CHAPTERIX.MYTHOLOGY (continued).
Nature-myths, their origin, canon of interpretation, preservation of original sense and significant names—Nature-myths of upper savage races compared with related forms among barbaric and civilized nations—Heaven and Earth as Universal Parents—Sun and Moon: Eclipse and Sunset, as Hero or Maiden swallowed by Monster; Rising of Sun from Sea and Descent to Under-World; Jaws of Night and Death, Symplegades; Eye of Heaven, Eye of Odin and the Graiæ—Sun and Moon as mythic civilizers—Moon, her inconstancy, periodical death and revival—Stars, their generation—Constellations, their place in Mythology and Astronomy—Wind and Tempest—Thunder—Earthquake.
From laying down general principles of myth-development, we may now proceed to survey the class of Nature-myths, such especially as seem to have their earliest source and truest meaning among the lower races of mankind.
Science, investigating nature, discusses its facts and announces its laws in technical language which is clear and accurate to trained students, but which falls only as a mystic jargon on the ears of barbarians, or peasants, or children. It is to the comprehension of just these simple unschooled minds that the language of poetic myth is spoken, so far at least as it is true poetry, and not its quaint affected imitation. The poet contemplates the same natural world as the man of science, but in his so different craft strives to render difficult thought easy by making it visible and tangible, above all by referring the being and movement of the world to such personal life as his hearers feel within themselves, and thus working out in far-stretched fancy the maxim that ‘Man is the measure of all things.’ Let but the key be recovered to this mythicdialect, and its complex and shifting terms will translate themselves into reality, and show how far legend, in its sympathetic fictions of war, love, crime, adventure, fate, is only telling the perennial story of the world’s daily life. The myths shaped out of those endless analogies between man and nature which are the soul of all poetry, into those half-human stories still so full to us of unfading life and beauty, are the masterpieces of an art belonging rather to the past than to the present. The growth of myth has been checked by science, it is dying of weights and measures, of proportions and specimens—it is not only dying, but half dead, and students are anatomising it. In this world one must do what one can, and if the moderns cannot feel myth as their forefathers did, at least they can analyse it. There is a kind of intellectual frontier within which he must be who will sympathise with myth, while he must be without who will investigate it, and it is our fortune that we live near this frontier-line, and can go in and out. European scholars can still in a measure understand the belief of Greeks or Aztecs or Maoris in their native myths, and at the same time can compare and interpret them without the scruples of men to whom such tales are history, and even sacred history. Moreover, were the whole human race at a uniform level of culture with ourselves, it would be hard to bring our minds to conceive of tribes in the mental state to which the early growth of nature-myth belongs, even as it is now hard to picture to ourselves a condition of mankind lower than any that has been actually found. But the various grades of existing civilization preserve the landmarks of a long course of history, and there survive by millions savages and barbarians whose minds still produce, in rude archaic forms, man’s early mythic representations of nature.
Those who read for the first time the dissertations of the modern school of mythologists, and sometimes even those who have been familiar with them for years, are prone to ask, with half-incredulous appreciation of the beauty andsimplicity of their interpretations, can they be really true? Can so great a part of the legendary lore of classic, barbarian, and mediæval Europe be taken up with the everlasting depiction of Sun and Sky, Dawn and Gloaming, Day and Night, Summer and Winter, Cloud and Tempest; can so many of the personages of tradition, for all their heroic human aspect, have their real origin in anthropomorphic myths of nature? Without any attempt to discuss these opinions at large, it will be seen that inspection of nature-mythology from the present point of view tells in their favour, at least as to principle. The general theory that such direct conceptions of nature as are so naïvely and even baldly uttered in the Veda, are among the primary sources of myth, is enforced by evidence gained elsewhere in the world. Especially the traditions of savage races display mythic conceptions of the outer world, primitive like those of the ancient Indian hymns, agreeing with them in their general character, and often remarkably corresponding in their very episodes. At the same time it must be clearly understood that the truth of such a general principle is no warrant for all the particular interpretations which mythologists claim to base upon it, for of these in fact many are wildly speculative, and many hopelessly unsound. Nature-myth demands indeed a recognition of its vast importance in the legendary lore of mankind, but only so far as its claim is backed by strong and legitimate evidence.
