THE BULL-ROARER.
A Study of the Mysteries.
As the belated traveller makes his way through the monotonous plains
of Australia, through the Bush, with its level expanses and clumps of
grey-blue gum trees, he occasionally hears a singular sound. Beginning
low, with a kind of sharp tone thrilling through a whirring noise, it
grows louder and louder, till it becomes a sort of fluttering windy
roar. If the traveller be a new comer, he is probably puzzled
to the last degree. If he be an Englishman, country-bred, he says
to himself, ‘Why, that is the bull-roarer.’ If he
knows the colony and the ways of the natives, he knows that the blacks
are celebrating their tribal mysteries. The roaring noise is made
to warn all women to keep out of the way. Just as Pentheus was
killed (with the approval of Theocritus) because he profaned the rites
of the women-worshippers of Dionysus, so, among the Australian blacks,
men must, at their peril, keep out of the way of female, and women out
of the way of male, celebrations.
The instrument which produces the sounds that warn women to remain
afar is a toy familiar to English country lads. They call it the
bull-roarer. The common bull-roarer is an inexpensive toy which
anyone can make. I do not, however, recommend it to families,
for two reasons. In the first place, it produces a most horrible
and unexampled din, which endears it to the very young, but renders
it detested by persons of mature age. In the second place, the
character of the toy is such that it will almost infallibly break all
that is fragile in the house where it is used, and will probably put
out the eyes of some of the inhabitants. Having thus, I trust,
said enough to prevent all good boys from inflicting bull-roarers on
their parents, pastors, and masters, I proceed (in the interests of
science) to show how the toy is made. Nothing can be less elaborate.
You take a piece of the commonest wooden board, say the lid of a packing-case,
about a sixth of an inch in thickness, and about eight inches long and
three broad, and you sharpen the ends. When finished, the toy
may be about the shape of a large bay-leaf, or a ‘fish’
used as a counter (that is how the New Zealanders make it), or the sides
may be left plain in the centre, and only sharpened towards the extremities,
as in an Australian example lent me by Mr. Tylor. Then tie a strong
piece of string, about thirty inches long, to one end of the piece of
wood and the bull-roarer (the Australian natives call it turndun,
and the Greeks called it ρομβος)
is complete. Now twist the end of the string tightly about your
finger, and whirl the bull-roarer rapidly round and round. For
a few moments nothing will happen. In a very interesting lecture
delivered at the Royal Institution, Mr. Tylor once exhibited a bull-roarer.
At first it did nothing particular when it was whirled round, and the
audience began to fear that the experiment was like those chemical ones
often exhibited at institutes in the country, which contribute at most
a disagreeable odour to the education of the populace. But when
the bull-roarer warmed to its work, it justified its name, producing
what may best be described as a mighty rushing noise, as if some supernatural
being ‘fluttered and buzzed his wings with fearful roar.’
Grown-up people, of course, are satisfied with a very brief experience
of this din, but boys have always known the bull-roarer in England as
one of the most efficient modes of making the hideous and unearthly
noises in which it is the privilege of youth to delight.
The bull-roarer has, of all toys, the widest diffusion, and the most
extraordinary history. To study the bull-roarer is to take a lesson
in folklore. The instrument is found among the most widely severed
peoples, savage and civilised, and is used in the celebration of savage
and civilised mysteries. There are students who would found on
this a hypothesis that the various races that use the bull-roarer all
descend from the same stock. But the bull roarer is introduced
here for the very purpose of showing that similar minds, working with
simple means towards similar ends, might evolve the bull-roarer and
its mystic uses anywhere. There is no need for a hypothesis of
common origin, or of borrowing, to account for this widely diffused
sacred object.
The bull-roarer has been, and is, a sacred and magical instrument
in many and widely separated lands. It is found, always as a sacred
instrument, employed in religious mysteries, in New Mexico, in Australia,
in New Zealand, in ancient Greece, and in Africa; while, as we have
seen, it is a peasant-boy’s plaything in England. A number
of questions are naturally suggested by the bull-roarer. Is it
a thing invented once for all, and carried abroad over the world by
wandering races, or handed on from one people and tribe to another?
