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. . CHAPTER
X THE SOUL OF MAN IS THE SOUL OF THE CLAN .
The ancient view of life necessarily leads thought
beyond the individual; one always looks about among the
family to find the sources of his will and his fate.
That honour which the individual bequeaths to his
successor with the prayer to have it raised on high like
a banner in the light, is after all only an individual's
share of that honour which all the kinsmen combine to
guard and unite in enjoying. This grandiose manner in
aim and fate and will, to be never content with less
than a kingdom, ever constrained to know one's fame the
greatest within the horizon, — this is indeed, no less
than the keen eyes, something appertaining to a whole
circle of men. The father's eye is gladdened when he
sees himself and his kinsmen again in his sons, when, as
the phrase runs, he can “see the luck of the family”
in his son. They
all had one hugr in common, shared one mind among them.
The walls of the brain formed no boundary for thoughts;
what was warmed in the mind of one kinsman did not come
to the others with the cold of strangeness. They were
one body as far as their frith and honour extended. The
kinsmen were identical, as surely as the single deer
leaping across the path was identical with all its
fellow deer, and bore in itself the whole nature of
deer, the whole great deer-soul. And the pain that ran
round the fence of kinsmen when one stave in it suffered
a blow was something more than a spiritual suffering.
Limbs as well as hugr gave notice when a misfortune had
chanced, long before any messenger came running with the
news. The same
peril of death threatened them all. They had one life
together. It may be said of two contemporaries, father
and daughter, that they had one life and therefore died
on the same day. This community of life is but a
stronger form of that which is found among all kinsmen.
True, the whole family would not die with the father,
not immediately, at any rate, but we know already well
enough how fatally the falling away of one affected the
future of all members of the family, how careful all had
to be in regard to their spiritual health, how eagerly
they sought after increase of soul, “restitution”.
The frith-fellows of a dead man were “fey”, and
their life could only be saved by energetically
combating the germs of death in the organism of the
clan. In
a Welsh story, the king says to an unknown kinsman:
“Who are you, for my heart beats toward you, and I
know you are of my blood.” These words might be the
simplest expression of an everyday feeling, and date
from a time when every kinsman knew by experience the
peculiar beat of frith in his breast. “The hugr told
him,” a Northman might have said, for he felt by the
movements in the luck within him, that luck of his luck
was approaching, as also he would perceive the approach
of an enemy by an alien luck “lying upon” his and
disabling it. A good woman, Orny, the daughter of the
distinguished chieftain Geitir, had been seduced by a
guest from Norway, and when the child was born, her
brother ordered him to be carried out and left to his
fate. But the boy was found by a neighbour and adopted
by him, and in his early years he ran about the
homesteads, and might also come as a guest to Krossavik,
his mother's home. One day, he came running headlong
into the room, as a child might do, and fell full length
on the floor; then it chanced that his grandfather burst
out laughing, while Orny burst into tears. Little
Thorstein went straight up to Geitir, and wished to know
what he was laughing at. But the old man said: “It was
because I saw something you did not see; when you came
in, a white bear ran before your feet, and it was that
you stumbled over, because it stopped suddenly at sight
of me; I should fancy you must be of higher birth than
you are taken to be.” This sight of the boy's fylgia
was enough to awaken the feeling of kinship in Geitir,
and when the boy was about to go home in the evening,
the old man bade him come again often, and added: “I
should think you have kin here.” Kinsmen
make one soul together — and yet they were
naturally so or so many individuals. The clan is not a
whole in the sense that it can be compared to a being
with many heads. Nor do the kinsmen stand as
shareholders in a fund of life which they agree to
administer. The community lies far deeper, so deep that
all conflict between the individual and the clan as a
whole is out of the question. Nor can we find the truth
in a compromise which reduces the claims of one side or
the other. The individuals are each a separate reality,
each is a person, and both reality and personality are
so marked that they can come to stand against each other
as will against will. But the personality which makes
the one kinsman a character is the same which gives his
brother and his son their silhouette-like sharpness. The
kinsmen own one another, they are one another, every
single one of them encloses the whole soul in each of
his acts. The
only way to re-experience the peculiarities of this
common soul is probably to see how the unity of life
affects men's practical doings. In the kinsmen's social
state of mutual dependence, as in their individual
independence, the thought is vitally and faithfully
illustrated. The old community allows the personality no
importance whatever in itself. A man thinking and acting
alone is a modern conception. In former times, the
solitary had no possibilities. His ideas, even though
amounting to genius, would perish, just as he himself
perished, leaving no trace. The fir that stands alone
decays, neither bark nor leaf clothe it, says the Hávamál;
and the words bear this literal meaning, that the tree
which stands alone in the field can only fade, it
uses all its force to delay the decomposing action of
wind and rot a little while. The individual could not
exist save as thrall or niding, in whom only the animal
part of human life remained, and barely that. A freedman
was the imperfect creature he was, because he had not
properly any clan. The man of family is free; because he
stands in the fence of kin, he has no weight crushing
him from above; it is otherwise with the freedman, he
stands alone, and therefore must have a power above him.
