MYTH, RITUAL, AND RELIGION

 

by Andrew Lang

 

 

 

 

Volume One

 

 

 

 

CONTENTS

 

 

PREFACE TO NEW IMPRESSION.

 

PREFACE TO NEW EDITION.

 

CHAPTER I. -- SYSTEMS OF MYTHOLOGY.

 

Definitions of religion--Contradictory evidence--"Belief in

spiritual beings"--Objection to Mr. Tylor's definition--Definition

as regards this argument--Problem: the contradiction between

religion and myth--Two human moods--Examples--Case of Greece--

Ancient mythologists--Criticism by Eusebius--Modern mythological

systems--Mr. Max Muller--Mannhardt.

 

 

CHAPTER II. -- NEW SYSTEM PROPOSED.

 

Chapter I. recapitulated--Proposal of a new method: Science of

comparative or historical study of man--Anticipated in part by

Eusebius, Fontenelle, De Brosses, Spencer (of C. C. C., Cambridge),

and Mannhardt--Science of Tylor--Object of inquiry: to find

condition of human intellect in which marvels of myth are parts of

practical everyday belief--This is the savage state--Savages

described--The wild element of myth a survival from the savage

state--Advantages of this method--Partly accounts for wide

DIFFUSION as well as ORIGIN of myths--Connected with general

theory of evolution--Puzzling example of myth of the water-

swallower--Professor Tiele's criticism of the method--

Objections to method, and answer to these--See Appendix B.

 

 

CHAPTER III. -- THE MENTAL CONDITION OF SAVAGES--CONFUSION WITH

                NATURE--TOTEMISM.

 

The mental condition of savages the basis of the irrational element

in myth--Characteristics of that condition: (1) Confusion of all

things in an equality of presumed animation and intelligence;

(2) Belief in sorcery; (3) Spiritualism; (4) Curiosity; (5) Easy

credulity and mental indolence--The curiosity is satisfied, thanks

to the credulity, by myths in answer to all inquiries--Evidence for

this--Mr. Tylor's opinion--Mr. Im Thurn--Jesuit missionaries'

Relations--Examples of confusion between men, plants, beasts and

other natural objects--Reports of travellers--Evidence from

institution of totemism--Definition of totemism--Totemism in

Australia, Africa, America, the Oceanic Islands, India, North Asia--

Conclusions: Totemism being found so widely distributed, is a proof

of the existence of that savage mental condition in which no line

is drawn between men and the other things in the world.  This

confusion is one of the characteristics of myth in all races.

 

 

CHAPTER IV. -- THE MENTAL CONDITION OF SAVAGES--MAGIC--

               METAMORPHOSIS--METAPHYSIC--PSYCHOLOGY.

 

Claims of sorcerers--Savage scientific speculation--Theory of

causation--Credulity, except as to new religious ideas--"Post hoc,

ergo propter hoc"--Fundamental ideas of magic--Examples:

incantations, ghosts, spirits--Evidence of rank and other

institutions in proof of confusions of mind exhibited in magical

beliefs.

 

 

CHAPTER V. -- NATURE MYTHS.

 

Savage fancy, curiosity and credulity illustrated in nature myths--

In these all phenomena are explained by belief in the general

animation of everything, combined with belief in metamorphosis--Sun

myths, Asian, Australian, African, Melanesian, Indian, Californian,

Brazilian, Maori, Samoan--Moon myths, Australian, Muysca, Mexican,

Zulu, Macassar, Greenland, Piute, Malay--Thunder myths--Greek and

Aryan sun and moon myths--Star myths--Myths, savage and civilised,

of animals, accounting for their marks and habits--Examples of

custom of claiming blood kinship with lower animals--Myths of

various plants and trees--Myths of stones, and of metamorphosis

into stones, Greek, Australian and American--The whole natural

philosophy of savages expressed in myths, and survives in folk-lore

and classical poetry; and legends of metamorphosis.