The close and deep analogies between the life of nature and the life of man have been for ages dwelt upon by poets and philosophers, who in simile or in argument have told of light and darkness, of calm and tempest, of birth, growth, change, decay, dissolution, renewal. But no one-sided interpretation can be permitted to absorb into a single theory such endless many-sided correspondences as these. Rash inferences which on the strength of mere resemblance derive episodes of myth from episodes of nature must be regarded with utter mistrust, for the student who has no more stringentcriterion than this for his myths of sun and sky and dawn, will find them wherever it pleases him to seek them. It may be judged by simple trial what such a method may lead to; no legend, no allegory, no nursery rhyme, is safe from the hermeneutics of a thorough-going mythologic theorist. Should he, for instance, demand as his property the nursery ‘Song of Sixpence,’ his claim would be easily established: obviously the four-and-twenty blackbirds are the four-and-twenty hours, and the pie that holds them is the underlying earth covered with the overarching sky; how true a touch of nature it is that when the pie is opened, that is, when day breaks, the birds begin to sing; the King is the Sun, and his counting out his money is pouring out the sunshine, the golden shower of Danae; the Queen is the Moon, and her transparent honey the moonlight; the Maid is the ‘rosy-fingered’ Dawn who rises before the Sun her master, and hangs out the clouds, his clothes, across the sky; the particular blackbird who so tragically ends the tale by snipping off her nose, is the hour of sunrise. The time-honoured rhyme really wants but one thing to prove it a Sun-myth, that one thing being a proof by some argument more valid than analogy. Or if historical characters be selected with any discretion, it is easy to point out the solar episodes embodied in their lives. See Cortès landing in Mexico, and seeming to the Aztecs their very Sun-priest Quetzalcoatl, come back from the East to renew his reign of light and glory; mark him deserting the wife of his youth, even as the Sun leaves the Dawn, and again in later life abandoning Marina for a new bride; watch his sun-like career of brilliant conquest, checkered with intervals of storm, and declining to a death clouded with sorrow and disgrace. The life of Julius Cæsar would fit as plausibly into a scheme of solar myth; his splendid course as in each new land he came, and saw, and conquered; his desertion of Cleopatra; his ordinance of the solar year for men; his death at the hand of Brutus, like Sîfrit’s death at the hand of Hagen in the Nibelungen Lied; his falling pierced withmany bleeding wounds, and shrouding himself in his cloak to die in darkness. Of Cæsar, better than of Cassius his slayer, it might have been said in the language of sun-myth:
‘... O setting sun,As in thy red rays thou dost sink to-night,So in his red blood Cassius’ day is set;The sun of Rome is set!’
‘... O setting sun,As in thy red rays thou dost sink to-night,So in his red blood Cassius’ day is set;The sun of Rome is set!’
‘... O setting sun,As in thy red rays thou dost sink to-night,So in his red blood Cassius’ day is set;The sun of Rome is set!’
‘... O setting sun,
As in thy red rays thou dost sink to-night,
So in his red blood Cassius’ day is set;
The sun of Rome is set!’
Thus, in interpreting heroic legend as based on nature-myth, circumstantial analogy must be very cautiously appealed to, and at any rate there is need of evidence more cogent than vague likenesses between human and cosmic life. Now such evidence is forthcoming at its strongest in a crowd of myths, whose open meaning it would be wanton incredulity to doubt, so little do they disguise, in name or sense, the familiar aspects of nature which they figure as scenes of personal life. Even where the tellers of legend may have altered or forgotten its earlier mythic meaning, there are often sufficient grounds for an attempt to restore it. In spite of change and corruption, myths are slow to lose all consciousness of their first origin; as for instance, classical literature retained enough of meaning in the great Greek sun-myth, to compel even Lempriere of the Classical Dictionary to admit that Apollo or Phœbus ‘is often confounded with the sun.’ For another instance, the Greeks had still present to their thoughts the meaning of Argos Panoptes, Io’s hundred-eyed, all-seeing guard who was slain by Hermes and changed into the Peacock, for Macrobius writes as recognizing in him the star-eyed heaven itself;[418]even as Indra, the Sky, is in Sanskrit the ‘thousand-eyed’ (sahasrâksha,sahasranayana). In modern times the thought is found surviving or reviving in a strange region of language: whoever it was that brought argo as a word for ‘heaven’ into the Lingua Furbesca or Robbers’ Jargon of Italy,[419]must have been thinking of the starry sky watchinghim like Argus with his hundred eyes. The etymology of names, moreover, is at once the guide and safeguard of the mythologist. The obvious meaning of words did much to preserve vestiges of plain sense in classic legend, in spite of all the efforts of the commentators. There was no disputing the obvious facts that Hēlios was the Sun, and Selēnē the Moon; and as for Jove, all the nonsense of pseudo-history could not quite do away the idea that he was really Heaven, for language continued to declare this in such expressions as‘sub Jove frigido.’The explanation of the rape of Persephone, as a nature-myth of the seasons and the fruits of the earth, does not depend alone on analogy of incident, but has the very names to prove its reality, Zeus, Hēlios, Dēmētēr—Heaven, and Sun, and Mother Earth. Lastly, in stories of mythic beings who are the presiding genii of star or mountain, tree or river, or heroes and heroines actually metamorphosed into such objects, personification of nature is still plainly evident; the poet may still as of old see Atlas bear the heavens on his mighty shoulders, and Alpheus in impetuous course pursue the maiden Arethusa.
In a study of the nature-myths of the world, it is hardly practicable to start from the conceptions of the very lowest human tribes, and to work upwards from thence to fictions of higher growth; partly because our information is but meagre as to the beliefs of these shy and seldom quite intelligible folk, and partly because the legends they possess have not reached that artistic and systematic shape which they attain to among races next higher in the scale. It therefore answers better to take as a foundation the mythology of the North American Indians, the South Sea Islanders, and other low-cultured tribes who best represent in modern times the early mythologic period of human history. The survey may be fitly commenced by a singularly perfect and purposeful cosmic myth from New Zealand.
