impossible to spare all, it was a katharsis of the wider sentiment loo THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT to spare one, and Totemism gave a very good excuse. It appealed to a universal instinct. This is not the same as to say that it had its origin in keeping pets ; it would be nearer the truth to describe the love of pets as a later birth of the same instinctive tendency which the Totemist follows when he cherishes and preserves his Totem. The primitive man is a child in the vast zoological garden of Nature ; a child with a heart full of love, curiosity and respect, anxious to make friends with the lion which looks so very kind and the white bear who must want some one to comfort him. The whole folk-lore of the world bears witness to this temper, even leaving Totemism out of the question. The Bechuanas make excuses to the lion before killing him, the Malays to the tiger, the Red Indians to the bear — he says that his children are hungry and need food — would the bear kindly not object to be killed? Some writers see Totemism in all this, and so it may be, but there is something in it deeper than even Totemism — there is human nature. Take the robin — has any one said it was a Totem ? Yet Mrs. Somerville declared she would as soon eat a child as a robin, a thoroughly Totemist sentiment. A whole body of protective superstition has crystal- lised around certain creatures which, because of their confiding nature, their charming ways, their welcome appearance at particular seasons, inspired man with an unusually strong impulse to spare them. I was interested to find the stork as sacred to the Arabs in Tunis and Algeria as he is to his German friends in the North. A Frenchman remarked that " sacred MAN AND HIS BROTHER loi birds are never good to eat," but he might have remembered the goose and hen of the ancient Bretons which Caesar tells us were kept "for pleasure" but never killed ; not to speak of the pigeons of Moscow and of Mecca. It should be observed how quickly the spared or cherished bird or beast becomes " lucky." In Germany and Scandinavia it is lucky to have a stork's nest on the roof. The regimental goat is the " luck of his company." M. S. Reinach's opinion that in Totemism is to be found the secret of the domestication of animals offers an attractive solution to that great problem, but it has not been, nor do I think that it will ever be, generally accepted. It, is however, plain, that where population is sparse, and dogs and guns undreamt of, wild animals would be far less wild than in countries with all the advantages of civilisa- tion ; the tameness of birds on lonely islands when the explorer first makes his descent is a case in point. No doubt, therefore, with the encouragement they received, the animal Totems acquired a con- siderable degree of tameness, but from that to domestication there is a long step. Our household "Totem," the robin, is relatively tame ; he will even eat crumbs on the breakfast-table, but he flies away in springtime and we see him no more. Besides being a social institution and a friendly bond between man and beast, Totemism is an attempt to explain the universe. Its spiritual vitality depends on the widely rooted belief in archetypes ; the things seen are the mirror of the things unseen, the material 102 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT is unreal, the immaterial the only reality. We are ourselves but cages of immortal birds. The real " I " is somewhere else ; it may be in a fish, as in the Indian folk-tale, or it may be in a god. I do not know, by the by, if it has been remarked that a man can be a Totem : the incarnation of the indwelling race-spirit. The Emperor of Japan corresponds exactly to this description. The deified Caesar was a Totem. A god can be a Totem : among the Hidery (islanders of the North Pacific whose inter- esting legends were published by the Chicago Folk- lore Association) the raven, which is their Totem, is the manifestation of the god Ne-kilst-lass who created the world. Here Totemism approaches till it touches Egyptian zoomorphism. Was this form an earlier or a later development than that in which the Totem is merely an ancestor? Our inability to reply shows our real want of certainty as to whether Totemism is a body of belief in a state of becoming or in a state of dissolution. We do know that Egyptian zoomorphism is not old, at least in the exaggerated shape it assumed in the worship of the bull Apis. It is a cult which owed its success to the animistic tendency of the human mind, but its particular cause is to be looked for in crystallised figurative language. The stu- pendous marble tombs of the sacred bulls that seem to overpower us in the semi-obscurity of the Serapeum remind one of how easy it is to draw false conclusions relative to the past if we possess only half-lights upon it : had Egyptian hieroglyphics never yielded up their secret we might have judged MAN AND HIS BROTHER 103 the faith of Egypt to have been the most material, instead of one of the most spiritual of religions. In Egyptian (as in Assyrian) cosmogony the visible universe is the direct creation of God. " The god who is immanent in all things is the creator of every animal : under his name of Ram, of the sheep, Bull, of the cows : he loves the scorpion in his hole, he is the god of the crocodile who plunges in the water : he is the god of those who rest in their graves. Amon is an image, Atmee is an image, Ra is an image : HE alone maketh himself in millions of ways." Amon Ra is described in another grand hymn as the maker of the grass for the cattle, of fruitful trees for men yet unborn ; causing the fish to live in the river, the birds to fill the air, giving breath to those in the egg, giving food to the bird that perches, to the creeping thing and to the flying thing alike, providing food for the rats in their holes, feeding the flying things in every tree. "Hail to thee, say all creatures. Hail to thee for all these things : the One, Alone with many hands, awake while all men sleep, to seek out the good of all creatures, "Amon Sustainer of all!" This is, indeed, a majestic psalm of universal life. Contrary to what was long the impression, the Wheel of Being was not an Egyptian doctrine, but the dead, or rather some of them, were believed to have the power of transforming themselves into animals for limited periods. It was a valued privilege of the virtuous dead : the form of a heron, a hawk or a swallow was a convenient travelling dress. Four-footed beasts were reserved to gods. I04 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT There was no prejudice against sport if carried on with due regard to vested sacred rights. The first hunting-dog whose name we know was Behkaa, who was buried with his master, his name being inscribed over his picture on the tomb. The injury of animals sacred to the gods was, of course, a grave sin. Among the protests of innocence of a departing soul we read : " I have not clipped the skins of the sacred beasts ; I have not hunted wild animals in their pasturages ; I have not netted the sacred birds ; I have not turned away the cattle of the gods ; I have not stood between a god and his manifestation." The Egyptian mind, which was essentially religious, saw the "god who is immanent in all things" yet standing outside these things to sustain them with a guiding providence ; the highly trained Chinese mind, with its philosophic trend, saw the divine indivisible intelligence without volition illuminating all that lived : "The mind of man and the mind of trees, birds and beasts, is just the one mind of heaven and earth, only brighter or duller by reflection : as light looks brighter when it falls on a mirror than when it falls on a dark surface, so divine reason is less bright in cow or sheep than in man." This fine definition was given by Choo-Foo-Tsze, the great exponent of Confucianism, who, when he was four years old, sur- prised his father by asking, on being told that the sky was heaven, "What is above it.-*" Choo-Foo-Tsze in the thirteenth century anticipated some modern conclusions of geology by remarking that since sea shells were found on lofty mountains as if generated in the middle of stones, it was plain "that what was MAN AND HIS BROTHER 105 below became lifted up, what was soft became hard " ; it was a deep subject, he said, and ought to be investigated. Long before the Nolan, Con- fucius had conceived the idea of the great Monad : " one God who contains and comprehends the whole world." It was an idea entirely incomprehensible to all but a few educated men in any age. Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism left the Chinese masses what they found them — a people whose folk-lore was their religion. Were they asked to believe in the Wheel of Being ? They made that folk-lore too. Dr. Giles tells the folk-tale of a certain gentleman who, having taken a very high degree, enjoyed the privilege (which is admitted to be uncommon) of recollecting what happened between his last death and birth. After he died, he was cited before a Judge of Purgatory and his attention was attracted by a quantity of skins of sheep, dogs, oxen, horses, which were hanging in a row. These were waiting for the souls which might be condemned to wear them ; when one was wanted, it was taken down and the man's own skin was stripped off and the other put on. This gentleman was condemned to be a sheep ; the attendant demons helped him on with his sheep- skin when the Recording Officer suddenly mentioned that he had once saved a man's life. The Judge, after looking at his books, ruled that such an act balanced all his misdoings : then the demons set to work to pull off the sheep-skin bit by bit, which gave the poor gentleman dreadful pain, but at last it was all got off except one little piece which was still sticking to him when he was born again as a man. io6 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT This story is amusing as showing what a mystical doctrine may come to when it gets into the hands of the thoroughgoing realist. For the Chinese peasant the supernatural has no mystery. To him it is a mere matter of ordinary knowledge that beasts, birds, fishes and insects not only have ghosts but also ghosts of ghosts — for the first ghost is liable to die. If any of these creatures do not -destroy life in three existences, they may be born as men — a belief no doubt due to the Buddhists, who in China seem to have concentrated all their energies on humanitarian propaganda and let metaphysics alone. Taoism has been called an "organised animism." Organised or unorganised, animism is still the popular faith of China. It is too convenient to lightly abandon, for it explains everything. For instance, whatever is odd, unexpected, very lucky, very unlucky, can be made as plain as day by mentioning the word " fox," Any one may be a fox without your knowing it : the fox is a jinnee, an elf who can work good or harm to man ; ^yho can see the future, get possession of things at a distance, and generally outmatch the best spiritualist medium. In Chinese folk-lore the fox has, as it were, made a monopoly of the world- wide notion that animals have a more intimate know- ledge of the supernatural than men. Soothsayers are thought to be foxes because they know what is going to happen. Man's speculations about himself and the universe arrange themselves under three heads : those which have not yet become a system, those which are a system, those which are the remains of a system. It MAN AND HIS BROTHER 107 is impossible that any set of ideas began by being a system unless it were revealed by an angel from heaven. But no sooner do ideas become systematic than they pass into the stage of dogma which is accepted not discussed. Everything is made to fit in with them. Thus to find the free play of the human mind one must seek it where there are the fewest formulae, written or unwritten, for tradition is as binding as any creed or code. There are savage races which, if they ever had Totemism, have pre- served few if any traces of it. To take them one by one and inquire into their views on animals would be well worth doing, but it is beyond my modest scope. I will say this, however — show me a savage who has not some humane and friendly ideas about animals ! The impulse to confess brotherhood with man's poor relations is everywhere the same : the excuses or reasons given for it vary a little. The animal to be kindly treated is the sanctuary of a god, the incarnation of a tribe, or simply the shelter of a poor wandering ghost. The Amazulu, one of the finest of savage races, believe that some snakes are Amatongo — some, not all. In fact, these snakes which are dead men are rather rare. One kind is black and another green. An Itongo does not come into the house by the door, nor does it eat frogs or mice. It does not run away like other snakes. Some say, " Let it be killed." Others interfere, " What, kill a man ? " If a man die who had a scar and you see a snake with a scar, ten to one it is that man. Then, at night, the village chief dreams and the dead man speaks to him. io8 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT " Do you now wish to kill me ? Do you already forget me ? I thought I would come and ask you for food, and do you kill me?" Then he tells him his name. Without any teaching, without any system, the savage thinks that the appearances which stand before him in sleep are real. If they are not real, what are they ? The savage may not be a reasonable being, but he is a being who reasons. In the morning the village chief tells his dream and orders a sin-offering to the Itongo (ghost) lest he be angry and kill them. A bullock or a goat is sacrificed and they eat the flesh. Afterwards they look every- where for the snake, but it has vanished. A snake that forces its way rapidly into a house is known to be a liar and he is a liar still. Do they turn him out of doors with a lecture on the beauty of veracity ? Far from that. " They sacrifice some- thing to such an Itongo." A few men turn into poisonous snakes, but this is by no means common. If offended, the Amatongo cause misfortune, but even if pleased they do not seem to confer many benefits ; perhaps they cannot, for surely it is easier to do evil than good. Once, however, a snake which was really the spirit of a chief, placed its mouth on a sore which a child had ; the mother was in a great fright, but happily she did not interfere and the snake healed the sore and went silently away. Other animals are sometimes human beings as well as snakes. The lizard is often the Itongo of an old woman. A boy killed some lizards in a cattle-pen with stones. Then he went and told his grandmother. />' MAN AND HIS BROTHER 109 who said he had done very wrong — those lizards were chiefs of the village and should have been worshipped. I think the grandmother was a humane old person ; I even suspect that she said the lizards were chiefs and not old women to make the admoni- tion more awful. The man who told this story to Canon Callaway (from whose valuable work on the Amazulu I take these notes) added that, looking back to the incident, he doubted if the lizards were Ama- tongo after all, because no harm came of their murder. He thought that they must have been merely wild animals which had become tame owing to people mistakenly thinking that they were Amatongo. What can one say to boys who ill-treat lizards ? I own that I have threatened them with ghostly treat- ment of the same sort. I even tried the supernatural argument with a little Arab boy, otherwise a nice intelligent child, who was throwing stones at a lizard which was moving at the bottom of the deep Roman well at El Djem : I did not know then that the persecution of lizards in Moslem lands is supposed (I hope erroneously) to have been ordered by Mohammed " because the lizard mimics the attitude of the Faithful at prayer.'' The lizard, one of the most winsome of God's creatures, has suffered generally from the prejudice which made reptile a word of reproach. It is the more worthy of remark, therefore, that in a place where one would hardly expect it, protective supersti- tion has done its work of rescue : Sicilian children catch lizards, but let them go unhurt to intercede for them before the Lord, as the lizard is held to be " in no THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT the presence of the Lord in heaven." One wonders if this is some distant echo of the text about the angels of the children (their archetypes) who always see God. Not always were reptiles scorned, but, possibly, they were always feared, Man's first idea is to worship what he fears ; his second idea, which may not come for many thousand years, is to throw a stone at it. The stone, besides representing physical fear, at a given moment also represents religious reprobation of what had been an object of worship in a forsaken faith. Primitive man took the interest of a wondering child in the great Saurian tribe. How did he know that they flew, that there were " dragons " on the earth ? How did he know that the snake once had legs ? — for if the snake of Eden was ordered to go on its belly, the inference seems to be that he was thought once to have moved in another way. The snake has lost his legs and the lizard his wings, and how the ancient popular imagination of the world made such accurate guesses about them must be left a riddle, unless we admit that it was guided by the fosi^l remains of extinct monsters. The serpent of the Biblical story was, says Dr. H. P. Smith, " simply a jinnee — a fairy if you will — possessed of more knowledge than the other animals, but otherwise like them." Here, again, we meet in the most venerable form, the belief that animals know more than men. Can we resist the conclusion that to people constantly inclined towards magic like the old-world Jews, it must have appeared that Eve was MAN AND HIS BROTHER iii dabbling in magic — by every rule of ancient religion, the sin of sins ? The cult of the serpent in its many branches is the greatest of animal cults, and it is the one in which we see most clearly the process by which man from being an impressionist became a symbolist, and from being a symbolist became a votary. We have only to read the Indian statistics of the number of persons annually killed by snake-bite to be persuaded that fear must have been the original feeling with which man regarded the snake. Fear is a religious feeling in primitive man, but other religious feelings were added j to it — admiration, for the snake, as all who have had ! the good luck to observe it in its wild state must agree, is a beautiful, graceful, and insinuating creature ; a sense of mystery, a sense of fascination which comes from those keen eyes fixed fearlessly upon yours, the simple secret, perhaps, of the much discussed power of snakes to fascinate their prey. What wonder if man under the influence of these combined impres- sions, symbolised in the serpent a divine force which could be made propitious by worship! In the forming of cults there has always been this unconscious passage from impressions to symbols, from symbols to "manifestations." But there has been also the conscious use of symbols by the priests and sages of ancient religions, in imparting as much of divine knowledge to the uninitiated as they thought that the uninitiated could bear. The origin of serpent worship has a probable relationship with this conscious use of symbols as well as with their unconscious growth. 