 

 

CHAPTER VI. -- NON-ARYAN MYTHS OF THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD AND OF MAN.

 

Confusions of myth--Various origins of man and of things--Myths of

Australia, Andaman Islands, Bushmen, Ovaherero, Namaquas, Zulus,

Hurons, Iroquois, Diggers, Navajoes, Winnebagoes, Chaldaeans,

Thlinkeets, Pacific Islanders, Maoris, Aztecs, Peruvians--

Similarity of ideas pervading all those peoples in various

conditions of society and culture.

 

 

CHAPTER VII. -- INDO-ARYAN MYTHS--SOURCES OF EVIDENCE.

 

Authorities--Vedas--Brahmanas--Social condition of Vedic India--

Arts--Ranks--War--Vedic fetishism--Ancestor worship--Date of Rig-

Veda Hymns doubtful--Obscurity of the Hymns--Difficulty of

interpreting the real character of Veda--Not primitive but

sacerdotal--The moral purity not innocence but refinement.

 

 

CHAPTER VIII. -- INDIAN MYTHS OF THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD AND OF MAN.

 

Comparison of Vedic and savage myths--The metaphysical Vedic

account of the beginning of things--Opposite and savage fable of

world made out of fragments of a man--Discussion of this hymn--

Absurdities of Brahmanas--Prajapati, a Vedic Unkulunkulu or Qat--

Evolutionary myths--Marriage of heaven and earth--Myths of Puranas,

their savage parallels--Most savage myths are repeated in Brahmanas.

 

 

CHAPTER IX. -- GREEK MYTHS OF THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD AND MAN.

 

The Greeks practically civilised when we first meet them in Homer--

Their mythology, however, is full of repulsive features--The

hypothesis that many of these are savage survivals--Are there other

examples of such survival in Greek life and institutions?--Greek

opinion was constant that the race had been savage--Illustrations

of savage survival from Greek law of homicide, from magic,

religion, human sacrifice, religious art, traces of totemism, and

from the mysteries--Conclusion: that savage survival may also be

expected in Greek myths.

 

 

CHAPTER X. -- GREEK COSMOGONIC MYTHS.

 

Nature of the evidence--Traditions of origin of the world and man--

Homeric, Hesiodic and Orphic myths--Later evidence of historians,

dramatists, commentators--The Homeric story comparatively pure--The

story in Hesiod, and its savage analogues--The explanations of the

myth of Cronus, modern and ancient--The Orphic cosmogony--Phanes

and Prajapati--Greek myths of the origin of man--Their savage

analogues.

 

 

CHAPTER XI. -- SAVAGE DIVINE MYTHS.

 

The origin of a belief in GOD beyond the ken of history and of

speculation--Sketch of conjectural theories--Two elements in all

beliefs, whether of backward or civilised races--The Mythical and

the Religious--These may be coeval, or either may be older than the

other--Difficulty of study--The current anthropological theory--

Stated objections to the theory--Gods and spirits--Suggestion that

savage religion is borrowed from Europeans--Reply to Mr. Tylor's

arguments on this head--The morality of savages.

 

 

 

PREFACE TO NEW IMPRESSION.

 

 

When this book first appeared (1886), the philological school of

interpretation of religion and myth, being then still powerful in

England, was criticised and opposed by the author.  In Science, as

on the Turkish throne of old, "Amurath to Amurath succeeds"; the

philological theories of religion and myth have now yielded to

anthropological methods.  The centre of the anthropological

position was the "ghost theory" of Mr. Herbert Spencer, the

"Animistic" theory of Mr. E. R. Tylor, according to whom the

propitiation of ancestral and other spirits leads to polytheism,

and thence to monotheism.  In the second edition (1901) of this

work the author argued that the belief in a "relatively supreme

being," anthropomorphic was as old as, and might be even older,

than animistic religion.  This theory he exhibited at greater

length, and with a larger collection of evidence, in his Making of

Religion.