It seems long ago and often to have come into men’sminds, that the overarching Heaven and the all-producing Earth are, as it were, a Father and a Mother of the world, whose offspring are the living creatures, men, and beasts, and plants. Nowhere, in the telling of this oft-told tale, is present nature veiled in more transparent personification, nowhere is the world’s familiar daily life repeated with more childlike simplicity as a story of long past ages, than in the legend of ‘The Children of Heaven and Earth’ written down by Sir George Grey among the Maoris about the year 1850. From Rangi, the Heaven, and Papa, the Earth, it is said, sprang all men and things, but sky and earth clave together, and darkness rested upon them and the beings they had begotten, till at last their children took counsel whether they should rend apart their parents, or slay them. Then Tane-mahuta, father of forests, said to his five great brethren, ‘It is better to rend them apart, and to let the heaven stand far above us, and the earth lie under our feet. Let the sky become as a stranger to us, but the earth remain close to us as our nursing mother.’ So Rongo-ma-tane, god and father of the cultivated food of man, arose and strove to separate the heaven and the earth; he struggled, but in vain, and vain too were the efforts of Tangaroa, father of fish and reptiles, and of Haumia-tikitiki, father of wild-growing food, and of Tu-matauenga, god and father of fierce men. Then slow uprises Tane-mahuta, god and father of forests, and wrestles with his parents, striving to part them with his hands and arms. ‘Lo, he pauses; his head is now firmly planted on his mother the earth, his feet he raises up and rests against his father the skies, he strains his back and limbs with mighty effort. Now are rent apart Rangi and Papa, and with cries and groans of woe they shriek aloud.... But Tane-mahuta pauses not; far, far beneath him he presses down the earth; far, far above him he thrusts up the sky.’ But Tawhiri-ma-tea, father of winds and storms, had never consented that his mother should be torn from her lord, and now there arose in his breast a fierce desire to war against his brethren. So theStorm-god rose and followed his father to the realms above, hurrying to the sheltered hollows of the boundless skies, to hide and cling and nestle there. Then came forth his progeny, the mighty winds, the fierce squalls, the clouds, dense, dark, fiery, wildly drifting, wildly bursting; and in their midst their father rushed upon his foe. Tane-mahuta and his giant forests stood unconscious and unsuspecting when the raging hurricane burst on them, snapping the mighty trees across, leaving trunks and branches rent and torn upon the ground for the insect and the grub to prey on. Then the father of storms swooped down to lash the waters into billows whose summits rose like cliffs, till Tangaroa, god of ocean and father of all that dwell therein, fled affrighted through his seas. His children, Ika-tere, the father of fish, and Tu-te-wehiwehi, the father of reptiles, sought where they might escape for safety; the father of fish cried, ‘Ho, ho, let us all escape to the sea,’ but the father of reptiles shouted in answer, ‘Nay, nay, let us rather fly inland,’ and so these creatures separated, for while the fish fled into the sea, the reptiles sought safety in the forests and scrubs. But the sea-god Tangaroa, furious that his children the reptiles should have deserted him, has ever since waged war on his brother Tane who gave them shelter in his woods, Tane attacks him in return, supplying the offspring of his brother Tu-matauenga, father of fierce men, with canoes and spears and fish-hooks made from his trees, and with nets woven from his fibrous plants, that they may destroy withal the fish, the Sea-god’s children; and the Sea-god turns in wrath upon the Forest-god, overwhelms his canoes with the surges of the sea, sweeps with floods his trees and houses into the boundless ocean. Next the god of storms pushed on to attack his brothers the gods and progenitors of the tilled food and the wild, but Papa, the Earth, caught them up and hid them, and so safely were these her children concealed by their mother, that the Storm-god sought for them in vain. So he fell upon the last of his brothers, the father of fierce men, but him he could not even shake,though he put forth all his strength. What cared Tu-matauenga for his brother’s wrath? He it was who has planned the destruction of their parents, and had shown himself brave and fierce in war; his brethren had yielded before the tremendous onset of the Storm-god and his progeny; the Forest-god and his offspring had been broken and torn in pieces; the Sea-god and his children had fled to the depths of the ocean or the recesses of the shore; the gods of food had been safe in hiding; but man still stood erect and unshaken upon the bosom of his mother Earth, and at last the hearts of the Heaven and the Storm became tranquil, and their passion was assuaged.
