‘Maiden Mergrete tho Loked her beside,And sees a loathly dragon, Out of an hirn glide:His eyen were full griesly, His mouth opened wide,And Margrete might no where flee There she must abide,Maiden Margrete Stood still as any stone,And that loathly worm, To her-ward gan goneTook her in his foul mouth, And swallowed her flesh and bone.Anon he brast—Damage hath she none!Maiden Mergrete Upon the dragon stood;Blyth was her harte, And joyful was her mood.’[446]
‘Maiden Mergrete tho Loked her beside,And sees a loathly dragon, Out of an hirn glide:His eyen were full griesly, His mouth opened wide,And Margrete might no where flee There she must abide,Maiden Margrete Stood still as any stone,And that loathly worm, To her-ward gan goneTook her in his foul mouth, And swallowed her flesh and bone.Anon he brast—Damage hath she none!Maiden Mergrete Upon the dragon stood;Blyth was her harte, And joyful was her mood.’[446]
‘Maiden Mergrete tho Loked her beside,And sees a loathly dragon, Out of an hirn glide:His eyen were full griesly, His mouth opened wide,And Margrete might no where flee There she must abide,
‘Maiden Mergrete tho Loked her beside,
And sees a loathly dragon, Out of an hirn glide:
His eyen were full griesly, His mouth opened wide,
And Margrete might no where flee There she must abide,
Maiden Margrete Stood still as any stone,And that loathly worm, To her-ward gan goneTook her in his foul mouth, And swallowed her flesh and bone.Anon he brast—Damage hath she none!Maiden Mergrete Upon the dragon stood;Blyth was her harte, And joyful was her mood.’[446]
Maiden Margrete Stood still as any stone,
And that loathly worm, To her-ward gan gone
Took her in his foul mouth, And swallowed her flesh and bone.
Anon he brast—Damage hath she none!
Maiden Mergrete Upon the dragon stood;
Blyth was her harte, And joyful was her mood.’[446]
Stories belonging to the same group are not unknown toEuropean folk-lore. One is the story of Little Red Ridinghood, mutilated in the English nursery version, but known more perfectly by old wives in Germany, who can tell that the lovely little maid in her shining red satin cloak was swallowed with her grandmother by the Wolf, but they both came out safe and sound when the hunter cut open the sleeping beast. Any one who can fancy with prince Hal, ‘the blessed sun himself a fair hot wench in flame-coloured taffeta,’ and can then imagine her swallowed up by Sköll, the Sun-devouring Wolf of Scandinavian mythology, may be inclined to class the tale of Little Red Ridinghood as a myth of sunset and sunrise. There is indeed another story in Grimm’s Märchen, partly the same as this one, which we can hardly doubt to have a quaint touch of sun-myth in it. It is called the Wolf and Seven Kids, and tells of the Wolf swallowing the kids all but the youngest of the seven, who was hidden in the clock-case. As in Little Red Ridinghood, they cut open the Wolf and fill him with stones. This tale, which took its present shape since the invention of clocks, looks as though the tale-teller was thinking, not of real kids and wolf, but of days of the week swallowed by night, or how should he have hit upon such a fancy as that the wolf could not get at the youngest of the seven kids, because it was hidden (like to-day) in the clock case?[447]
It may be worth while to raise the question apropos of this nursery tale, does the peasant folk-lore of modern Europe really still display episodes of nature-myth, not asmere broken-down and senseless fragments, but in full shape and significance? In answer it will be enough to quote the story of Vasilissa the Beautiful, brought forward by Mr. W. Ralston in one of his lectures on Russian Folk-lore. Vasilissa’s stepmother and two sisters, plotting against her life, send her to get a light at the house of Bába Yagá, the witch, and her journey contains the following history of the Day, told in truest mythic fashion. Vasilissa goes and wanders, wanders in the forest. She goes, and she shudders. Suddenly before her bounds a rider, he himself white, and clad in white, the horse under him white, and the trappings white. And day began to dawn. She goes farther, when a second rider bounds forth, himself red, clad in red, and on a red horse. The sun began to rise. She goes on all day, and towards evening arrives at the witch’s house. Suddenly there comes again a rider, himself black, clad all in black, and on a black horse; he bounded to the gates of the Bába Yagá and disappeared as if he had sunk through the earth. Night fell. After this, when Vasilissa asks the witch, who was the white rider, she answers, ‘That is my clear Day;’ who was the red rider, ‘That is my red Sun;’ who was the black rider, ‘That is my black Night; they are all my trusty friends.’ Now, considering that the story of Little Red Ridinghood belongs to the same class of folk-lore tales as this story of Vasilissa the Beautiful, we need not be afraid to seek in the one for traces of the same archaic type of nature-myth which the other not only keeps up, but keeps up with the fullest consciousness of meaning.
