The Weekly Machen
The following article is the fourteenth and final in a series by Arthur Machen for The Daily Express. Next week, we return with Machen to the Evening News.
How We Lost Our Tails
Revelations of a Wonderful Book of Folk-lore
by
Arthur Machen
November 21, 1918
Sir James Frazier, the famous author of “The Golden Bough,” has written another learned and wonderful book, called “Folk Lore in the Old Testament” (Macmillan, three vols., 37s. 6d. net). It seals with the Bible narratives, the Fall of Man, the Flood, the Tower of Babel, with marriage customs as exemplified in the story of Jacob’s serving for his wife, with the ordeals, observances, and prohibitions of the Jewish Law; and parallels these tales, customs, and laws with like tales, customs, and laws gathered from the store of an encyclopædic learning.
The Serpent beguiled Eve; and the author sets out the tales of all the false animals who have deceived the race of men to their undoing from the legends and traditions of all the regions of the world. No tribe, however, remote the mountains among which it dwells, however desolate the region in which it pitches its tents, is beyond the reach of Sir James Frazer’s investigation.
Here you will find the Creation legend as told by the Marindinsesse, “a tribe who occupy the dreary, treeless, monotonous flats on the southern coast of Dutch New Guinea.”
Turn a page, and you find that, according to the Haida Indians of the Queen Charlotte Islands, the race of man arose from the marriage of the heavenly raven with a cockle on the beach. Or there is the view of the Maidu Indians of California, who held that man was created by a personage called Earth-Initiate, who descended from the sky by a rope made of feathers.
In a word, you have in these three volumes the quintessence of a whole library of strange, curious, and enchanting learning. I have never had much respect for the “what one book would take with you to a desert island?” competitions; but I certainly think that “Folk Lore in the Old Testament,” with its endless variety of mythos and legend, its innumerable byways of speculation and interest, would put in a very strong claim to be the one book to be packed in the desert-islanders trunk.
Having said so much, I should like to say how deeply I should dissent from one main conclusion that I am sure the author would draw from the sum of his vast researches. Sir James Frazer looks upon the queer tales of talking beasts and loquacious moons that the tribes of the waste and the wood and the mountain have told him as evidences of the degraded and savage barbarism and superstition from which man has arisen to the bright light of to-day.
I would dissent. I would say that the truth is that we are, somehow, the sons of God. This truth primitive man apprehended; but to make it intelligible to himself he had to put it in the form of a picture story. His symbols are not our symbols, but it is doubtful whether the highest truth can be communicated to man or apprehended by him save through symbols of some kind.
Here and there, these strange, grotesque myths seem to have the hint and gleam of an unexpected significance and beauty in them. Thus, Ashantis say that long ago men were happy, since God dwelt among them. But one day it happened that God was looking at some women who were pounding a mash with pestles in a mortar. The women were angry with God, and told him to go away, and as he went slowly they beat him off with their pestles. And so God left the world and gave men over to the direction of the fetishes.
From which fetishes, be it remarked, we have suffered severely ever since.
One thing I had forgotten. It is gratifying to learn that there is, or was, a tribe of Californian Indians in complete agreement with Darwin as to be the reason why we have no tails. Both the savages and the scientist taught that we wore out our tails by our habit of sitting on them.
Previous: No Cattle Shows
Next: Looking Backward
darklybrightpress.com 
This entry fits with my notion of Machen as, on the aesthetic side, favoring High Church ceremony, but on the level of what is to be believed as a theological liberal. Folklore of the Old Testament as his desert island book!
LikeLike
Thanks for this – the first of the series after the Armistice! And thanks for the link – which, when I followed it, handily showed scans of Volumes II and III among Similar Items at the bottom of the page. I suspect the first verb of the second sentence is “deals” – and that a “you” has fallen out in the quotation in the second sentence of paragraph 5: “would you take” (if I may aspire to be a better text critic than I too often fail to be).
Machen clearly combines a theological anti-progressivism (so to call it) in paragraphs six, seven, and ten with a general readiness to enjoy the enormous, variously mutually-contradictory “myths” and sift them for the “truth primitive man apprehended” – which he does not take to include the particular evolutionary myth which both “the savages and the scientist taught”, giving the latter cum suis a ‘twist of the tail’ as it were.
The questions of both Anglican theology and liturgy (“lex orandi, lex credendi”) and of (at least) Nineteenth- and early Twentieth-century theology and ‘theological liberalism’ are ones which strongly invite more attention than I am knowledgeable to give them – though recently reading Charles Kingsley’s Hereward the Wake and sampling theological works of Sabine Baring-Gould now spur me on, in addition to thinking about F.D. Maurice and George MacDonald’s deliberate Anglicanism and about C.S. Lewis (for a couple examples).
LikeLike