But now Tu-matauenga, father of fierce men, took thought how he might be avenged upon his brethren who had left him unaided to stand against the god of storms. He twisted nooses of the leaves of the whanake tree, and the birds and beasts, children of Tane the Forest-god, fell before him; he netted nets from the flax-plant, and dragged ashore the fish, the children of Tangaroa the Sea-god; he found in the hiding-place underground the children of Rongo-ma-tane, the sweet potato and all cultivated food, and the children of Haumia-tikitiki, the fern-root and all wild-growing food, he dug them up and let them wither in the sun. Yet, though he overcame his four brothers, and they became his food, over the fifth he could not prevail, and Tawhiri-ma-tea, the Storm-god, still ever attacks him in tempest and hurricane, striving to destroy him both by sea and land. It was the bursting forth of the Storm-god’s wrath against his brethren that caused the dry land to disappear beneath the waters: the beings of ancient days who thus submerged the land were Terrible-rain, Long-continued-rain, Fierce-hailstorms; and their progeny were Mist, and Heavy-dew, and Light-dew, and thus but little of the dry land was left standing above the sea. Then clear light increased in the world, and the beings who had been hidden between Rangi and Papa before they were parted, now multiplied upon the earth. ‘Up to this time the vast Heaven has still ever remainedseparated from his spouse the Earth. Yet their mutual love still continues; the soft warm sighs of her loving bosom still ever rise up to him, ascending from the woody mountains and valleys, and men call these mists; and the vast Heaven, as he mourns through the long nights his separation from his beloved, drops frequent tears upon her bosom, and men seeing these term them dew-drops.’[420]
The rending asunder of heaven and earth is a far-spread Polynesian legend, well known in the island groups that lie away to the north-east.[421]Its elaboration, however, into the myth here sketched out was probably native New Zealand work. Nor need it be supposed that the particular form in which the English governor took it down among the Maori priests and tale-tellers, is of ancient date. The story carries in itself evidence of an antiquity of character which does not necessarily belong to mere lapse of centuries. Just as the adzes of polished jade and the cloaks of tied flax-fibre, which these New Zealanders were using but yesterday, are older in their place in history than the bronze battle-axes and linen mummy cloths of ancient Egypt, so the Maori poet’s shaping of nature into nature-myth belongs to a stage of intellectual history which was passing away in Greece five-and-twenty centuries ago. The myth-maker’s fancy of Heaven and Earth as father and mother of all things naturally suggested the legend that they in old days abode together, but have since been torn asunder. In China the same idea of the universal parentage is accompanied by a similar legend of the separation. Whether or not there is historical connexion here between the mythology of Polynesia and China, I will not guess, but certainly the ancient Chinese legend of theseparation of heaven and earth in the primæval days of Puang-Ku seems to have taken the very shape of the Polynesian myth: ‘Some say a person called Puang-Ku opened or separated the heavens and the earth, they previously being pressed down close together.’[422]As to the mythic details in the whole story of ‘The Children of Heaven and Earth,’ there is scarcely a thought that is not still transparent, scarcely even a word that has lost its meaning to us. The broken and stiffened traditions which our fathers fancied relics of ancient history, are, as has been truly said, records of a past which was never present; but the simple nature-myth, as we find it in its actual growth, or reconstruct it from its legendary remnants, may be rather called the record of a present which is never past. The battle of the storm against the forest and the ocean is still waged before our eyes; we still look upon the victory of man over the creatures of the land and sea; the food-plants still hide in their mother earth, and the fish and reptiles find shelter in the ocean and the thicket; but the mighty forest-trees stand with their roots firm planted in the ground, while with their branches they push up and up against the sky. And if we have learnt the secret of man’s thought in the childhood of his race, we may still realize with the savage the personal being of the ancestral Heaven and Earth.
The idea of the Earth as a mother is more simple and obvious, and no doubt for that reason more common in the world, than the idea of the Heaven as a father. Among the native races of America the Earth-mother is one of the great personages of mythology. The Peruvians worshipped her as Mama-Pacha or ‘Mother-Earth,’ and the Caribs, when there was an earthquake, said that it was their mother Earth dancing, and signifying to them to dance and make merry likewise, which accordingly they did. Among the North-American Indians the Comanches call on the Earthas their mother, and the Great Spirit as their father. A story told by Gregg shows a somewhat different thought of mythic parentage. General Harrison once called the Shawnee chief Tecumseh for a talk:—‘Come here, Tecumseh, and sit by your father!’ he said. ‘You my father!’ replied the chief, with a stern air. ‘No! yonder sun (pointing towards it) is my father, and the earth is my mother, so I will rest on her bosom,’ and he sat down on the ground. Like this was the Aztec fancy, as it seems from this passage in a Mexican prayer to Tezcatlipoca, offered in time of war: ‘Be pleased, O our Lord, that the nobles who shall die in the war be peacefully and joyously received by the Sun and the Earth, who are the loving father and mother of all.’[423]In the mythology of Finns, Lapps, and Esths, Earth-Mother is a divinely honoured personage.[424]Through the mythology of our own country the same thought may be traced, from the days when the Anglo-Saxon called upon the Earth, ‘Hâl wes thu folde, fira modor,’ ‘Hail thou Earth, men’s mother,’ to the time when mediæval Englishmen made a riddle of her, asking ‘Who is Adam’s mother?’ and poetry continued what mythology was letting fall, when Milton’s archangel promised Adam a life to last