Or is the bull-roarer a toy that might be accidentally hit on in any
country where men can sharpen wood and twist the sinews of animals into
string? Was the thing originally a toy, and is its religious and
mystical nature later; or was it originally one of the properties of
the priest, or medicine-man, which in England has dwindled to a plaything?
Lastly, was this mystical instrument at first employed in the rites
of a civilised people like the Greeks, and was it in some way borrowed
or inherited by South Africans, Australians, and New Mexicans?
Or is it a mere savage invention, surviving (like certain other features
of the Greek mysteries) from a distant stage of savagery? Our
answer to all these questions is that in all probability the presence
of the ρομβος, or bull-roarer, in
Greek mysteries was a survival from the time when Greeks were in the
social condition of Australians.
In the first place, the bull-roarer is associated with mysteries
and initiations. Now mysteries and initiations are things that
tend to dwindle and to lose their characteristic features as civilisation
advances. The rites of baptism and confirmation are not secret
and hidden; they are common to both sexes, they are publicly performed,
and religion and morality of the purest sort blend in these ceremonies.
There are no other initiations or mysteries that civilised modern man
is expected necessarily to pass through. On the other hand, looking
widely at human history, we find mystic rites and initiations numerous,
stringent, severe, and magical in character, in proportion to the lack
of civilisation in those who practise them. The less the civilisation,
the more mysterious and the more cruel are the rites. The more
cruel the rites, the less is the civilisation. The red-hot poker
with which Mr. Bouncer terrified Mr. Verdant Green at the sham masonic
rites would have been quite in place, a natural instrument of probationary
torture, in the Freemasonry of Australians, Mandans, or Hottentots.
In the mysteries of Demeter or Bacchus, in the mysteries of a civilised
people, the red-hot poker, or any other instrument of torture, would
have been out of place. But in the Greek mysteries, just as in
those of South Africans, Red Indians, and Australians, the disgusting
practice of bedaubing the neophyte with dirt and clay was preserved.
We have nothing quite like that in modern initiations. Except
at Sparta, Greeks dropped the tortures inflicted on boys and girls in
the initiations superintended by the cruel Artemis.
But Greek mysteries retained the daubing with mud and the use of the
bull-roarer. On the whole, then, and on a general view of the
subject, we prefer to think that the bull-roarer in Greece was a survival
from savage mysteries, not that the bull-roarer in New Mexico, New Zealand,
Australia, and South Africa is a relic of civilisation.
Let us next observe a remarkable peculiarity of the turndun,
or Australian bull-roarer. The bull-roarer in England is a toy.
In Australia, according to Howitt and Fison, the bull-roarer is regarded with religious awe. ‘When, on
lately meeting with two of the surviving Kurnai, I spoke to them of
the turndun, they first looked cautiously round them to see that no
one else was looking, and then answered me in undertones.’
The chief peculiarity in connection with the turndun is that women may
never look upon it. The Chepara tribe, who call it bribbun,
have a custom that, ‘if seen by a woman, or shown by a man to
a woman, the punishment to both is death.’
Among the Kurnai, the sacred mystery of the turndun is preserved
by a legend, which gives a supernatural sanction to secrecy. When
boys go through the mystic ceremony of initiation they are shown turnduns,
or bull-roarers, and made to listen to their hideous din. They
are then told that, if ever a woman is allowed to see a turndun, the
earth will open, and water will cover the globe. The old men point
spears at the boy’s eyes, saying: ‘If you tell this to any
woman you will die, you will see the ground broken up and like the sea;
if you tell this to any woman, or to any child, you will be killed!’
As in Athens, in Syria, and among the Mandans, the deluge-tradition
of Australia is connected with the mysteries. In Gippsland there
is a tradition of the deluge. ‘Some children of the Kurnai
in playing about found a turndun, which they took home to the camp and
showed the women. Immediately the earth crumbled away, and it
was all water, and the Kurnai were drowned.’
In consequence of all this mummery the Australian women attach great
sacredness to the very name of the turndun. They are much less
instructed in their own theology than the men of the tribe. One
woman believed she had heard Pundjel, the chief supernatural being,
descend in a mighty rushing noise, that is, in the sound of the turndun,
when boys were being ‘made men,’ or initiated.