And
to stand in the fence of kin, means forming part of a
solid order, which no genius and no strength of mind can
change. We have really no word to measure such habits as
bend the will of every man the way it would not go, as
if it were acting of its own accord. What we want is a
word to express a law that works its will not by
hindering or repressing the plans of the individual but
by lending itself as a force and an initiative in the
thoughts and ambitions of every wilful single man who is
under the sway of the rule. Frith lays the regard for
kinsmen into the plans while they are still in process
of conception, and when it happens, as it may very well
do, that a member of a clan is inspired with a spirit of
opposition against the nearest of kin, his refractory
desire comes into the world with the will of his
antagonists imbedded in it as its innermost self. A
change in the inherited honour, that which one's
forefathers had regarded as right and useful and needful
— whether the change were one affecting relations with
men, or an alteration of what we call methods of
working, sacred customs — such an alteration was
hardly to be effected by one man's will. In a sense the
laws governing our relations to our fellow-men are
stiffer and less plastic than the social rules of
ancient society, but they correspondingly leave a way
open to artifice and persuasion. We can get round the
law if it is too narrow to have room for conscience, we
can render it lip-service and without breaking it save
our souls; we can maintain our position in humanity by
living an official outward life, and thus save ourselves
from spiritual isolation, and gain that contact with the
neighbouring community which is necessary if a man is
quietly to get on with his own work. In those times, a
man could not, whether by craft or defiance, break
through the constitutional laws of life without getting
strangled in the process. A man stood in the fence of
kinsmen, and only that which could be attained without
breaking the chain was attainable at all. But
on the other hand it would be rash and contrary to all
experience were we to conclude that the clansman is
necessarily duller and less of a character than the
isolated individuals of modern times, or that he has
fewer possibilities of working out what we call his
personality. As long as the strength is turned outwards
and does not attack the unassailable frith and honour,
the clan has no choice save between defending the unruly
members and cutting them off from itself, and a healthy
stock will be slow to bleed itself. As long as the
undertakings of the individual are inspired by the
honour and “fate” that is within him, and his
ambition is the prolongation of his ancestors' deeds, he
can let himself go and drag his kinsmen along with him.