The development of nature-myth into heroic legend seems to have taken place among the barbaric tribes of the South Sea Islands and North America much as it took place among the ancestors of the classic nations of the Old World. We are not to expect accurate consistency or proper sequence of episodes in the heroic cycles, but to judge from the characteristics of the episodes themselves as to the ideas which suggested them. As regards the less cultured races, a glance at two legendary cycles, one from Polynesia and theother from North America, will serve to give an idea of the varieties of treatment of phases of sun-myth. The New Zealand myth of Maui, mixed as it may be with other fancies, is in its most striking features the story of Day and Night. The story of the Sun’s birth from the ocean is thus told. There were five brothers, all called Maui, and it was the youngest Maui who had been thrown into the sea by Taranga his mother, and rescued by his ancestor Tama-nui-ki-te-Rangi, Great-Man-in-Heaven, who took him to his house, and hung him in the roof. Then is given in fanciful personality the tale of the vanishing of Night at dawn. One night, when Taranga came home, she found little Maui with his brothers, and when she knew her last-born, the child of her old age, she took him to sleep with her, as she had been used to take the other Mauis his brothers, before they were grown up. But the little Maui grew vexed and suspicious, when he found that every morning his mother rose at dawn and disappeared from the house in a moment, not to return till nightfall. So one night he crept out and stopped every crevice in the wooden window and the doorway, that the day might not shine into the house; then broke the faint light of early dawn, and then the sun rose and mounted into the heavens, but Taranga slept on, for she knew not it was broad day outside. At last she sprang up, pulled out the stopping of the chinks, and fled in dismay. Then Maui saw her plunge into a hole in the ground and disappear, and thus he found the deep cavern by which his mother went down below the earth as each night departed. After this, follows the episode of Maui’s visit to his ancestress Muri-ranga-whenua, at that western Land’s End where Maori souls descend into the subterranean region of the dead. She sniffs as he comes towards her, and distends herself to devour him, but when she has sniffed round from south by east to north, she smells his coming by the western breeze, and so knows that he is a descendant of hers. He asks for her wondrous jawbone, she gives it to him, and it is his weapon in his next exploit when he catches the sun, Tama-nui-te-Ra, Great-Man-Sun,in the noose, and wounds him and makes him go slowly. With a fishhook pointed with the miraculous jawbone, and smeared with his own blood for bait, Maui next performs his most famous feat of fishing up New Zealand, still called Te-Ika-a-Maui, the fish of Maui. To understand this, we must compare the various versions of the story in these and other Pacific Islands, which show that it is a general myth of the rising of dry land from beneath the ocean. It is said elsewhere that it was Maui’s grandfather, Rangi-Whenua, Heaven-Earth, who gave the jawbone. More distinctly, it is also said that Maui had two sons, whom he slew when young to take their jawbones; now these two sons must be the Morning and Evening, for Maui made the morning and evening stars from an eye of each; and it was with the jawbone of the eldest that he drew up the land from the deep. It is related that when Maui pulled up his fish, he found it was land, on which were houses, and stages on which to put food, and dogs barking, and fires burning, and people working. It appears, moreover, that the submarine region out of which the land was lifted was the under-world of Night, for Maui’s hook had caught the gable of the house of Hine-nui-te-po, Great-Daughter-of-Night, and when the land came up her house was on it, and she was standing near. Another Maori legend tells how Maui takes fire in his hands, it burns him, and he springs with it into the sea: ‘When he sank in the waters, the sun for the first time set, and darkness covered the earth. When he found that all was night, he immediately pursued the sun, and brought him back in the morning.’ When Maui carried or flung the fire into the sea, he set a volcano burning. It is told, again, that when Maui had put out all fires on earth, his mother sent him to get new fire from her ancestress Mahuika. The Tongans, in their version of the myth, relate how the youngest Maui discovers the cavern that leads to Bulotu, the west-land of the dead, and how his father, another Maui, sends him to the yet older Maui who sits by his great fire; the two wrestle, and Maui brings away fire for men,leaving the old earthquake-god lying crippled below. The legendary group thus dramatizes the birth of the sun from the ocean and the departure of the night, the extinction of the light at sunset and its return at dawn, and the descent of the sun to the western Hades, the under-world of night and death, which is incidentally identified with the region of subterranean fire and earthquake. Here, indeed, the characteristics of true nature-myth are not indistinctly marked, and Maui’s death by his ancestress the Night fitly ends his solar career.[448]
It is a sunset-story, very differently conceived, that begins the beautiful North American Indian myth of the Red Swan. The story belongs to the Algonquin race. The hunter Ojibwa had just killed a bear and begun to skin him, when suddenly something red tinged all the air around. Reaching the shore of a lake, the Indian saw it was a beautiful red swan, whose plumage glittered in the sun. In vain the hunter shot his shafts, for the bird floated unharmed and unheeding, but at last he remembered three magic arrows at home, which had been his father’s. The first and second arrow flew near and nearer, the third struck the swan, and flapping its wings, it flew off slowly towards the sinking of the sun. With full sense of the poetic solar meaning of this episode Longfellow has adapted it as a sunset picture, in one of his Indian poems:
‘Can it be the sun descendingO’er the level plain of water?Or the Red Swan floating, flying,Wounded by the magic arrow,Staining all the waves with crimson,With the crimson of its life-blood,Filling all the air with splendour,With the splendour of its plumage?’
‘Can it be the sun descendingO’er the level plain of water?Or the Red Swan floating, flying,Wounded by the magic arrow,Staining all the waves with crimson,With the crimson of its life-blood,Filling all the air with splendour,With the splendour of its plumage?’
‘Can it be the sun descendingO’er the level plain of water?Or the Red Swan floating, flying,Wounded by the magic arrow,
‘Can it be the sun descending
O’er the level plain of water?
Or the Red Swan floating, flying,
Wounded by the magic arrow,
Staining all the waves with crimson,With the crimson of its life-blood,Filling all the air with splendour,With the splendour of its plumage?’
Staining all the waves with crimson,
With the crimson of its life-blood,
Filling all the air with splendour,
With the splendour of its plumage?’