113 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT Besides the prejudice against reptiles, modern popular superstition has placed several animals under a ban, and especially the harmless bat and the useful barn owl. Traditional reasons exist, no doubt, in every case ; but stronger than these are the associa- tions of such creatures with the dark in which the sane man of a certain temperament becomes a partial lunatic ; a prey to unreal terrors which the flap of a bat's wing or the screech of an owl is enough to work up to the point of frenzy. It is a most unfortunate thing for an animal if it be the innocent cause of a frisson, a feeling of uncanny dread. The little Italian owl, notwithstanding that it too comes out at dusk, has escaped prejudice. This was the owl of Pallas Athene and of an earlier cult. As in the case of the serpent, its wiles to fascinate its prey were the ground- work of its reputation for wisdom. Of this there cannot be, I think, any doubt, though the droll bobs and curtesies which excite an irresistible and fatal curiosity in small birds, have suggested in the mind of the modern man a thing so exceedingly far from wisdom as civettetia, which word is derived from civetta — " the owl of Minerva " as Italian class-books say. The descent from the goddess of wisdom to the coquette is the cruellest decadence of all ! VI THE FAITH OF IRAN THE Zoroastrian theory of animals cannot be severed from the religious scheme with which it is bound up. It is not a side-issue, but an integral part of the whole. It would be useless to attempt to treat it without recalling the main features in the development of the faith out of which it grew. In the first place, who were the people, occupying what we call Persia, to whom the Sage, who was not one of them, brought his interpretation of the know- ledge of good and evil ? The early Iranians must have broken off from the united body of the Aryans at a time when they spoke a common language, which though not Sanscrit, was very like it. The affinities between Sanscrit and the dialect called with irremedi- able inaccuracy " Zend " are of the strongest. From this we conclude that, on their establishment in their new home, the Iranians differed little from the race of whose customs the Rig-Veda gives — not a full picture — but a faithful outline. Pastoral folk, devoted to their flocks and herds, but not unlearned in the cultivation of the earth and the sowing of grain, they had reached what may be called the highest stage 8 "3 114 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT of primitive civilisation. Though milk, butter and cooked corn formed their principal food, on feast days they also ate meat, chiefly the flesh of oxen and buffaloes, which they were careful to cook thoroughly. The progressive Aryans, who called half-raw meat by a term exactly corresponding to the too familiar " rosbif saignant," denounced the more savage peoples who consumed it as " wild men " or " demons," They kept horses, asses and mules ; horses were sacrificed occasionally ; for instance, kings sacrificed a horse to obtain male issue. The wild boar was hunted, if not in the earliest, at least in very early times. The dog was prized for its fidelity as guardian of the house and flocks, but there is no trace of its having been pro- tected by extraordinary regulations such as those which later came into force in Iran. On the other hand, the name of dog had never yet been used in reproach. It seems to have been among Semitic races that the contempt for man's best friend arose, but it is morally certain that it arose nowhere till dogs became scavengers of cities. It was the home- less pariah cur that gave the dog the bad name from which have sprung so many ugly words registered in modern vocabularies. Even now, when Jew or Moslem uses "dog" in a bad sense, he means " cur " ; he knows quite well the other kind of dog — he knows Tobit's dog, which, bounding on before the young man and the angel, told the glad tidings of his master's return ; Tobit's dog which was one of the animals admitted by Mohammed into highest heaven. But " pariah dog " became synonymous of pariah, and notwithstanding the present tendency to THE FAITH OF IRAN 115 attribute the opprobrium of the pig to original sanctity (and consequent reservation), I am inclined to think that the pig likewise came to be scorned because he was a scavenger. In some Indian cities herds of wild pigs still enter the gates just before they are closed at dusk, to pass out of them as soon as they are opened in the morning : during the night they do their work excellently, and by day they take a well-earned sleep in the jungle. They deserve gratitude, for they keep the cities free from disease, but, like other public servants, they scarcely get it. In Vedic times every home had its watch-dog, whose warning bark was as unwelcome to lovers as it was to robbers. The Rig- Veda preserves the prayer of a young girl who asks that her father, her mother, her grandfather, and the •match-dog may sleep soundly while she meets her expected lover : a charming glimpse of the chaste freedom of early Aryan manners. The newly-wedded wife enters her husband's house as mistress, not as slave ; the elders say to the young couple : " You are master and mistress of this house ; though there be father-in-law and mother-in-law, they are placed under you." If that was not quite what happened, yet the principle was granted, and there is much in that. The bride rode to her new home in a car drawn by four milk- white oxen ; when she alighted at the threshold, these golden words were spoken to her : " Make thyself loved for the sake of the children that will come to thee ; guard this house, be as one with thy husband ; may you grow old here together. Cast no evil looks, hate not thy spouse, be gentle in thought and deed even ii6 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT to the animals of this home." Bride and bridegroom are exhorted to be of one heart, of one mind, "to love each other as a cow loves her calf," a simple and true metaphor full of the country-side, full of the youth of the world. If these were the customs and this was the life which the Iranians may be supposed to have taken with them, what was the religion ? The early Aryans had a Nature-cult more spiritualised under the form of Varuna and more materialised under the form of Indra. Some students of the Avesta have thought that here could be found the elements of the Dualism which formed the essential doctrine of Mazdaism. But it is almost certain that no real Dualism existed in oldest Iran. The Avesta once contrasts the wor- shippers of God with the worshippers of Daevas, of those who breed the cow and have the care of it with those who ill-treat it and slaughter it at their sacrifices. But Indra- worship has no connexion with devil- worship, nor does this or similar texts prove that devil-worship, properly so called, ever flourished in Iran. Other religious reformers than Zoroaster have named the devotees of former religions "devil- worshippers." For the rest, there is reason to think that in the Avesta the term was applied to Turanian raiders, not to true Iranians. In an Assyrian inscription, Ahura Mazda is said to have created joy for all creatures : a belief which Mazdean Dualism impugns. So far as can be guessed, the earliest Iranian faith was the worship of good spirits — of a Good Spirit. Less pure extra-beliefs may, or rather must, have existed contemporaneously, but Pho/o] [MiiiisiiL ASSYRIAN GOD CARRYING ANTELOPE AND WHEAT-EAR. British Museum. [To face page ii6. THE FAITH OF IRAN 117 they remained in the second rank. The cult of good spirits was the home-cult of shepherd and herdsman offered to the genii of their flocks and herds. While these genii answered the purpose of the lares or little saints everywhere dear to humble hearts, it is probable that in character they already resembled the Fravashis or archetypes that were to play so great a part in Mazdean doctrine. The cult of the Good Spirit, the national and kingly cult, was the worship of one God whose most worthy symbol, before Zoroaster as after, was the sun and whose sacrament with men was fire. The early Iranian had no temple, no altar : he went up into a high place and offered his prayer and sacrifice without priest or pomp. If we wish to trace his faith back to an Indian source, instead of bringing on the scene Varuna and Indra, it will be better to inquire whether there were elements of the same faith underlying the unwieldy fabric of Vedic religion. The answer is, that there were. The grandest text in the Rig- Veda, the one text recognised from farthest antiquity as of incalcu- lable value, is the old Persian religion contained in a formula : " That Sun's supremacy — God — let us adore Which may well direct." " Enable with perpetual light, The dulness of our blinded sight." So great a virtue was attributed to the Gayatri that the mind which thought it was supposed to unite with the object of thought : the eyes of the soul looked on Truth, of which all else is but the shadow. This is the spirit in which it is still repeated every day by ii8 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT every Hindu. The sacrosanct words were "Vishnu, Brahma, and Shiva," or, yet more often, they are described as "the mother of the Vedas," which, if it means anything, means that they are older than the Vedas. The point most to be noticed about the Gayatri is that its importance cannot be set aside by saying that this text is to be explained by Henotheism: the habit of referring to each god immediately addressed as supreme. Nor was the text selected arbitrarily by Western monotheists : for thousands of years before any European knew it, the natives of India had singled it out as the most solemn affirmation of man's belief in the Unseen. It is open to argument, though not to proof, that the Gayatri crystallises a creed which the Iranians took with them in their migration. Peoples then moved in clans, not in a motley crowd gathered on an emigrant steamer. The clan or clans to which the Iranians belonged may have clung to a pri- mordial faith, not yet overlaid by myths which materialised symbols and mysteries which made truth a secret. Such speculations are guess-work, but that the primitive religion of Persia was essentially mono- theistic is an opinion which is likely to survive all attacks upon it. On less sure grounds stands the identification of that primitive religion with Zoro- astrianism. The great authorities of a former generation, and amongst them my distinguished old friend. Professor Jules Oppert, believed that Cyrus was a Mazdean. But there is a good deal to support the view that Zoroastrianism did not become the THE FAITH OF IRAN 119 State religion till the time of the SdsAnians, who, as a new dynasty, grasped the political importance of having under them a strong and organised priest- hood. Before that time the Magians seem to have been rather a sort of Salvation Army or Society of Jesus than the directors of a national Church. As late as the reign of Darius the Persians fre- quently buried their dead, a practice utterly repugnant to the Mazdean. Again, from Greek sources we know that the Persian kings sacrificed hecatombs of animals ; thousands of oxen, asses, stags, &c., were immolated every day. Darius ordered one hundred bullocks, two hundred rams, four hundred lambs to be given to the Jews on the dedication of the new Temple (as well as twelve he-goats as sin-offerings for the twelve tribes) so that they might offer " sacrifices of sweet savours unto the God of heaven and pray for the life of the king and his sons." Evidently Darius considered profuse animal sacrifices as a natural part of any great religious ceremony. Can it be supposed that such slaughter would have pleased a strict Zoroastrian? The Mazdeans retained the sacrifice of flesh as food : a small piece of the cooked meat eaten at table was included in the daily offering with bread, grain, fruits and the Homa juice, which was first drunk by the officiating priest, then by the worshippers, and finally thrown on the sacred fire. The small meat-offering was not animal sacrifice or anything at all like it. The Parsis substitute milk even for this small piece of meat, perhaps because the meat was usually beef, which would have caused offence to their Hindu fellow-citizens. I asked a 120 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT Parsi High Priest who lunched with me at Basle during the second Congress for the History of Reli- gions, what viands were eschewed by his community ? He replied that they avoided both beef and the flesh of swine, but only out of respect for their neighbours' rules : to them oil alone was forbidden — probably because of its virtue as a light-giver. In the Zoro- astrian sacrifice it was never lost sight of that the outward act was but one of piety and obedience ; the true sacrifice was of the heart : "I offer good thoughts, good words, good deeds." It is hardly needful to say that the Mithraic taurobolium was in sheer contradiction to Mazdean law. Heretical sects were the bane of Zoroastrianism, and with one of these sprang up the strange practices which the Romans brought into Europe. Possibly its origin should be sought in some infiltration from the West, for it is more suggestive of Orphic rites than of any form of Eastern ceremonies. A Christian writer of the name of Socrates, who lived in the fifth cen- tury, said that at Alexandria, in a cavern consecrated to Mithra, human skulls and bones were found, the inference being that human sacrifice was the real rite, symbolised by the slaying of the bull. The source of this information is suspect, but even if not guilty of such excesses, the Mithra-worshippers of Western Persia must have been rank corrupters of the faith. In the Avesta, Mithra is the luminous aether; sometimes he appears as an intercessor; sometimes he dispenses the mercy or wields the vengeance of God. But in reality he is an attribute, about the nature of which members of the faith had THE FAITH OF IRAN 121 less excuse for making mistakes than we have. It is difficult for the Indian or Japanese not to make analogous mistakes concerning some forms of worship in Southern Europe. In Old Iran the Sacred Fire was kept perpetually alight. Sweet perfumes were spread around the place of prayer, for which a little eminence was chosen, but there were no images and no temples. Archaeologists have failed to find traces of a building set apart for religious worship among the splendid ruins of Persepolis : the "forty towers" only tell of the pleasure-palace of an Eastern king. Was it that the profound spirituality of this people shrank not only from carving a graven image of the deity, but also from giving him a house made with hands ? What could the maker of the firmament want with human fanes ? Some such thought may have caused the-- Iranians to suppress for so long a time the in- stinct which impels man to build temples. In any case, it seems as if Cyrus and after him Darius threw themselves into the scheme for rebuilding the Hebrew temple with all the more enthusiasm from the fact that immemorial custom held them back from temple- building at home. The cuneiform inscriptions bear witness that these kings were monotheists : they believed in one sole creator of heaven and earth, by whose will kings reign and govern, and if they invoked the aid of heavenly hierarchs they never confused the creatures, however powerful, with the creator. That Creator they called by the name of Ahura Mazda, but they recognised that he was one, whatever the name might be by which he was called. 