se yondir, to, the galaxie,
the whiche men clepe the Milky Way,
for it is white, and some parfay
ycallin it han Watlingestrete.”
To the savage the rainbow is a living monster, a serpent seeking whom it
may devour, coming to earth to slake its unquenchable thirst, and preying
on the unwary. But in more poetic myth, its mighty many-coloured arch
touching, as it seems to do, the earth itself, is a road to glory. In the
_Edda_ it is the three-coloured bridge Bifröst, “the quivering track” over
which the gods walk, and of which the red is fire, so that the
Frost-giants may not cross it. In Persian myth it is Chinvad, the “bridge
of the gatherer,” flung across the gloomy depths between this world and
the home of the blessed; in Islam it is El-Sirat, the bridge thin as a
hair and sharp as a scimitar, stretching from this world to the next;
among the Greeks it was Iris, the messenger from Zeus to men, charged with
tidings of war and tempest; to the Finns it was the bow of Tiernes, the
god of thunder; whilst to the Jew it was the messenger of grace from the
Eternal, who did set “his bow in the clouds” as the promise that never
again should the world be destroyed by flood. Such belief in the heavens
as the field of activities profoundly affecting the fortunes of mankind,
and in the stars as influencing their destinies, has been persistent in
the human mind. The delusions of the astrologer are embalmed in language,
as when, forgetful of a belief shared not only by sober theologians, but
by Tycho Brahe and Kepler, we speak of “disaster,” and of our friends as
“jovial,” “saturnine,” or “mercurial.” But the illusions of the savage or
semi-civilised abide as an animating part of many a faith, undisturbed by
a science which has swept the skies and found no angels there, and whose
keen analysis separates for ever the ancient belief in a connection
between the planets and man’s fate. For convenience’ sake, we retain on
our celestial maps and globes the men and monsters pictured by barbaric
fancy in the star-positions and clusters, noting these as interesting
examples of survival. Yet we are the willing dupes of illusions nebulous
as these, and, charm he never so wisely, the Time-spirit fails to
disenchant us.
(_c._) _The Earth and Sky._
If the sun and moon are the parents of the stars, the heavens and the
earth are the parents of all living things. Of this widely-found myth, one
of the most striking specimens occurs among the Maoris. From Rangi, the
heaven, and Papa, the earth, sprang all living things; but earth and sky
clave together, and darkness rested on them and their children, who
debated whether they should rend them asunder or slay them. Then
Tane-mahuta, father of forests, reasoned that it was better to rend them,
so that the heaven might become a stranger, and the earth remain as their
nursing-mother. One after another they strove to do this, but in vain,
until Tane-mahuta, with giant strength and strain, pressed down the earth
and thrust upward the heaven. But one of his brothers, father of wind and
storm, who had not agreed to this parting of his parents, followed Rangi
into the sky, and thence sent forth his progeny, “the mighty winds, the
fierce squalls, the clouds dense and dark, wildly drifting, wildly
hunting,” himself rushing on his foe, snapping the huge trees that barred
his path, and strewing their trunks and branches on the ground, while the
sea was lashed into high-crested waves, and all the creatures therein
affrighted. The fish darted hither and thither, but the reptiles fled into
the forests, causing quarrel between Tangaroa, the ocean-god, and
Tane-mahuta for giving them shelter. So the brothers fought, the ocean-god
wrecking the canoes and sweeping houses and trees beneath the waters, and
had not Papa hidden the gods of the tilled food and the wild within her
bosom, they would have perished. Wars of revenge followed quickly one upon
the other; the storm-god’s anger was not soon appeased; so that the
devastation of the earth was well-nigh complete. But, at last, light arose
and quiet ensued, and the dry land appeared. Rangi and Papa, parted for
ever, quarrelled no more, but helped the one the other, and “man stood
erect and unbroken on his mother Earth.”
The myth of Cronus will at once occur to the reader. Heaven (Uranus) and
Earth (Gaea) were husband and wife, and their many children all hated
their father for concealing them between the hollows of their mother’s
breasts, so that they were shut out from light. Gaea sided with them and
provided Cronus, the youngest, with an iron sickle wherewith he unmanned
Uranus and separated him from Gaea. Cronus married his sister Rhea, and,
at the advice of his parents, swallowed his children one by one as they
were born, lest they grew up and usurped his place among the Immortals.