The story goes on to tell how the hunter speeds westward in pursuit of the Red Swan. At lodges where he rests, they tell him she has often passed there, but those who followed her have never returned. She is the daughter of an old magician who has lost his scalp, which Ojibwa succeeds in recovering for him and puts back on his head, and the old man rises from the earth, no longer aged and decrepit, but splendid in youthful glory. Ojibwa departs, and the magician calls forth the beautiful maiden, now not his daughter but his sister, and gives her to his victorious friend. It was in after days, when Ojibwa had gone home with his bride, that he travelled forth, and coming to an opening in the earth, descended and came to the abode of departed spirits; there he could behold the bright western region of the good, and the dark cloud of wickedness. But the spirits told him that his brethren at home were quarrelling for the possession of his wife, and at last, after long wandering, this Red Indian Odysseus returned to his mourning constant Penelope, laid the magic arrows to his bow, and stretched the wicked suitors dead at his feet.[449]Thus savage legends from Polynesia and America, possibly indeed shaped under European influence, agree with the theory[450]that Odysseus visiting the Elysian fields, or Orpheus descending to the land of Hades to bring back the ‘wide-shining’ Eurydikê, are but the Sun himself descending to, and ascending from, the world below.
Where Night and Hades take personal shape in myth,we may expect to find conceptions like that simply shown in a Sanskrit word for evening,‘rajanîmukha,’i.e., ‘mouth of night.’ Thus the Scandinavians told of Hel the death-goddess, with mouth gaping like the mouth of Fenrir her brother, the moon-devouring wolf; and an old German poem describes Hell’s abyss yawning from heaven to earth:
‘der was der Hellen gelîchdiu daz abgrundebegenit mit ir mundeunde den himel zuo der erden.’[451]
‘der was der Hellen gelîchdiu daz abgrundebegenit mit ir mundeunde den himel zuo der erden.’[451]
‘der was der Hellen gelîchdiu daz abgrundebegenit mit ir mundeunde den himel zuo der erden.’[451]
‘der was der Hellen gelîch
diu daz abgrunde
begenit mit ir munde
unde den himel zuo der erden.’[451]
The sculptures on cathedrals still display for the terror of the wicked the awful jaws of Death, the mouth of Hell wide yawning to swallow its victims. Again, where barbaric cosmology accepts the doctrine of a firmament arching above the earth, and of an under world whither the sun descends when he sets and man when he dies, here the conception of gates or portals, whether really or metaphorically meant, has its place. Such is the great gate which the Gold Coast negro describes the Heaven as opening in the morning for the Sun; such were the ancient Greek’s gates of Hades, and the ancient Jew’s gates of Sheol. There are three mythic descriptions connected with these ideas found among the Karens, the Algonquins, and the Aztecs, which are deserving of special notice. The Karens of Burma, a race among whom ideas are in great measure borrowed from the more cultured Buddhists they have been in contact with, have precedence here for the distinctness of their statement. They say that in the west there are two massive strata of rocks which are continually opening and shutting, and between these strata the sun descends at sunset, but how the upper stratum is supported, no one can describe. The idea comes well into view in the description of a Bghai festival, where sacrificed fowls are thus addressed,—‘The seven heavens, thou ascendest to the top; the seven earths, thou descendestto the bottom. Thou arrivest at Khu-the; thou goest unto Tha-ma [i.e., Yama, the Judge of the Dead in Hades.] Thou goest through the crevices of rocks, thou goest through the crevices of precipices. At the opening and shutting of the western gates of rock, thou goest in between; thou goest below the earth where the Sun travels. I employ thee, I exhort thee. I make thee a messenger, I make thee an angel, &c.’[452]Passing from Burma to the region of the North American lakes, we find a corresponding description in the Ottawa tale of Iosco, already quoted here for its clearly marked personification of Sun and Moon. This legend, though modern in some of its description of the Europeans, their ships, and their far-off land across the sea, is evidently founded on a myth of Day and Night. Iosco seems to be Ioskeha, the White One, whose contest with his brother Tawiscara, the Dark One, is an early and most genuine Huron nature-myth of Day and Night. Iosco and his friends travel for years eastward and eastward to reach the sun, and come at last to the dwelling of Manabozho near the edge of the world, and then, a little beyond, to the chasm to be passed on the way to the land of the Sun and Moon. They began to hear the sound of the beating sky, and it seemed near at hand, but they had far to travel before they reached the place. When the sky came down, its pressure would force gusts of wind from the opening, so strong that the travellers could hardly keep their feet, and the sun passed but a short distance above their heads, The sky would come down with violence, but it would rise slowly and gradually. Iosco and one of his friends stood near the edge, and with a great effort leapt through and gained a foothold on the other side; but the other two were fearful and undecided, andwhen their companions called to them through the darkness, ‘Leap! leap! the sky is on its way down,’ they looked up and saw it descending, but paralyzed by fear they sprang so feebly that they only reached the other side with their hands, and the sky at the same moment striking violently on the earth with a terrible sound, forced them into the dreadful black abyss.[453]Lastly, in the funeral ritual of the Aztecs there is found a like description of the first peril that the shade had to encounter on the road leading to that subterranean Land of the Dead, which the sun lights when it is night on earth. Giving the corpse the first of the passports that were to carry him safe to his journey’s end, the survivors said to him, ‘With these you will pass between the two mountains that smite one against the other.’[454]On the suggestion of this group of solar conceptions and that of Maui’s death, we may perhaps explain as derived from a broken-down fancy of solar myth that famous episode of Greek legend, where the good ship Argo passed between the Symplêgades, those two huge cliffs that opened and closed again with swift and violent collision.[455]Can any effort of baseless fancy have brought into the poet’s mind a thought so quaint in itself, yet so fitting with the Karen and Aztec myths of the gates of Night and Death? With the Maori legend, the Argonautic tale has a yet deeper coincidence. In both the event is to determine the future; but this thought is worked out in two converse ways. If Maui passed throughthe entrance of Night and returned to Day, death should not hold mankind; if the Argo passed the Clashers, the way should lie open between them for ever. The Argo sped through in safety, and the Symplêgades can clash no longer on the passing ship; Maui was crushed, and man comes not forth again from Hades.