122 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT " Thus saith Cyrus, king of Persia : the Lord God of Heaven hath given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and He hath charged me to build Him a house at Jerusalem, which is Judah." In the un- canonical Book of Esdras, it is said more significantly that King Cyrus " commanded to have the house of the Lord in Jerusalem built where they should worship with eternal fire." The recently deciphered Babylonian inscriptions have been brought forward to show that the Jews were mistaken in thinking that Cyrus was a monotheist, because he honoured Merodach in Babylon just as he had honoured Jehovah at Jerusalem. He was, it is said, a "poly- theist at heart." If he was, his honouring Merodach does not prove it. To my mind it proves exactly the reverse. Cyrus understood the monotheism which was at the bottom of the Babylonian religious system and which these very tablets have revealed to modern scholarship. He understood that "however nume- rous and diversified the nations of the earth may be, the God who reigns over them all can never be more than one." ' He was governed by expediency in his respect for the faiths of his subject peoples, but he was governed also by something higher than expediency. That Darius Hystaspis, who is allowed to have been a monotheist, continued his policy, shows that it was not thought to involve disloyalty to Ahura Mazda since of such disloyalty Darius would have been incapable. If we grant that the Iranians were, in the main, ' Words written by a Japanese reformer named Okubo about fifty years ago. THE FAITH OF IRAN 123 monotheistic at a date when not more than a part of the population professed Zoroastrianism, the ques- tion follows, of what was the difference between the reformed and the unreformed religion? To answer this satisfactorily, we must remember that the para- mount object of Zoroaster was less change than conservation. Like Moses whom an attractive if not well-founded theory makes his contemporary, he saw around a world full of idolatry, and he feared lest the purer faith of Iran should be swamped by the encroachments of polytheism and atheism (for, strangely enough, the Avesta abounds in references to sheer negation). The aim of every doctrine or practice which he introduced was to revivify, to render more comprehensible, more consistent, the old monotheistic faith. With regard to practice, the most remarkable in- novation was that which concerned the disposal of the dead. It cannot be explained as a relic of bar- barism : it was introduced with deliberation and with the knowledge that it would shock human sensibility then, just as much as it does now. The avowed reason for giving the dead to vultures or animals is that burial defiles the earth. It was recognised that this argument was open to the objection that birds or beasts were likely to drop portions of dead bodies on the earth. The objection was met with scholastic resourcefulness not to say casuistry : it was declared that " accidents " do not count. Though so strongly insisted on in the Avesta, the practice only became general at a late period : even after Mazdeism had made headway, bodies were often enveloped in 124 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT wax to avoid defilement of the earth while evading the prescribed rite. Cremation, the natural alter- native to burial, would have polluted the sacred fire. It was observed, no doubt, that the con- sumption of the dead by living animals was the means employed by Nature for disposing of the dead. Why do we so rarely see a dead bird or hare or rabbit or squirrel.'' The fact is not mysterious when we come to look into it. It may have been thought that what Nature does must be well done. The Parsis themselves seem to suppose that this and other prescriptions of their religious law were inspired by sanitary considerations, and they attribute to them their comparative immunity from plague during the recent epidemics at Bombay. Defilement of water by throwing any impurity into rivers is as severely forbidden as the defilement of the earth. Possibly another reason against- burial was the desire to prevent anything like the material cult of the dead and the association of the fortunes of the immortal soul with those of the mortal body, such as prevailed among the Egyptians, whose practices doubtless were known to the Magi by whom, rather than by any one man, the Mazdean law was framed. Finally, the last rites provided a recurrent object-lesson conducive to the mental habit of separating the pure from the impure. They re- minded the Mazdean that life is pure because given by Ormuzd ; death impure because inflicted by Ahriman. The rule of every religion is designed largely, if not chiefly, as a moral discipline. ' ' Among the Buddhists of Thibet the dead are given to dogs and birds of prey as a last act of charity — to feed the hungry. THE FAITH OF IRAN 125 The true originality of Zoroastrianism as a religious system lies in the dualistic conception of creation which is the nexus that connects all its parts. This was seen at once, when the Avesta became known in Europe, but the idea was so entirely misunderstood and even travestied, that Zoroaster was represented as a believer in two gods whose power was equal, if, indeed, the power of the evil one were not the greater. Recently among the manuscripts of Leo- pardi were found these opening lines of an unfinished " Hymn to Ahriman " : — " Re delle cose, autor del mondo, arcana Malvagita, sommo potere e somma Intelligenza, eterno Dator de' mali e regitor del moto. . . ." They are fine lines, but if Anro-Mainyus might fitly be called "arcana malvagita" and "dator de' mali," nothing could be farther removed from the Zoroastrian idea than the rest of the description. Ahriman possessed neither supreme power nor supreme intelligence, nor was he author of the world, but only of a small portion of it. To this day, how- ever, it has pleased pessimists to claim Zoroaster, the most optimist of prophets, as one of their fraternity. The real Ahriman gains in tremendous force from the vagueness of his personality. Sometimes he acts as a person : as in the Temptation of Zoroaster when he offers him the kingdoms of the world if he will but serve him. But no artist would have dared to give him human form. And surely no one in Iran would have alluded to him by mild or good-humoured euphemisms. 126 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT He shares this, however, with the mediaeval devil, that he works at an eternally pre-destined disadvan- tage. He is fore-doomed to failure. Good is stronger than Evil, and Good is lasting, Evil is passing. In the end. Evil must cease to be. Though not immortal, Ahriman was primordial. Unlike the fallen star of the morning, what he is, that he was. He did not choose Evil : he is Evil as Ormuzd is Good. He can create, but only things like himself The notion that both Ormuzd and Ahriman proceeded from a prior entity, Boundless Time, is a late legend. Ormuzd and Ahriman existed always, the one in eternal light, the other in beginning- less darkness. An immense vacuum divided the light from the darkness and Ahriman knew not Ormuzd, Evil knew not Good, till Good was ex- ternalised in the beneficent creation. "Young life lowed through the meadows, the woods and the echoing mountains, Wandered bleating in valleys and warbled on blossom- ing branches." The sight of created things gave Ahriman the will to create corresponding things, evil instead of good. He made sin, disease, death, the flood, the earth- quake, famine, slaughter, noxious animals. So the pieces were set down on the chess-board of being, and, as in all religions, man's soul was the stake. The difference from other religions lay in the determined effort to grapple with the problem of the origin of evil. The tribe of divine students among whom Mazdeism sprang up saw in that un- THE FAITH OF IRAN 127 solved problem the great cause of unbelief, and they set themselves to solve it by the theory which J. S. Mill said was the only one which could reconcile philosophy with religion — the theory of primal forces at war. The Indian did not attempt to fathom it ; the Egyptian and Assyrian set it aside ; we know the offered Hebrew solution : "I form the light and create darkness ; I make peace and create evil, I, the Lord, do all these things." But this is a state- ment, not a solution, because though it may be believed, it cannot be thought. The attraction of the dualistic conception is shown by nothing more clearly than by the extraordinary vitality of Mani- chaeism in the face of every kind of persecution both in the East and West, although Manichseism, with its ascription of the creation of mankind to the Evil Principle, its depreciation of woman, its out-and-out asceticism which included abstinence from animal food (a rule borrowed by Mani from the Buddhists in his journey in India) contrasts unfavourably with the faith that did not make a single demand on human nature except to be good, even as its Creator was good. The origin of the Magians was Semitic, or, as some think, prae-Semitic and prae-Aryan. Travellers brought tales of them to the ancient world which listened with a fascinated interest, while it failed to see the importance of the mighty religious phe- nomenon of Israel. The "Wise men of the East" had a charm for antiquity, as they were to have for the Infant Church which never tired of depicting them in its earliest art. Mention of the " Persarum 128 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT Magos " is frequent from Herodotus to Cicero, who speaks of them under that name. According to Herodotus the Magi sang the Theogony, and Pausanias describes them as reading from a book which was certainly the Avesta, though it must . not be overlooked that never but once does it contain the smallest reference to them. This tribe of divine students enjoyed a high reputation at the Babylonian Court, which seems less unexpected by the light of recent research than it did when the Babylonians and Assyrians were thought to be destitute of any trace of an esoteric religion tending to monotheism. That the Magians were monotheisd cannot be disputed. Probably they were skilled in astronomy and in medicine, the two sciences which almost covered what was meant then by learning in the East. Probably also they were astrologers like other searchers of the heavens, but they were not magic-workers, a calling that had a bad name. The Magi in the Gospel story are supposed to have been guided by astronomical calculations ; whatever these may have been, they could not have been ignorant of the prophecy in their own Scriptures of a Virgin who should give birth to the Saviour and Judge of men. The ante-natal soul of this Virgin had been venerated for centuries in Iran. An in- filtration of Messianic prophecies might induce them to conclude that the Child would be " King of the Jews." It was not likely that they would take so long a journey to do homage to any new-born earthly king, but it was quite possible that they might go in search of the promised Saviour. o ~ THE FAITH OF IRAN 129 In Media we know that the people lived at one time in tribes, without kings. In one form or another, the tribal organisation existed and exists everywhere in the East. What is caste but a petrified tribal system ? The first discovery which a European makes on landing on the skirts of the East, is that everything is done by tribes. The Algerian conjurors who swallow fire, drive nails into their heads and do other gruesome feats are a semi-religious tribe which has thrived from time immemorial on the exercise of the same profession. The dwarfs of the late Bey of Tunis, whom I saw at Bardo, belonged to a tribe which does nothing but furnish dwarfs. Apply to a high or worthy end this corporate pursuit of a given object and it must produce remarkable results. The unanimous belief of the Greeks that Zoroaster was founder of the Magians is held no longer, but he is still thought to have been one of them. Moslem tradition made him the servant of a Hebrew prophet, and even serious Western students were inclined to trace Mazdeism to the Jewish prisoners who were brought into Media by the Assyrians. It is un- necessary to say that at present the Jews are regarded as the debtors. There is no figure of a religious teacher so elusive as that of Zoroaster, and they are all elusive. But in the case of Zoroaster it is not only the man that eludes us — it is also his environment. Brahmanical India of to-day reflects as in a glass the society into which Sakya Muni cast his seed ; in fact, we understand the seed-sowing better than the 9 130 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT harvest; Buddhism at its apogee seems of the nature of an interlude in the history of the change- less East. China still throws light on its passionless sage, passionless in a sense so far deeper than the Indian recluses, who, though they knew it not, did but substitute for the passion of the flesh the more inebriating passion of the spirit. From the splendid treasury of prae- Islamic poetry, we know that the Arab race had acquired its specialised type before the Muezzin first called the faithful to prayer. The moral petrifaction of the many and the religious and patriotic ferment of the few which formed the milieu of nascent Christianity, can be realised without any stretdi of the imagination. Buddha, Confucius, and He that was greater than they, came into highly civilised societies in organised states ; Mohammed came into an unorganised state which lacked political and religious cohesion, but the unity of race was already developed : the Emirs of the Soudan whose star set at Omdurman were the living pictures of the Arabs who first rallied to the Prophet's banner. Of the society of Old Iran to which Zoroaster spoke, it is difficult to form a distinct idea and to judge how far it had moved away from early Aryan simplicity. We gather that it was still a society in which sheep- raising and dairy-farming played a preponderant part. Those modern expressions may serve us better than to say " shepherds " and " herdsmen," since fixity of dwelling with the possession of what then was considered wealth seems to have been a very common case. Nomadic life lasted on, but it was held in disrepute. There appears to have been THE FAITH OF IRAN 131 nothing like a national or warlike spirit such as that possessed by the Jews, though occasional Turanian incursions had to be repelled. There were few towns and many scattered villages and homesteads. We are conscious that these impressions derived from the Avesta may be partially erroneous. Teachers of religion only take note of political or other cir- cumstances so far as it suits their purpose. Zoroaster (the Greek reading of Zarathustra, which in modern Persian becomes Zardusht), was born, as far as can be guessed, in Bactria, which became the stronghold of Avestic religion and the last refuge of the national monarchy on the Arab invasion. There was a time when his existence was denied, but no one doubts it now. Eight hundred years before Christ is the date which most modern scholars assign to him, though some place him much farther back, while others think they discern reasons for his having appeared after Buddha. The legend of his life (not to be found in the Avesta) begins in the invariable way : he was descended from kings ; as a young man he retired to a grotto in the desert, where he lived an austere life of reflection for seven years. Zoroaster never taught asceticism, but tradi- tion attributes to him the season of solitude and self-collection without which perhaps, in fact as well as in fable, the supreme power over other men's minds was never wielded by man. Various marvellous particulars are related : he was suckled by two ewes ; wild animals obeyed his voice ; when thrown under the feet of oxen and horses, they avoided hurting him. In his seven years' 132 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT retirement he meditated on idol-worship, on false gods and false prophets. The people of Iran, sub- stantially monotheist but prone to sliding into degrad- ing superstition, offered a field for his mission. He took to him a few disciples and began to preach to as many as would hear, but he met with great - difficulties. At last, he found favour with a king by curing his favourite horse, and he might have ended his days in peace but the spirit urged him to continue his apostolate. Not to princes but to peasants did he chiefly address himself; he did not call them away from their work but exhorted them to pursue it diligently. "He who cultivates the earth will never lack, but he who does not, will stand idly at the doors of others to beg food." Labour is not an evil, man who earns his bread by the sweat of his brow is not under a curse : he is the fellow- worker with God ! This was the grandest thing that Zoroaster taught. It is singular to note the affinity between his teaching and the Virgilian conception of the husbandman as half a priest. In the Middle Ages the same thought arose where one would not look for it : among those religious orders which had the luminous inspiration that in work not in indolence lay the means of salvation : " Laborare est orare." The care of the God-created animals brought with it a special blessing : it was actually a way to heaven. If a friend gave us a cherished animal, should not we treat it well for that friend's sake as well as for its own value ? Would not it remind us of the giver ? Would not we be anxious that he should find it in good health if by chance he came on a visit } This THE FAITH OF IRAN 133 is how Zoroaster wished man to feel about the cow, the sheep, the dog. Auguste Comte considered domestic animals as a part of humanity. Zoroaster considered them as a trust from God. Moslem traditions finish the story of the Mazdean prophet by telling that he was beaten to death by " devil- worshippers," probably Turanian raiders. Zoroastrian authorities are silent about his end, which is thought to bear out the legend that it was unfortunate. The Parsis hold that the whole Avesta was the work of Zoroaster. Much of the original material has disappeared, and although Western writers are disposed to throw all the blame on the Moslem invaders, the steady Persian tradition which accuses "Alexander the Rtiman" of having caused the destruction of an important part of it, cannot be well answered by saying that such barbarism was not likely to be committed by the Macedonian conqueror. When Persepolis was reduced to ruins some of the sacred books " written with gold ink on prepared cow-skins" may have been destroyed by accident, but as it was certain that the Zoroastrian priests would do all they could to foment resistance to the hated idolater, we cannot be too sure that the deed was not done on purpose. The way of dis- posing of the dead set the Greeks against the Zoroastrians, and they even thought or affected to think that the dying as well as the dead were given to dogs. The Arabs, no doubt, burnt what they could lay their hands on of what was left, and it tells much for the devotion of the faithful few, the 134 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT persecuted remnant in Persia, and the band of exiles who found a happier fate in India, that nevertheless the Avesta has been preserved in a representative though incomplete form, to take its place in among the sacred literatures of the world. When the Parsis return, as they hope to do, to a free Persia, they may carry the Avesta proudly before them as the Sikhs carried the Granth to the prophet-martyr's tomb at Delhi : they have done more than keep the faith, they have lived it. The present Avesta consists of five books. The Gdth^s or hymns alone really claim to have been composed by Zoroaster himself, and this claim is admitted by European scholars who disagree with the Parsis in denying that the other four books are by the same author. They are : the " Yasna," a ceremonial liturgy, the " Vispered," a work resembling the " Yasna," but apparently less ancient ; the " Ven- dldS.d," which contains the Mazdean religious law, and the " Khordah Avesta," a household prayer-book for the laity. The original text was written in an Aryan dialect related to Sanscrit ; after a time, this tongue was understood by no one but the priests and not much by them ; it was decided, therefore, to