 

Since 1901, a great deal of fresh testimony as to what Mr. Howitt

styles the "All Father" in savage and barbaric religions has

accrued.  As regards this being in Africa, the reader may consult

the volumes of the New Series of the Journal of the Anthropological

Institute, which are full of African evidence, not, as yet,

discussed, to my knowledge, by any writer on the History of

Religion.  As late as Man, for July, 1906, No. 66, Mr. Parkinson

published interesting Yoruba legends about Oleron, the maker and

father of men, and Oro, the Master of the Bull Roarer.

 

From Australia, we have Mr. Howitt's account of the All Father in

his Native Tribes of South-East Australia, with the account of the

All Father of the Central Australian tribe, the Kaitish, in North

Central Tribes of Australia, by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen (1904),

also The Euahlayi Tribe, by Mrs. Langley Parker (1906).  These

masterly books are indispensable to all students of the subject,

while, in Messrs. Spencer and Gillen's work cited, and in their

earlier Native Tribes of Central Australia, we are introduced to

savages who offer an elaborate animistic theory, and are said to

show no traces of the All Father belief.

 

The books of Messrs. Spencer and Gillen also present much evidence

as to a previously unknown form of totemism, in which the totem is

not hereditary, and does not regulate marriage.  This prevails

among the Arunta "nation," and the Kaitish tribe.  In the opinion

of Mr. Spencer (Report Australian Association for Advancement of

Science, 1904) and of Mr. J. G. Frazer (Fortnightly Review,

September, 1905), this is the earliest surviving form of totemism,

and Mr. Frazer suggests an animistic origin for the institution.  I

have criticised these views in The Secret of the Totem (1905), and

proposed a different solution of the problem.  (See also "Primitive

and Advanced Totemism" in Journal of the Anthropological Institute,

July, 1906.)  In the works mentioned will be found references to

other sources of information as to these questions, which are still

sub judice.  Mrs. Bates, who has been studying the hitherto almost

unknown tribes of Western Australia, promises a book on their

beliefs and institutions, and Mr. N. W. Thomas is engaged on a

volume on Australian institutions.  In this place the author can

only direct attention to these novel sources, and to the promised

third edition of Mr. Frazer's The Golden Bough.

 

A. L.

 

 

 

PREFACE TO NEW EDITION.

 

 

The original edition of Myth, Ritual and Religion, published in

1887, has long been out of print.  In revising the book I have

brought it into line with the ideas expressed in the second part of

my Making of Religion (1898) and have excised certain passages

which, as the book first appeared, were inconsistent with its main

thesis.  In some cases the original passages are retained in notes,

to show the nature of the development of the author's opinions.  A

fragment or two of controversy has been deleted, and chapters xi.

and xii., on the religion of the lowest races, have been entirely

rewritten, on the strength of more recent or earlier information

lately acquired.  The gist of the book as it stands now and as it

originally stood is contained in the following lines from the

preface of 1887: "While the attempt is made to show that the wilder

features of myth survive from, or were borrowed from, or were

imitated from the ideas of people in the savage condition of

thought, the existence--even among savages--of comparatively pure,

if inarticulate, religious beliefs is insisted on throughout".  To

that opinion I adhere, and I trust that it is now expressed with

more consistency than in the first edition.  I have seen reason,

more and more, to doubt the validity of the "ghost theory," or

animistic hypothesis, as explanatory of the whole fabric of

religion; and I present arguments against Mr. Tylor's contention

that the higher conceptions of savage faith are borrowed from

missionaries.[1]  It is very possible, however, that Mr. Tylor has

arguments more powerful than those contained in his paper of 1892.