On turnduns the Australian sorcerers can fly up to heaven. Turnduns
carved with imitations of water-flowers are used by medicine-men in
rain-making. New Zealand also has her bull-roarers; some of them,
carved in relief, are in the Christy Museum, and one is engraved here.
I have no direct evidence as to the use of these Maori bull-roarers
in the Maori mysteries. Their employment, however, may perhaps
be provisionally inferred.
One can readily believe that the New Zealand bull-roarer may be whirled
by any man who is repeating a Karakia, or ‘charm to raise
the wind’:—
Loud wind,
Lasting wind,
Violent whistling wind,
Dig up the calm reposing sky,
Come, come.
In New Zealand ‘the natives regarded the wind as an indication of the presence
of their god,’ a superstition not peculiar to Maori religion.
The ‘cold wind’ felt blowing over the hands at spiritualistic
séances is also regarded (by psychical researchers) as
an indication of the presence of supernatural beings. The windy
roaring noise made by the bull-roarer might readily be considered by
savages, either as an invitation to a god who should present himself
in storm, or as a proof of his being at hand. We have seen that
this view was actually taken by an Australian woman. The hymn
called ‘breath,’ or haha, a hymn to the mystic wind,
is pronounced by Maori priests at the moment of the initiation of young
men in the tribal mysteries. It is a mere conjecture, and possibly
enough capable of disproof, but we have a suspicion that the use of
the mystica vannus Iacchi was a mode of raising a sacred wind
analogous to that employed by whirlers of the turndun.
Servius, the ancient commentator on Virgil, mentions, among other
opinions, this—that the vannus was a sieve, and that it
symbolised the purifying effect of the mysteries. But it is clear
that Servius was only guessing; and he offers other explanations, among
them that the vannus was a crate to hold offerings, primitias frugum.
We have studied the bull-roarer in Australia, we have caught a glimpse
of it in England. Its existence on the American continent is proved
by letters from New Mexico, and by a passage in Mr. Frank Cushing’s
‘Adventures in Zuni.’ In Zuni, too, among a semi-civilised Indian tribe, or rather a tribe
which has left the savage for the barbaric condition, we find the bull-roarer.
Here, too, the instrument—a ‘slat,’ Mr. Gushing calls
it—is used as a call to the ceremonial observance of the tribal
ritual. The Zunis have various ‘orders of a more or less
sacred and sacerdotal character.’ Mr. Cushing writes:—
These orders were engaged in their annual ceremonials, of which little
was told or shown me; but, at the end of four days, I heard one
morning a deep whirring noise. Running out, I saw a procession of
three priests of the bow, in plumed helmets and closely-fitting
cuirasses, both of thick buckskin—gorgeous and solemn with sacred
embroideries and war-paint, begirt with bows, arrows, and war-clubs,
and each distinguished by his badge of degree—coming down one of the
narrow streets. The principal priest carried in his arms a wooden
idol, ferocious in aspect, yet beautiful with its decorations of
shell, turquoise, and brilliant paint. It was nearly hidden by
symbolic slats and prayer-sticks most elaborately plumed. He was
preceded by a guardian with drawn bow and arrows, while another
followed, twirling the sounding slat, which had attracted alike my
attention and that of hundreds of the Indians, who hurriedly flocked
to the roofs of the adjacent houses, or lined the street, bowing their
heads in adoration, and scattering sacred prayer-meal on the god and
his attendant priests. Slowly they wound their way down the hill,
across the river, and off toward the mountain of Thunder. Soon an
identical procession followed and took its way toward the western
hills. I watched them long until they disappeared, and a few hours
afterward there arose from the top of 'Thunder Mountain' a dense
column of smoke, simultaneously with another from the more distant
western mesa of 'U-ha-na-mi,' or 'Mount of the Beloved.'
Then they told me that for four days I must neither touch nor eat
flesh or oil of any kind, and for ten days neither throw any refuse
from my doors, nor permit a spark to leave my house, for 'This was the
season of the year when the "grandmother of men" (fire) was precious.'
Here then, in Zuni, we have the bull-roarer again, and once more
we find it employed as a summons to the mysteries. We do not learn,
however, that women in Zuni are forbidden to look upon the bull-roarer.