make a translation, which was called the " Zend," or "interpretation," or, as we should say, "the authorised version." At first Europeans thought that " Zend " meant the original tongue in which the work was written. Curiously enough, the lan- guage into which the Scriptures were rendered was not Iranian or Old Persian, but Pahlavi, a lingua franca full of Semitic words, which had been coined THE FAITH OF IRAN 135 for convenience in communicating with the Assyrians and Syrians when they were under one king. Pahlavi was also used for official inscriptions, for coinage, for commerce ; it was a sort of Esperanto. The text and the translation enjoyed equal authority, but the former was called "the Avesta of Heaven" and the latter " the Avesta of Earth." The first fragment of the " Avesta " that reached Europe was a copy of the "Yasna" brought to Canterbury by an unknown Englishman in 1633, Other scraps followed, but no real attempt to trans- late it was made till the adventurous Anquetil Duperron published in 1771 the version which he had made with the assistance of Parsi priests and which was rejected in unwise haste by Sir William Jones as a supercherie litUraire, chiefly on the score that its contents were for the most part pure non- sense, and hence could not be the work of Zoroaster. Germany at once was more just than England to the man who, though he had not succeeded in making a good translation, deserved the highest honour as a pioneer. Even now that better translations are available, the Avesta is apt to dishearten the reader on his first acquaintance with it. Many passages have remained obscure, and the desire to be literal in this as in some other Oriental works has hindered the translators from writing their own languages well. It needs a Sir Richard Jebb to produce a translation which is a classic and is yet microscopically accurate. I once asked Professor F. C. Burkitt why the Sep- tuagint did not make more impression on the Hellenic 136 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT and Roman students of Alexandria by mere force of the literary power of the Bible ? He replied that he thought it was to be explained by the poor degree of literary skill possessed by the Greek translators or by most of them. Another reminiscence comes to my mind here : I recollect that eminent scholar and deeply religious-minded man, Albert R^ville, saying to me : " The Bible is so much more amusing than the Koran ! " I am afraid one must confess that the Koran is so much " more amusing " than the A vesta. It is a good rule, however, to approach all religious books with patience and with reverence, for they contain, even if concealed under a bushel, the finest thoughts of man. When we have grown accustomed to the outward frame of the Avesta, the inner sense becomes clearer. It is like a piece of music by Tschaikowsky : at first the modulations seem bizarre, the themes incoherent ; then, by degrees, a consecutive plan unwinds itself and we know that what appeared meaningless sound was divine harmony. The essential teaching of the Avesta is summed up in the text : " Adore God with a pure mind and a pure body, and honour Him in His works." Force, power, energy, waters and stagnant pools, springs, running brooks, plants that shoot aloft, plants that cover the ground, the earth, the heavens, stars, sun, moon, the everlasting lights, the flocks, the kine, the water-tribes, those that are of the sky, the flying, the wild ones — " We honour all these, Thy holy and pure creatures, O Ahura Mazda, divine artificer!" " The Voice said : Call My works thy friends." THE FAITH OF IRAN 137 If the lyric note of great religious expression is rarely reached (only, perhaps, in a few pieces, such as the noble hymn to the sun-symbol), the sustained exposition of life is so reasonable and yet so lofty that to contemplate it after gazing at the extrava- gances of pillar-saints and Indian Yogi, signals, as it were, a return to sanity and health after the nuit blanche of fever. The " Khordah Avesta" contains this counsel or good wish : " Be cheerful ; live thy life the whole time which thou wilt live." Man is not asked to do the impossible or even the difficult : he is asked to enjoy. To the extreme spirituality which shrank from making even a mental image of God is joined a "this worldliness " which saw in rational enjoy- ment a religious duty. Instead of choosing poverty, man was ordered to make good use of wealth ; instead of mortifying the flesh, he was to avoid calumny, evil-speaking, quarrels, to give clothes to the poor, to pray not only for himself but for others. If he does wrong, let him repent honestly in his heart and do some practical good work as a pledge of his repentance. The soul which grieves for its wrong- doing and sins no more comes back into the light of " God the giver, Forgiver, rich in Love, who always is, always was, always will be ! " When it was asked, " What is in the first place most accept- able to this earth } " the answer came : " When a holy man walks on it, O Zarathustra ! " Good men work wiik God, who, sure of .ultimate triumph, is yet Himself struggling now against the Power of Darkness, There is no religion without a good 138 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT life : "All have not the Faith who do not hear it ; all hear it not who are unclean ; all are unclean who are sinners." God did not send calamities to His servants, but He compassionates them in their trials : " The voice of him weeping, however low, mounts up to the star-lights, comes round the whole world." It is no sin to desire riches : " Thy kingdom come, O Ahura, when the virtuous poor shall inherit the earth." In spite of the sufferings of good people, even on this fair earth there is more of pleasantness for the good than for the wicked, and in the next world there is bliss eternal. I do not think that Robert Browning studied the Avesta, but to the thoroughly Zoroastrian line quoted above I am tempted to add this other which is not less so : — " Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph." For the individual, as for the universe, Right must triumph. If the prophet of optimism has a harder task than the oracle of despair, it is, perhaps, a more profitable task. The Parsi repeats daily, as his ancestors did before him, the so-called Honover or " Ahuna-Vairya," or logos which brings God down to man as the Gayatri lifts man up to God : " One Master and Lord, all holy and supreme ; one teacher of His Law, appointed by God's almighty will as shepherd to the weak," The Mazdean " law " was a thought-out system to prevent idolatry and atheism, and to make men lead good lives. There is no racial exclusiveness in it: the Mazdeans had no shibboleth or peculiar sign ; THE FAITH OF IRAN 139 Zoroaster, himself a foreigner, did not appeal to a chosen people or to a miraculously evolved caste : he only knew of good men and bad, A really good man, truthful and charitable in all his ways, had three heavens open to him even though he "offered no prayers and chanted no Gith^s " ; only the fourth heaven, a little nearer the presence of God, was reserved for those who had devoted their lives to religion. Temperance was enjoined, as without tem- perance there could not be health. The family was sacred and marriage meritorious : children, the gift of Ahura Mazda, were recruits for the great Salvation Army of the future. Immorality was severely cen- sured, but the victims of it were befriended. Stringent and most humane religious laws protected the fille-mere from being driven " by her shame " to destroy herself or her offspring. Girls were married at sixteen : the address to young brides may be com- pared with that in the Rig- Veda : " I speak these words to you, maidens who wed. I say them unto you — imprint them on your hearts. Learn to know the world of the Holy Spirit according to the Law. Even so, let one of you take the other as the Law ordains, for it will be to you a source of perfect joy." At the time when Zoroastrianism was the State religion, the Sdsdnian period, we find that the kings frequently had harems. It is certain, however, that if in this as in other things the priests were complacent, they were untrue to orthodox Zoroastrian doctrine and custom, which only permitted the taking of a second wife in some rare cases, as when there was no issue by the first. 140 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT Even then, it does not seem to have been encouraged. The blot on Avestic morality is the strange recom- mendation of consanguineous marriages, which the Parsis interpret as far as possible in a figurative sense, but it must have been intended to be followed, though it is plain that such unions were never popular. The declared object was the hypothetical maximum purity of race : exactly the same object as that contemplated in the union of Siegemund and Siegelind in the Nibelungenlied — a curious parallel. To my mind, the desire to keep agricultural property together may have had something to do with it. The present moral ideas of the Parsis do not differ from those of Europeans, and when they requested to be placed under the English instead of the Hindu marriage law, their wish was granted. In A vesta times the priests both married and toiled like the rest of the people. When their pros- perity under the Sdsanians tended to make them a class apart, they seem to have become less faithful to the ideals of their master, less stern in opposing evil in high places. It is a common experience of history. Originally they were true citizen-priests, mixing with the" people as being of them. There was no life better or holier than the common life of duty and work. Isolation of any kind was con- trary to the central Zoroastrian view of man as a social being. Among the wicked souls in hell, each one thinks itself utterly alone: it has no sight or knowledge of the host around it. Nothing could illustrate more powerfully than this the saying of a great French writer : " Seul a un synonyme : mort ! " Solitude is the death of the soul. VII ZOROASTRIAN ZOOLOGY NO investigator of early Iran can afford to neglect the Shahnameh of Firdusi, which was as good history as he could make it ; that is to say, it was founded on extremely old legendary lore collected by him with a real wish to revive the memory of the past. Firdusi sang the glories of the " fire- worshippers " with such enthusiasm that one cannot be surprised if, when he died, the Sheikh of Tus doubted whether he ought receive orthodox Moslem burial : a doubt removed by an opportune dream in which the Sheikh saw the poet in Paradise. In Firdusi's epic we are told that the earliest Persian king (who seems to have been not very far off the first man) lived in peace with all creation. Wild animals came round and knew him for their lord. He had a son who was killed by demons and a grandson named Husheng, who, as soon as he was old enough, made war on the demons (Turanians.'') 141 142 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT to avenge his father's murder. Every species of wild and tame beast obeyed Husheng : — "The savage beasts, and those of gentler kind, Alike reposed before him and appeared To do him homage." In his war on the demon's brood, Hdsheng was helped by wolf; tiger, lion, and even by the fowls of the air. All this while mankind had lived on fruit and the leaves of trees. Hdsheng taught his people to bake bread. He was succeeded by his son Taliumen, in whose reign panthers, hawks, and falcons were tamed. The next king introduced weaving and the use of armour. His successor was remembered for having kept a herd of i,ooo cows whose milk he gave to the poor. Then came Zorik, who owned 10,000 horses. Zorak was seduced by Iblis, the evil spirit, who, in order to accomplish it, became his chief cook. Iblis was the real founder of the culinary art ; till then, people lived still almost entirely on bread and fruit, but the king's new chef prepared the most savoury dishes, for which he used the flesh of all kinds of birds and beasts. Finally, he sent to table a partridge and a pheasant, after which Zorik promised the devil to grant him any request he might make. Here there are fugitive reminiscences of parallel legends in the Bundehesh, a Parsi religious book belonging to post-Avestic times. The first human couple served God faithfully till, for some unexplained reason, they were induced to ascribe creation and supreme power to the daevas. This was the "un- "*>V ^^^ W', rm :i^ ^^^Kn Im '**^^ '■^W -'i/^^Bi^^K^^afjU^HH^HBHRH^V 1 ' ' 9\i 1 r 8 ■§ I^^^S^w '^^w 1 i- 1 ffM^^M^^^9wS 1 I w^4' ^ '" r'X « IT ' 'if/' mS^^^B^M ;; '^ '"y ■ m ^lil^H Ie* ^ M ■4U. *'^:'^ '^'iiii^^r:.^jifl <^^-: -j'l^i^':^ ^ r ■^- ^ : :-j^^^^-& iPff ^H^Pi^ W' P/ibto] [y. Dimlafoy. KING FIGHTING GRIFFIN WITH SCORPION'S TAIL. Palace of Darius. {By permission of M. Marcel Dienlafoy.) [To face page 142, ZOROASTRIAN ZOOLOGY 143 forgivable sin," the ascription of the miraculous power of God to the devil. Ahriman rejoiced at their treason, though it is not said that he was the cause of it : man could choose between good and evil. After their defection, the man and the woman clothed themselves in leaves and took to hunting. Ahriman put it into their heads to kill a goat and then to light a fire by rubbing two sticks : they blew on the fire to fan the flame and roasted a piece of the goat. One bit they threw in the air as a sacrifice to the Nature spirits, saying, " This for the Yazatas ! " A kite flew past and carried off the sacrifice. After- wards, the man and woman dressed in skins and told innumerable lies. Going from bad to worse, they engendered a large family whence sprang the twenty-five races of mankind. How this story got into the Bundehesh I do not know, but I am sure that Zoroaster would have disowned it. He knew of no collective " fall of man," whether in connexion with partridges, pheasants, or goat-flesh. The Avesta, in its sober cosmogony, is content to speak of the proto-man, Gayo Marathan (mortal life), and the proto-good-animal, Geus Urva, from whom all human beings and all animals of the good creation are derived. Nevertheless, Ahura Mazda is described frequently as creating each animal ; the proto-creature was only the modus operandi of the divine power. As in biology, divided sex was a secondary development. From the bull, Geus Urva, proceeded first his own species, and then sheep, camels, horses, asses, birds, water-animals. 144 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT The distinguishing qualification given him of good and laborious is the most striking proof of the originality of Magian ideas : instead of the strong bulls of Basan roaring in their might, the bull we have here is one with the ploughing ox : — " T'amo, o pio bove ; e mite un sentimento Di vigore e di pace al cor m'infondi . . . ." — the patient, the long-suffering, the gentle, though strong-limbed helper of man in his daily toil, good in his vigour, good in his mildness, but good most of all in his labour, for Zoroaster called labour a holy thing. The animal which did most to cultivate God's earth and make the desert flower like a rose, was the paragon of creatures. It must not be thought that to the Geus Urva or his kind was ever rendered' the homage due to their Creator. If there was one thing more abhorrent to the Zoroastrian mind than idolatry it was zoolatry : when Cambyses killed a new Apis with many of his followers in Egypt, he had no reason to fear Mazdean criticism. The soul of the bull receives dulia not latria. " We honour the soul of the bull , . . and also our own souls and our cattle's souls who help to preserve our life ; the souls by which they exist and which exist for them." So runs one of the G^this, one of the hymns of Zoroaster himself. " We honour the souls of the swift, wild animals ; we honour the souls of just men and women in whatever place they are born, whose pure natures have overcome evil. We honour saintly men and saintly women, living immortal, always living, always increasing in glory— ZOROASTRIAN ZOOLOGY 145 all man and woman souls faithful to the Spirit of God." In this song of praise we have brought before us vividly a fundamental doctrine of the Avestja which pervades every page of it : the belief in the Fravashi, the soul-partner, the double or angel, which exists before birth as during life and after death. This belief has a great interest for us as it would seem that it was only by chance that it did not pass into the body of Christian dogma. The Jews of the new school had held it for quite two hundred years before Christ. Besides other allusions, are the three distinct references to the soul-partner in the New Testament. Christ Himself speaks of the angels of the children who are always in the presence of God and who complain to Him if the children are ill- treated. Secondly, when Peter issued from prison, those who saw him said, "It is his angel." Thirdly, it is stated that the Sadducees believed that there was no resurrection, "neither angel nor Spirit," but that the Pharisees, of whom Paul was one, " confessed both." These three references become intelligible for the first time after reading the GELthis. True it is that he who knows only one religion, knows none. Ahriman inflicted every sort of suffering on the primal creature — this was the beginning of cruelty to animals. At last, he caused its death. The soul of the Bull dwells in the presence of God, and to it, as intercessor, all suffering creatures lift their plaints. Why were they made to suffer wrath, ill-usage, hunger ? Will no one lead them to sweet pastures ? 10 146 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT The creature-soul carries the cry of the creatures to God. Ahura Mazda promises the advent of Zoroaster, redresser of all wrongs. But the Bull- soul weeps and complains : how can the voice of one weak man avail to help."