What the attitude of Mannhardt was, in 1877 and later, we have seen. He
disbelieves in the philological system of explaining myths by
etymological conjectures. He disbelieves in the habit of finding, in
myths of terrestrial occurrences, reflections of celestial phenomena. But
earlier, in his long essay Die lettischen Sonnenmythen (in Zeitschrift
fur Ethnologie, 1875), he examines the Lettish popular songs about the
Sun, the Sun's daughters, the god-sons, and so forth. Here, of course,
he is dealing with popular songs explicitly devoted to solar phenomena,
in their poetical aspect. In the Lettish Sun-songs and Sun-myths of the
peasants we see, he says, a myth-world 'in process of becoming,' in an
early state of development, as in the Veda (p. 325). But, we may reply,
in the Veda, myths are already full-grown, or even decadent. Already
there are unbelievers in the myths. Thus we would say, in the Veda we
have (1) myths of nature, formed in the remote past, and (2) poetical
phrases about heavenly phenomena, which resemble the nature-poetry of the
Letts, but which do not become full-grown myths. The Lett songs, also,
have not developed into myths, of which (as in the Apollo and Daphne
story, by Mr. Max Muller's hypothesis) _the original meaning is lost_.
In the Lett songs we have a mass of nature-pictures--the boat and the
apples of the Sun, the red cloak hung on the oak-tree, and so on;
pictures by which it is sought to make elemental phenomena intelligible,
by comparison with familiar things. Behind the phenomena are, in popular
belief, personages--mythical personages--the Sun as 'a magnified
non-natural man,' or woman; the Sun's mother, daughters, and other
heavenly people. Their conduct is 'motived' in a human way. Stories are
told about them: the Sun kills the Moon, who revives.
All this is perfectly familiar everywhere. Savages, in their fables,
account for solar, lunar, and similar elemental processes, on the theory
that the heavenly bodies are, and act like, human beings. The Eskimo
myth of the spots on the Moon, marks of ashes thrown by the Sun in a love-
quarrel, is an excellent example. But in all this there is no 'disease
of language.' These are frank nature-myths, 'aetiological,' giving a
fabulous reason for facts of nature.
Mannhardt on Marchen.
But Mannhardt goes farther. He not only recognises, as everyone must do,
the Sun, as explicitly named, when he plays his part in myth, or popular
tale (Marchen). He thinks that even when the Sun is not named, his
presence, and reference to him, and derivation of the incidents in
Marchen from solar myth, may sometimes be detected with great probability
(pp. 326, 327). But he adds, 'not that every Marchen contains a
reference to Nature; that I am far from asserting' (p. 327).
Now perhaps nobody will deny that some incidents in Marchen may have been
originally suggested by nature-myths. The all-swallowing and
all-disgorging beast, wolf, or ogre, may have been derived from a view of
Night as the all-swallower. But to disengage natural phenomena,
mythically stated, from the human tangle of Marchen, to find natural
phenomena in such a palimpsest as Perrault's courtly and artificial
version of a French popular tale, is a delicate and dangerous task. In
many stories a girl has three balls--one of silver, one of gold, one of
diamond--which she offers, in succession, as bribes. This is a perfectly
natural invention. It is perilous to connect these balls, gifts of
ascending value, with the solar apple of iron, silver, and gold (p. 103
and note 5). It is perilous, and it is quite unnecessary. Some
one--Gubernatis, I think--has explained the naked sword of Aladdin, laid
between him and the Sultan's daughter in bed, as the silver sickle of the
Moon. Really the sword has an obvious purpose and meaning, and is used
as a symbol in proxy-marriages. The blood shed by Achilles in his latest
victories is elsewhere explained as red clouds round the setting Sun,
which is conspicuously childish. Mannhardt leans, at least, in this
direction.
'The Two Brothers'
Mannhardt takes the old Egyptian tale of 'The Two Brothers,' Bitiou and
Anepou. This fable, as old, in actual written literature, as Moses, is a
complex of half the Marchen plots and incidents in the world. It opens
with the formula of Potiphar's Wife. The falsely accused brother flies,
and secretes his life, or separable soul, in a flower of the mystic Vale
of Acacias. This affair of the separable soul may be studied in Mr.
Hartland's Perseus, and it animates, as we shall see, Mr. Frazer's theory
of the Origin of Totemism. A golden lock of the wicked wife's hair is
then borne by the Nile to the king's palace in Egypt. He will insist on
marrying the lady of the lock. Here we are in the Cinderella formula, en
plein, which may be studied, in African and Santhal shapes, in Miss
Coxe's valuable Cinderella. {60} Pharaoh's wise men decide that the
owner of the lock of hair is (like Egyptian royalty at large) a daughter
of the Sun-god (p. 239). Here is the Sun, in all his glory; but here we
are dealing with a literary version of the Marchen, accommodated to royal
tastes and Egyptian ideas of royalty by a royal scribe, the courtly
Perrault of the Egyptian Roi-Soleil. Who can say what he
introduced?--while we _can_ say that the Sun-god is absent in South
African and Santhal and other variants. The Sun may have slipped out
here, may have been slipped in there; the faintest glimmer of the
historical sense prevents us from dogmatising.
Wedded to Pharaoh, the wicked wife, pursuing her vengeance on Bitiou,
cuts down his life-tree. Anepou, his brother, however, recovers his
concealed heart (life), and puts it in water. Bitiou revives. He
changes himself into the sacred Bull, Apis--a feature in the story which
is practically possible in Egypt alone. The Bull tells the king his
story, but the wicked wife has the Bull slain, as by Cambyses in
Herodotus. Two of his blood-drops become two persea trees. One of them
confesses the fact to the wicked wife. She has them cut down; a chip
flies into her mouth, she becomes a mother by the chip, the boy (Bitiou)
again becomes king, and slays his mother, the wicked wife.
In the tree, any tree, acacia or persea, Mannhardt wishes to recognise
the Sun-tree of the Lett songs. The red blossoms of the persea tree are
a symbol of the Sun-tree: of Horus. He compares features, not always
very closely analogous, in European Marchen. For example, a girl hides
in a tree, like Charles II. at Boscobel. That is not really analogous
with Bitiou's separable life in the acacia! 'Anepou' is like 'Anapu,'
Anubis. The Bull is the Sun, is Osiris--dead in winter. Mr. Frazer,
Mannhardt's disciple, protests a grands cris against these
identifications when made by others than Mannhardt, who says, 'The
Marchen is an old obscure solar myth' (p. 242). To others the story of
Bitiou seems an Egyptian literary complex, based on a popular set of
tales illustrating furens quid femina possit, and illustrating the world-
wide theory of the separable life, dragging in formulas from other
Marchen, and giving to all a thoroughly classical Egyptian colouring.
{61a} Solar myths, we think, have not necessarily anything to make in
the matter.