There is another solar metaphor which describes the sun, not as a personal creature, but as a member of a yet greater being. He is called in Java and Sumatra ‘Mata-ari,’ in Madagascar ‘Maso-andro,’ the ‘Eye of Day.’ If we look for translation of this thought from metaphor into myth, we may find it in the New Zealand stories of Maui setting his own eye up in heaven as the Sun, and the eyes of his two children as the Morning and the Evening Stars.[456]The nature-myth thus implicitly and explicitly stated is one widely developed on Aryan ground. It forms part of that macrocosmic description of the universe well known in Asiatic myth, and in Europe expressed in that passage of the Orphic poem which tells of Jove, at once the world’s ruler and the world itself: his glorious head irradiates the sky where hangs his starry hair, the waters of the sounding ocean are the belt that girds his sacred body the earth omniparent, his eyes are sun and moon, his mind, moving and ruling by counsel all things, is the royal æther that no voice nor sound escapes:
‘Sunt oculi Phœbus, Phœboque adversa recurrensCynthia. Mens verax nullique obnoxius ætherRegius interitu’, qui cuncta movetque regitqueConsilio. Vox nulla potest, sonitusve, nec ullusHancce Jovis sobolem strepitus, nec fama latere.Sic animi sensum, et caput immortale beatusObtinet: illustre, immensum, immutabile pandens,Atque lacertorum valido stans robore certus.’[457]
‘Sunt oculi Phœbus, Phœboque adversa recurrensCynthia. Mens verax nullique obnoxius ætherRegius interitu’, qui cuncta movetque regitqueConsilio. Vox nulla potest, sonitusve, nec ullusHancce Jovis sobolem strepitus, nec fama latere.Sic animi sensum, et caput immortale beatusObtinet: illustre, immensum, immutabile pandens,Atque lacertorum valido stans robore certus.’[457]
‘Sunt oculi Phœbus, Phœboque adversa recurrensCynthia. Mens verax nullique obnoxius ætherRegius interitu’, qui cuncta movetque regitqueConsilio. Vox nulla potest, sonitusve, nec ullusHancce Jovis sobolem strepitus, nec fama latere.Sic animi sensum, et caput immortale beatusObtinet: illustre, immensum, immutabile pandens,Atque lacertorum valido stans robore certus.’[457]
‘Sunt oculi Phœbus, Phœboque adversa recurrens
Cynthia. Mens verax nullique obnoxius æther
Regius interitu’, qui cuncta movetque regitque
Consilio. Vox nulla potest, sonitusve, nec ullus
Hancce Jovis sobolem strepitus, nec fama latere.
Sic animi sensum, et caput immortale beatus
Obtinet: illustre, immensum, immutabile pandens,
Atque lacertorum valido stans robore certus.’[457]
Where the Aryan myth-maker takes no thought of thelesser light, he can in various terms describe the sun as the eye of heaven. In the Rig-Veda it is the ‘eye of Mitra, Varuna, and Agni’—‘chakshuh Mitrasya Varunasyah Agneh.’[458]In the Zend-Avesta it is ‘the shining sun with the swift horses, the eye of Ahura-Mazda;’ elsewhere both eyes, apparently sun and moon, are praised.[459]To Hesiod it is the ‘all-seeing eye of Zeus’—‘πάντα ἰδὼν Διὸς ὀφθαλμός:’Macrobius speaks of antiquity calling the sun the eye of Jove—‘τί ἥλιος; οὐράνιος ὀφθαλμός.’[460]The old Germans, in calling the sun ‘Wuotan’s eye,’[461]recognized Wuotan, Woden Odhin, as being himself the divine Heaven. These mythic expressions are of the most unequivocal type. By the hint they give, conjectural interpretations may be here not indeed asserted, but suggested, for two of the quaintest episodes of ancient European myth. Odin, the All-father, say the old skalds of Scandinavia, sits among his Æsir in the city Asgard, on his high throne Hlidskialf (Lid-shelf), whence he can look down over the whole world discerning all the deeds of men. He is an old man wrapped in his wide cloak, and clouding his face with his wide hat, ‘os pileo ne cultu proderetur obnubens,’ as Saxo Grammaticus has it. Odin is one-eyed; he desired to drink from Mimir’s well, but he had to leave there one of his eyes in pledge, as it is said in the Völuspa:
‘All know I, Odin! Where thou hiddest thine eyeIn Mimir’s famous well.Mead drinks Mimir every morningFrom Wale-father’s pledge—Wit ye what this is?’
‘All know I, Odin! Where thou hiddest thine eyeIn Mimir’s famous well.Mead drinks Mimir every morningFrom Wale-father’s pledge—Wit ye what this is?’
‘All know I, Odin! Where thou hiddest thine eyeIn Mimir’s famous well.Mead drinks Mimir every morningFrom Wale-father’s pledge—Wit ye what this is?’
‘All know I, Odin! Where thou hiddest thine eye
In Mimir’s famous well.
Mead drinks Mimir every morning
From Wale-father’s pledge—Wit ye what this is?’
As Odin’s single eye seems certainly to be the sun in heaven, one may guess what is the lost eye in the well—perhaps the sun’s own reflection in any pool, or morelikely that of the moon, which in popular myth is told of as found in the well.[462]Possibly, too, some such solar fancy may explain part of the myth of Perseus. There are three Scandinavian Norns, whose names are Urdhr, Verdhandi, and Skuld—Was, and Is, and Shall-be—and these three maidens are the ‘Weird sisters’ who fix the lifetime of all men. So the Fates, the Parkai, daughters of the inevitable Anágkē, divide among them the periods of time: Lachesis sings the past, Klôthô the present, Atropos the future. Now is it allowable to consider these fatal sisters as of common nature with two other mythic sister-triads—the Graiai and their kinsfolk the Gorgons?[463]If it be so, it is easy to understand why of the three Gorgons one alone was mortal, whose life her two immortal sisters could not save, for the deathless past and future cannot save the ever-dying present. Nor would the riddle be hard to read, what is the one eye that the Graiai had between them, and passed from one to another?—the eye of day—the sun,that the past gives up to the present, and the present to the future.