* It invokes stronger and more effectual aid. The hymn is really a litany of suffering animals, the grandeur of the thought flashing across obscurities which make it almost impossible to translate. Very mysterious is the expression of incredulity in the efficacy of the help of Zoroaster, an expression which stands quite alone, and in which some have seen a proof that this hymn was not written by the Prophet. But would any one else have dared to question his power or to call him "one weak man"? Can it be that Zoroaster was distressed to find his efforts to prevent cruelty so unavailing, and that he here covertly invokes the " strong arm of the law " to do what he had failed in doing } In the pages of the Avesta everything is tried to enforce humanity : hopes of reward, threats of punishment, appeals to religious obedience, common gratitude, self-interest. It cannot but appear singular that among an Eastern pastoral and agricultural people such reiterated admonitions should have been needful. The cow and the horse, " animals mani- festly pure which bring with them words of blessing," inflict terrible anathemas on their tormentors : — The cow curses him who keeps her : " Mayest thou remain without posterity, ever continuing of evil report, thou who dost not distribute me food, and yet causest me to labour for thy wife, thy children and thy own sustenance." ZOROASTRIAN ZOOLOGY 147 The horse curses his owner : " Mayest thou not be he who harnesses swift horses, not one of those who sit on swift horses, not one who makes swift horses hasten away. Thou dost not wish strength to me in the numerous assembly, in the circle of many men." The cow which is led astray by robbers calls to Mithra " ever with unlifted hands, thinking of the stall," and Mithra, here figuring as the vengeance of God, destroys the house, the clan, the confederacy, the region, the rule of him who injured her. She is the type of prosperity : " O thou who didst create the cow, give us immortal life, safety, power, plenty." She is dear to her Creator : " Thou hast given the earth as a sweet pasture for the cow." She is praised because she furnishes the offerings, flesh, milk, and butter. This reminds us of the differences of point of view between the Persian and the Indian humanitarian. The Indian, in theory at least, simply forbade taking animal life. He had the great advantage of the argument of the straight line. The Zoroastrian was handicapped by his moderation. It is easier far to teach extraordinary than ordinary well-doing ; every moralist who has set out to improve mankind has found that. Zoroaster had not the smallest doubt about his contention that man has imperative duties in regard to what used to be called " the brute crea- tion." Man could not live as man at all without it : we who have harnessed steam and trapped the electric spark might entertain such a possibility, but to Zoroaster the idea would have seemed absurd. As we owe so much to animals, the least we can do 148 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT is to treat them well. Yet, though he included wanton and useless slaughter in "ill-treatment," he allows the killing of animals for food. Herodotus remarked that, unlike the Egyptians, the Magian priests did not think it pollution to kill animals with their own hands — except dogs and oxen. It is to be supposed that the framers of Zoroastrian law believed that animal food was necessary for man's health and strength, perfect health being the state most acceptable to the Creator. Believing this, they could not forbid the temperate use of it. Gargantuan feasts were not dreamt of; if they had been, they would have received the condemnation given to all excesses. We are apt to fall into the way of thinking of sacred books which is that of their own adepts ; we think of them as written by unpremeditated impulse. But commonly this was not the case. The Avesta, especially, bears signs of conclusions reached by patient reasoning. While, however, the Magians permitted the slaughter of animals, they bowed to the original scruple which has no race-limits, by ordering that such slaughter should be accompanied by an expiatory rite without the performance of which it was unlawful. This was the offering of the head of the animal to Homa : regarded, in this instance, as the archetype of the " wine of life " — the sacred or sacramental juice of the plant which has been identified with the Indian Soma. The Homa juice was much the most sacred thing that could be eaten or drunk ; if it is true that it contained alcohol, the little jet of flame that would start upwards as it was thrown on the sacrificial fire might seem actually to bear with ZOROASTRIAN ZOOLOGY 149 it the spirit of the offering. Whatever was the exact idea implied by the dedication of slaughtered animals to Homa, the fact that they were killed for food did not, of course, in any way affect their extra-mortal destiny. The " souls of our cattle " — their archetypes — could not suffer death. As a careful observer, which he is now allowed to have been, Herodotus remarked that not only might the priests take animal life, but that they thought it highly meritorious to take the life of certain animals such as ants, serpents, and some kinds of birds. It required no profound knowledge of the East to notice something unusual in this. Even the Jews, with their classification of clean and unclean beasts, cast no moral slur on the forbidden category, and if the ser- pent of Eden was cursed, later snakes regained their character and inspired no loathing ; the snake-charmer with his crawling pupils was a well known and popular entertainer. Farther East, every holy man respected the life of an ant as much as of an elephant. Zoroaster alone banned the reptile and the major part of the insect world. No penance was more salutary than to kill ten thousand scorpions, snakes, mosquitoes, ants that walk in single file, harvesting ants, wasps, or a kind of fly which was the very death of cattle. The innocent lizard suffered by reason of his relationship with the crocodile ; the harmless frog and tortoise excited a wrath which they had done nothing to merit. Among mammals, the mouse is singled out for destruction : although the wolf is a legionary of Ahriman, he is more often classed with the " wicked two-legged one " — perverse man — than with the evil ISO THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT creation properly so called. In one place Ahriman is said to have created " devouring beasts," but on closer examination these devouring beasts proved to be only the harvesting ants which were reckoned deadly foes of the agriculturist. Any one who has seen how much newly-sown grass seed these favourites of Solomon will remove in a shining hour will under- stand the prejudice, though he will not, I hope, share it. Roughly speaking, the diligent, old-fashioned gardener who puzzles his pious mind as to why " those things" were ever created, is a born Zoroastrian. To tell him with Paul that "every creature of God is good" does not comfort him much. Zoroaster's answer is as philosophically complete as it is scientifi- cally weak. Certain creatures are noxious to man ; a good Creator would not have made creatures noxious to men, ergo, such creatures were not made by a good Creator, Besides the scientific objection to any hard- and-fast line of division between animals, there is another : the pity of it. I wonder that some velvet- coated field-mouse, approaching softly on tip- toe as Zoroaster lay in his grotto, did not inquire with its appealing eyes : " Do you really think that I look as if I were made by the Evil One ? " In spite of the numerous advantages of a theory which, in a literal sense, makes a virtue of necessity (a sad necessity to some of us), the theological ban of creatures for no other reason than that they are inconvenient to man detracts from the ideal beauty of Zoroastrian faith. Darwin, in a letter to Asa Gray, the American botanist, said that the sufferings of caterpillars and ZOROASTRIAN ZOOLOGY 15 1 mice made him doubt the existence of "a beneficent and omnipotent Creator." How often does doubt seem more religious than belief! The eschatology of the creatures deemed of dark- ness is not clear, but I believe there is no mention of their Fravashis : it is permissible to suppose, there- fore, that, all along, they are rather appearances than realities : things that cannot feel, though Ahriman feels defeat in their destruction. For the rest, though Zoroaster treated wasps or mice much as Torque- mada treated heretics, he made it no merit to torment them : he simply desired their extermination as every fruit-grower or farmer desires it to this day. Students of Zoroastrianism have been mystified by the seeming detachment of the dog from the other "good" animals and the separate jurisdiction designed for it. In my opinion this arose only from the fact that the dog was not a food-providing animal. Hence it could be made penal (by ireligious, not by civil, law, it must be remembered) to kill a dog, and it was natural that his body should be disposed of in the same way as a man's. What else could be done with it .'' It was natural also that since his death was inflicted by Ahriman (since it came of itself), purification ceremonials should be performed to re- move the pollution. The religious scope of such ceremonials was like that of reconsecrating a church in which suicide or murder has been committed. That the dog was highly appreciated, that he was valued as an essential helper in the existing conditions of life, is amply proved, but that he was "reverenced" more than some other animals — e.g., the cow — is open 152 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT to doubt. The dog was recognised as more human which made him more liable to err. It was the celebrated chapter on the dog which convinced Sir W. Jones that Anquetil Duperron's translation was a forgery. It should have struck him that this was not how a European would have made Zoroaster speak about the favoured animal. In the comparisons of canine qualities with those of certain human beings, there is more of satire than of panegyric. The whole Fargard XIII. has been interpreted as purely mystical: the dog symbolising the "will," a meaning which, according to this argument, fits the term "Dog" in all passages of the scriptures of Iran. This is a hard saying. More reasonable is the supposition that Far- gard XIII. formed part of a treatise on animals and got into the Vendidsld by chance. However that may be, the " eight characters " of the dog show observation though not reverence : he loves darkness like a thief, and at times has been known to be one ; he fawns like a slave, he is a self-seeker like a courtezan, he eats raw meat like a beast of prey. The words relative to his " chasing about the well- born cow " have been interpreted to mean that he chased her back home when she had strayed, but I seem to have seen dogs chasing about well-born cows from no such benevolent motive. Some of the com- parisons are neither flattering nor critical but descrip- tive : the dog loves sheep like a child, he runs here and there in front, like a child ; he dodges in and out like a child. The j'eu (V esprit of the "eight characters" is followed by what appears to be a serious statement of how THE REAL DOG OF IRAN. Louvre. {By permission of Messrs. Chafman & Hall, Lid.) [To face patie 152 \ \ \ \ ZOROASTRIAN ZOOLOGY 153 to treat the dog which misconducts himself. There is no capital punishment, nothing like the stoning of the ox which gores a man or woman, in the Bible. If a dog attacks man or cattle he is to lose an ear ; if he does it a third time his foot is to be cut off, or, as Bleeck humanely suggests, he is to be rendered so far lame that it is easy to escape from him. The "dumb dog" of vicious disposition is to be tied up. If a dog is no longer sane in his mind and has become dangerous on that account, you are to try and cure him as you would a man, but if this fails, you must chain him up and muzzle him, using a sort of wooden pillory which prevents him from biting. This passage is curious, because, while it seems to allude plainly to hydro- phobia, it contains no hint of the worser consequences to man than a simple bite. We find that there were four if not more breeds of dogs, each of which was carefully trained for its work. The house-dog, the personal dog (which may have been a blood-hound), sheep and herd-dogs are all mentioned, but there is no mention of sporting-dogs or of sport in the Avesta. The dogs must have been powerful, as they were required to be a match for the wolf, " the growing, the flattering, the deadly wolf," which was the dread of every homestead in Iran. There were also " wolves with claws " (tigers), but they were comparatively few. The kinship of wolf and dog was recognised, and there was an impression that the most murderous wolf was the half-breed of a wolf and a bitch. Perhaps the wolf of dog-descent came more boldly to the dwelling of man, having no instinctive fear of him. It is said, too, that the 1S4 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT deadliest kind of dog was the dog that had a wolf- mother. Possibly such cross-breeding was tried experimentally in the hope of obtaining dogs which could best resist the wolf. If the dog is never represented as a creature of faultless perfection, it yet remains an established truth that "dwellings would not stand fast on the earth created by Ahura Mazda were there not dogs which pertain to the cattle and to the village." It is the Lord of Creation who says : " The dog I have made, O Zarathustra, with his own clothing and his own shoes ; with keen scent and sharp teeth, faithful to men, as a protector to the folds. For I have made the dog, I who am Ahura Mazda ! " To attack the dog was like an attack on the police. Slitting the ear of the house or sheep-dog out of malice, or cutting off his foot, or belabouring him so that thieves got at the sheep, were not unfrequent crimes and they are dealt with no more severely than they deserve. Who killed a house-dog outright, or a sheep-dog or personal dog or well-trained dog, was warned that in the next world his soul would go howling worse than a wolf in the depths of the forest; shunned by all other souls, growled at by the dogs that guard the bridge Chinvat. Eight hundred blows with a horse-goad are adjudged to the wretch who so injures a dog that it die. To strike or chase a bitch with young brings a dreadful curse. Much is said about the proper care of the mother and the puppies. To give a dog too hot food or too hard bones is as bad as turning apostate. His right food is milk and fat and lean meat. " Of all known creatures that 20R0ASTR1AN ZOOLOGY IJS which ages soonest is the dog left foodless among people who eat — who seeks here and there his food and finds it not." As a rule unnamed wild animals may be supposed to have been protected. The fox was considered a powerful daeva-scarer, which shows that not only in China did the fox seem an "uncanny" beast. In Iran his supernatural services made him highly esteemed. There seem to have been no cats though so many mice. The later Iran was destined to be a great admirer of cats, witness the praise of them by Persian poets, but it is not easy to fix the date when they were introduced. Monkeys were known and were attributed by a post-Avestic superstition to the union of human women and daevas. Vultures were sacred because they devoured good Mazdeans. On the whole, not much attention was paid to wild nature, with one striking exception : the extraordinary respect for the water-dog, beaver or otter. Suddenly the solid utilitarian basis of Zoroastrian zoology gives way and we behold a fabric of dreams. We might under- stand it better could we know the early animistic beliefs of Iran, though the trend of the A vesta apparently ran counter to old popular credences far more than with them. It should be remembered that water was only a little less sacred than fire in the Zoroastrian system ; the defilement of rivers was strictly forbidden. The Udra, or beaver, became the " luck " of the rivers : to destroy it would provoke a drought. If it was found roaming on the land, the Mazdean was bound to carry it to the nearest stream. In later legend, the Udra, even more than the fox, iS6 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT was a daeva-foe. But by far its most important characteristic is its mythical connexion with the dog. To the question : " What becomes of the aged dog when his strength fails him and he dies ? " follows the answer: "He goes to the dwelling in the water, where he is met by two water-dogs." These are his con- ductors to the dogs' paradise. A fair sward beneath the waters, cool and fresh in the summer heat, is at least a pleasant idea, but when the two water-dogs are described as consisting of one thousand male and one thousand female dogs, the myth seems to lose its balance which no proper myth ought to do. Myths have the habit of proceeding rationally enough in their own orbit. Later commentators reject this fantastic interpretation and suppose the verse to mean that the dog-soul is received, not by two, but by two thousand water-dogs, which in Oriental hyper- bole would mean merely "a great many." Be this as it may, Udra-murder was a frightful sin, and frightful were the penalties attached to it. Besides undergoing the usual blows with a horse-goad (to be self inflicted.