‘... till like ripe fruit, thou dropInto thy mother’s lap.’[425]
‘... till like ripe fruit, thou dropInto thy mother’s lap.’[425]
‘... till like ripe fruit, thou dropInto thy mother’s lap.’[425]
‘... till like ripe fruit, thou drop
Into thy mother’s lap.’[425]
Among the Aryan race, indeed, there stands, wide and firm, the double myth of the ‘two great parents,’ as the Rig-Veda calls them. They areDyaushpitar,Ζεὺς πατήρ,Jupiter, the ‘Heaven-father,’ andPrthivî mâtar, the ‘Earth-mother;’ and their relation is still kept in mind in the ordinance of Brahman marriage according to theYajur-Veda, where the bridegroom says to the bride, ‘I am the sky, thou art the earth, come let us marry.’ When Greek poets called Ouranos and Gaia, or Zeus and Dēmētēr, husband and wife, what they meant was the union of Heaven and Earth; and when Plato said that the earth brought forth men, but God was their shaper, the same old mythic thought must have been present to his mind.[426]It reappears in ancient Scythia;[427]and again in China, where Heaven and Earth are called in the Shu-King ‘Father and Mother of all things.’ Chinese philosophy naturally worked this idea into the scheme of the two great principles of nature, the Yin and Yang, male and female, heavenly and earthly, and from this disposition of nature they drew a practical moral lesson: Heaven, said the philosophers of the Sung dynasty, made man, and earth made woman and therefore woman is to be subject to man as Earth to Heaven.[428]
Entering next upon the world-wide myths of Sun, Moon, and Stars, the regularity and consistency of human imagination may be first displayed in the beliefs connected with eclipses. It is well known that these phenomena, to us now crucial instances of the exactness of natural laws, are, throughout the lower stages of civilization, the very embodiment of miraculous disaster. Among the native races of America it is possible to select a typical series of myths describing and explaining, according to the rules of savage philosophy, these portents of dismay. The Chiquitos of the southern continent thought the Moon was hunted across the sky by huge dogs, who caught and tore her till her light was reddened and quenched by the blood flowing from her wounds, and then the Indians, raising a frightfulhowl and lamentation, would shoot across into the sky to drive the monsters off. The Caribs, thinking that the demon Maboya, hater of all light, was seeking to devour the Sun and Moon, would dance and howl in concert all night long to scare him away. The Peruvians, imagining such an evil spirit in the shape of a monstrous beast, raised the like frightful din when the Moon was eclipsed, shouting, sounding musical instruments, and beating the dogs to join their howls to the hideous chorus. Nor are such ideas extinct in our own days. In the Tupi language, the proper description of a solar eclipse is ‘oarasu jaguaretê vü,’ that is, ‘Jaguar has eaten Sun;’ and the full meaning of this phrase is displayed by tribes who still shout and let fly burning arrows to drive the devouring beast from his prey. On the northern continent, again, some savages believed in a great sun-swallowing dog, while others would shoot up arrows to defend their luminaries against the enemies they fancied attacking them. By the side of these prevalent notions there occur, however, various others; thus the Caribs could imagine the eclipsed Moon hungry, sick, or dying; the Peruvians could fancy the Sun angry and hiding his face, and the sick Moon likely to fall in total darkness, and bring on the end of the world; the Hurons thought the Moon sick, and explained their customary charivari of shouting men and howling dogs as performed to recover her from her complaint. Passing on from these most primitive conceptions, it appears that natives of both South and North America fell upon philosophic myths somewhat nearer the real facts of the case, insomuch as they admit that the Sun and Moon cause eclipses of one another. In Cumana, men thought that the wedded Sun and Moon quarrelled, and that one of them was wounded; and the Ojibwas endeavoured by tumultuous noise to distract the two from such a conflict. The course of progressive science went far beyond this among the Aztecs, who, as part of their remarkable astronomical knowledge, seem to have had an idea of the real cause ofeclipses, but who kept up a relic of the old belief by continuing to speak in mythologic phrase of the Sun and Moon being eaten.[429]Elsewhere in the lower culture, there prevailed similar mythic conceptions. In the South Sea Islands some supposed the Sun and Moon to be swallowed by an offended deity, whom they therefore induced, by liberal offerings, to eject the luminaries from his stomach.[430]In Sumatra we have the comparatively scientific notion that an eclipse has to do with the action of the Sun and Moon on one another, and, accordingly, they make a loud noise with sounding instruments to prevent the one from devouring the other.[431]So, in Africa, there may be found both the rudest theory of the Eclipse-monster, and the more advanced conception that a solar eclipse is ‘the Moon catching the Sun.’[432]
It is no cause for wonder that an aspect of the heavens so awful as an eclipse should in times of astronomic ignorance have filled men’s minds with terror of a coming destruction of the world. It may help us still to realize this thought if we consider how, as Calmet pointed out many years ago, the prophet Joel adopted the plainest words of description of the solar and lunar eclipse, ‘The sun shall be turned into darkness and the moon into blood;’ nor could the thought of any catastrophe of nature have brought his hearers face to face with a more lurid and awful picture. But to our minds, now that the eclipse has long passed from the realm of mythology into the realm of science, such words can carry but a feeble glimmer of their early meaning. Theancient doctrine of the eclipse has not indeed lost its whole interest. To trace it upward from its early savage stages to the period when astronomy claimed it, and to follow the course of the ensuing conflict over it between theology and science—ended among ourselves but still being sluggishly fought out among less cultured nations—this is to lay open a chapter of the history of opinion, from which the student who looks forward as well as back may learn grave lessons.