Finally, the South African evidence, which is supplied by letters from
a correspondent of Mr. Tylor’s, proves that in South Africa, too,
the bull-roarer is employed to call the men to the celebration of secret
functions. A minute description of the instrument, and of its
magical power to raise a wind, is given in Theal’s ‘Kaffir
Folklore,’ p. 209. The bull-roarer has not been made a subject
of particular research; very probably later investigations will find
it in other parts of the modern world besides America, Africa, New Zealand,
and Australia. I have myself been fortunate enough to encounter
the bull-roarer on the soil of ancient Greece and in connection with
the Dionysiac mysteries. Clemens of Alexandria, and Arnobius,
an early Christian father who follows Clemens, describe certain toys
of the child Dionysus which were used in the mysteries. Among
these are turbines, κωνοι, and ρομβοι.
The ordinary dictionaries interpret all these as whipping-tops, adding
that ρομβος is sometimes ‘a
magic wheel.’ The ancient scholiast on Clemens, however,
writes: ‘The κωνος is a little piece
of wood, to which a string is fastened, and in the mysteries it is whirled
round to make a roaring noise.’ Here, in short, we have a brief but complete description of the bull-roarer
of the Australian turndun. No single point is omitted. The κωνος, like the turndun, is
a small object of wood, it is tied to a string, when whirled round it
produces a roaring noise, and it is used at initiations. This
is not the end of the matter.
In the part of the Dionysiac mysteries at which the toys of the child
Dionysus were exhibited, and during which (as it seems) the κωνος,
or bull-roarer, was whirred, the performers daubed themselves all over
with clay. This we learn from a passage in which Demosthenes describes
the youth of his hated adversary, Æschines. The mother of
Æschines, he says, was a kind of ‘wise woman,’ and
dabbler in mysteries. Æschines used to aid her by bedaubing
the initiate over with clay and bran.
The word αποματτων, here
used by Demosthenes, is explained by Harpocration as the ritual term
for daubing the initiated. A story was told, as usual, to explain
this rite. It was said that, when the Titans attacked Dionysus
and tore him to pieces, they painted themselves first with clay, or
gypsum, that they might not be recognised. Nonnus shows, in several
places, that down to his time the celebrants of the Bacchic mysteries
retained this dirty trick. Precisely the same trick prevails in
the mysteries of savage peoples. Mr. Winwood Reade
reports the evidence of Mongilomba. When initiated, Mongilomba
was ‘severely flogged in the Fetich House’ (as young Spartans
were flogged before the animated image of Artemis), and then he was
‘plastered over with goat-dung.’ Among the natives
of Victoria, the ‘body of the initiated is bedaubed with clay, mud, charcoal
powder, and filth of every kind.’ The girls are plastered
with charcoal powder and white clay, answering to the Greek gypsum.
Similar daubings were performed at the mysteries by the Mandans, as
described by Catlin; and the Zunis made raids on Mr. Cushing’s
black paint and Chinese ink for like purposes. On the Congo, Mr.
Johnson found precisely the same ritual in the initiations. Here,
then, not to multiply examples, we discover two singular features in
common between Greek and savage mysteries. Both Greeks and savages
employ the bull-roarer, both bedaub the initiated with dirt or with
white paint or chalk. As to the meaning of the latter very un-Aryan
practice, one has no idea. It is only certain that war parties
of Australian blacks bedaub themselves with white clay to alarm their
enemies in night attacks. The Phocians, according to Herodotus
(viii. 27), adopted the same ‘aisy stratagem,’ as Captain
Costigan has it. Tellies, the medicine-man (μαντις),
chalked some sixty Phocians, whom he sent to make a night attack on
the Thessalians. The sentinels of the latter were seized with
supernatural horror, and fled, ‘and after the sentinels went the
army.’ In the same way, in a night attack among the Australian Kurnai,
‘they
all rapidly painted themselves with pipe-clay: red ochre is no use,
it cannot frighten an enemy.’ If, then, Greeks in the historic
period kept up Australian tactics, it is probable that the ancient mysteries
of Greece might retain the habit of daubing the initiated which occurs
in savage rites.