Compared with the splendid Lord of Day, the pale Lady of Night takes, in myth as in nature, a lower and lesser place. Among the wide legendary group which associates together Sun and Moon, two striking examples are to be seen in the traditions by which half-civilized races of South America traced their rise from the condition of the savage tribes around them. These legends have been appealed to even by modern writers as gratefully remembered records of real human benefactors, who carried long ago to America the culture of the Old World. But happily for historic truth, mythic tradition tells its tales without expurgating the episodes which betray its real character to more critical observation. The Muyscas of the high plains of Bogota were once, they said, savages without agriculture, religion, or law; but there came to them from the East an old and bearded man, Bochica, the child of the Sun, and he taught them to till the fields, to clothe themselves, to worship the gods, to become a nation. But Bochica had a wicked, beautiful wife, Huythaca, who loved to spite and spoil her husband’s work; and she it was who made the river swell till the land was covered by a flood, and but a few of mankind escaped to the mountain-tops. Then Bochica was wroth, and he drove the wicked Huythaca from the earth, and made her the Moon, for there had been no moon before; and he cleft the rocks and made the mighty cataract of Tequendama, to let the deluge flow away. Then, when the land was dry, he gave to the remnant of mankind the year and its periodic sacrifices, and the worship of the Sun. Now the people who told this myth had not forgotten, what indeed we might guess without their help, that Bochica was himself Zuhé, the Sun, and Huythaca the Sun’s wife, the Moon.[464]
Like to this in meaning, though different in fancy, is the civilization-myth of the Incas. Men, said this Quichua legend, were savages dwelling in caves like wild beasts devouring wild roots and fruit and human flesh, covering themselves with leaves and bark or skins of animals. But our father the Sun took pity on them, and sent two of his children, Manco Ccapac and his sister-wife, Mama Occllo these rose from the lake of Titicaca, and gave to the uncultured hordes law and government, marriage and moral order, tillage and art and science. Thus was founded the great Peruvian empire, where in after ages each Inca and his sister-wife, continuing the mighty race of Manco Ccapac and Mama Occllo, represented in rule and religion not only the first earthly royal ancestors, but the heavenly father and mother of whom we can see these to be personifications, namely, the Sun himself, and his sister-wife the Moon.[465]Thus the nations of Bogota and Peru, remembering their days of former savagery, and the association of their culture with their national religion, embodied their traditions in myths of an often-recurring type, ascribing to the gods themselves, in human shape, the establishment of their own worship.
The ‘inconstant moon’ figures in a group of characteristic stories. Australian legend says that Mityan, the Moon, was a native cat, who fell in love with some one else’s wife, and was driven away to wander ever since.[466]The Khasias of the Himalaya say that the Moon falls monthly in love with his mother-in-law, who throws ashes in his face, whence his spots.[467]Slavonic legend, following the same track, saysthat the Moon, King of Night and husband of the Sun, faithlessly loved the Morning Star, wherefore he was cloven through in punishment, as we see him in the sky.[468]By a different train of thought, the Moon’s periodic death and revival has suggested a painful contrast to the destiny of man, in one of the most often-repeated and characteristic myths of South Africa, which is thus told among the Namaqua. The Moon once sent the Hare to Men to give this message, ‘Like as I die and rise to life again, so you also shall die and rise to life again,’ but the Hare went to the Men and said, ‘Like as I die and do not rise again, so you shall also die and not rise to life again.’ Then the Hare returned and told the Moon what he had done, and the Moon struck at him with a hatchet and slit his lip, as it has remained ever since, and some say the Hare fled and is still fleeing, but others say he clawed at the Moon’s face and left the scars that are still to be seen on it, and they also say that the reason why the Namaqua object to eating the hare (a prejudice which in fact they share with very different races) is because he brought to men this evil message.[469]It is remarkable that a story so closely resembling this, that it is difficult not to suppose both to be versions from a common original, is told in the distant Fiji Islands. There was a dispute between two gods as to how man should die: ‘Ra Vula (the Moon) contended that man should be like himself—disappear awhile and then live again. Ra Kalavo (the Rat) would not listen to this kind proposal, but said, “Let man die as a rat dies.” And he prevailed.’ The dates of the versions seem to show that the presence of these myths among the Hottentots and Fijians, at the two opposite sides of the globe, is at any rate not due to transmission in modern times.[470]
There is a very elaborate savage nature-myth of the generation of the Stars, which may unquestionably serve as a clue connecting the history of two distant tribes. The rude Mintira of the Malayan Peninsula express in plain terms the belief in a solid firmament, usual in the lower grades of civilization; they say the sky is a great pot held over the earth by a cord, and if this cord broke, everything on earth would be crushed. The Moon is a woman, and the Sun also: the Stars are the Moon’s children, and the Sun had in old times as many. Fearing, however, that mankind could not bear so much brightness and heat, they agreed each to devour her children; but the Moon, instead of eating up her stars, hid them from the Sun’s sight, who believing them all devoured, ate up her own; no sooner had she done it, than the Moon brought her family out of their hiding-place. When the Sun saw them, filled with rage she chased the Moon to kill her; the chase has lasted ever since, and sometimes the Sun even comes near enough to bite the Moon, and that is an eclipse; the Sun, as men may still see, devours his Stars at dawn, and the Moon hides hers all day while the Sun is near, and only brings them out at night when her pursuer is far away. Now among a tribe of North East India, the Ho of Chota-Nagpore, the myth reappears, obviously from the same source, but with a varied ending; the Sun cleft the Moon in twain for her deceit, and thus cloven and growing whole again she remains, and her daughters with her which are the Stars.[471]