But when Zeus was born, and Cronus asked for the child, Rhea deceived him
by giving him a stone wrapped in swaddling bands. When Zeus grew up he
gave his father an emetic, whereupon the children were all disgorged, and
with them the stone, which became a sacred object at Delphi. There is no
such being as Cronus in Sanskrit, but what may be called the Vedic variant
of the myth is that in which Dyaus (Heaven) and Prithivî (Earth), were
once joined and subsequently separated.
In China we find a legend of “a person called Puangku, who is said to have
separated the heaven and the earth, they formerly being pressed down close
together,” and, as one might expect, such a transparent nature-myth of the
rending asunder of the world and sky is widespread.
The solar mythologists were perplexed at its presence among the refined
and cultured Greeks. “How can we imagine that a few generations before the
time of Solon the highest notions of the Godhead among the Greeks were
adequately expressed by the story of Uranus maimed by Cronus, of Cronus
eating his own children, swallowing a stone, and vomiting out alive his
own progeny. Among the lowest tribes of Africa and America we hardly find
anything more hideous and revolting.” So the moral character of the Greeks
and the exclusive comparative method of Professor Max Müller and his
adherents were vindicated by the discovery that as Cronus means time, the
apparently repulsive myth simply means that time swallows up the days
which spring from it; “and,” remarks Sir G. W. Cox in his _Manual of
Mythology_, “the old phrase meant simply this and nothing more, although
before the people came to Greece they had forgotten its meaning.”[9]
Cronus is a more than usually troublesome _crux_ to the etymologists.
Here, as elsewhere, “the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life;” and
we may turn to the fundamental idea resident in the myth. The savage, in
the presence of recurring light and darkness, of the clouds lifting and
dispersing before the sunrise, has his legend of a time when this was not
so, but when heaven and earth were closed-in one upon the other till some
hero thrust them apart. And, to his rude intelligence, the conception of
night as a devouring monster, might easily “start the notion of other
swallowing and disgorging beings.” In brief, to quote Mr. Andrew Lang,
“just as the New Zealander had conceived of heaven and earth as at one
time united, to the prejudice of their children, so the ancestors of the
Greeks had believed in an ancient union of heaven and earth. Both by
Greeks and Maoris, heaven and earth were thought of as living persons,
with human parts and passions. Their union was prejudicial to their
children, and so the children violently separated their parents.”[10]
The beliefs of the ancient Finns, as described in the _Kalevala_, in the
world as a divided egg, of which the white is the ocean, the yolk the sun,
the arched shell the sky, and the darker portions the clouds; and of the
Polynesians that the universe is the hollow of a vast cocoa-nut shell, at
the tapering bottom of which is the root of all things, are to us so
grotesque that it is not easy to regard them as explanations seriously
invented by the human mind. Yet these, together with the notions of the
two halves of the shell of Brahma’s egg, and of the two calabashes which
form the heaven and the earth in African myth, find their correspondences
in the widespread conception of the over-arching firmament as a hard and
solid thing,[11] with holes (or windows[12]) to let the rain through, with
gates through which angels descend,[13] or through which prophets peer
into celestial mysteries;[14] a firmament outside which other people live,
as instanced by the Polynesian term for strangers, “papalangi,” or
“heaven-bursters.” In Esthonian myth Ilmarine hammers steel into a vault
which he strained like a tent over the earth, nailing thereon the silver
stars and moon, and suspending the sun from the roof of the tent with
machinery to lift it up and let it down. The like achievement is recorded
of Ilmarinen in the _Kalevala_, the cosmogony of which corresponds to that
of the Esthonian _Kalevipöeg_.
These are the less refined forms of myths which have held their ground
from pre-scientific times till now, and the rude analogies of which are
justified by the appearances of things as presented by the senses. Man’s
intellectual history is the history of his escape from the illusions of
the senses, it is the slow and often tardily accepted discovery that
nature is quite other than that which it seems to be. And this variance
between appearances and realities remained hidden until the intellect
challenged the report about phenomena which the sense-perceptions brought.
