Myth, Ritual And Religion Volume I Part 13

(1) Primitive Culture, i. 288.

In Australia the myth says that there was a time when the sun did not set. "It was at all times day, and the blacks grew weary." Norralie considered and decided that the sun should disappear at intervals. He addressed the sun in an incantation (couched like the Finnish Kalewala in the metre of Longfellow's Hiawatha); and the incantation is thus interpreted: "Sun, sun, burn your wood, burn your internal substance, and go down". The sun therefore now burns out his fuel in a day, and goes below for fresh firewood.(1)

(1) Brough Smyth, Aborigines of Victoria, i. 430.

In New Zealand the taming of the sun is attributed to the great hero Maui, the Prometheus of the Maoris. He set snares to catch the sun, but in vain, for the sun's rays bit them through. According to another account, while Norralie wished to hasten the sun's setting, Maui wanted to delay it, for the sun used to speed through the heavens at a racing pace. Maui therefore snared the sun, and beat him so unmercifully that he has been lame ever since, and travels slowly, giving longer days.

"The sun, when beaten, cried out and revealed his second great name, Taura-mis-te-ra."(1) It will be remembered that Indra, in his abject terror when he fled after the slaying of Vrittra, also revealed his mystic name. In North America the same story of the trapping and laming of the sun is told, and attributed to a hero named Tcha-ka-betch. In Samoa the sun had a child by a Samoan woman. He trapped the sun with a rope made of a vine and extorted presents. Another Samoan la.s.soed the sun and made him promise to move more slowly.(2) These Samoan and Australian fancies are nearly as dignified as the tale in the Aitareya Brahmana. The G.o.ds, afraid "that the sun would fall out of heaven, pulled him up and tied him with five ropes". These ropes are recognised as verses in the ritual, but probably the ritual is later than the ropes. In Mexico we find that the sun himself (like the stars in most myths) was once a human or pre-human devotee, Nanahuatzin, who leapt into a fire to propitiate the G.o.ds.(3) Translated to heaven as the sun, Nanahuatzin burned so very fiercely that he threatened to reduce the world to a cinder. Arrows were therefore shot at him, and this punishment had as happy an effect as the beatings administered by Maui and Tcha-ka-betch. Among the Bushmen of South Africa the sun was once a man, from whose armpit a limited amount of light was radiated round his hut. Some children threw him up into the sky, and there he stuck, and there he shines.(4) In the Homeric hymn to Helios, as Mr. Max Muller observes, "the poet looks on Helios as a half G.o.d, almost a hero, who had once lived on earth," which is precisely the view of the Bushmen.(5) Among the Aztecs the sun is said to have been attacked by a hunter and grievously wounded by his arrows.(6) The Gallinomeros, in Central California, seem at least to know that the sun is material and impersonal. They say that when all was dark in the beginning, the animals were constantly jostling each other. After a painful encounter, the hawk and the coyote collected two b.a.l.l.s of inflammable substance; the hawk (Indra was occasionally a hawk) flew up with them into heaven, and lighted them with sparks from a flint. There they gave light as sun and moon. This is an exception to the general rule that the heavenly bodies are regarded as persons. The Melanesian tale of the bringing of night is a curious contrast to the Mexican, Maori, Australian and American Indian stories which we have quoted. In Melanesia, as in Australia, the days were long, indeed endless, and people grew tired; but instead of sending the sun down below by an incantation when night would follow in course of nature, the Melanesian hero went to Night (conceived of as a person) and begged his a.s.sistance. Night (Qong) received Qat (the hero) kindly, darkened his eyes, gave him sleep, and, in twelve hours or so, crept up from the horizon and sent the sun crawling to the west.(7) In the same spirit Paracelsus is said to have attributed night, not to the absence of the sun, but to the apparition of certain stars which radiate darkness. It is extraordinary that a myth like the Melanesian should occur in Brazil. There was endless day till some one married a girl whose father "the great serpent," was the owner of night. The father sent night bottled up in a gourd. The gourd was not to be uncorked till the messengers reached the bride, but they, in their curiosity, opened the gourd, and let night out prematurely.(8)

(1) Taylor, New Zealand, p. 131.

(2) Turner, Samoa, p. 20.

(3) Sahagun, French trans., vii. ii.

(4) Bleck, Hottentot Fables, p. 67; Bushman Folk-Lore, pp. 9, 11.

(5) Compare a Californian solar myth: Bancroft, iii. pp. 85, 86.

(6) Bancroft, iii. 73, quoting Burgoa, i. 128, 196.

(7) Codrington, Journ. Anthrop. Inst., February, 1881.

(8) Contes Indiens du Bresil, pp. 1-9, by Couto de Magalhaes. Rio de Janeiro, 1883. M. Henri Gaidoz kindly presented the author with this work.