From savagery up to civilization, there may be traced inthe mythology of the Stars a course of thought, changed indeed in application, yet never broken in its evident connexion from first to last. The savage sees individual stars as animate beings, or combines star-groups into living celestial creatures, or limbs of them, or objects connected with them; while at the other extremity of the scale of civilization, the modern astronomer keeps up just such ancient fancies, turning them to account in useful survival, as a means of mapping out the celestial globe. The savage names and stories of stars and constellations may seem at first but childish and purposeless fancies; but it always happens in the study of the lower races, that the more means we have of understanding their thoughts, the more sense and reason do we find in them. The aborigines of Australia say that Yurree and Wanjel, who are the stars we call Castor and Pollux, pursue Purra the Kangaroo (our Capella), and kill him at the the beginning of the great heat and the mirage is the smoke of the fire they roast him by. They say also that Marpean-Kurrk and Neilloan (Arcturus and Lyra) were the discoverers of the ant-pupas and the eggs of the loan-bird, and taught the aborigines to find them for food. Translated into the language of fact, these simple myths record the summer place of the stars in question, and the seasons of ant-pupas and loan-eggs, which seasons are marked by the stars who are called their discoverers.[472]Not less transparent is the meaning in the beautiful Algonquin myth of the Summer-maker. In old days eternal winter reigned upon the earth, till a sprightly little animal called the Fisher, helped by other beasts his friends, broke an opening through the sky into the lovely heaven-land beyond, let the warm winds pour forth and the summer descend to earth, and opened the cages of the prisoned birds: but when the dwellers in heaven saw their birds let loose and their warm gales descending, they started in pursuit, and shooting their arrows at the Fisher, hit him at last in his one vulnerable spot at the tip of his tail; thushe died for the good of the inhabitants of earth, and became the constellation that bears his name, so that still at the proper season men see him lying as he fell toward the north on the plains of heaven, with the fatal arrow still sticking in his tail.[473]Compare these savage stories with Orion pursuing the Pleiad sisters who take refuge from him in the sea, and the maidens who wept themselves to death and became the starry cluster of the Hyades, whose rising and setting betokened rain: such mythic creatures might for simple significance have been invented by savages, even as the savage constellation-myths might have been made by ancient Greeks. When we consider that the Australians who can invent such myths, and invent them with such fulness of meaning, are savages who put two and one together to make their numeral for three, we may judge how deep in the history of culture those conceptions lie, of which the relics are still represented in our star-maps by Castor and Pollux, Arcturus and Sirius, Boötes and Orion, the Argo and the Charles’s Wain, the Toucan and the Southern Cross. Whether civilized or savage, whether ancient or new made after the ancient manner, such names are so like in character that any tribe of men might adopt them from any other, as American tribes are known to receive European names into their own skies, and as our constellation of the Royal Oak is said to have found its way, in new copies of the old Hindu treatises, into the company of the Seven Sages and the other ancient constellations of Brahmanic India.
Such fancies are so fanciful, that two peoples seldom fall on the same name for a constellation, while, even within the limits of the same race, terms may differ altogether. Thus the stars which we call Orion’s Belt are in NewZealand either the Elbow of Maui, or they form the stem of the Canoe of Tamarerete, whose anchor dropped from the prow is the Southern Cross.[474]The Great Bear is equally like a Wain, Orion’s Belt serves as well for Frigga’s or Mary’s Spindle, or Jacob’s Staff. Yet sometimes natural correspondences occur. The seven sister Pleiades seem to the Australians a group of girls playing to a corroboree; while the North American Indians call them the Dancers; and the Lapps the Company of Virgins.[475]Still more striking is the correspondence between savages and cultured nations in fancies of the bright starry band that lies like a road across the sky. The Basutos call it the ‘Way of the Gods;’ the Ojis say it is the ‘Way of Spirits,’ which souls go up to heaven by.[476]North American tribes know it as ‘the Path of the Master of Life,’ the ‘Path of Spirits,’ ‘the Road of Souls,’ where they travel to the land beyond the grave, and where their camp-fires may be seen blazing as brighter stars.[477]Such savage imaginations of the Milky Way fit with the Lithuanian myth of the ‘Road of the Birds,’ at whose end the souls of the good, fancied as flitting away at death like birds, dwell free and happy.[478]That souls dwell in the Galaxy was a thought familiar to the Pythagoreans, who gave it on their master’s word that the souls that crowd there descend, and appear to men as dreams,[479]and to the Manichæans whose fancy transferred pure souls to this ‘column of light,’ whence they couldcome down to earth and again return.[480]It is a fall from such ideas of the Galaxy to the Siamese ‘Road of the White Elephant,’ the Spaniards’ ‘Road of Santiago,’ or the Turkish ‘Pilgrims’ Road,’ and a still lower fall to the ‘Straw Road’ of the Syrian, the Persian, and the Turk, who thus compare it with their lanes littered with the morsels of straw that fall from the nets they carry it in.[481]But of all the fancies which have attached themselves to the celestial road, we at home have the quaintest. Passing along the short and crooked way fromSt.Paul’s to Cannon Street, one thinks to how small a remnant has shrunk the name of the great street of the Wætlingas, which in old days ran from Dover through London into Wales. But there is a Watling Street in heaven as well as on earth, once familiar to Englishmen, though now almost forgotten even in local dialect. Chaucer thus speaks of it in his ‘House of Fame:’ —
‘Lo there (quod he) cast up thine eyeSe yondir, lo, the Galaxie,The whiche men clepe The Milky Way,For it is white, and some parfay,Ycallin it han Watlynge strete.’[482]
‘Lo there (quod he) cast up thine eyeSe yondir, lo, the Galaxie,The whiche men clepe The Milky Way,For it is white, and some parfay,Ycallin it han Watlynge strete.’[482]
‘Lo there (quod he) cast up thine eyeSe yondir, lo, the Galaxie,The whiche men clepe The Milky Way,For it is white, and some parfay,Ycallin it han Watlynge strete.’[482]
‘Lo there (quod he) cast up thine eye
Se yondir, lo, the Galaxie,
The whiche men clepe The Milky Way,
For it is white, and some parfay,
Ycallin it han Watlynge strete.’[482]
Turning from the mythology of the heavenly bodies, a glance over other districts of nature-myth will afford fresh evidence that such legend has its early home within the precincts of savage culture. It is thus with the myths of the Winds. The New Zealanders tell how Maui can ride upon the other Winds or imprison them in their caves, but he cannot catch the West wind nor find its cave to roll astone against the mouth, and therefore it prevails, yet from time to time he all but overtakes it, and hiding in its cave for shelter it dies away.[483]Such is the fancy in classic poetry of Aeolus holding the prisoned winds in his dungeon cave:—
‘Hic vasto rex Aeolus antroLuctantes ventos, tempestatesque sonorasImperio premit, ac vinclis et carcere fraenat.’[484]
‘Hic vasto rex Aeolus antroLuctantes ventos, tempestatesque sonorasImperio premit, ac vinclis et carcere fraenat.’[484]
‘Hic vasto rex Aeolus antroLuctantes ventos, tempestatesque sonorasImperio premit, ac vinclis et carcere fraenat.’[484]
‘Hic vasto rex Aeolus antro
Luctantes ventos, tempestatesque sonoras
Imperio premit, ac vinclis et carcere fraenat.’[484]
The myth of the Four Winds is developed among the native races of America with a range and vigour and beauty scarcely rivalled elsewhere in the mythology of the world. Episodes belonging to this branch of Red Indian folklore are collected in Schoolcraft’s ‘Algic Researches,’ and thence rendered with admirable taste and sympathy, though unfortunately not with proper truth to the originals, in Longfellow’s masterpiece, the ‘Song of Hiawatha.’ The West Wind Mudjekeewis is Kabeyun, Father of the Winds, Wabun is the East Wind, Shawondasee the South Wind, Kabibonokka the North Wind. But there is another mighty wind not belonging to the mystic quaternion, Manabozho the North-West Wind, therefore described with mythic appropriateness as the unlawful child of Kabeyun. The fierce North Wind, Kabibnokka, in vain strives to force Shingebis, the lingering diver-bird, from his warm and happy winter-lodge; and the lazy South Wind, Shawondasee, sighs for the maiden of the prairie with her sunny hair, till it turns to silvery white, and as he breathes upon her, the prairie dandelion has vanished.[485]Man naturally divides his horizon into four quarters, before and behind, right and left, and thus comes to fancy the world a square, and to refer the winds to its four corners. Dr. Brinton, in his ‘Myths of the New World,’ has well traced from these ideas the growth of legend after legend among the nativeraces of America, where four brother heroes, or mythic ancestors or divine patrons of mankind, prove, on closer view, to be in personal shape the Four Winds.[486]
The Vedic hymns to the Maruts, the Storm Winds, who tear asunder the forest kings and make the rocks shiver, and assume again, after their wont, the form of new-born babes, the mythic feats of the child Hermes in the Homeric hymn, the legendary birth of Boreas from Astraios and Eôs, Starry Heaven and Dawn, work out, on Aryan ground, mythic conceptions that Red Indian tale-tellers could understand and rival.[487]The peasant who keeps up in fireside talk the memory of the Wild Huntsman, Wodejäger, the Grand Veneur of Fontainebleau, Herne the Hunter of Windsor Forest, has almost lost the significance of this grand old storm-myth. By mere force of tradition, the name of the ‘Wish’ or ‘Wush’ hounds of the Wild Huntsman has been preserved through the west of England; the words must for ages past have lost their meaning among the country folk, though we may plainly recognize in them Woden’s ancient well-known name, old German ‘Wunsch.’ As of old, the Heaven-God drives the clouds before him in raging tempest across the sky, while, safe within the cottage walls, the tale-teller unwittingly describes in personal legendary shape this same Wild Hunt of the Storm.[488]
It has many a time occurred to the savage poet or philosopher to realize the thunder, or its cause, in myths of a Thunder-bird. Of this wondrous creature North American legend has much to tell. He is the bird of the great Manitu, as the eagle is of Zeus, or he is even the great Manitu himself incarnate. The Assiniboins not only knowof his existence, but have even seen him, and in the far north the story is told how he created the world. The Ahts of Vancouver’s Island talk of Tootooch, the mighty bird dwelling aloft and far away, the flap of whose wings makes the thunder (Tootah), and his tongue is the forked lightning. There were once four of these birds in the land, and they fed on whales; but the great deity Quawteaht, entering into a whale, enticed one thunder-bird after another to swoop down and seize him with his talons, when plunging to the bottom of the sea he drowned it. Thus three of them perished, but the last one spread his wings and flew to the distant height where he has since remained. The meaning of the story may probably be that thunderstorms come especially from one of the four quarters of heaven. Of such myths, perhaps that told among the Dacotas is the quaintest: Thunder is a large bird, they say: hence its velocity. The old bird begins the thunder; its rumbling noise is caused by an immense quantity of young birds, or thunders, who continue it, hence the long duration of the peals. The Indian says it is the young birds, or thunders, that do the mischief; they are like the young mischievous men who will not listen to good counsel. The old thunder or bird is wise and good, and does not kill anybody, nor do any kind of mischief. Descending southward to Central America, there is found mention of the bird Voc, the messenger of Hurakan, the Tempest-god (whose name has been adopted in European languages ashuracano,ouragan,hurricane) of the Lightning and of the Thunder. So among Caribs, Brazilians, Hervey Islanders and Karens, Bechuanas and Basutos, we find legends of a flapping or flashing Thunder-bird, which seem simply to translate into myth the thought of thunder and lightning descending from the upper regions of the air, the home of the eagle and the vulture.[489]
The Heaven-god dwells in the regions of the sky, and thus what form could be fitter for him and for his messengers than the likeness of a bird? But to cause the ground to quake beneath our feet, a being of quite different nature is needed, and accordingly the office of supporting the solid earth is given in various countries to various monstrous creatures, human or animal in character, who make their office manifest from time to time by a shake given in negligence or sport or anger to their burden. Wherever earthquakes are felt, we are likely to find a version of the great myth of the Earth-bearer. Thus in Polynesia the Tongans say that Maui upholds the earth on his prostrate body, and when he tries to turn over into an easier posture there is an earthquake, and the people shout and beat the ground with sticks to make him lie still. Another version forms part of the interesting myth lately mentioned, which connects the under-world whither the sun descends at night, with the region of subterranean volcanic fire and of earthquake. The old Maui lay by his fire in the dead-land of Bulotu, when his grandson Maui came down by the cavern entrance; the young Maui carried off the fire, they wrestled, the old Maui was overcome, and has lain there bruised and drowsy ever since, underneath the earth, which quakes when he turns over in his sleep.[490]In Celebes we hear of the world-supporting Hog, who rubs himself against a tree, and then there is an earthquake.[491]Among the Indians of North America, it is said that earthquakes come of the movement of the great world-bearing Tortoise. Now this Tortoise seems but a mythic picture of the Earth itself,and thus the story only expresses in mythic phrase the very fact that the earth quakes; the meaning is but one degree less distinct than among the Caribs, who say when there is an earthquake that their Mother Earth is dancing.[492]Among the higher races of the continent, such ideas remain little changed in nature; the Tlascalans said that the tired world-supporting deities shifting their burden to a new relay caused the earthquake;[493]the Chibchas said it was their god Chibchacum moving the earth from shoulder to shoulder.[494]The myth ranges in Asia through as wide a stretch of culture. The Kamchadals tell of Tuil the Earthquake-god, who sledges below ground, and when his dog shakes off fleas or snow there is an earthquake;[495]Ta Ywa, the solar hero of the Karens, set Shie-oo beneath the earth to carry it, and there is an earthquake when he moves.[496]The world-bearing elephants of the Hindus, the world-supporting frog of the Mongol Lamas, the world-bull of the Moslems, the gigantic Omophore of the Manichæan cosmology, are all creatures who carry the earth on their backs or heads, and shake it when they stretch or shift.[497]Thus in European mythology the Scandinavian Loki, strapped down with thongs of iron in his subterranean cavern, writhes when the overhanging serpent drops venom on him; or Prometheus struggles beneath the earth to break his bonds; or the Lettish Drebkuls or Poseidon the Earth-shaker makes the ground rock beneath men’s feet.[498]From thorough myths of imagination such as most of these, it may be sometimes possible to distinguish philosophic myths like them in form, but which appear to be attempts atserious explanation without even a metaphor. The Japanese think that earthquakes are caused by huge whales creeping underground, having been probably led to this idea by finding the fossil bones which seem the remains of such subterranean monsters, just as we know that the Siberians who find in the ground the mammoth-bones and tusks account for them as belonging to huge burrowing beasts, and by force of this belief, have brought themselves to think they can sometimes see the earth heave and sink as the monsters crawl below. Thus, in investigating the earthquake myths of the world, it appears that two processes, the translation into mythic language of the phenomenon itself, and the crude scientific theory to account for it by a real moving animal underground, may result in legends of very striking similarity.[499]
In thus surveying the mythic wonders of heaven and earth, sun, moon, and stars, wind, thunder, and earthquake, it is possible to set out in investigation under conditions of actual certainty. So long as such beings as Heaven or Sun are consciously talked of in mythic language, the meaning of their legends is open to no question, and the actions ascribed to them will as a rule be natural and apposite. But when the phenomena of nature take a more anthropomorphic form, and become identified with personal gods and heroes, and when in after times these beings, losing their first consciousness of origin, become centres round which floating fancies cluster, then their sense becomes obscure and corrupt, and the consistency of their earlier character must no longer be demanded. In fact, the unreasonable expectation of such consistency in nature-myths, after they have passed into what may be called their heroic stage, is one of the mythologist’s most damaging errors. The present examination of nature-myths has mostly taken them in their primitive and unmistakable condition, and has only been in some degree extended to include closely-correspondinglegends in a less easily interpretable state. It has lain beyond my scope to enter into any systematic discussion of the views of Grimm, Grote, Max Müller, Kuhn, Schirren, Cox, Bréal, Dasent, Kelly, and other mythologists. Even the outlines here sketched out have been purposely left without filling in surrounding detail which might confuse their shape, although this strictness has caused the neglect of many a tempting hint to work out episode after episode, by tracing their relation to the myths of far-off times and lands. It has rather been my object to bring prominently into view the nature-mythology of the lower races, that their clear and fresh mythic conceptions may serve as a basis in studying the nature-myths of the world at large. The evidence and interpretation here brought forward, imperfect as they are, seem to countenance a strong opinion as to the historical development of legends which describe in personal shape the life of nature. The state of mind to which such imaginative fictions belong is found in full vigour in the savage condition of mankind, its growth and inheritance continue into the higher culture of barbarous or half-civilized nations, and at last in the civilized world its effects pass more and more from realized belief into fanciful, affected, and even artificial poetry.