For our information is not yet adequate to a scientific theory of

the Origin of Religion, and probably never will be.  Behind the

races whom we must regard as "nearest the beginning" are their

unknown ancestors from a dateless past, men as human as ourselves,

but men concerning whose psychical, mental and moral condition we

can only form conjectures.  Among them religion arose, in

circumstances of which we are necessarily ignorant.  Thus I only

venture on a surmise as to the germ of a faith in a Maker (if I am

not to say "Creator") and Judge of men.  But, as to whether the

higher religious belief, or the lower mythical stories came first,

we are at least certain that the Christian conception of God, given

pure, was presently entangled, by the popular fancy of Europe, in

new Marchen about the Deity, the Madonna, her Son, and the

Apostles.  Here, beyond possibility of denial, pure belief came

first, fanciful legend was attached after.  I am inclined to

surmise that this has always been the case, and, in the pages on

the legend of Zeus, I show the processes of degeneration, of

mythical accretions on a faith in a Heaven-God, in action.  That

"the feeling of religious devotion" attests "high faculties" in

early man (such as are often denied to men who "cannot count up to

seven"), and that "the same high mental faculties . . . would

infallibly lead him, as long as his reasoning powers remained

poorly developed, to various strange superstitions and customs,"

was the belief of Mr. Darwin.[2]  That is also my view, and I note

that the lowest savages are not yet guilty of the very worst

practices, "sacrifice of human beings to a blood-loving God," and

ordeals by poison and fire, to which Mr. Darwin alludes.  "The

improvement of our science" has freed us from misdeeds which are

unknown to the Andamanese or the Australians.  Thus there was, as

regards these points in morals, degeneracy from savagery as society

advanced, and I believe that there was also degeneration in

religion.  To say this is not to hint at a theory of supernatural

revelation to the earliest men, a theory which I must, in limine

disclaim.

 

 

[1] Tylor, "Limits of Savage Religion."  Journal of the

Anthropological Institute, vol. xxi.

 

[2] Descent of Man, p. 68, 1871.

 

 

In vol. ii. p. 19 occurs a reference, in a note, to Mr. Hartland's

criticism of my ideas about Australian gods as set forth in the

Making of Religion.  Mr. Hartland, who kindly read the chapters on

Australian religion in this book, does not consider that my note on

p. 19 meets the point of his argument.  As to the Australians, I

mean no more than that, AMONG endless low myths, some of them

possess a belief in a "maker of everything," a primal being, still

in existence, watching conduct, punishing breaches of his laws,

and, in some cases, rewarding the good in a future life.  Of course

these are the germs of a sympathetic religion, even if the being

thus regarded is mixed up with immoral or humorous contradictory

myths.  My position is not harmed by such myths, which occur in all

old religions, and, in the middle ages, new myths were attached to

the sacred figures of Christianity in poetry and popular tales.

 

Thus, if there is nothing "sacred" in a religion because wild or

wicked fables about the gods also occur, there is nothing "sacred"

in almost any religion on earth.

 

Mr. Hartland's point, however, seems to be that, in the Making of

Religion, I had selected certain Australian beliefs as especially

"sacred" and to be distinguished from others, because they are

inculcated at the religious Mysteries of some tribes.  His aim,

then, is to discover low, wild, immoral myths, inculcated at the

Mysteries, and thus to destroy my line drawn between religion on

one hand and myth or mere folk-lore on the other.  Thus there is a

being named Daramulun, of whose rites, among the Coast Murring, I

condensed the account of Mr. Howitt.[1]  From a statement by Mr.

Greenway[2] Mr. Hartland learned that Daramulun's name is said to

mean "leg on one side" or "lame".  He, therefore, with fine humour,

speaks of Daramulun as "a creator with a game leg," though when

"Baiame" is derived by two excellent linguists, Mr. Ridley and Mr.

Greenway, from Kamilaroi baia, "to make," Mr. Hartland is by no

means so sure of the sense of the name.  It happens to be

inconvenient to him!  Let the names mean what they may, Mr.

Hartland finds, in an obiter dictum of Mr. Howitt (before he was

initiated), that Daramulun is said to have "died," and that his

spirit is now aloft.  Who says so, and where, we are not

informed,[3] and the question is important.