Frith lays the kinsmen at the mercy of the individual —
and his initiative. He can screw up honour as far as
he pleases; the others have no choice but to follow;
they cannot force him down, they have nothing to trust
to against him beyond the power of words to persuade;
they may try to talk him over, but if he be not amenable
to reason, then they are obliged to enter into his
undertakings and make themselves participants both in
the responsibility and in the risk. The fact of his
being a part of the soul himself enables him to coerce
the whole soul. The man who has a tenfold or hundredfold
soul not only possesses an inner strength that is
lacking in a man whose life is confined to his own
single body, but he also has deeper opportunities of
becoming a rich and many-sided character. Frith
was a constitutional law harder than we can easily find
nowadays, but then again, it was a power that could be
used, both for good and evil. A man can force his way
into the centre of luck and appropriate luck to himself,
he can assimilate the souls of others and make them
dependent on his own, and then fling men forward toward
whatever object he pleases, as long as he is sure of
himself and his luck. There is hardly any formal
authority which the strong man can take up and inspire
with his peculiar gifts, his courage, his initiative,
his craft, his wit, his insolent self-reliance; but he
has that which is better; he makes the others parts of
his thought and will, and digests them as it were, into
his soul; the strong man uses his fellows as his own
limbs. The
authority in such a clan-society is of a peculiar sort,
it is here, it is there, it is everywhere, and it never
sleeps. But there is no absolutely dominant power. The
circle may perhaps have its leader in chief, but he
cannot force anyone to his will. In Iceland, this lack
of subordination appears in the crudest light. Iceland
had men who gladly paid out of their own purse for the
extravagances of their restless kinsmen, if only they
could maintain peace and prevent futile bloodshed; but
their peacemaking was an everlasting patchwork. There
was no power over those who did not seek the right. To
take firm action against them was a thing even the most
resolute of their kin could never do, for it was out of
the question for the clan to disown its unruly members
and leave them to the mercy of their enemies. When
Chrodin, a man of noble stock, was chosen, for his
cleverness and god-fearing ways, to be majordomo in
Austria, he declined with these significant words: “I
cannot bring about peace in Austria, chiefly because all
the great men in the country are my kinsmen. I cannot
overawe them and cannot have any one executed. Nay,
because of their very kinship they will rise up and act
in defiance.” Primitive
soul is generally described by European historians as
something exclusively belonging to mythology and
religion; but to catch its true character we must
recognise that it is a psychological entity as well. It
is so far from being dependent on speculation and belief
that it is first and foremost an object of experience,
an everyday reality. The thrall has no soul, our
ancestors say; and they know, because they have seen
that it is lacking in him. When a thrall finds himself
in a perilous situation, be goes blind, so that he
dashes down and kills himself out of pure fear of death.
How a soulless man would naturally behave we can learn
from the story of the fight at Orlygsstad, where the
wise and noble chief Arnkel met his death. When Arnkel
unexpectedly found himself attacked by a superior force
he sent home his thrall to bring aid. On the road the
messenger was accosted by a fellow-servant — and
willingly fell to helping him with a load of hay. Not
until the evening, when those at home asked where Arnkel
was, did he wake up and remember that his master was
fighting with Snorri at Orlygsstad. There is no need of
any hypothesis as to soul and life to make clear the
fact that the thrall lacked hugr and hamingja; his
soullessness is discernible by the lack-lustre of his
eyes. The only possibility for a thrall to rise into
something like a human being is by inspiration of his
master's luck and life, and thus faithfulness and
devotion are the noblest virtues of a bondman. An
excellent illustration of the way a thrall is able to
reflect his master is given in a short story from Landnáma.
One autumn a body of men who were shipwrecked on the
Icelandic coast sought refuge at an outlying farm
belonging to Geirmund, a noble chieftain of royal birth.
The bondman steward invited the whole company to pass
the winter as the guests of Geirmund, and on being asked
by Geirmund how he had dared to fill the house with
strangers he answered: “As long as there are men in
this country people will not forget what sort of man you
were, since your thrall dared do such a thing without
asking your consent.” Absolute
unity, community of life within the clan, must find its
justification in absolute unlikeness, essential
difference from all other circles. “Our” life is not
only peculiar in character, it has its own stem, its own
root, and drinks of its own wells. There seems but one
inference possible viz. that our ancestors narrowed
humanity down to their own circle and looked upon all
persons outside their frith as non-human; but this
inference that presupposes our pale but extensive
category humanity, does not hold good in ancient or
primitive culture. The question as to human beings and
non-human beings, human life and non-human life lay
outside the plane where their thoughts moved; the
problem could not be set up in the form it involuntarily