‘Come now,’ as Herodotus would say, ‘I will show
once more that the mysteries of the Greeks resemble those of Bushmen.’ In Lucian’s Treatise on Dancing,
we read, ‘I pass over the fact that you cannot find a single ancient
mystery in which there is not dancing. . . . To prove this I will not
mention the secret acts of worship, on account of the uninitiated.
But this much all men know, that most people say of those who reveal
the mysteries, that they “dance them out.”’
Here Liddell and Scott write, rather weakly, ‘to dance out, let
out, betray, probably of some dance which burlesqued these ceremonies.’
It is extremely improbable that, in an age when it was still forbidden
to reveal the ορyια, or secret rites, those rites
would be mocked in popular burlesques. Lucian obviously intends
to say that the matter of the mysteries was set forth in ballets d’action. Now this is exactly the case in the surviving
mysteries of the Bushmen. Shortly after the rebellion of Langalibalele’s
tribe, Mr. Orpen, the chief magistrate in St. John’s Territory,
made the acquaintance of Qing, one of the last of an all but exterminated
tribe. Qing ‘had never seen a white man, except fighting,’
when he became Mr. Orpen’s guide. He gave a good deal of
information about the myths of his people, but refused to answer certain
questions. ‘You are now asking the secrets that are not
spoken of.’ Mr. Orpen asked, ‘Do you know the secrets?’
Qing replied, ‘No, only the initiated men of that dance know these
things.’ To ‘dance’ this or that means, ‘to
be acquainted with this or that mystery;’ the dances were originally
taught by Cagn, the mantis, or grasshopper god. In many mysteries,
Qing, as a young man, was not initiated. He could not ‘dance them out.’
There are thus undeniably close resemblances between the Greek mysteries
and those of the lowest contemporary races.
As to the bull-roarer, its recurrence among Greeks, Zunis, Kamilaroi,
Maoris, and South African races, would be regarded, by some students,
as a proof that all these tribes had a common origin, or had borrowed
the instrument from each other. But this theory is quite unnecessary.
The bull-roarer is a very simple invention. Anyone might find
out that a bit of sharpened wood, tied to a string, makes, when whirred,
a roaring noise. Supposing that discovery made, it is soon turned
to practical use. All tribes have their mysteries. All want
a signal to summon the right persons together and warn the wrong persons
to keep out of the way. The church bell does as much for us, so
did the shaken seistron for the Egyptians. People with neither bells nor seistra find the bull-roarer, with its mysterious
sound, serve their turn. The hiding of the instrument from women
is natural enough. It merely makes the alarm and absence of the
curious sex doubly sure. The stories of supernatural consequences
to follow if a woman sees the turndun lend a sanction. This is
not a random theory, without basis. In Brazil, the natives have
no bull-roarer, but they have mysteries, and the presence of the women
at the mysteries of the men is a terrible impiety. To warn away
the women, the Brazilians make loud ‘devil-music’ on what
are called ‘jurupari pipes.’ Now, just as in Australia,
the women may not see the jurupari pipes on pain of death.
When the sound of the jurupari pipes is heard, as when the turndun is
heard in Australia, every woman flees and hides herself. The women
are always executed if they see the pipes. Mr. Alfred Wallace
bought a pair of these pipes, but he had to embark them at a distance
from the village where they were procured. The seller was afraid
that some unknown misfortune would occur if the women of his village set eyes on the juruparis.
The conclusion from all these facts seems obvious. The bull-roarer
is an instrument easily invented by savages, and easily adopted into
the ritual of savage mysteries. If we find the bull-roarer used
in the mysteries of the most civilised of ancient peoples, the most
probable explanation is, that the Greeks retained both the mysteries,
the bull-roarer, the habit of bedaubing the initiate, the torturing
of boys, the sacred obscenities, the antics with serpents, the dances,
and the like, from the time when their ancestors were in the savage
condition. That more refined and religious ideas were afterwards
introduced into the mysteries seems certain, but the rites were, in
many cases, simply savage. Unintelligible (except as survivals)
when found among Hellenes, they become intelligible enough among savages,
because they correspond to the intellectual condition and magical fancies
of the lower barbarism. The same sort of comparison, the same
kind of explanation, will account, as we shall see, for the savage myths
as well as for the savage customs which survived among the Greeks.
Footnotes
Uncharted Knowledge
Wisdom From Previous Realities
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