 

 

[1] J. A. I., xiii. pp. 440-459.

 

[2] Ibid., xxi. p. 294.

 

[3] Ibid., xiii. p. 194.

 

 

For the Wiraijuri, IN THEIR MYSTERIES, tell a myth of cannibal

conduct of Daramulun's, and of deceit and failure of knowledge in

Baiame.[1]  Of this I was unaware, or neglected it, for I

explicitly said that I followed Mr. Howitt's account, where no such

matter is mentioned.  Mr. Howitt, in fact, described the Mysteries

of the Coast Murring, while the narrator of the low myths, Mr.

Matthews, described those of a remote tribe, the Wiraijuri, with

whom Daramulun is not the chief, but a subordinate person.  How Mr.

Matthews' friends can at once hold that Daramulun was "destroyed"

by Baiame (their chief deity), and also that Daramulun's voice is

heard at their rites, I don't know.[2]   Nor do I know why Mr.

Hartland takes the myth of a tribe where Daramulun is "the evil

spirit who rules the night,"[3] and introduces it as an argument

against the belief of a distant tribe, where, by Mr. Howitt's

account, Daramulun is not an evil spirit, but "the master" of all,

whose abode is above the sky, and to whom are attributed powers of

omnipotence and omnipresence, or, at any rate, the power "to do

anything and to go anywhere. . . .  To his direct ordinances are

attributed the social and moral laws of the community."[4]  This is

not "an evil spirit"!  When Mr. Hartland goes for scandals to a

remote tribe of a different creed that he may discredit the creed

of the Coast Murring, he might as well attribute to the Free Kirk

"the errors of Rome".  But Mr. Hartland does it![5]  Being "cunning

of fence" he may reply that I also spoke loosely of Wiraijuri and

Coast Murring as, indifferently, Daramulunites.  I did, and I was

wrong, and my critic ought not to accept but to expose my error.

The Wiraijuri Daramulun, who was annihilated, yet who is "an evil

spirit that rules the night," is not the Murring guardian and

founder of recognised ethics.

 

 

[1] J. A. I., xxv. p. 297.

 

[2] Ibid., May, 1895, p. 419.

 

[3] Ibid.

 

[4] Ibid., xiii. pp. 458, 459.

 

[5] Folk-Lore, ix., No. iv., p. 299.

 

 

But, in the Wiraijuri mysteries, the master, Baiame, deceives the

women as to the Mysteries!  Shocking to US, but to deceive the

women as to these arcana, is, to the Australian mind in general,

necessary for the safety of the world.  Moreover, we have heard of

a lying spirit sent to deceive prophets in a much higher creed.

Finally, in a myth of the Mystery of the Wiraijuri, Baiame is not

omniscient.  Indeed, even civilised races cannot keep on the level

of these religious conceptions, and not to keep on that level is--

mythology.  Apollo, in the hymn to Hermes, sung on a sacred

occasion, needs to ask an old vine-dresser for intelligence.

Hyperion "sees all and hears all," but needs to be informed, by his

daughters, of the slaughter of his kine.  The Lord, in the Book of

Job, has to ask Satan, "Whence comest thou?"  Now for the sake of

dramatic effect, now from pure inability to live on the level of

his highest thought, man mythologises and anthropomorphises, in

Greece or Israel, as in Australia.

 

It does not follow that there is "nothing sacred" in his religion.

Mr. Hartland offers me a case in point.  In Mrs. Langloh Parker's

Australian Legendary Tales (pp. 11, 94), are myths of low

adventures of Baiame.  In her More Australian Legendary Tales (pp.

84-99), is a very poetical and charming aspect of the Baiame

belief.  Mr. Hartland says that I will "seek to put" the first set

of stories out of court, as "a kind of joke with no sacredness

about it".  Not I, but the Noongahburrah tribe themselves make this

essential distinction.  Mrs. Langloh Parker says:[1] "The former

series" (with the low Baiame myths) "were all such legends as are

told to the black picaninnies; among the present are some they

would not be allowed to hear, touching as they do on sacred things,

taboo to the young".  The blacks draw the line which I am said to

seek to draw.