assumes for us, still less could it be answered. When we cross the frontier that separates our civilization from primitive culture, we pass into a different world altogether. The world inhabited by souls does not form a wide plane in which creature touches creature edge to edge as in our universe, where things and beings are viewed chiefly from without as space-filling bodies. Our fathers' horizon was apparently far narrower than ours, thought reached earlier to the walls of the world; but the smaller circle held far more than we could crush into a corresponding area. In reality, the capacity of Middle-garth is unlimited, for this folk-home consists of a number of worlds overlapping one another, and thus not dependent on space for their extent. In Middle-garth, the animals do not run in and out one among the rest crowding for elbow-room. The wolf is called heath-walker, because the heath is part of its soul, but this does not necessarily make it akin to the deer, that is called heath-treader. The haunt of the wolf is not necessarily the same as that of the deer, however closely they may coincide geographically. The heath, as heath, was a thing by itself, an independent soul as well as a space; but when we say heath-walker, or heath-treader, we only get to it through the animal that fills out the foreground, now through the grey, carrion-eating, “bold” wolf — when the heath is an attribute of unluck, —now through the “antler-crowned”, “oak's shelter-seeking”, “head backward-curving” deer — and the heath is then a soul-quality. In the sphere which is dismissed summarily by us with the formula day and night there was room for a number of souls meeting one another as independent beings whole to whole instead of limiting one another. First day and night live there. Day is the light or shining one and the beautiful one, but he has other characteristics, as the Anglo-Saxon language intimates by calling him noisy or the time of bustling, the time of men being astir. Independently of light and day the sun has his going among men, and his individual nature is expressed in the names: ever-shining, terror of the giants, fugitive. The sun drives his steeds, Arvakr and Alsvinnr, with the same right as day drives his Skinfaxi — to emphasise their mutual independence in the mythical language. The essence of night is darkness and blackness, sleep and dream, but its nature also includes anxiety and the uncanny — therefore it is derived from the home of the giants. But its soul goes still farther; dominion over time must have been part of night's luck, since our fathers reckoned by nights. Moon, too, is a hastener, but it has other powers of its own; it counts the years and wards off evil thoughts; and thus it is wholly different from the other light. Next to these great gods must be added a series of smaller divinities, which to us are only names save for some shreds of myths. Ny, the waxing, brightly shining moon, and Nid, the dark moon or the moonless night, live as “dwarfs” in an antiquarian's catalogue of minor mythological beings. We should not wonder at finding the phases of the moon as beings apart from the moon itself and having their own nature; their former independence has left its mark faintly in the verses of the Voluspá about the gods who gave Night and Nid their names, and in the teaching of the Vafthrudnismál as to the gods who set up Ny and Nid as a means of counting the years. Of Bil and Hjuki, two beings connected with the moon, we should know nothing if they had not slipped into history because in literary times men could remember a legend of their past, when they went to the well and were stolen away by the moon. It is possible that Bil represents the relation between the moon and woman's weakness — though this is nothing but a guess suggested by the myths of other peoples. Under the heavens fare roaring storms, driving snow, and these are not merely servants carrying out the will of a greater, any more than Ny and Nid; they are independent souls whose nature is indicated by such names as: boisterous traveller or breaker of trees, and they have their own origin, being called Sons of Fornjot. Nevertheless, heaven itself has as its megin both light and wide extent, clouds, storm and hard weather, clearness and drift and close heat, as we see by the names applied to it in poetry; possibly too the sun formed part of its power. And in the same way the moon, as the reckoner of time, included the hours of light and day in itself, without encroaching upon their independence as souls; this side of the moon's personality is expressed in a myth that makes Day the son of Night by Dellingr. For a modern mind approaching the question in the assurance that the parts of existence are dovetailed into one another, it is dangerous to venture out into Middle-garth. If one cannot change one's being and become as one of the natures in this kingdom, then one is crushed between the soul-colossi that fill that little space. The souls come, growing apace, with an unlimited power of filling new spaces, and overwhelm the inexperienced from every side. So great is the independence of every soul, that the recalcitrant souls are not even fused together by having a common origin; if ever anything came into being — if not rather all things simply were from the beginning —then day and sun, moon and night alike arose independently. The sine qua non for finding oneself at home in Middle-garth is to see everything, each thing by itself, as world-forming and world-filling, and not as part of a world. Neither animal nor tree, heaven nor earth is regarded as occupying a greater or smaller portion of space in existence, but as a great or a little world. In the same way, the souls overlap one another among men. Each clan contained the luck and soul of neighbouring clans, and was in turn contained by its friends, without in the least hazarding its independence as a person. Where people meets people or tribe meets tribe they are