-*) the murderer must kill ten thousand each of some half-dozen insects and reptiles : this, at least, is how it looks, but as a matter of fact the long lists of penalties in the Vendidzld must be taken not as cumulative, but as alternative. This is evident, though it is never stated, and it explains many things. A large number of the alternative punish- ments for beaver-killing take the form of offerings to the priests. Arms, whips, grindstones, handmills, house-matting, wine and food, a team of oxen, cattle both small and large, a suitable wife — the young ZOROASTRIAN ZOOLOGY 157 sister of the sinner — these are among the specified offerings. The culprit may also build a bridge, or breed fourteen dogs as an act of expiation ; in short, he may do any kind of meritorious deed, but something he must do, or it will be the worse for him in the world to come. The Vendid4d was not a code of criminal law enforced by the civil power, but an adjugation of penances for the atonement of sin. This was not understood at first, which caused the selection of punishments to appear more extravagant than it really is. For the most part the penances were active good works or things which were reckoned as such. Charity and alms-giving were always contemplated among the means of grace, and if they were not dwelt upon more continually, it was because there existed nothing comparable to modern destitution. Moreover, it was understood better than in other parts of the East that not every beggar was a saint : too often he was a lazy fellow who had shirked the common obligation of labour. The repetition of certain prayers was another practice recommended to the repentant sinner. But no good work or pious exercise was of any avail unless accompanied by sincere sorrow for having done wrong. The Law opened the door of grace, but to obtain it the heart must have become changed. God forgives those who truly desire His forgiveness. It is impossible to doubt that the spurious Mazdeism which got into Europe, distorted though it was, yet took with it the two great Mazdean doctrines of repentance and the remission of sin. Great ideas conquer, and it was by these two doctrines 158 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT that Mithraism so nearly conquered the Western world — not by its unlovely rites. On one or two points the human eschatology of Zoroastrianism is associated with dogs. A dog is brought into the presence of the dying man. This has been explained by reference to the dogs of Yama, the Vedic lord of death, and the European superstition about the howling of a dog being a death-portent is explained in the same way, but in both instances the immediate cause seems nearer at hand. An Indian officer once remarked to me that any one who had heard the true " death-howl " of a dog would never need any recondite reason for the uncomfortable feeling which it arouses. As regards the Zoroastrian dog, the immediate cause of the belief that he drives away evil spirits lies in the fact that he drives away thieves and prowlers in the night. Death being a pollution as the work of Ahriman, evil spirits beset the dying, but they flee at the sight of the dog, created by Ahura Mazda to protect man. The dead wander for three days near the tenantless body : then they go to the bridge Chinvat, where the division takes place between the good and the wicked. The bridge is guarded by dogs, who drive away all things evil from the path of the righteous, but do nothing to prevent bad spirits from tripping up sinners so that they fall into the pit. The good go into light, sinners into darkness, where Ahriman, " whose religion is evil," mocks them, saying: " Why did you eat the bread of Ahura Mazda and do my work ? and thought not of your own Creator but practised my will ? " Nothing is told of the punish- ZOROASTRIAN ZOOLOGY 159 ment of Ahriman — the doom of Evil is to be Evil — but in the end he will be utterly extinguished. Through time, but not through eternity the wicked remain in his power. In the Khordah Avesta it is said that God, after purifying all the obedient, will purify the wicked out of hell. In the words of a living Parsi writer : " The reign of terror, at the end of the stipulated time, vanishes into oblivion, and its chief factor, Ahriman, goes to meet his doom of total extinction, whilst Ahura Mazda, the Omnipotent Victor, remains the Great All in All." The Zoroastrian was as free as Socrates himself from the materialism which looks upon the body after death as if it were still the being that tenanted it. Some kind of renewed body the dead will have : meanwhile, this is not they ! The hope of immortality was so firm that it was thought an actual sin to give way to excessive mourning : the wailing and keening of the Jews seem to be here condemned, though they are not mentioned, there being no direct allusion to the religions of other peoples in the Avesta. There is a river of human tears which hinders souls on their way to beatitude : the dead would fain that the living check their tears which swell the river and make it hard to cross over in safety. The same idea is to be found in one of the most beautiful of Scandi- navian folk-songs. The small work known as the Book of Ardi Virif is a document of priceless worth to the student of Mazdean eschatology, and it is also of the greatest interest in its relation to ideas about animals. If printed in a convenient form, every humane person i6o THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT would carry it in his pocket. Like the vision of the Seer of Patmos this work is purely religious ; it attempts no criticism of life and man such as that em- bodied in the " Divina Commedia," but in spite of this difference in aim, there is an astonishing resemblance between its general plan and that of the poem of Dante., Without going into this subject, I may say that I cannot feel convinced that with the geographical, astronomical, and other knowledge of the East which is believed to have reached Dante by means of conversations with merchants, pilgrims and perhaps craftsmen (for that Italian artists worked in India at an early date the Madonna-like groups in many a remote Hindu temple bear almost certain testimony), there did not come to him also some report of the travels of the Persian visitant to the next world. The author of the Persian vision was a pious Mazdean whose whole desire was to revive religious feeling amid growing indifference. He is supposed to have lived not earlier than 500, and not later than 700 A.D. The former is the likelier date. Had the assault of Islam begun, the book must have borne traces of the struggle with invaders who threatened to annihilate the faith. The author states that the work was intended as an antidote in the first place to atheism and in the second to "the religions of many kinds " that were springing up. This probably con- tains a reference to Christian sects, but it is not the way that allusion would have been made to propa- gandists with a sword in their hands. Christian sects managed to recover from the first persecution in 344 A.D., after which they were more often than not ZOROASTRIAN ZOOLOGY i6i tolerated, though the Zoroastrian priesthood feared a Church that possessed an organisation so much like their own. They were accused, moreover, as at Rome, of being anti-national : everywhere the senti- ment against the Christians took a form closely resembling the anti-Semiticism of our days. Such accusations can hardly fail to create, to some extent, the thing they predicate, and it is no great wonder if in the end the Persian Christians received the Moslem invaders with favour. Though the essence of Mazdeism is peace to men of good-will, it is to be feared that the Zoroastrian priests (like others) were less tolerant than their creed, and that the harassing of the Christians generally originated with them. They are known to have counselled this policy to Homizd IV., who gave them the memorable answer that his royal throne could not stand on its front legs alone, but needed the support of the Christians and other sectaries as well as of the faithful. It was one of the wisest sayings that ever fell from the lips of a king and more Mazdean than all the bigotry of Zoroastrian clericalism. The author of Ardi Virif tried the perfectly legi- timate means of persuasion in rallying his country- men to their own religion. He tells the story of how, in an age of doubt, it was agreed that the best thing would be to send some one into the next world to see if Mazdeism were, indeed, the true religion. Lots fell on a very virtuous man named Ardd Virif, who was commissioned to make the journey in a trance-state produced by the administration of a narcotic. Even now, in India, children and others II i62 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT are given narcotics, sometimes of a dangerous sort, in order to obtain knowledge which is supposed to come to them whilst insensible. To a Mazdean the ordeal would be particularly terrible, because sleep, like death, was created by Ahriman. The calm fortitude with which Ard4 Virif submits, while' his family break into loud weeping, almost reminds one of the bearing of Socrates on the eve of a similar departure but one with no return. "It is the custom that I should pray to the departed souls and make a will," he says ; "when I have done that, give me the narcotic." His body was treated as though dead, being kept at the proper distance from fire and other sacred things, but priests stayed near it night and day, praying and reading the Scriptures, that the powers of ill might not prevail. At the end of seven days the wandering spirit of Ard^ Viraf re-entered his inanimate form, and after he had taken food and water and wine he called for a ready writer, to whom he dictated the tale of what he had seen. Guided by Srosh the Pious and Ataro the Angel (Virgil and Beatrice) the traveller visited heaven and hell. At the outset he saw the meeting of a righteous soul and its Fravashi. This soul crosses the Chinvat bridge in safety, and on the other side passes into an atmosphere laden with an ineffably sweet perfume which emanates from the direction of the presence of God. Here it meets a damsel more wondrously fair than aught it has beheld in the land of the living. Enraptured at the sight, it asks her name and receives the answer : "I am thine own good actions." Every good deed embellishes the ZOROASTRIAN ZOOLOGY 163 human soul's archetype, every evil deed mars and stains it with the hideousness of sin. This poetic and beautiful conception was not due to the author of Ardi Vir4f : it is taken from the venerable pages of the Avesta itself. In the abode of Punishment the most impressive penalties are those undergone by the souls which have tortured helpless infants or dumb animals. The mother who feeds another's child from greed and starves her own, is seen digging into an iron hill with her breasts while the cry of her child for food comes ever from the other side of the hill, " but the infant comes not to' the mother nor the mother to the infant." Here the supreme anguish is mental : it is caused by the awakening of that maternal instinct which the woman stifled on earth. Has the Inferno any thought so luminously subtle as this.'' The woman-soul will never reach her child "till the re- newal of the world." Till the renewal of the world ! Across the hell-fog penetrates the final hope ! The unfaithful wife who destroys the fruit of her illicit love sufifers a horrible punishment. It is strange that if we wish to find an analogy to these severe judgments on offences against infancy, we must go to a small tribe of Dravidian mountaineers in the Nilgiri hills, among whose folk-songs is one which describes a vision of heaven and hell. In this a woman is shown who is condemned to see her own child continually die, because she refused help to a stranger's child, saying: "It is not mine!" Those who treated their beasts cruelly, who over- worked them, overloaded them, gave them insufficient i64 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT food, continued to work them when they suffered from sores caused by leanness instead of trying to cure the sores, are seen by ArdU Virif hung up head downwards while a ceaseless rain of stones falls on their backs. Those who wantonly killed animals have a knife driven ceaselessly into their hearts. Those who muzzled the ox which ploughed the furrows are dashed under the feet of cattle. The same punishment falls to those who forget to give water to the oxen in the heat of the day or who worked them when hungry and thirsty. Demons like dogs constantly tear the man who kept back food from shepherds'-dogs and house-dogs or who beat or killed them: he offers bread to the dogs, but they eat it not and only tear the more. Arda Vlrif tells a story which belongs to the cycle of " Sultan Murad," immortalised by Victor Hugo. A certain lazy man named Dav4n6s, who never did any other thing of good during all the years when he governed many provinces, once cast a bundle of grass with his right foot to within the reach of a ploughing-ox. Hence his right foot is exempted from torment while the rest of his body is gnawed by noxious creatures. It is easy to imagine that the realistic picture of heaven and hell by a poet of no little power produced the deepest effect on the minds of people, who for the most part took it to be literally true. No Oriental work ever became more popular or was more widely read and translated. People still living can remember the time when it was the habit of the Parsis at Bombay to have public readings of Ard4 Vlr^f, on ZOROASTRIAN ZOOLOGY 165 which occasions the audience, especially the feminine part of it, broke into violent sobbing from the ex- citement caused by the description of the punishment of the wicked. The Parsis have abandoned now the theory that the book is other than a work of imagi- nation, but it may be hoped that they will not cease to regard it as a cherished legacy from their fathers and a precious bequest to their children. VIII A RELIGION OF RUTH ' AN Englishman who went to see a Hindu saint was deterred from entering the cave where the holy man lived by the spectacle of numerous rats. The hermit, observing his hesitation, inquired what was the matter? " Don't you see them ? " answered his visitor. "Yes," was the brief reply. "Why don't you kill them ? " asked the Englishman. "Why should I kill them?" said the native of the land. Finding the whole onus of the discussion thrown on his shoulders, the English traveller felt that it would be difficult with his limited knowledge of the language to express a European's ideas about rats. He thought to sum up the case in one sen- tence : " We people kill them." To which the saint answered : " We people don't kill them." In another country, but still among a race which has inherited the habit of looking at questions be- tween man and animals not exclusively from the man's point of view, a learned professor proposed to an old gardener at Yezd that they should dig up an ant-hill to ascertain if the local prejudice were true which insisted that inside each ant-hill there lodged two scorpions. The old Persian declined to be a 166 A RELIGION OF RUTH 167 party to any such proceeding. "As long as the scorpions stay inside," he said with decision, "we have no right to molest them and to do so would bring ill-luck." These anecdotes show, amusingly and convincingly, the wall of demarcation between Eastern and Western thought by which the son of the West is apt to find his passage barred. They serve my purpose in quot- ing them the better because they are not connected with the religious sect whose precepts I am going to sketch. They illustrate what I believe to be true, namely, that this sect and Buddhism itself would not have made their way in so wonderful a manner, seemingly almost without effort, had they not found the ground prepared by a racial tendency to fly to the doctrine of Ahimsa, or " non-killing," which forms part of their systems. No religion prevails unless it appeals to some chord, if not of the human heart everywhere, at least of the particular human hearts to which it is directed. In the West a religion based on Vegetarianism would not have a chance. Not that there exists no trace of the life-preserving instinct among Western peoples — far from that. All nice children have it and all saints of the type of him of Assisi. Other people have it who are neither children, nor saints, rujr yet lunatics ("though by your smiling you seem to say so "). I know an old hero of the Siege of Delhi who to this day would stoop to lift a worm from his path. But the sentiment, which in the West is rather a secret thing, forming a sort of freemasonry among those who feel it, asserts its sway in the East i68 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT in the broad light of day. No one there would mind giving the fullest publicity to his opinion that the scorpion has as good a right to live undisturbed in his domestic ant-hill as you have in your suburban villa; Long before the Jainas made Akimsa a gateway to perfection, innumerable Asiatics practised and even preached the very same rule. It was the bond of union between all the religious teachers and ascetics who constituted a well-defined feature in Indian life from remote if not from the earliest antiquity. The founders of Jainism and of Buddhism, too, were Gurus like the rest, only they possessed an intensified magnetic influence and, at least in Buddha's case, an unique genius. Every Eastern religion has been taught by a Guru, not excepting the most divine of them all.' In the occurrence of a new religious evolution much depends on the individual, but much also on the fulness of time. When Buddhism and Jainism arose, the psychological moment was come for a change or modification in the current faith. To some degree, both were a revolt against Sacer- dotalism. Men were told that they could work out their salvation without priestly aid or intervention. The new teachers, though each springing from the class of the feudal nobility, won to their side the ' " It is stated of the Divine Founder of the Christian religion that without a parable spoke He not to the people. Christ, in fact, acted and taught as an Oriental Guru, a character which none of the European writers of Christ's life has invested Him with " (Rev. J. Long : v. " Oriental Proverbs " in the Report of the Proceedings of the Second Congress of Orientalists). \ \ * ^ A RELIGION OF RUTH 169 \ \ \ surging wave of the only kind of democratic yearning which, till now, Asia has known — the yearning for religious equality. Professor Hermann Jacobi (the foremost authority on Jainism, to whom all who study the subject owe an unbounded debt) suggests that there was a certain friction between the highly meri- torious of the noble and the priestly castes because the priests were inclined to look down on the layman saint. To this category belonged Sakya Muni, who was the younger son of a prince, or, as we should say, a feudal lord, and who renounced rank and riches to become a recluse. The same family history is told of Mahavira, whom the Jainas claim to be their founder. For a long time Europeans believed the two religions to have but one source, and Jainism was dismissed as a Buddhist sect. The Jainas, however, always strongly held that they had a founder of their own, namely, Mahavira, and they even declared that Buddha was not his master but his disciple. After much research, Professor Jacobi de- cided the case in their favour by assigning to them a separate origin. Both Sakya Muni and Mahavira are generally believed to have flourished in the sixth century B.C. The confusion of the Jainas with the Buddhists and even with the Brahmans has made it difficult to reckon their present numbers : in the census of 1901 they are estimated at 1,334,138, chiefly living in the Bombay Presidency, but this does not tell us their real number. Jainas are to be found almost everywhere in Upper India, in the West and South and along the Ganges. They inhabit the towns I70 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT more than the country. In treating ancient Indian religions the living document is always round the corner, ready to be called into the