For in the ages when feeling was dominant, and the judgment scarce
awakened, the simple explanations in venerable legends sung by bard or
told by aged crone--legends to which age had given sanctity which finally
placed them among the world’s sacred literatures--were received without
doubt or question. But, as belief in causality spread, men were not
content to rest in the naïve explanations of an uncritical age. What man
had guessed about nature gave place to what nature had to say about
herself, and with the classifying of experience science had its birth.
Meanwhile, until this quite recent stage in man’s progress was reached,
the senses told their blundering tale of an earth flat and fixed, with
sun, moon, and stars as its ministering servants, while gods or beasts
upbore it, and mighty pillars supported the massive firmament In Hindu
myth the tortoise which upholds the earth rests upon an elephant, whose
legs _reach all the way down_! In Bogotà the culture-god Bochica punishes
a lesser and offending deity by compelling him to sustain the part of
Atlas, and it is in shifting his burden from shoulder to shoulder that
earthquakes are caused. The natives of Celebes say that these are due to
the world-supporting Hog as he rubs himself against a tree; the
Thascaltecs that they occur when the deities who hold up the world relieve
one another; the Japanese think that they are caused by huge dragons
wriggling underground, an idea probably confirmed by the discovery of
monster fossil bones. In Algonquin myth the mighty man Earthquake “can
pass along under the ground, and make all things shake and tremble by his
power.”
As the myths about earth-bearers prevail in the regions of earthquakes, so
do those about subterranean beings in the neighbourhood of volcanoes. The
superstitions which mountainous countries especially foster are
intensified when the mountains themselves cast forth their awful and
devastating progeny, “red ruin” and the other children born of them. Man
in his dread, “caring in no wise for the external world, except as it
influenced his own destiny; honouring the lightning because it could
strike him, the sea because it could drown him,”[15] could do naught else
than people them with maleficent beings, and conceive of their
sulphur-exhaling mouths as the jaws of a bottomless pit.
(_d._) _Storm and Lightning, etc._
If in freeing ourselves from the tyranny of the “solar” theory we shackled
ourselves with some other, we should certainly prefer that which is known
as the “meteorological,” and which, in the person of Kuhn and other
supporters, finds a more rational and persistent source of myth in
phenomena which are fitful and startling, such as hurricane and tempest,
earthquake and volcanic outburst. Sunrises and sunsets happen with a
regularity which failed to excite any strong emotion or stimulate
curiosity, and the remotest ancestor of the primitive Aryan soon shook off
the habit--if, indeed, he ever acquired it--of going to bed in fear and
trembling lest the sun should not come back again. Nature, in her softer
aspects and her gracious bounties, in the spring-time with its promise,
the summer with its glory, the autumn with its gifts, has moved the heart
of man to song and festival and procession; as, by contrast, the frosts
that nipped the early buds and the fierce heat that withered the
approaching harvest gave occasion for plaintive ditty and sombre ceremony.
It is in the fierce play and passionate outbursts of the elements, in the
storm, the lightning, and the thunder, that the feelings are aroused and
that the terror-stricken fancy sees the strife of wrathful deities, or
depicts their dire work amongst men. Hence, all the world over, the
storm-god and the wind-god have played a mighty part.
To the savage, the wind, blowing as it listeth, its whence and whither
unknown, itself invisible, yet the sweep and force of its power manifest
and felt, must have ranked amongst the most striking phenomena. And, as
will be seen hereafter, the correspondences between wind and breath, and
the connection between breath and life, added their quota of mystery in
man’s effort to account for the impalpable element. Of this
personification of the elements the following Ojibway folk-tale, cited by
Dorman, gives poetic illustration:--“There were spirits from all parts of
the country. Some came with crashing steps and roaring voice, who directed
the whirlwinds which were in the habit of raging about the neighbouring
country. Then glided in gently a sweet little spirit, which blew the
summer gale. Then came in the old sand-spirit, who blew the sand-squalls
in the sand-buttes toward the west. He was a great speech-maker, and shook
the lodge with his deep-throated voice, as he addressed the spirits of the
cataracts and waterfalls, and those of the islands who wore beautiful
green blankets.”