not men-filled surfaces cut across by a political or linguistic line; the two circles have an earthly boundary between them, but this line of demarcation is only the upper edge of their mutual contact. Below it stand friendship and enmity, intercourse and feud, with all the shades that the character of honour and luck gives to these relationships. For one who, himself a soul, regards the others as souls, friends are not something outside him; their self, their honour, their work, their forefathers enter into him as part of his nature. And the others again possess him and his, not as tributary or subject, but as contents of honour. Each people — larger or smaller according to the intensity of intercourse — is the world, its folk takes up the earth, partly as inhabited land, partly as waste land, and fills it out to its farthest bounds. Our folk is Middle-garth, and that which lies beyond is Utgard. Moreover, the earth itself is not an area in which many tribes are huddled up, but as we have seen, a living being conceiving from the plough and the sower, a woman and yet the broad, green expanse of soil and “roads”. And this broad, teeming, immovable earth is part of the soul of each tribe, not a common mother of all, as is seen in the legends and cults, when every tribe tells its personal story of the origin of earth without questioning the right of their neighbours to give their account of how the world, or rather, how their world arose. So it is among primitive peoples whose cosmogonies are better known, and so it was among ancient peoples in the north, as the spirit of their myths and the diversity of their traditions bear witness. The question as to human being — non-human being thus disappears in face of the simple fact that all which is not our life is another soul, call it what we will. Foreigners have no legal value. In later times they were accorded only an illusory recognition in law and judgement, in older times their life and right was a matter of indifference. One does not kill an animal, or cut down a tree, out of sheer idleness, without some reason or other, whether this consist in the harmfulness of the thing while living or in its use when dead, and to understand these strictures we must remember that primitive men are far more careful about destroying souls than men of civilization who feel no responsibility whatever towards the creatures round them, because they recognise only their value as things. In the same way formerly one would hardly strike down a barbarian for simply existing. But killing a stranger did not differ in character from violating one of the innumerable non-human souls in existence. Within the misty horizon formed by the hordes of the mumbling or speechless men, stands a community where the individual has a certain legal value, characterising him as a being of the same sort as the being who attacks him. The member of a community has the right to possess his own in peace. His life is costly. But within the narrow circle that is held together by a common law-thing, common chieftain, common war and peace, homicide is after all not a crime against life itself, not even to be reckoned as anything unnatural. On the other hand, from the moment we enter into the clan, the sacredness of life rises up in absolute inviolability, with its judgement upon bloodshed as sacrilege, blindness, suicide. The reaction comes as suddenly and as unmistakably as when a nerve is touched by a needle. With this slight movement from society over to clan we have crossed the deepest gulf in existence. Such is life in primitive experience — not a mere organism, not a collection of parts held together by some unifying principle, but a unique soul apparent in every one of its manifestations. The being is so homogeneous and personal that all its particles, as well as all its qualities and characteristics, involve the whole creature. When a man grasps a handful of earth, he has in his hand its wideness and its firmness and its fruitfulness; we may explain the fact by saying that a grain of the soil contains its soul and essence; or we may say that the fragment is the whole — both expressions are right and both are wrong insofar as the fact is not expressible in our language, but only to be got at by resurrection of an experience foreign to us. When a man eats an animal, or drinks its blood, he assimilates bearness or wolfness, and by his act he not only assumes the ferociousness and courage of the beast, but its habits and form as well; the bodily shape of the animal enters into his constitution, and may force itself out in some moments, even perhaps to complete transformation. You cannot mimic the gambols of an animal but an inner adjustment takes place, any more than you can behave like a woman without inducing a mood of feminine feeling, for by the dramatic imitation the dancer evokes the being which expresses itself in those movements, and takes upon himself the responsibility of giving it power to manifest itself. It is told of an Icelander that he killed a man-eating bear to avenge his father and brother; and to make the revenge complete, he ate the animal. From that time he was rather difficult to manage, and his nature underwent a change which was nothing else but the bearness working within him. And similarly, by striking up friendships, men are vitally associated, more or less strongly, with their fellow men; as the brethren of the clan are not only one soul but one bone, one flesh, in a literal sense that escapes modern brains, so the soul of the clan is really knit with the souls of its neighbours and friends, to quote an expression from the Old Testament, which has now lost the force it originally carried among the Israelites as well as among the Teutons.
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