The myths which have been reported deal mainly with the sun as a person who shines, and at fixed intervals disappears. His relations with the moon are much more complicated, and are the subject of endless stories, all explaining in a romantic fashion why the moon waxes and wanes, whence come her spots, why she is eclipsed, all starting from the premise that sun and moon are persons with human parts and pa.s.sions.

Sometimes the moon is a man, sometimes a woman and the s.e.x of the sun varies according to the fancy of the narrators. Different tribes of the same race, as among the Australians, have different views of the s.e.x of moon and sun. Among the aborigines of Victoria, the moon, like the sun among the Bushmen, was a black fellow before he went up into the sky.

After an unusually savage career, he was killed with a stone hatchet by the wives of the eagle, and now he shines in the heavens.(1) Another myth explanatory of the moon's phases was found by Mr. Meyer in 1846 among the natives of Encounter Bay. According to them the moon is a woman, and a bad woman to boot. She lives a life of dissipation among men, which makes her consumptive, and she wastes away till they drive her from their company. While she is in retreat, she lives on nourishing roots, becomes quite plump, resumes her gay career, and again wastes away. The same tribe, strangely enough, think that the sun also is a woman. Every night she descends among the dead, who stand in double lines to greet her and let her pa.s.s. She has a lover among the dead, who has presented her with a red kangaroo skin, and in this she appears at her rising. Such is the view of rosy-fingered Dawn entertained by the blacks of Encounter Bay. In South America, among the Muyscas of Bogota, the moon, Huythaca, is the malevolent wife of the child of the sun; she was a woman before her husband banished her to the fields of s.p.a.ce.(2) The moon is a man among the Khasias of the Himalaya, and he was guilty of the unpardonable offence of admiring his mother-in-law. As a general rule, the mother-in-law is not even to be spoken to by the savage son-in-law. The lady threw ashes in his face to discourage his pa.s.sion, hence the moon's spots. The waning of the moon suggested the most beautiful and best known of savage myths, that in which the moon sends a beast to tell mortals that, though they die like her, like her they shall be born again.(3) Because the spots in the moon were thought to resemble a hare they were accounted for in Mexico by the hypothesis that a G.o.d smote the moon in the face with a rabbit;(4) in Zululand and Thibet by a fancied translation of a good or bad hare to the moon.

(1) Brough Smyth, Aborigines of Victoria, i. 432.

(2) Tylor, Primitive Culture, i. 353.

(3) Bleek, Reynard in South Africa, pp. 69-74.

(4) Sahagun, viii. 2.

The Eskimos have a peculiar myth to account for the moon's spots. Sun and moon were human brother and sister. In the darkness the moon once attempted the virtue of the sun. She smeared his face over with ashes, that she might detect him when a light was brought. She did discover who her a.s.sailant had been, fled to the sky, and became the sun. The moon still pursues her, and his face is still blackened with the marks of ashes.(1) Gervaise(2) says that in Maca.s.sar the moon was held to be with child by the sun, and that when he pursued her and wished to beat her, she was delivered of the earth. They are now reconciled. About the alternate appearance of sun and moon a beautifully complete and adequate tale is told by the Piute Indians of California. No more adequate and scientific explanation could possibly be offered, granting the hypothesis that sun and moon are human persons and savage persons. The myth is printed as it was taken down by Mr. De Quille from the lips of Tooroop Eenah (Desert Father), a chief of the Piutes, and published in a San Francisco newspaper.

(1) Crantz's History of Greenland, i. 212.

(2) Royaume de Macacar, 1688.

"The sun is the father and ruler of the heavens. He is the big chief.

The moon is his wife and the stars are their children. The sun eats his children whenever he can catch them. They flee before him, and are all the time afraid when he is pa.s.sing through the heavens. When he (their father) appears in the morning, you see all the stars, his children, fly out of sight--go away back into the blue of the above--and they do not wake to be seen again until he, their father, is about going to his bed.

"Down deep under the ground--deep, deep, under all the ground--is a great hole. At night, when he has pa.s.sed over the world, looked down on everything and finished his work, he, the sun, goes into his hole, and he crawls and creeps along it till he comes to his bed in the middle part of the earth. So then he, the sun, sleeps there in his bed all night.

"This hole is so little, and he, the sun, is so big, that he cannot turn round in it; and so he must, when he has had all his sleep, pa.s.s on through, and in the morning we see him come out in the east. When he, the sun, has so come out, he begins to hunt up through the sky to catch and eat any that he can of the stars, his children, for if he does not so catch and eat he cannot live. He, the sun, is not all seen. The shape of him is like a snake or a lizard. It is not his head that we can see, but his belly, filled up with the stars that times and times he has swallowed.

"The moon is the mother of the heavens and is the wife of the sun. She, the moon, goes into the same hole as her husband to sleep her naps. But always she has great fear of the sun, her husband, and when he comes through the hole to the n.o.bee (tent) deep in the ground to sleep, she gets out and comes away if he be cross.