There is reason to consider most or all civilized nations to have started from the myth of the Eclipse-monster in forms as savage as those of the New World. It prevails still among the great Asiatic nations. The Hindus say that the demon Râhu insinuated himself among the gods, and obtained a portion of the amrita, the drink of immortality; Vishnu smote off the now immortal head, which still pursues the Sun and Moon whose watchful gaze detected his presence in the divine assembly. Another version of the myth is that there are two demons, Râhu and Ketu, who devour Sun and Moon respectively, and who are described in conformity with the phenomena of eclipses, Râhu being black, and Ketu red; the usual charivari is raised by the populace to drive them off, though indeed, as their bodies have been cut off at the neck, their prey must of natural course slip out as soon as swallowed. Or Râhu and Ketu are the head and body of the dissevered demon, by which conception the Eclipse-monster is most ingeniously adapted to advanced astronomy, the head and tail being identified with the ascending and descending nodes. The following remarks on the eclipse-controversy, made by Mr. Samuel Davis a century ago in the Asiatick Researches, are still full of interest. ‘It is evident, from what has been explained, that the Pūndits, learned in the Jyotish shastrū, have truer notions of the form of earth and the economy of the universe than are ascribed to the Hindoos in general: and that they must reject the ridiculous belief of the common Brahmūns, thateclipses are occasioned by the intervention of the monster Rahoo, with many other particulars equally unscientific and absurd. But as this belief is founded on explicit and positive declarations contained in the védūs and pooranus, the divine authority of which writings no devout Hindoo can dispute, the astronomers have some of them cautiously explained such passages in those writings as disagree with the principles of their own science: and where reconciliation was impossible, have apologized, as well as they could, for propositions necessarily established in the practice of it, by observing, that certain things, as stated in other shastrūs, might have been so formerly, and may be so still; but for astronomical purposes, astronomical rules must be followed.’[433]It is not easy to give a more salient example than this of the consequence of investing philosophy with the mantle of religion, and allowing priests and scribes to convert the childlike science of an early age into the sacred dogma of a late one. Asiatic peoples under Buddhist influence show the eclipse-myth in its different stages. The rude Mongols make a clamour of rough music to drive the attacking Aracho (Râhu) from Sun or Moon. A Buddhist version mentioned by Dr. Bastian describes Indra the Heaven-god pursuing Râhu with his thunderbolt, and ripping open his belly, so that although he can swallow the heavenly bodies, he lets them slip out again.[434]The more civilized nations of South-East Asia, accepting the eclipse-demons Râhu and Ketu, were not quite staggered in their belief by the foreigners’ power of foretelling eclipses, nor even by learning roughly to do the same themselves. The Chinese have official announcement of an eclipse duly made beforehand, and then proceed to encounter the ominous monster, when he comes, withgongs and bells and the regularly appointed prayers. Travellers of a century or two ago relate curious details of such combined belief in the dragon and the almanac, culminating in an ingenious argument to account for the accuracy of the Europeans’ predictions. These clever people, the Siamese said, know the monster’s mealtimes, and can tell how hungry he will be, that is, how large an eclipse will be required to satisfy him.[435]
In Europe popular mythology kept up ideas, either of a fight of sun or moon with celestial enemies, or of the moon’s fainting or sickness; and especially remnants of such archaic belief are manifested in the tumultuous clamour raised in defence or encouragement of the afflicted luminary. The Romans flung firebrands into the air, and blew trumpets, and clanged brazen pots and pans,‘laboranti succurrere lunae.’Tacitus, relating the story of the soldiers’ mutiny against Tiberius, tells how their plan was frustrated by the moon suddenly languishing in a clear sky (luna claro repente coelo visa languescere): in vain by clang of brass and blast of trumpet they strove to drive away the darkness, for clouds came up and covered all, and the plotters saw, lamenting, that the gods turned away from their crime.[436]In the period of the conversion of Europe, Christian teachers began to attack the pagan superstition, and to urge that men should no longer clamour and cry ‘vince luna!’ to aid the moon in her sore danger; and at last there came a time when the picture of the sun or moon in the dragon’s mouth became a mere old-fashioned symbol to represent eclipses in the calendar, and the saying,‘Dieu garde la lune des loups’passed into a mocking proverb against fear of remote danger. Yet the ceremonial charivari is mentioned in our own country in the seventeenth century:‘The Irish or Welsh during eclipses run about beating kettles and pans, thinking their clamour and vexations available to the assistance of the higher orbes.’ In 1654 Nuremberg went wild with terror of an impending solar eclipse; the markets ceased, the churches were crowded with penitents, and a record of the event remains in the printed thanksgiving which was issued (Danckgebeth nach vergangener höchstbedrohlich und hochschädlicher Sonnenfinstenuss), which gives thanks to the Almighty for granting to poor terrified sinners the grace of covering the sky with clouds, and sparing them the sight of the awful sign in heaven. In our own times, a writer on French folklore was surprised during a lunar eclipse to hear sighs and exclamations,‘Mon Dieu, qu’elle est souffrante!’and found on enquiry that the poor moon was believed to be the prey of some invisible monster seeking to devour her.[437]No doubt such late survivals have belonged in great measure to the ignorant crowd, for the educated classes of the West have never suffered in its extreme the fatal Chinese union of scepticism and superstition. Yet if it is our mood to bewail the slowness with which knowledge penetrates the mass of mankind, there stand dismal proofs before us here. The eclipse remained an omen of fear almost up to our own century, and could rout a horror-stricken army, and fill Europe with dismay, a thousand years after Pliny had written in memorable words his eulogy of the astronomers; those great men, he said, and above ordinary mortals, who, by discovering the laws of the heavenly bodies, had freed the miserable mind of men from terror at the portents of eclipses.