In the legends of the Quiches, the mysterious creative power is Hurakan
(whence _hurricane_), among the Choctaws the original word for Deity is
Hushtoli, the storm-wind, and in Peru to kiss the air was the commonest
and simplest sign of adoration of the collective divinities. The
Guayacuans of South America, when a storm arose and there was much thunder
or wind, all went out in troops, as it were to battle, shaking their clubs
in the air, shooting flights of arrows in that direction whence the storm
came.[16]
The Araucanians thought that gales and thunderstorms were the battles
fought between the spirits of the dead and their foes.
Turning to the literatures of higher races, we find in the prose _Edda_,
when Gangler asks whence comes the wind, that Ha answers him: “Thou must
know that at the northernmost point in the heavens sits a giant,
“In the guise of an eagle;
And the winds, it is said,
Rush down on the earth
From his outspreading pinions.”
In Finnish myth the north wind Pulmri, father of the frost, is sometimes
imaged as an eagle.
“The Indians believe in a great bird called by them _Wochowsen_ or
_Wuchowsen_, meaning Wind-Blow or the Wind-Blower, who lives far to the
north, and sits upon a great rock at the end of the sky. And it is because
whenever he moves his wings the wind blows they of old times called him
that.” And in another Algonquin myth: “Ga-oh is the Spirit of the Winds.
He moves the winds, but he is chained to a rock. The winds trouble him,
and he tries very hard to get free. When he struggles the winds are
forced away from him, and they blow upon the earth. Sometimes he suffers
terrible pain, and then his struggles are violent. This makes the winds
wild, and they do damage on the earth. Then he feels better and goes to
sleep, and the winds become quiet also.”[17]
In the _Veda_ the Maruts or Storm-gods, to whom many of the hymns are
addressed, “make the rocks to tremble and tear asunder the kings of the
forest,” like Hermes in his violence and like Boreas in his rage. Whether
or no they become in Scandinavian legend the grim and fearful Ogres
swiftly sailing in their cloud-ships, we may see in them the “crushers”
and “grinders,”[18] as their name imports, the types of northern deities
like Odin, long degraded into the Wild Huntsman and his phantom crew,
whose uncouth yells the peasant hears in the midnight air.[19] Among the
Aztecs Cuculkan, the bird-serpent, was a personification of the wind,
especially of the east wind, as bringer of the rain. It was at one of his
shrines, to which pilgrimages were made from great distances, that the
Spaniards first saw to their surprise a cross surmounting the temple of
this god of the wind, whence arose a legend that the Apostle Thomas had
evangelised America. But, in fact, the pagan cross of Central America and
Mexico was the symbol of the four cardinal points.
In his valuable book on the _Myths of the Red Race_ Dr. Brinton has
brought together a mass of evidence in support of a theory that the
sanctity in which the number four is held by the American races is due to
the adoration of the cardinal points, which are identified with the four
winds, who in hero-myths are the four ancestors of the human race. The
illustrations with which the argument is supported are numerous and
valuable, but the argument itself is made to rest too strongly on an
assumed primitive symbolism, whereas it suffices to show how the early
notion of the flat world, as also square, would lead to the myth of the
four winds blowing from the four corners, a myth often illustrated in
ancient maps with an angel at each corner from whose mouth the wind
issues. The official title of the Incas was “Lord of the four quarters of
the earth,” and the number appears in all sorts of combinations, but the
theory may be pushed to extremes in compelling every fact to square with
it.[20] As the illustrations given above show, we are some steps nearer to
the primitive myth when we find the wind conceived of as a mighty bird,
which indeed is in both old and new world mythology a common symbol of
thunder and lightning also. On this matter Dr. Brinton’s remarks bear
quoting.