witness-box, and the Jainas of to-day can give a good account of themselves. Every one has a good word for them ; a friend of mine, than whom few know India better, describes them thus : "A tall, fair, handsome, good and humble lot they are and terribly bullied they are by their more bellicose fellow-countrymen, who all look on Jainas as made for them to pilfer, but the Jainas never turn on their persecutors." In spite of their meekness, they are good men of business, which is proved by their remarkable success in commerce. Perhaps it is not such bad policy to be peaceful, and helpful, and honest as a cynical century supposes. The Jainas say of Mahavira that he was one of a long line of holy ascetics twenty-four of whom are venerated in their temples under the name of Tirth- akaras or Jinas, " Conquerors " in the sense of having conquered the flesh. Needless to point out that the founders of great religious systems invariably accept this principle of evolution : they complete what others began, and in due time a new manifestation will arrive either in the form of a more perfect revelation of themselves or in that of a fore-destined successor. The Buddhists now await Matreya, or " the Buddha of kindness." The Jainas have not added to their twenty-four glorified beings, but there is nothing to prevent them from doing so. To these specimens of perfected humanity they have raised some of the most glorious temples ever lifted by the hand of A RELIGION OF RUTH 171 man towards heaven. Tier on tier mount the ex- quisitely beautiful towers of the Jaina cathedrals in the most lonely part of the Muklagerri hills. They seem like the Parsifal music turned into stone : an allegory of the ascent of the soul from corruption to incorruption, from change to permanency. The desire to worship something finds a vent in the reverence paid to the Tirthakaras, but the Jaina religion admits neither relics nor the iteration of prayers. The building of splendid shrines and of refuges for man and beast are the particular means of grace open to the Jaina who cannot comply in all respects with the exacting demands of his scrip- tures, which, were they literally fulfilled, would leave no one on the world but ascetics. The wealthy Jaina is only too glad to avail himself of the chance of acquiring some merit, however far it must fall short of the highest. Besides this, in moments of religious fervour temple-building becomes a frenzy : whole races are swept along by the blind impulse to incarnate their spiritual cravings in spires or pagodas or minarets pointing to the sky — the eternal symbol. The greatest of Jaina temples mark the epoch of some such wave of spiritual emotion. The Jaina scriptures, which were first collected from aural report and written down by a learned man in the sixth century a.d., are really a Rule of Discipline for monks, and not a guide for the mass of mankind. If we could imagine the only Christian Scripture being the immortal book of Thomas a Kempis, we should form the idea of a very similar state of things. It is surprising not how little but how much of this 172 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT rigid rule is followed by every Jaina to this day, be he monk or layman. The vegetarian principle in- volved in Ahimsa is observed rigorously by all — clearly with no bad effect on health after a trial of about twenty-four centuries, for the Jainas' physique is excellent, and they are less subject to disease than the other communities. They strain and boil water before drinking, and whatever may be said of the motive, the practice must be highly commended. They are also often to be seen wearing a mouth-cloth to prevent them from swallowing flies, and they carry little brooms with which they sweep insects out of their path. The hospitals for sick animals begin to be better managed than formerly, when they incurred much censure as mere conglomerations of hopeless suffering to relieve which practical means were not taken. A folly adopted by the more fanatical Jainas at the time of their origin was that of going " sky clad," which makes it probable that they were the gymnosophists known to the Greeks. They saw well later to limit this practice to certain times and occasions or to abandon it for the far more pleasant one of wearing white garments. Buddha warned his followers against the " sky-clad " aberration. He disagreed with the Jainas on a more vital point in the view he took of penance and self-inflicted torture. It shows the high intellectuality of the man that towards the end of his life he pronounced penance, though he had gone through much of it himself, to be vanity of vanities. The Jainas took the opposite view' : " Subdue the body just as fire consumes old wood." They hold that merit is bound up with a A RELIGION OF RUTH 173 certain definite and tangible thing: the Buddhist, more philosophically, makes it consist in intention. This is the chief doctrinal difference between Jaina and Buddhist, and though each is bound to charity and the Jaina is particularly enjoined by his scriptures not to turn other people's religion into ridicule, it has to be confessed that in their frequent disputes they spare no pains and neglect no arts of Socratic reason- ing to reduce each other's theories to an absurdity. Irony is a weapon always used in Indian religious discussion. Mahavira himself " fulfilled the law " by allowing gnats, flies, and other things to bite him and crawl over him for four months without ever once losing his equanimity. It is told that he met all sorts of pleasant or unpleasant events with an even mind whether they arose from divine powers, men, or animals. The Jainas did not deny that there were divine powers : there might be any number of them, and the influence they wielded for good or for ill (I think especially for ill) was not inconsiderable. Only they were not morally admirable like a man victorious through suffering. The greater willingness of the Jainas to admit gods into the wheel of being, and even to allow some homage to be paid to them, was one reason why they clashed less with the Brahmans. After the subsidence of Buddhism the Jainas managed to go on existing, somewhat despised and annoyed, but tolerated. While both Buddhists and Jainas place the prohibi- tion to take life at the head of their law, its application is infinitely more thoroughgoing among the Jainas, 174 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT who also attach to it ideas which have no place in Buddhist metaphysics. From the Jaina position, it seems to imply a tendency to primitive animism, though it is hard to say whether this comes from a real process of retrogression or simply from the Indo-Aryan desire for a synthesis — the more easily attained the more you assume. It is startling to hear that in the last census over eight millions were returned as animists — it proves that the old credences die hard. The Jainas took into their soul-world fire, water, wind, shooting plants and germinating seeds. The disciplinary results must have been inconvenient, but a religion was never less popular because it put its devotees to inconvenience. Those who still clung to animistic beliefs were already prepared to see a soul in the flickering fire, the rushing water, the grow- ing blade. We all have odds and ends of animism ; did not Coventry Patmore say : " There is something human in a tree " .-* With more detail the Jaina observes that trees and plants are born and grow old ; they distinguish the seasons, they turn towards the sun, the seeds grow up : how, then, shall we deny all knowledge to them? "The asoka buds and blossoms when touched by a fair girl's feet." Can we help recalling the familiar lines in the " Sensitive Plant"?— " I doubt not the flowers ot that garden sweet Rejoiced in the sound of her gentle feet ; I doubt not they felt the spirit that came From her glowing fingers thro' all their frame." Now, Science, which is on the way to becoming very kind to man's early beliefs, comes forward in the A RELIGION OF RUTH 175 person of Mr. Francis Darwin to tell us that plants have "mind" and "intelligence," especially the hop and the bryony. All fairy-tales will come true if we wait long enough. Once, and once only, in Jaina writings I have noticed it given as a distinct reason for sparing plants and trees, that they may contain the transmigrated soul of a man. Even in the case of animals the doctrine of transmigration is rarely adduced as the reason for not killing them, though it is fully accepted by Jainas in common with all the Indian sects sprung from Brahmanism by which it was started. Coming to the Indian views of animals from those which antiquity represented as the preaching of Pythagoras, we expect to see this argument put forward at every turn, but it is not. In Jaina writings the incentive is humanity : to do to others as we would be done by. It is true that as an aid to this incentive, the cruel are threatened with the most awful punishments. In Indian sacred writings one is wearied by the nice balance constantly drawn between every deed and its consequences to the doer for a subsequent millennium. In mediaeval monkish legends we find exactly the same device for keeping the adept in the paths of virtue, but wherever we find it, we sigh for the spontaneous emotion of pity of the Good Samaritan who never reflected "If I do not get off my ass and go to help that Jew, how very bad it will be for my Karman ! " We ought not to forget in this connexion that rewards and punishments have not the same meaning to the Indian as to us : they are not extraneous prizes 176 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT or penalties, but the working out of a mathematical problem which we both set and solve for ourselves. It is utterly impossible to escape from the con- sequences of our evil acts : they are debts which must be paid, though we may set about performing good acts which will make our future happiness exceed our future misery in time and extent. The highest good comes of itself, automatically, to him who merits it, as is illustrated with great beauty in the Jaina story of the White Lotus. This flower, the symbol of perfection, bloomed in the centre of a pool and was descried by many who made violent efforts to reach it, but they were all set fast in the mud. Then came a holy ascetic who stood motionless on the bank. " O white Lotus, fly up ! " he said, and the White Lotus flew to his breast. Even among Indian sects which all abound in this kind of composition the Jainas are remarkable for their wealth of moral tales and apothegms. As is well known, they possess a parable called " The Three Merchants," closely resembling the parable of the Talents as told by Matthew and Luke, and still more exactly agreeing with the version given in the so-called " Gospel according to the Hebrews." The theory of Karman suggests several modern scientific speculations such as the idea that the brain retains an ineffaceable print of every impression received by it, and again, the extreme view of heredity which makes the individual the moral and physical slave of former generations. It is a theory which has the advantage of disposing of many riddles. Different sects have slightly varying opinions A RELIGION OF RUTH 177 about the nature of the Karman: the Jainas see in this receptacle of good and evil deeds a material, though supersensual, reality with a physical basis. Each individual consists of five parts : the visible body, the vital energy thought to consist of fire, or, as we might say, of electricity, the Karman and two subliminal selves which appear to be only latent in most persons, but by which, when called into activity, the individual can transform himself, travel to distances and do other unusual things. That each man is provided with a wraith or double is an old and widely-spread belief; but in Western lore the double does not seem to be commanded by its pair : it rather moves like an unconscious, wandering photo- graph of him. The Jainas have the same word for the soul and for life : giva, and this name they bestow on the whole range of things which they consider as living : the elements, seeds, plants, animals, men, gods. One would think that the sense of personal identity would become vague in the contemplation of voyages over so vast a sea of being, but, on the contrary, this identity is the one thing about which the individual seems perfectly sure. We have frequently such utterances as : " My own self is the doer and the undoer of misery and happiness ; my own self is friend and foe." A sort of void seems spread round the individual which even family affection, very strong though it has always been in India, is powerless to bridge. A lovely testimony to this affection, and at the same time an avowal of its unavailingness, is to be found in the one single exception to the Jaina 12 178 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT law that the wholly virtuous man must desire nothing, not even Nirvana must he desire, much less earthly love or friendship. But he may desire to take upon him the painful illness of one of his dear kindred. It is added sadly, however, that never has such a desire been fulfilled, for one man cannot take upon him the pains of another, neither can he feel what another feels. " Man is born alone, he dies alone, he falls alone, he rises alone. His passions, consciousness, intellect, perceptions and impressions belong to him exclusively. Another cannot save him or help him. He grows old, his hair turns white, even this dear body he must relinquish — none can stay the hour." Again it is written : — " Man ! thou art thy own friend, why wishest thou for a friend beyond thyself .''" The isolation of the soul with its paramount impor- tance to its owner (that is to say, to itself) makes it obligatory to pursue its interests even at the expense of the most sacred affections. The Pagan, the Jew, the Moslem could not have been brought to yield assent to this doctrine, but it meets us con- tinually in Catholic hagiology ; for instance, St. Francois de Sales told Madame de Chantal that she ought, if needful, to walk into the cloister over the dead body of her son. So in a Jaina story, father, mother, wife, child, sister, brother try in vain to wrest a holy young man from his resolve to leave them. In vain the old people say: "We will do all the work if you will only come home ; come, child ! We will pay your debts ; you need not stay longer A RELIGION OF RUTH 179 than you like — only come home ! " The quite admir- able young man (who sets one furiously wishing for a stout birch rod) proceeds on his way unmoved. But it is remarked, " At such appeals the weak break down like old, worn-out oxen going up hill." We prefer the weak. Who was the first anchorite ? Perhaps in very early states of society a few individuals got lost in the mountain or forest, where they lived on fruits and nuts, and then, after a long time, some of them were re-discovered, and, because they seemed so strange and mysterious after their long seclusion, they were credited with supernatural gifts. Animals do not go away alone except in the rare case of being seized with mania, or in the universal case of feeling the approach of death. The origin of hermits cannot, therefore, be explained by analogy with animals. One can conceive that a hermit's life may have great attractions, but scarcely that of a Jaina hermit, who is expected to employ his leisure in the most painful mortification of the flesh. Though other- worldly advantages form the great object which spurs men to choose such a lot we must not forget that this sort of life is held to confer powers which are, by no means, other-worldly. By it the Brahman becomes superior to caste, being incapable of pollu- tion : if he wished he could drink after the most miserable Western had touched the cup. The theory of asceticism is very much alike every- where, and the extraordinary faculties claimed by the Jainas for their holy men are the portion, more or less, of the Indian holy man in general. These i8o THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT faculties may be briefly described as an abnormal development of the subliminal self, but that is not an adequate account of the vastness of their range. One feels often inclined to ask — without granting revelation or, indeed, the existence of an omniscient being who could give it — how does the Buddhist or Jaina acquire perfect certainty that he knows all about his own and man's destiny? The question of authority is of primary importance in all religions : in what way does Buddhist or Jaina solve it ? It is evident that scepticism based on this very ground does sometimes harass the soul of the Jaina novice : " The weak," we are told, "when bitten by a snarling dog or annoyed by flies and gnats, will begin to say : ' / have not seen the next world, all may end with death.' " It startles one to hear from the mouth of the devil's advocate in an ancient Eastern homily a cry so modern, so Western : — *' Death means heaven, he longs to receive it, But what shall I do if I don't believe it ? " ' Sir Alfred Lyall's questioner found none to answer him, but the Jaina has an answer which, if accepted, must prove entirely satisfactory. The superlatively virtuous individual possesses an effortless certainty about the secrets of life. In a state superinduced by means which, though arduous, are at the disposal of all, the soul can view itself, read its history, past, present and to come, know the souls of others, remember what happened in former births, understand the heavenly bodies and the universe. Here is ' " Verses written in India," p. 13. A RELIGION OF RUTH i8i nothing miraculous : a veil is lifted, and hidden things become plain. It is as if a man who had cataract in both eyes underwent a successful operation — after which he sees. The supersensual perception of Jaina, or Joghi, or Guru is much akin to the "infused knowledge" ascribed to the saints of the Thebaid. He knows — because he knows. By the devout, information de- rived from these persons is accepted as readily as we should accept information about radium from a qualified scientific man. The most confident of all that the information is true is he who gives it : fraud must be dismissed finally as the key to any such phenomena. The Indian mind has grasped a great idea in referring what we call spirit to fixed laws no less than what we call matter. But in spirit it sees a force infinitely exceeding the force of matter. "The holy monk," say the Jaina scriptures, "might