Day is daily swallowed up by Night, to be set free again at dawn, and from time to time suffers a like but shorter durance in the maw of the Eclipse and the Storm-cloud;Summer is overcome and prisoned by dark Winter, to be again set free. It is a plausible opinion that such scenes from the great nature-drama of the conflict of light and darkness are, generally speaking, the simple facts, which in many lands and ages have been told in mythic shape, as legends of a Hero or maiden devoured by a Monster, and hacked out again or disgorged. The myths just displayed show with absolute distinctness, that myth can describe eclipse as the devouring and setting free of the personal sun and moon by a monster. The following Maori legend will supply proof as positive that the episode of the Sun’s or the Day’s death in sunset may be dramatized into a tale of a personal solar hero plunging into the body of the personal Night.
Maui, the New Zealand cosmic hero, at the end of his glorious career came back to his father’s country, and was told that here, perhaps, he might be overcome, for here dwelt his mighty ancestress, Hine-nui-te-po, Great-Daughter-of-Night, whom ‘you may see flashing, and as it were opening and shutting there, where the horizon meets the sky; what you see yonder shining so brightly-red, are her eyes, and her teeth are as sharp and hard as pieces of volcanic glass; her body is like that of a man; and as for the pupils of her eyes, they are jasper; and her hair is like the tangles of long sea-weed, and her mouth is like that of a barra-couta.’ Maui boasted of his former exploits, and said, ‘Let us fearlessly seek whether men are to die or live for ever;’ but his father called to mind an evil omen, that when he was baptizing Maui he had left out part of the fitting prayers, and therefore he knew that his son must perish. Yet he said, ‘O, my last-born, and the strength of my old age, ... be bold, go and visit your great ancestress, who flashes so fiercely there where the edge of the horizon meets the sky.’ Then the birds came to Maui to be his companions in the enterprise, and it was evening when they went with him, and they came to the dwelling of Hine-nui-te-po, and found her fast asleep. Maui chargedthe birds not to laugh when they saw him creep into the old chieftainess, but when he had got altogether inside her, and was coming out of her mouth, then they might laugh long and loud. So Maui stripped off his clothes, and the skin on his hips, tattooed by the chisel of Uetonga, looked mottled and beautiful, like a mackerel’s, as he crept in. The birds kept silence, but when he was in up to his waist, the little tiwakawaka could hold its laughter in no longer, and burst out loud with its merry note; then Maui’s ancestress awoke, closed on him and caught him tight, and he was killed. Thus died Maui, and thus death came into the world, for Hine-nui-te-po is the goddess both of night and death, and had Maui entered into her body and passed safely through her, men would have died no more. The New Zealanders hold that the Sun descends at night into his cavern, bathes in the Wai Ora Tane, the Water of Life, and returns at dawn from the under-world; hence we may interpret the thought that if Man could likewise descend into Hades and return, his race would be immortal.[438]Further evidence that Hine-nui-te-po is the deity of Night or Hades, appears in another New Zealand myth. Tane, descending to the shades below in pursuit of his wife, comes to the Night (Po) of Hine-a-te-po, Daughter-of-Night, who says to him, ‘I have spoken thus to her “Return from this place, as I, Hine-a-te-po, am here. I am the barrier between night and day.”’[439]It is seldom that solar characteristics aremore distinctly marked in the several details of a myth than they are here.