"She, the moon, has great love for her children, the stars, and is happy to travel among them in the above; and they, her children, feel safe, and sing and dance as she pa.s.ses along. But the mother, she cannot help that some of her children must be swallowed by the father every month.

It is ordered that way by the Pah-ah (Great Spirit), who lives above the place of all.

"Every month that father, the sun, does swallow some of the stars, his children, and then that mother, the moon, feels sorrow. She must mourn; so she must put the black on her face for to mourn the dead. You see the Piute women put black on their faces when a child is gone. But the dark will wear away from the face of that mother, the moon, a little and a little every day, and after a time again we see all bright the face of her. But soon more of her children are gone, and again she must put on her face the pitch and the black."

Here all the phenomena are accounted for, and the explanation is as advanced as the Egyptian doctrine of the hole under the earth where the sun goes when he pa.s.ses from our view. And still the Great Spirit is over all: Religion comes athwart Myth.

Mr. Tylor quotes(1) a nature myth about sun, moon and stars which remarkably corresponds to the speculation of the Piutes. The Mintira of the Malayan Peninsula say that both sun and moon are women. The stars are the moon's children; once the sun had as many. They each agreed (like the women of Jerusalem in the famine), to eat their own children; but the sun swallowed her whole family, while the moon concealed hers.

When the sun saw this she was exceedingly angry, and pursued the moon to kill her. Occasionally she gets a bite out of the moon, and that is an eclipse. The Hos of North-East India tell the same tale, but say that the sun cleft the moon in twain for her treachery, and that she continues to be cut in two and grow again every month. With these sun and moon legends sometimes coexists the RELIGIOUS belief in a Creator of these and of all things.

(1) Primitive Culture, i. 356.

In harmony with the general hypothesis that all objects in nature are personal, and human or b.e.s.t.i.a.l, in real shape, and in pa.s.sion and habits, are the myths which account for eclipses. These have so frequently been published and commented on(1) that a long statement would be tedious and superfluous. To the savage mind, and even to the Chinese and the peasants of some European countries, the need of an explanation is satisfied by the myth that an evil beast is devouring the sun or the moon. The people even try by firing off guns, shrieking, and clashing cymbals, to frighten the beast (wolf, pig, dragon, or what not) from his prey. What the hungry monster in the sky is doing when he is not biting the sun or moon we are not informed. Probably he herds with the big bird whose wings, among the Dacotahs of America and the Zulus of Africa, make thunder; or he may a.s.sociate with the dragons, serpents, cows and other aerial cattle which supply the rain, and show themselves in the waterspout. Chinese, Greenland, Hindoo, Finnish, Lithunian and Moorish examples of the myth about the moon-devouring beasts are vouched for by Grimm.(2) A Mongolian legend has it that the G.o.ds wished to punish the maleficent Arakho for his misdeeds, but Arakho hid so cleverly that their limited omnipotence could not find him. The sun, when asked to turn spy, gave an evasive answer. The moon told the truth.

Arakho was punished, and ever since he chases sun and moon. When he nearly catches either of them, there is an eclipse, and the people try to drive him off by making a hideous uproar with musical and other instruments.(3) Captain Beeckman in 1704 was in Borneo, when the natives declared that the devil "was eating the moon".

(1) Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. i.; Lefebure, Les Yeux d'Horus.

(2) Teutonic Mythology, English trans., ii. 706.

(3) Moon-Lore by Rev. T. Harley, p. 167.

Dr. Brinton in his Myths and Myth-Makers gives examples from Peruvians, Tupis, Creeks, Iroquois and Algonkins. It would be easy, and is perhaps superfluous, to go on multiplying proofs of the belief that sun and moon are, or have been, persons. In the Hervey Isles these two luminaries are thought to have been made out of the body of a child cut in twain by his parents. The blood escaped from the half which is the moon, hence her pallor.(1) This tale is an exception to the general rule, but reminds us of the many myths which represent the things in the world as having been made out of a mutilated man, like the Vedic Purusha. It is hardly necessary, except by way of record, to point out that the Greek myths of sun and moon, like the myths of savages, start from the conception of the solar and lunar bodies as persons with parts and pa.s.sions, human loves and human sorrows. As in the Mongolian myth of Arakho, the sun "sees all and hears all," and, less honourable than the Mongolian sun, he plays the spy for Hephaestus on the loves of Ares and Aphrodite. He has mistresses and human children, such as Circe and Aeetes.(2)

(1) Gill, Myths and Songs, p. 45.

(2) See chapter on Greek Divine Myths.

The sun is all-seeing and all-penetrating. In a Greek song of to-day a mother sends a message to an absent daughter by the sun; it is but an unconscious repet.i.tion of the request of the dying Ajax that the heavenly body will tell his fate to his old father and his sorrowing spouse.(1)

(1) Sophocles, Ajax, 846.