 

 

[1] More Legendary Tales, p. xv.

 

 

In yet another case[1] grotesque hunting adventures of Baiame are

told in the mysteries, and illustrated by the sacred temporary

representations in raised earth.  I did not know it; I merely

followed Mr. Howitt.  But I do not doubt it.  My reply is, that

there was "something sacred" in Greek mysteries, something

purifying, ennobling, consoling.  For this Lobeck has collected

(and disparaged) the evidence of Pindar, Sophocles, Cicero and many

others, while even Aristophanes, as Prof. Campbell remarks, says:

"We only have bright sun and cheerful life who have been initiated

and lived piously in regard to strangers and to private

citizens".[2]  Security and peace of mind, in this world and for

the next, were, we know not how, borne into the hearts of Pindar

and Sophocles in the Mysteries.  Yet, if we may at all trust the

Fathers, there were scenes of debauchery, as at the Mysteries of

the Fijians (Nanga) there was buffoonery ("to amuse the boys," Mr.

Howitt says of some Australian rites), the story of Baubo is only

one example, and, in other mysteries than the Eleusinian, we know

of mummeries in which an absurd tale of Zeus is related in

connection with an oak log.  Yet surely there was "something

sacred" in the faith of Zeus!  Let us judge the Australians as we

judge Greeks.  The precepts as to "speaking the straightforward

truth," as to unselfishness, avoidance of quarrels, of wrongs to

"unprotected women," of unnatural vices, are certainly communicated

in the Mysteries of some tribes, with, in another, knowledge of the

name and nature of "Our Father," Munganngaur.  That a Totemistic

dance, or medicine-dance of Emu hunting, is also displayed[3] at

certain Mysteries of a given tribe, and that Baiame is spoken of as

the hero of this ballet, no more deprives the Australian moral and

religious teaching (at the Mysteries) of sacred value, than the

stupid indecency whereby Baubo made Demeter laugh destroys the

sacredness of the Eleusinia, on which Pindar, Sophocles and Cicero

eloquently dwell.  If the Australian mystae, at the most solemn

moment of their lives, are shown a dull or dirty divine ballet

d'action, what did Sophocles see, after taking a swim with his pig?

Many things far from edifying, yet the sacred element of religious

hope and faith was also represented.  So it is in Australia.

 

 

[1] J. A. I., xxiv. p. 416.

 

[2] Religion in Greek Literature, p. 259. It is to be regretted

that the learned professor gives no references.  The Greek

Mysteries are treated later in this volume.

 

[3] See A picture of Australia, 1829, p. 264.

 

 

These studies ought to be comparative, otherwise they are

worthless.  As Mr. Hartland calls Daramulun "an eternal Creator

with a game leg" who "died," he may call Zeus an "eternal father,

who swallowed his wife, lay with his mother and sister, made love

as a swan, and died, nay, was buried, in Crete".  I do not think

that Mr. Hartland would call Zeus "a ghost-god" (my own phrase), or

think that he was scoring a point against me, if I spoke of the

sacred and ethical characteristics of the Zeus adored by Eumaeus in

the Odyssey.  He would not be so humorous about Zeus, nor fall into

an ignoratio elenchi.  For my point never was that any Australian

tribe had a pure theistic conception unsoiled and unobliterated by

myth and buffoonery.  My argument was that AMONG their ideas is

that of a superhuman being, unceasing (if I may not say eternal), a

maker (if I may not say a Creator), a guardian of certain by no

means despicable ethics, which I never proclaimed as supernormally

inspired!  It is no reply to me to say that, in or out of

Mysteries, low fables about that being are told, and buffooneries

are enacted.  For, though I say that certain high ideas are taught

in Mysteries, I do not think I say that in Mysteries no low myths

are told.

 

I take this opportunity, as the earliest, to apologise for an error

in my Making of Religion concerning a passage in the Primitive

Culture of my friend Mr. E. B. Tylor.  Mr. Tylor quoted[1] a

passage from Captain John Smith's History of Virginia, as given in

Pinkerton, xiii. pp. 13-39, 1632.  In this passage no mention

occurs of a Virginian deity named Ahone but "Okee," another and

more truculent god, is named.  I observed that, if Mr. Tylor had

used Strachey's Historie of Travaile (1612), he would have found "a

slightly varying copy" of Smith's text of 1632, with Ahone as

superior to Okee.  I added in a note (p. 253): "There is a

description of Virginia, by W. Strachey, including Smith's remarks

published in 1612.  Strachey interwove some of this work with his

own MS. in the British Museum."  Here, as presently will be shown,

I erred, in company with Strachey's editor of 1849, and with the

writer on Strachey in the Dictionary of National Biography.  What

Mr. Tylor quoted from an edition of Smith in 1632 had already

appeared, in 1612, in a book (Map of Virginia, with a description

of the Countrey) described on the title-page as "written by Captain

Smith," though, in my opinion, Smith may have had a collaborator.

There is no evidence whatever that Strachey had anything to do with

this book of 1612, in which there is no mention of Ahone.  Mr.

Arber dates Strachey's own MS. (in which Ahone occurs) as of 1610-

1615.[2]  I myself, for reasons presently to be alleged, date the

MS. mainly in 1611-1612. If Mr. Arber and I are right, Strachey

must have had access to Smith's MS. before it was published in

1612, and we shall see how he used it.  My point here is that

Strachey mentioned Ahone (in MS.) before Smith's book of 1612 was

published.  This could not be gathered from the dedication to Bacon

prefixed to Strachey's MS., for that dedication cannot be earlier

that 1618.[3]  I now ask leave to discuss the evidence for an early

pre-Christian belief in a primal Creator, held by the Indian tribes

from Plymouth, in New England, to Roanoke Island, off Southern

Virginia.

 

 

[1] Prim. Cult. ii. p. 342.

 

[2] Arber's Smith, p. cxxxiii.

 

[3] Hakluyt Society, Strachey, 1849, pp. xxi., xxii.

 

 

THE GOD AHONE.

 

An insertion by a manifest plagiary into the work of a detected

liar is not, usually, good evidence.  Yet this is all the evidence,

it may be urged, which we have for the existence of a belief, in

early Virginia, as to a good Creator, named Ahone.  The matter

stands thus: In 1607-1609 the famed Captain John Smith endured and

achieved in Virginia sufferings and adventures.  In 1608 he sent to

the Council at home a MS. map and description of the colony.  In

1609 he returned to England (October).  In May, 1610, William

Strachey, gent., arrived in Virginia, where he was "secretary of

state" to Lord De la Warr.  In 1612 Strachey and Smith were both in

England.  In that year Barnes of Oxford published A Map of

Virginia, with a description, etc., "written by Captain Smith,"

according to the title-page.  There was annexed a compilation from

various sources, edited by "W. S.," that is, NOT William Strachey,

but Dr. William Symonds.  In the same year, 1612, or in 1611,

William Strachey wrote his Historie of Travaile into Virginia

Britannia, at least as far as page 124 of the Hakluyt edition of

1849.[1]

 

 

[1] For proof see p. 24. third line from foot of page, where 1612

is indicated.  Again, see p. 98, line 5, where "last year" is dated

as "1610, about Christmas," which would put Strachey's work at this

point as actually of 1611; prior, that is, to Smith's publication.

Again, p. 124, "this last year, myself being at the Falls" (of the

James River), "I found in an Indian house certain clawes . . .

which I brought away and into England".

 

 

If Strachey, who went out with Lord De la Warr as secretary i