In the list of myths of engulfing monsters, there are others which seem to display, with a clearness almost approaching this, an origin suggested by the familiar spectacle of Day and Night, or Light and Darkness. The simple story of the Day may well be told in the Karen tale of Ta Ywa, who was born a tiny child, and went to the Sun to make him grow; the Sun tried in vain to destroy him by rain and heat, and then blew him up large till his head touched the sky; then he went forth and travelled from his home far over the earth; and among the adventures which befell him was this—a snake swallowed him, but they ripped the creature up, and Ta Ywa came back to life,[440]like the Sun from the ripped up serpent-demon in the Buddhist eclipse-myth. In North American Indian mythology, a principal personage is Manabozho, an Algonquin hero or deity whose solar character is well brought into view in an Ottawa myth which tells us that Manabozho (whom it calls Na-na-bou-jou) is the elder brother of Ning-gah-be-ar-nong Manito, the Spirit of the West, god of the country of the dead in the region of the setting sun. Manabozho’s solar nature is again revealed in the story of his driving the West, his father, across mountain and lake to the brink of the world, though he cannot kill him. This sun-hero Manabozho, when he angled for the King of Fishes, was swallowed, canoe and all; then he smote the monster’s heart with his war-club till he would fain have cast him up into the lake again, but the hero set his canoe fast across the fish’s throat inside, and finished slaying him; when the dead monster drifted ashore, the gulls pecked an opening for Manabozho to come out. This is a story familiar toEnglish readers from its introduction into the poem of Hiawatha. In another version, the tale is told of the Little Monedo of the Ojibwas, who also corresponds with the New Zealand Maui in being the Sun-Catcher; among his various prodigies, he is swallowed by the great fish, and cut out again by his sister.[441]South Africa is a region where there prevail myths which seem to tell the story of the world imprisoned in the monster Night, and delivered by the dawning Sun. The Basutos have their myth of the hero Litaolane; he came to man’s stature and wisdom at his birth; all mankind save his mother and he had been devoured by a monster; he attacked the creature and was swallowed whole, but cutting his way out he set free all the inhabitants of the world. The Zulus tell stories as pointedly suggestive. A mother follows her children into the maw of the great elephant, and finds forests and rivers and highlands, and dogs and cattle, and people who had built their villages there; a description which is simply that of the Zulu Hades. When the Princess Untombinde was carried off by the Isikqukqumadevu, the ‘bloated, squatting, bearded monster,’ the King gathered his army and attacked it, but it swallowed up men, and dogs, and cattle, all but one warrior; he slew the monster, and there came out cattle, and horses, and men, and last of all the princess herself. The stories of these monsters being cut open imitate, in graphic savage fashion, the cries of the imprisoned creatures as they came back from darkness into daylight. ‘There came out first a fowl, it said, “Kukuluku! I see the world!” For, for a long time it had been without seeing it. After the fowl there came out a man, he said “Hau! I at length see the world!”’ and so on with the rest.[442]
The well-known modern interpretation of the myth of Perseus and Andromeda, or of Herakles and Hesione, as a description of the Sun slaying the Darkness, has its connexion with this group of legends. It is related in a remarkable version of this story, that when the Trojan King Laomedon had bound his daughter Hesione to the rock, a sacrifice to Poseidon’s destroying sea-monster, Herakles delivered the maiden, springing full-armed into the fish’s gaping throat, and coming forth hairless after three days’ hacking within. This singular story, probably in part of Semitic origin, combines the ordinary myth of Hesione or Andromeda with the story of Jonah’s fish, for which indeed the Greek sculpture of Andromeda’s monster served as the model in early Christian art, while Joppa was the place where vestiges of Andromeda’s chains on a rock in front of the town were exhibited in Pliny’s time, and whence the bones of a whale were carried to Rome as relics of Andromeda’s monster. To recognize the place which the nature-myth of the Man swallowed by the Monster occupies in mythology, among remote and savage races and onward among the higher nations, affects the argument on a point of Biblical criticism. It strengthens the position of the critics who, seeing that the Book of Jonah consists of two wonder-episodes adapted to enforce two great religious lessons, no longer suppose intention of literal narrative in what they may fairly consider as the most elaborate parable of the Old Testament. Had the Book of Jonah happened to be lost in old times, and only recently recovered, it is indeed hardly likely that any other opinion of it than this would find acceptance among scholars.[443]
The conception of Hades as a monster swallowing men in death, was actually familiar to Christian thought. Thus, to take instances from different periods, the account of the Descent into Hades in the Apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus makes Hades speak in his proper personality, complaining that his belly is in pain, when the Saviour is to descend and set free the saints imprisoned in it from the beginning of the world; and in mediæval representations of this deliverance, the so-called ‘Harrowing of Hell,’ Christ is depicted standing before a huge fish-like monster’s open jaws, whence Adam and Eve are coming forth first of mankind.[444]With even more distinctness of mythical meaning, the man-devouring monster is introduced in the Scandinavian Eireks-Saga. Eirek, journeying toward Paradise, comes to a stone bridge guarded by a dragon, and entering into its maw, finds that he has arrived in the world of bliss.[445]But in another wonder-tale, belonging to that legendary growth which formed round early Christian history, no such distinguishable remnant of nature-myth survives.St.Margaret, daughter of a priest of Antioch, had been cast into a dungeon, and there Satan came upon her in the form of a dragon and swallowed her alive: