Primitive Culture/Chapter 9
CHAPTER IX.
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 mythic dialect, 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 and simplicity 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 ever-lasting 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 naively 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 stringent criterion 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 Cortés 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 Caesar 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 with many 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!'
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;[1] 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,[2] must have been thinking of the starry sky watching him 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's minds, 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 the Storm-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 willows 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 ha<d 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 broke 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 let him unaided to stand against the god of storms. He twisted nooses of the leaves of the whanake tree, and the birds an 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-tan 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-hailstorm 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, all 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 remained separated 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.'[3]
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.[4] 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 the separation 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.'[5] 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 Earth as 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.'[6] In the mythology of Finns, Lapps, and Esths, Earth-Mother is a divinely honoured personage.[7] 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 drop Into thy mother's lap.'[8]
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 are Dyaushpitar, Ζεὺς πατήρ, Jupiter, the 'Heaven-father,' and Prthivî mâtar, the 'Earth-mother;' and their relation is still kept in mind in the ordinance of Brahman marriage according to the
3 Grimm, 'D. M.' pp. xix. 229-33, 608; Halliwell, 'Pop. Rhymes,' p. 153; Milton, 'Paradise Lost,' ix. 273, i. 535; see Lucretius, i. 250. Yajur-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 Demeter, 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.[9] It reappears in ancient Scythia;[10] 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 Yn 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.[11]
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 frightful
1 Pictet, 'Origines Indo-Europ.' part ii. pp. 663-7; Colebrooke, 'Essays,' vol. i. p. 220. Plato, Repub. iii. 414-5; ‘ἡ γὴ αὐτοὺς μήτηρ οὖσα ἀνῆκε—ἀλλ’ ὁ θεὸς πλάττων.’
2 Herod, iv. 59.
3 Plath, 'Religion der alten Chinesen' part i. p. 37; Davis, 'Chinese,' vol. ii. p. 64; Legge, 'Confucius,' p. 106; Bastian, 'Mensch,' vol. ii. p. 437, vol iii. p. 302. howl 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 vû,' 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 of eclipses, but who kept up a relic of the old belief by con- tinuing to speak in mythologic phrase of the Sun and Moon being eaten.[12] 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.[13] 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.[14] So, in Africa, there may be found both the rudest theory of the Eclipse-monster, and the more ad- vanced conception that a solar eclipse is 'the Moon catching the Sun.'[15]
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. The
1 J. G. Müller, 'Amer. Urrelig.' pp. 53, 219, 231, 255, 395, 420; Martius, 'Ethnog. Amer.' vol. i. pp. 329, 467, 585, vol. ii. p. 109 ; Southey, 'Brazil,' vol. i. p. 352, vol. ii. p. 371; De la Borde, 'Caraibes,' p. 525; Dobrizhoffer, 'Abipones,' vol. ii. p. 84; Smith and Lowe, 'Journey from Lima to Para,' p. 230; Schoolcraft, 'Indian Tribes of N. A.' part i. p. 271; Charlevoix, 'Nouv. France,' vol. vi. p. 149; Cranz, 'Grönland,' p. 295; Bastian, 'Mensch,' vol. iii. p. 191; 'Early Hist, of Mankind,' p. 163.
2 Ellis, 'Polyn. Res.' vol. i. p. 331. 3 Marsden, 'Sumatra,' p. 194. 4 Grant in 'Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. iii. p. 90; Kölle, 'Kanuri Proverbs, &c.,' p. 207. ancient 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 Pŭndits, learned in the Jyotish shastrŭ, 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 Brahmŭns, that eclipses 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 védŭs 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 shastrŭs, might have been so formerly, and may be so still; but for astronomical purposes, astronomical rules must be followed.'[16] 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.[17] 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, with gongs 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.[18]
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.[19] 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 Sonnenfinsternuss), 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.[20] 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 barracouta.' 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 charged the 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.[21] 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."'[22] It is seldom that solar characteristics are more 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,[23] 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 to English 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.[24] 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.[25]
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.[26]
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.[27] 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.[28] 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:
'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 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.'[29]
Stories belonging to the same group are not unknown to
1 'Apocr. Gosp.' Nicodemus, ch. xx.; Mrs. Jameson, 'History of our Lord in Art,' vol. ii. p. 258.
2 Eireks Saga, 3, 4, in 'Flateyjarbok,' vol. i., Christiania, 1859; Baring-Gould, 'Myths of the Middle Ages,' p. 238.
3 Mrs. Jameson, 'Sacred and Legendary Art,' vol. ii. p. 138. European 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?[30]
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 as mere 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 the other 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.[31]
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 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?'
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.[32] Thus savage legends from Polynesia and America, possibly indeed shaped under European influence, agree with the theory[33] 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,
1 Schoolcraft, 'Algic Res.' vol. ii. pp. 1-33. The three arrows recur in Manabozho's slaying the Shining Manitu, vol. i. p. 153. See the remarkably corresponding three magic arrows in Orvar Odd's Saga; Nilsson, 'Stone Age,' p. 197. The Red-Swan myth of sunset is introduced in George Eliot's 'Spanish Gypsy,' p. 63; Longfellow, 'Hiawatha,' xii.
2 See Kuhn's 'Zeitschrift,' 1860, vol. ix. p. 212; Max Müller, 'Chips,' vol. ii. p. 127; Cox, 'Mythology,' vol. i. p. 256, vol. ii. p. 239. we may expect to find conceptions like that simply shown in a Sanskrit word for evening, 'rajanirnukha,' 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 gelich diu daz abgrunde begenit mit ir munde unde den himel zuo der erden.'[34]
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 descendest to 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, though 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.'[35] 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, and when 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.[36] 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.'[37] 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.[38] 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 through the 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.[39] 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 ad versa 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.'[40]
Where the Aryan myth-maker takes no thought of the
1 Polack, 'Manners of N. Z.' vol. i. p. 16; 'New Zealand,' vol. i. p. 358; Yate, p. 142; Schirren, pp. 88, 165.
2 Euseb. Præp. Evang. iii. 9. lesser 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.'[41] 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.[42] To Hesiod it is the 'all-seeing eye of Zeus' — (Greek characters) Macrobius speaks of antiquity calling the sun the eye of Jove — (Greek characters)[43] The old Germans, in calling the sun 'Wuotan's eye,'[44] 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 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 more
1 Rig-Veda, i. 115; Böhtlingk and Roth, s.v. 'mitra.' 2 Avesta, tr. Spiegel, 'Yaçna,' i. 35; iii., lxvii., 61-2; compare Burnouf, 'Yaçna.' 3 Macrob. Saturnal. i. 21, 13. See Max Müller, 'Chips,' vol. ii. p. 85. 4 Grimm, 'Deutsche Myth.' p. 665. See also Hanusch, 'Slaw. Myth.' p. 213. likely that of the moon, which in popular myth is told of as found in the well.[45] 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 Anagkē, 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?[46] 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.[47]
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.[48] 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.[49] 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.[50] Slavonic legend, following the same track, says that 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.[51] 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.[52] 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.[53]
There is a very elaborate savage nature-myth of thje 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.[54]
From savagery up to civilization, there may be traced in the 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.[55] 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; thus he 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.[56] Compare these savage stories with Orin 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, Bootes 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 New Zealand either the Elbow of Maui, or they form the stern of the Canoe of Tamarerete, whose anchor dropped from the prow is the Southern Cross.[57] 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.[58] 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.[59] 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.[60] 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.[61] 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,[62] and to the Manichæans whose fancy transferred pure souls to this 'column of light,' whence they could come down to earth and again return.[63] 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.[64] 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 from St. 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 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.'[65]
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 a
1 Beausobre, 'Hist. de Manichée,' vol. ii. p. 513.
2 Bastian, 'Oestl. Asien,' vol. iii. p. 341; 'Chronique de Tabari,' tr. Dubeux, p. 24; Grimm, 'D.M.' p. 330, &c.
3 Chaucer, 'House of Fame,' ii. 427. With reference to questions of Aryan mythology illustrated by the savage galaxy-myths, see Pictet, 'Origines,' part ii. p. 582, &c. Mr. J. Jeremiah informs me that 'Watling Street' is still (1871) a name for the Milky Way in Scotland; see also his paper on 'Welsh names of the Milky Way,' Philological Soc., Nov. 17, 1871. The corresponding name 'London Road ' is used in Suffolk. stone 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.[66] Such is the fancy in classic poetry of Aeolus holding the prisoned winds in his dungeon cave: —
'Hic vasto rex Aeolus antro Luctantes ventos, tempestatesque sonoras Imperio premit, ac vinclis et carcere fraenat.'[67]
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.[68] 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 native
2 Virg. Aeneid, i. 56; Homer, Odyss. x. 1. races 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.[69]
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.[70] The peasant who keeps up in fire-side 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.[71]
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 know of 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 as huracano, 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.[72]
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.[73] In Celebes we hear of the world-supporting Hog, who rubs himself against a tree, and then there is an earthquake.[74] 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.[75] 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;[76] the Chibchas said it was their god Chibchacum moving the earth from shoulder to shoulder.[77] 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;[78] 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.[79] 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.[80] 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.[81] 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 at serious 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.[82]
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-corresponding legends 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.
- ↑ Macrob. 'Saturn.' i. 19, 12. See Eurip. Phœn. 1116, &c. and Schol.; Welcker, vol. i. p. 336; Max Müller, 'Lectures,' vol. ii. p. 380.
- ↑ Francisque-Michel, 'Argot,' p 425.
- ↑ Sir G. Grey, 'Polynesian Mythology,' p. i. &c., translated from the original Maori text published by him under the title of 'Ko nga Mahinga a nga Tupuna Maori, &c.' London, 1854. Compare with Shortland, 'Trads. of N. Z.' p. 55, &c.; R. Taylor, 'New Zealand,' p. 114, &c.
- ↑ Schirren, 'Wandersagen der Neuseeländer, &c.' p. 42; Ellis, 'Polyn. Res.' vol. i. p. 116; Tyerman and Bennet, p. 526; Turner, 'Polynesia,' p. 245.
- ↑ Premare in Pauthier, 'Livres Sacrés de l'Orient,' p. 19; Doolittle, 'Chinese,' vol, ii. p. 396.
- ↑ J. G. Müller, 'Amer. Urrelig.' pp. 108, 110, 117, 221, 369, 494, 620; Rivero and Tschudi, 'Ant. of Peru,' p. 161; Gregg, 'Journal of a Santa Fé Trader,' vol. ii. p. 237; Sahagun, 'Retorica, &c., Mexicana,' cap. 3, in Kingsborough, 'Ant. of Mexico,' vol. v.
- ↑ Castrén, 'Finn. Myth.' p. 86.
- ↑ 3
- ↑ 1
- ↑ 2
- ↑ 3
- ↑ 1
- ↑ 2
- ↑ 3
- ↑ 4
- ↑ H. H. Wilson, 'Vishnupurana,' pp. 78, 140; Skr. Dic. s.v. râhu; Sir W. Jones in 'As. Res.' vol. ii. p. 290; S. Davis, ibid., p. 258; Pictet, 'Origines Indo-Europ.' part ii. p. 584; Roberts, 'Oriental Illustrations,' p. 7; Hardy, 'Manual of Buddhism.'
- ↑ Castrén, 'Finn. Myth,' p. 63; Bastian, 'Oestl. Asien,' vol. ii. p. 344.
- ↑ Klemm, 'C. G.' vol. vi. p. 449; Doolittle, 'Chinese,' vol. i. p. 308; Turpin, Richard, and Borri in Pinkerton, vol. iv. pp. 579, 725, 815; Bastian, 'Oestl. Asien,' vol. ii. p. 109, vol. iii. p. 242. See Eisenmenger, 'Entdecktes Judenthum,' vol. i. p. 398 (Talmudic myth).
- ↑ Plutarch. de Facie in Orbe Lunae; Juvenal, Sat. vi. 441; Plin. ii. 9; Tacit. Annal. i. 28.
- ↑ Grimm, 'D. M.' pp. 668-78, 224; Hanusch, 'Slaw. Myth,' p. 268; Brand, 'Pop. Ant.' vol. iii. p. 152; Horst, 'Zauber-Bibliothek,' vol. iv. p. 350; D. Monnier, 'Traditions populaires comparées,' p. 138; see Migne, 'Dic. des Superstitions,' art. 'Eclipse'; Cornelius Agrippa, 'De Occulta Philosophia,' ii. c. 45, gives a picture of the lunar eclipse-dragon.
- ↑ Grey, 'Polyn Myth.' pp. 54-58; in his Maori texts, Ko nga Mahinga, pp. 28-30, Ko nga Mateatea, pp. xlviii.-ix. I have to thank Sir G. Grey for a more explicit and mythologically more consistent translation of the story of Maui's entrance into the womb of Hine-nui-te-po and her crushing him to death between her thighs, than is given in his English version. Compare R. Taylor, 'New Zealand,' p. 132; Schirren, 'Wandersagen der Neuseel.' p. 33; Shortland, 'Trads. of N. Z.' p. 63 (a version of the myth of Maui's death); see also pp. 171, 180, and Baker in 'Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. i. p. 53.
- ↑ John White, 'Ancient History of the Maori,' vol. i. p. 146. In former editions a statement received from New Zealand was inserted, that the cry or laugh of the tiwakawaka or pied fantail is only heard at sunset. This, however does not agree with the accounts of Sir W. Lawry Buller, who, in his 'Birds of New Zealand,' vol. i. p. 69, supplemented by his answer to my enquiry, makes it clear that the bird sings in the daytime. Thus the argument connecting the sunset-song with the story as a sunset-myth falls away. In another version of Maui's death, in White, vol. ii. p. 112, the laughing bird is the patatai or little swamp-rail, which cries at and after nightfall and in the early morning (Buller, vol. ii. p. 98). Note to 3rd ed.]
- ↑ Mason, 'Karens,' in ' Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,' 1865, part ii. p. 178, &c.
- ↑ Schoolcraft, 'Indian Tribes,' part iii. p. 318; 'Algic Res.' vol. i. p. 135, &c., 144; John Tanner, 'Narrative,' p. 357; see Brinton, 'Myths of New World,' p. 166. For legends of Sun-Catcher, see 'Early Hist. of Mankind,' ch. xii.
- ↑ Casalis, 'Basutos,' p. 347; Callaway, 'Zulu Tales,' vol. i. pp. 56, 69, 84, 334 (see also the story, p. 241, of the frog who swallowed the princess and carried her safe home). See Cranz, p. 271 (Greenland angekok swallowed by bear and walrus and thrown up again), and Bastian, 'Mensch,' vol. ii. pp. 506-7; J. M. Harris in 'Mem. Anthrop. Soc.' vol. ii. p. 31 (similar notions in Africa and New Guinea).
- ↑ Tzetzes ap. Lycophron, Cassandra, 33. As to connexion with Joppa and Phœnicia, see Plin. v. 14; ix. 4; Mela, i. 11; Strabo, xvi. 2, 28; Movers, Phönizier, vol. i. pp. 422-3. The expression in Jonah, ii. 2, 'out of the belly of Hades' (mibten sheol, ἐκ κοιλίας ᾅδου) seems a relic of the original meaning of the myth.
- ↑ 1
- ↑ 2
- ↑ 3
- ↑ J. and W. Grimm, 'Kinder und Hausmärchen,' vol. i. pp. 26, 140; vol.iii. p. 15. [See ref. to these two stories, 'Early Hist, of M.' 1st ed. (1865) p. 338.] I find that Sir G. W. Cox, 'Mythology' (1870), vol. i. p. 358, had noticed the Wolf and Seven Kids as a myth of the days of the week (Note to 2nd ed.). For mentions of the wolf of darkness, see Hanusch, p. 192; Edda, 'Gylfaginning,' 12; Grimm, 'D. M.' pp. 224, 668. With the episode of the stones substituted compare the myth of Zeus and Kronos. For various other stories belonging to the group of the Man swallowed by the Monster, see Lucian, Historiæ Veræ I.; Hardy, 'Manual of Buddhism,' p. 501; Lane, 'Thousand and One Nights,' vol. iii. p. 104; Halliwell, 'Pop. Rhymes,' p. 98; 'Nursery Rhymes,' p. 48; 'Early Hist, of Mankind,' p. 337.
- ↑ Grey, 'Polyn. Myth.' p. 16, &c., see 144; Jas. White, 'Ancient History of the Maori,' vol. ii. pp. 76, 115. Other details in Schirren, 'Wandersagen der Neuseeländer,' pp. 32-7, 143-51; R. Taylor, 'New Zealand,' p. 124, &c.; compare 116, 141, &c., and volcano-myth, p. 248; Yate, 'New Zealand,' p. 142; Polack, 'M. and C. of New Z.' vol. i. p. 15; S. S. Farmer, 'Tonga Is.' p. 134. See also Turner, 'Polynesia,' pp. 252, 527 (Samoan version). In comparing the group of Maui-legends it is to be observed that New Zealand Mahuika and Maui-Tikitiki correspond to Tongan Mafuike and Kijikiji, Samoan Mafuie and Tiitii.
- ↑ 1
- ↑ 2
- ↑ Grimm, 'D. M.' pp. 291, 767.
- ↑ Mason, 'Karens,' in 'Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,' 1865, part ii. pp. 233-4. Prof. Liebrecht, in his notice of the 1st ed. of the present work, In 'Gött. Gel. Anz.' 1872, p. 1290, refers to a Burmese legend in Bastian, O. A. vol. ii. p. 515, and a Mongol legend, Gesser Chan, book iv.
- ↑ Schoolcraft, 'Algic Researches,' vol. ii. p. 40, &c; Loskiel, 'Gesch. der Mission,' Barby, 1789, p. 47 (the English edition, part i. p. 35, is incorrect). See also Brinton, 'Myths of New World,' p. 63. In an Esquimaux tale, Giviok comes to the two mountains which shut and open; paddling swiftly between, he gets through, but the mountains clashing together crush the stern of his kayak: Rink, 'Eskimoische Eventyr og Sagn,' p. 98, referred to by Liebrecht, l.c.
- ↑ Kingsborough, 'Antiquities of Mexico,' vol. i.; Torquemada, 'Monarquia Indiana,' xiii. 47; 'Con estos has de pasar por medio de dos Sierras, que se estan batiendo, y encontrando la una con la otra.' Clavigero, vol. ii. p. 94.
- ↑ Apollodor. i. 9, 22; Appollon. Rhod. Argonautica, ii. 310-616; Pindar, 'Pythia Carm.' iv. 370.
- ↑ 1
- ↑ 2
- ↑ 1
- ↑ 2
- ↑ 3
- ↑ 4
- ↑ Edda, 'Völuspa,' 22; 'Gylfaginning,' 15. See Grimm, 'D.M.' p. 133; 'Reinhart Fuchs.'
- ↑ As to the identification of the Norns and the Fates, see Grimm, 'D. M.' pp. 376-86; Max Müller, 'Chips,' vol. ii. p. 154. It is to be observed in connexion with the Perseus-myth, that another of its obscure episodes, the Gorgon's head turning those who look on it into stone, corresponds with myths of the sun itself. In Hispaniola, men came out of two caves (thus being born of their mother Earth); the giant who guarded these caves strayed one night, and the rising sun turned him into a great rock called Kauta, just as the Gorgon's head turned Atlas the Earth-bearer into the mountain that bears his name; after this, others of the early cave-men were surprised by the sunlight, and turned into stones, trees, plants or beasts (Friar Roman Pane in 'Life of Columbus in Pinkerton, vol. xii. p. 80; J. G. Müller, 'Amer. Urrelig.' p. 179). In Central America a Quiché legend relates how the ancient animals were petrified by the Sun (Brasseur, 'Popol Vuh,' p. 245). Thus the Americans have the analogue of the Scandinavian myths of giants and dwarfs surprised by daylight outside their hiding-places, and turned to stones. Such fancies appear connected with the fancied human shapes of rocks or 'standing stones' which peasants still account for as transformed creatures. Thus in Fiji, two rocks are a male and female deity turned to stone at daylight, Seemann, 'Viti,' p. 66; see Liebrecht in 'Heidelberg. Jahrb.' 1864, p. 216. This idea is brought also into the Perseus-myth, for the rocks abounding in Seriphos are the islanders thus petrified by the Gorgon's head.
- ↑ Piedrahita, 'Hist. Gen. de las Conquistas del Nuevo Reyno de Granada,' Antwerp, 1688, part i. lib. i. c. 3; Humboldt, 'Monumens,' pl. vi.; J. G. Müller, 'Amer. Urrelig.' pp. 423-30.
- ↑ Garcilaso de la Vega, 'Commentarios Reales,' i. c. 15; Prescott, 'Peru,' vol. i. p. 7; J. G. Müller, pp. 303-8, 328-39. Other Peruvian versions show the fundamental solar idea in different mythic shapes (Tr. of Cieza de Leon, tr. and ed. by C. R. Markham, Hakluyt Soc. 1864, pp. xlix. 298, 316, 372). W. B. Stevenson ('Residence in S. America,' vol. i. p. 394) and Bastian ('Mensch,' vol. iii. p. 347) met with a curious perversion of the myth, in which Inca Manco Ccapac, corrupted into Ingasman Cocapac, gave rise to a story of an Englishman figuring in the midst of Peruvian mythology.
- ↑ Stanbridge, 'Abor. of Australia,' in 'Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. i. p. 301.
- ↑ H. Yule, 'Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,' vol. xiii. p. 628.
- ↑ Hanusch, 'Slaw. Myth.' p. 269.
- ↑ Bleek, 'Reynard in S. Africa,' pp. 69-74; C. J. Andersson, 'Lake Ngami,' p. 328; see Grout, 'Zulu-land,' p. 148; Arbousset and Daumas, p. 471. As to connexion of the moon with the hare, cf. Skr. 'çaçanka;' and in Mexico, Sahagun, book vii. c. 2, in Kingsborough, vol. vii.
- ↑ Williams, 'Fiji,' vol. i. p. 205. Compare the Caroline Island myth that in the beginning men only quitted life on the last day of the waning moon, and resuscitated as from a peaceful sleep when she reappeared; but the evil spirit Erigirers inflicted a death from which there is no revival: De Drosses, 'Hist. des Navig. aux Terres Australes,' vol. ii. p. 479. Also in a song of the Indians of California it is said, that even as the moon dies and returns to life, so they shall be re-born after death; Duflot de Mofras in Bastian, 'Rechtsverhältnisse,' p. 385, see 'Psychologie,' p. 54.
- ↑ 'Journ. Ind. Archip.' vol. i. p. 284; vol. iv. p. 333; Tickell in 'Journ. As. Soc.' Bengal, vol. ix. part ii. p. 797; Latham, 'Descr. Eth.' vol. ii. p. 422.
- ↑ Stanbridge in 'Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. i. pp. 301-3.
- ↑ Schoolcraft, 'Algic Res.' vol. i. pp. 57-66. The story of the hero or deity invulnerable like Achilles save in one weak spot, recurs in the tales of the slaying of the Shining Manitu, whose scalp alone was vulnerable, and of the mighty Kwasind, who could be killed only by the cone of the white pine wounding the vulnerable place on the crown of his head (vol. i. p. 153; vol. ii. p. 163).
- ↑ Taylor, 'New Zealand,' p. 363.
- ↑ Stanbridge, l.c.; Charlevoix, vol. vi. p. 148; Leems, 'Lapland,' in Pinkerton, vol. i. p. 411. The name of the Bear occurring in North America in connexion with the stars of the Great and Little Bear (Charlevoix, l.c.; Cotton Mather in Schoolcraft, 'Tribes,' vol. i. p. 284) has long been remarked on (Goguet, vol. i. p. 262; vol. ii. p. 366, but with reference to Greenland, see Cranz, p. 294). See observations on the history of the Aryan name in Max Müller, 'Lectures,' 2nd series, p. 361.