reduce millions to ashes by the fire of his wrath." Besides such tremendous powers as these he has all the minor accomplishments of the spiritualist or hypnotist : thought-reading, levitation, clairvoyance, &c., and he can always tame wild beasts. He is under strict obligations to use his powers with discretion. It is not right to make profit out of them : that man is anathema who lives by divination from dreams, diagrams, sticks, bodily changes, the cries of animals. The Jainas denounce magic not less strongly than the other religious teachers of the East. This is interesting because the reasons are lacking which are commonly held to explain the i82 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT world-wide prejudice against magic : the Jainas do not attribute it to the agency of evil spirits, nor can their dislike of it be attributed to the professional jealousy of priests in regard to rival thaumaturgists. For the Jaina the power (Jf magic-working lies in every one, and those who have developed their other spiritual powers have also this one at their command, but to avail themselves of it is an enormous sin. There is a weird story showing what infamies a magic- working " ascetic " may perpetrate. A monk carried off, by magical arts, all the women he met, till the king of that country trapped him in a hollow tree and had him put to death. The women were set free and returned to their husbands, except one, who refused to go back because she had fallen desperately in love with her seducer. A very wise man suggested that the monk's bones should be pounded and mixed with milk, and then given to the woipan to drink : this was done and she was cured of her passion. Over the whole East, the report that some one was working miracles, even the most beneficent, raised both suspicion and jealousy. This was why secrecy was recommended about all such acts. How far the belief in the extraordinary gifts of the ascetic rests on hallucination, and how far mfen in an artificially created abnormal condition can do things of which hypnotic manifestations are but the outer edge, it is not my purpose to inquire. The Jaina monks are said sometimes to fast for four days, and no doubt the stimulus of starvation (especially when the brain has not been weakened by long disease), produces an ecstatic state which men A RELIGION OF RUTH 183 have everywhere supposed to indicate religious perfection. This may be observed even in birds, which from some difficulty in swallowing, die of starvation : I had a canary that sang for days before it died a sweet incessant song, the like of which I never heard : it seemed not earthly. The best side in Eastern religions is not their thaumaturgy but the steady ethical tendency which pushes itself up out of the jungle of extravagance and self-delusion. Though we may not have much sympathy with the profession of a "houseless" saint, it is impossible to deny the moral elevation of such a picture of him as is drawn in the Jaina conversion story of "The True Sacrifice." A holy man, born in the highest Brahmanical caste, but who had found wisdom in Jaina vows, went on a long journey and walked and walked till he came to Benares, where he found a very learned Brahman who was deeply versed in astronomy and in the Vedas. When the " Houseless " arrived, the priest was about to offer up sacrifice, and perhaps because he did not wish to be disturbed at such a moment, he told him rudely to go away — he would have no beggars there. The holy man was not angry ; he had not come to extort food or water, but from the pure desire to save souls. He quietly told the priest that he was ignorant of the essence of the Vedas, of the true meaning of sacrifice, of the government of the heavenly bodies. There must have been a peculiar effluence of sanctity flowing from the " Houseless " as the priest took his rebukes with meekness, and merely asked for enlightenment. Then the seer delivered his message. It is not the i84 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT tonsure that makes the priest or repetition of the sacred syllable om that makes the saint. It is not by dwelling in woods or by wearing clothes of bark or grass that salvation may be reached. Equanimity, chastity, knowledge, and penance are the ways to holiness. His actions alone colour a man's soul : as his works are, so is he. Persuaded of the truth, the priest addressed the " Houseless " as the truest of sacrificers, the most learned of all who know the Vedas, the inspired exponent of Brahmanhood, and begged him to accept his alms. But the mendicant refused : he only conjured the priest out of pity for his own soul to join the order of the " Houseless." After having been rightly schooled in Jaina precepts, the Brahman followed his advice, and in due time he became a very great saint like his instructor. As the Jaina scriptures are in effect a manual of discipline for monks, it is natural that they should be severe on womankind. Not that a woman's soul is worth less than a man's or, rather, since spirit is sexless, the distinction does not exist. A woman may be as good a saint as a man ; a nun may be as meritorious as a monk. The identity of mysticism independent of creed was never more apparent than in the beautiful saying of a Jaina nun : " As a bird dislikes the cage, so do I dislike the world," which might have been uttered by any of the self-consumed spirits of the Latin Church from St. Teresa down- wards. I have never come across an allusion to being born again as a woman as a punishment. But though the fullest potentiality of merit is allowed to woman in the abstract, the Eternal Feminine is A RELIGION OF RUTH 185 looked upon in the concrete as man's worst snare. " Women are the greatest temptation in the world." The Jaina books are Counsels of Perfection and not a Decalogue framed for common humanity : they give one the idea of being intended for preternatur- ally good people, and never more so than in the manner in which they treat the dreadful snares and temptations for which women are answerable : instead of a Venusberg, we are shown — the domestic hearth! The story in question might be called "The Woes of the Model Husband ! " A girl who vowed that she would do anything rather than be parted from the dear object of her affections, has no sooner settled the matter once for all by marriage than she begins to scold and trample on the poor man's head. Her spouse is sent on a thousand errands, not one moment can he call his own. Countless are the lady's wants and her commands keep pace with them : " Do look for the bodkin ; go and get some fruit ; bring wood to cook the vegetables ; why don't you come and rub my back instead of standing there doing nothing .■* Are my clothes all right .■* Where is the scent-bottle ? I want the hair-dresser. Where is my basket to put my things in ? And my trinkets? There, I want my shoes and my umbrella. Bring me my comb and the ribbon to tie up my hair. Get the looking-glass and a tooth-brush. I must have a needle and thread. You really ought to look after the stores, the rainy season will be here in no time." These and many more are the young wife's behests, the appalling list of which might well intimidate those about to marry, but there is worse to come. £86 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT When "the joy of their lives, the crown of their "wedded bliss" arrives in the shape of a baby, it is the unfortunate husband who is set to mind it : he has to get up in the night to sing lullabies to it "just as if he were a nurserymaid," and ashamed though he is of such a humiliation, he is actually put to wash the baby-linen ! " All this has been done by many men who for the sake of pleasure have stooped so low ; they become the equals of slaves, animals, beasts of burden, mere nobodies." Would not most readers take this for a quotation from one of Ibsen's plays rather than from a sacred volume which was composed a considerable time before the beginning of our era? The Indian pessimist is withheld from suicide by the dread of a worse existence beyond the pyre. He is the coward of conscience to a much greater extent than the weary Occidental, because his sense of the unseen is so much stronger. In the Jaina system, however, suicide is permitted under certain circumstances. After twelve years of rigorous pen- ance a man is allowed the supreme favour of "a religious death " — in other words, he may commit suicide by starvation. This is called Itvara. The civilised Indian does not seem to have the power of dying when he pleases without the assistance of starvation which is possessed by some of the higher savage races. The soul may be re-born in any earthly form from the lowest to the highest, but there are other possi- bilities before it when it leaves its mortal coil. Those who are very bad, too bad to disgrace the earth A RELIGIOI>J OF RUTH 187 again — above all, the cruel — are consigned to an Inferno more awful than Dante's, though not without points of striking resemblance to it. The very good who abounded in charity and in truth, but who yet lived in the world the life of the world, become gods, glorified beings enjoying a great measure of happiness and power, but not eternal. Far beyond the joys of this heaven, which are still thinkable, is the unthink- able bliss of the Perfect, of the Conquerors, of the Changeless. The human mind could not adjust the idea of evolution more scientifically to the soul's destiny. It is unnecessary to say that the number who become even gods is very small. A great deal is achieved if a man is simply born again as a man, for though Jaina and Buddhist thinks that man's lot is wretched (or, at least that it ought to be when we consider its inherent evils), yet it must be distinctly remembered that he thinks the life of beasts far more wretched. Leopardi's " Song of the Nomadic Shepherd in Asia," in which he makes the world- weary shepherd envy the fate of his sheep, is steeped in Western not in Eastern pessimism : only in the last lines, which really contradict the rest, we find the true Eastern note : — " Perchance in every form That Nature may on everything bestow The day of birth brings everlasting woe." The Indian seems never to be struck by what to us seems (perhaps in error, but I hope not) the inconscient joy of creatures, nor yet that of children. i88 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT He is constantly sure that all creation groaneth and travaileth. Nothing is young in Asia, all is very old. Every one is tired. In our minds thoughtless joy is connected with innocency, and in these Indian creeds there is no innocency as there is no effortless All-Good. Perfection is the result of labour. No other religious teacher spoke of little children as Christ did — Christ, whose incomprehensible followers were one day to consign the larger part of them, as a favour, " to the easiest room in hell." Ardently as children are desired and lovingly as they are treated in the East, something essential to the charm of childhood eludes the Oriental perception of it. In the sacred books of those Indian communities which concern themselves most about animals, they are very rarely shown in an attractive light. The horse, almost alone, is spoken of with genuine admiration ; for instance, there is this simile : "As the trained Kambdga steed whom no noise frightens, exceeds all other horses in speed, so a very learned monk is superior to all others." An elephant is extolled for having knelt down before a holy recluse though only newly tamed, and we hear that Ma- havira's words were understood by all animals. Folk-lore tells much that scriptures do not tell, and if we had a collection of Jaina folk-lore we should find, no doubt, records of charming friendships between beasts and saints, but in the Jaina sacred books pity, not love, is the feeling shown towards animals. As a rule, Indian philosophical writers shirk the question of how far the soul which was and may "-^i^».^^x ^k^ BUDDHA PACIFYING AN INTOXICATED ELEPHANT. India Museum. [To face page i88. A RELIGION OK RUTH 189 be again a man's retains its consciousness during its residence in lower forms. Probably the answer, were it given, would be : "Not very far," but the higher animals are credited with a fuller share of reflection than in the West. Hence it is preferable to assume the shape of one of the higher than of one of the lower organisms, but still it is far better to be re-born as the lowest of men than as the highest of animals. If it is something to be re-born as a man at all, it is a great deal to be re-born as a fortunate man, healthy, wealthy, and surrounded by troops of friends : at least, to the simple-minded such a pros- pect must appear to hold out a very splendid hope. It is remarkable what good care the framers of the intensely ascetic Jaina faith took of people who could not pretend to walk in the path of the elect. The mere " householder " (so called to distinguish him from the more admirable " Houseless ") has the promise of an ample recompense if he is only truthful, and humane, and liberal in alms-giving and temple-building. He may win very great promotion on earth or even a place in the Jaina heaven, the abode of light, where happy beings live long and enjoy great power and energy, and never grow old. Such a state agrees with the logical evolution of a virtuous but still this-worldly man. Could he aspire sincerely to a more spiritual state, and can the soul outsoar its own aspirations ? The Jaina heaven is not eternal, but does every one wish for eternity? Most people wish for ten or fifteen years of tolerable freedom from care on this side of the grave. If they 190 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT knew for certain that they were going to enjoy one thousand years of heaven, they would not think much of what would happen at the end of that time. There remain the pure and separated spirits who in this present life have climbed beyond the plane of mortality. They are in the world, not of it, and they, indeed, " have a glimpse of incomprehensibles and thoughts of things which thoughts but tenderly touch." For these, the Jaina, like the Buddhist, keeps Nirvana. The extreme reticence of Buddha and even of Buddhist commentators on the inner significance of this word — meaning literally " liberation " — is not observed by the Jainas, though it must not be in- ferred that there was any doctrinal difference of it in the view taken by the two sects. The Jainas show a great anxiety to tell what Nirvana is ; if they fail it is because it baffles all description. They re- pudiate the idea that it signified annihilation, but admit that the subject oversteps the bounds of the thinkable. " The liberated soul perceives and knows, but there is no analogy by which to describe it — without body, re-birth, sex, dimensions." We think of the wonderful lines in the Helena of Euripides : — " . . . . the mind Of the dead lives not, but immortal sense When to immortal ether gone, possesses ;" lines which, like not a few others in Euripides, seem to reflect a light not cast from Grecian skies. Like every stage in the history of the life-soul {givd) Nirvana is governed by an immutable law of A RELIGION OF RUTH 191 evolution. When all the dross is eliminated only- pure spirit is left : a distilled essence not only in- destructible, for spirit is always indestructible, but also changeless. All the rest dies, which means that it changes, that it is re-born : this part can die no more, and hence can be born no more. It has gained the liberty of which the soul goes seeking in the Dantesque sense. It has gained safety, rest, peace. How familiar the words sound ! Here am I in Asia, and I could dream myself back under the roof of the village church where generations of simple folk had sought a rest-cure for their minds : where I, too, first listened to those words safety, rest, peace, with the strange home-sickness they awaken in young children or in the very old who have pre- served their childhood's faith. There are words that, by collecting round them inarticulate longings and indefinite associations, finally leave the order of language and enter that of music ; they evoke an emotion, not an idea. The emotions which sway the human heart are few, and they are very much alike. The self-same word-music transports the English child to the happy land, far, far away, and the Indian mystic to Nirvana. Almost everything which the Jainas say of Nirvana might have been said by any follower of any spiritual religion who attempted to suggest a place of final beatitude. "There is a safe place in view of all, but hard to approach, where there is no old age, nor death, nor pain, nor disease. This place which is in view of all is called Nirvana or freedom from pain. 192 THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN HUMAN THOUGHT or it is called perfection ; it is the safe, happy, quiet place. It is the eternal haven which is in view of all, but is difficult to approach." Nirvana is the getting- well of the soul. "He will put away all the misery which always afflicts man- kind ; as it were, recovered from a long illness, he becomes infinitely happy and obtains the final aim." We are told that the Buddhas that were and the Buddhas that will be, have peace for their foundation, even as all things have the earth for their foundation. (The term Buddha, or " Enlightened," is used by Jainas as well as by Buddhists for super-excellent beings.) Nirvana may or rather must be possessed before the death of the visible body : it must be obtained by the living if it is to be enjoyed by the dead. Detachment from the world, self-denial, selflessness, help the soul on its way, but the two moral qualities which are absolutely essential are kindness and veracity. Ruth and truth are written over the portals of eternity. "He should cease to injure living things whether they move or not, on high, below or on earth, for this has been called Nirvana, which consists in peace." "A sage setting out for Nirvana should not speak untruth: this rule comprises Nirvana and the whole of carefulness." If a novice does anything wrong, he should never deny it : if he has not done it he should say, " I have not done it." A lie must never be told — "not even in jest or in anger." Were there nothing else of good in Jaina discipline this devotion to truth would place it high on mankind's mountain. -, ^^^^vl'^^' ll 1 rmma '^^^^^HHr*^' '9 i flH| \ r > _^5Pn 1 j^RhMh^^^^ -.:ih^ ^ ^ Wfe'-. -'^^1 ^ 1 ^^^^^' '^^^^H i^^' -.^1 Brv :|^| ^^D ^^^^m s 1 '^ 'J^H 2 -