Like the wind the bird sweeps through the aërial spaces, sings in the
forests, and rustles on its course; like the cloud it floats in
mid-air, and casts its shadow on the earth; like the lightning it
darts from heaven to earth to strike its unsuspecting prey. These
tropes were truths to savage nations, and led on by that law of
language which forced them to conceive everything as animate or
inanimate, itself the product of a deeper law of thought which urges
us to ascribe life to whatever has motion, they found no animal so
appropriate for their purpose here as the bird. Therefore the
Algonquins say that birds always make the winds, that they create the
waterspouts, and that the clouds are the spreading and agitation of
their wings; the Navajos that at each cardinal point stands a white
swan, who is the spirit of the blasts; so also the Dakotas frequently
explain the thunder as the sound of the cloud-bird flapping his wings;
the lightning as the fire that flashes from his tracks, like the
sparks which the buffalo scatters when he scours over a stony plain.
Estimates differ much as to the size of the Thunder-Bird. In one tradition
an Indian found its nest, and secured a feather which was above two
hundred feet long, while in another tradition the bird is said to be no
bigger than one’s little finger. But among the Western Indians he is an
immense eagle. “When this aërial monster flaps his wings loud peals of
thunder roll over the prairie; when he winks his eye it lightens; when he
wags his tail the waters of the lake which he carries on his back overflow
and produce rain.” Mixcoatl, the Mexican Cloud-Serpent, as well as Jove,
carries his bundle of arrows or thunderbolts, which in the hand of Thor
are represented by his mighty club or hammer. The old and universal belief
that stones were hurled by the Thunder-God is not so far-fetched as we, in
our pride of science, might think, for the flints which are mistaken for
thunderbolts, and which become objects of adoration as well as charms,
produce a flash when struck by the lightning. In the lightning flash man
would see the descent of fire from heaven for his needs. That he should
regard it, like water, as a living creature, with power to hurt or help
him, is in keeping with attribution of life to all that moved. Its
apparent connection with the great source of heat would foster the feeling
which expressed itself in fire-worship, with its curious survivals to
modern times. No element was more calculated to excite awe in its seeming
unrelation to the objects which produced it. Once secured, to guard it
from extinction or theft was a serious duty, and everything from which it
issued, trees as its hiding-place, since it came from the wood when
rubbed, stones also, since sparks shot from them when struck, were held
sacred. In the manifold myths about its origin one feature is common, that
its seed was stolen, the chief agents (probably as the messengers between
earth and sky) being birds, or men assuming the form of birds. The Sioux
Indians say that their first ancestor procured his fire from the sparks
which a panther struck from the rocks as he bounded up a hill. But of
examples from the lower culture, forerunners of the Zeus-defying
Prometheus, Mr. Gill’s _Myths of the South Pacific_ supplies one which may
be taken as a sample of the rest. Maui, a famous South Sea hero, finding
some cooked food in a basket brought by Buataranga from the nether world,
and relishing it more than raw food, determines to steal the fire, and
flying to the Buataranga’s realm frightens the fire-god by threats and
blows into revealing the secret. Then wresting the fire-sticks from him he
sets the under-world in flames, and returns with his prize to the
upper-world; thenceforth “all the dwellers there used fire-sticks, and
enjoyed the luxuries of light and of cooked food.”
(_e._) _Light and Darkness._
As in the conflict raging in the sky during gale or tempest, when the
light and the darkness alternately prevail, the barbaric mind sees war
waged between the heroes of the spirit-land who have carried their
unsettled blood feuds thither, so in many myths the lightning is no
comrade of the thunder, but its foe, the battle of bird with serpent. The
resemblance of the lightning flash to the sharp, sudden, zigzag movements
of the serpent, a creature so mysterious to barbaric man in its unlikeness
to the beasts of the field, accounts for a myth the influence of which as
a terrorising agent on human conduct is in course of rapid decay. Its
importance in the history of belief in the supernatural is too
far-reaching to be passed over, and in tracing its course it is necessary
to show its connection with the group of storm-myths and sun-myths of the
Aryan race in the battles between Indra and Vritra, Ormuzd and Ahriman,
Thor and Midgard, Hercules and Cacus, Apollo and Pythôn, and St. George
and the Dragon.
All the Aryan nations have among their legends, often exalted into epic
themes, the story of a battle between a hero and a monster. In each case
the hero conquers, and releases treasures, or in some way renders succour
to man, through his victory. In Hindu myth this battle is fought between
Indra and Vritra.