- ↑ Casalis, p. 196; Waitz, vol. ii. p. 191.
- ↑ Long's Exp. vol. i. p. 288; Schoolcraft, part i. p. 272; Le Jeune in 'Rel. des Jés. de la Nouvelle France,' 1634, p. 18; Loskiel, part i. p. 35; J. G. Müller, p. 63.
- ↑ Hanusch, pp. 272, 407, 415.
- ↑ Porphyr. de Antro Nympharum, 28; Macrob. de Somn. Scip. 1. 12.
- ↑ 1
- ↑ 2
- ↑ 3
- ↑ Yate, 'New Zealand,' p. 144, see Ellis, 'Polyn. Res.' vol. ii. p. 417.
- ↑ 2
- ↑ Schoolcraft, 'Algic Res.' vol. i. p. 200; vol. ii. pp. 122, 214; 'Indian Tribes,' part iii, p. 324.
- ↑ Brinton, 'Myths of the New World,' ch. iii.
- ↑ 'Rig-Veda,' tr. by Max Müller, vol. i. (Hymns to Maruts); Welcker, 'Griech. Götterl.' vol. iii. p. 67; Cox, 'Mythology of Aryan Nations,' vol. ii. ch. v.
- ↑ Grimm, 'D. M.' pp. 126, 599, 894; Hunt, 'Pop. Rom.' 1st ser. p. xix.; Baring-Gould, 'Book of Werewolves,' p. 101; see 'Myths of the Middle Ages,' p. 25; Wuttke, 'Deutsche Volksaberglaube,' pp. 13, 236; Monnier, 'Traditions,' pp. 75, &c., 741, 747.
- ↑ Pr. Max v. Wied, 'Reise in N. A.' vol. i. pp. 446, 455; vol. ii. pp. 152, 223; Sir Alex. Mackenzie, 'Voyages,' p. cxvii.; Sproat, 'Scenes of Savage Life' (Vancouver's I.), pp. 177, 213; Irving, 'Astoria,' vol. ii. ch. xxii.; Le Jeune, op. cit. 1634, p. 26; Schoolcraft, 'Indian Tribes,' part iii. p. 233, 'Algic Res.' vol. ii. pp. 114-6, 199; Catlin, vol. ii. p. 164; Brasseur, 'Popol Vuh,' p. 71 and Index, 'Hurakan;' J. G. Müller, 'Amer. Urrel.' pp. 222, 271; Ellis, 'Polyn. Res.' vol. ii. p. 417; Jno. Williams, 'Missionary Enterprise,' p. 93; Mason, l.c. p. 217; Moffat, 'South Africa,' p. 338; Casalis, 'Basutos,' p. 266; Callaway, 'Religion of Amazulu,' p. 119.
- ↑ Mariner, 'Tonga Is.' vol. ii. p. 120; S. S. Farmer, 'Tonga,' p. 135; Schirren, pp. 35-7.
- ↑ 'Journ. Ind. Archip.' vol. ii. p. 837.
- ↑ J. G. Müller, 'Amer. Urrelig.' pp. 61, 122.
- ↑ Brasseur, 'Mexique,' vol. iii. p. 482.
- ↑ Pouchet, 'Plurality of Races,' p. 2.
- ↑ Steller, 'Kamtschatka,' p. 267.
- ↑ Mason, 'Karens,' l.c. p. 182.
- ↑ Bell, 'Tr. in Asia,' in Pinkerton, vol. vii. p. 369; Bastian, 'Oestl. Asien,' vol. ii. p. 168; Lane, 'Thousand and one Nights,' vol. i. p. 21; see Latham, 'Descr. Eth.' vol. ii. p. 171; Beausobre, 'Manichée,' vol. i. p. 243.
- ↑ Edda, 'Gylfaginning,' 50; Grimm, 'D. M.' p. 777, &c.
- ↑ Kaempfer, 'Japan,' in Pinkerton, vol. vii. p. 684; see mammoth-myths in 'Early Hist. of Mankind,' p. 315.