Cornell University Library The original of this bool< is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924099175345 3 1924 099 175 345 In compliance with current copyright law, Cornell University Library produced this replacement volume on paper that meets the ANSI Standard Z39.48-1992 to replace the irreparably deteriorated original. 2004 THE GIFT OF T. F. CRANE,. Professor of the Romance Languages and Literatures. 4...^.3.S.gug.q ^S\ml.cS.. OTHER WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR. THE INDIAN SAINT, OR, BUDDHA AND BUDDHISM, A SKETCH HESTOKicAr- AND Cbitical, Published by the Author. (The edition of this work was limited and all copies have been sold.) In these sublime heights of Oriental mysticism, Mr. Mills breathes as freely as if they formed his native air. He moves along the dizzy mountain-tops vrith the elastic tread of one who finds himself at home on their loftiest summits. The spirit of his book is in admirable har- mony with the subjects. The style is lucid and singularly attractive in its modest beauty.— Geo. A. Blpley, in New TorU Tribune. This beautifully written prose-poem.— Jfrs. M. E. B., in. Unity, Chicago. An excellent popular life of Sakya Muni, the Indian saint, the founder of Buddhism. His book shows extensive research and a mind of high order.— The Oraphio, New York. ■ This final essay [the closing chapter] strikes us as something uncom- monly good in thought and tone.— Boston Transcript. PEBBLES, PEARLS, AND GEMS OF THE ORIENT. Gathered and arranged by Chas. D. B. Mills. Boston, George H. Ellis, 141 Franklin Street, 1882. This beautiful volume reflects credit alike on editor and publisher. It is a collection of the wisest, sweetest, and most trenchant aphorisms- of the East. Than Mr. Mills, there could be no more discriminating col- lector of the wisdom of the Oriental poets, prophets and sages. He has the true literary honey-bee's critical taste. There is garnered up in this volume DO moral poison or literary chaS..— Index, Boston. There is evidence on every page that Mr. Mills is a born lover of the Orient mind. He has ranged widely througli the literature of the East. He has read the various Scriptures, Brahmanio, Buddhist, Confucian, Iranian. He has read the poets with an equal care, those of the East and those of Occidental birth and trauiing who have resung the Eastern songs or been inspired by Eastern themes. Sententious wisdom has for him a remarkable fascination There is education in morals and in worship here, and in the perception that Christianity is not exhaustive of the spiritual riches of mankind.— Ben. John tC. ChadwicTi, in Chris- tian Begister. This volume may still be ordered of C. W. Babdeen, Syracuse, N. Y. Price §1.50, post-paid. THE TREE OF MYTHOLOGY, ITS GROWTH AND FRUITAGE : GENESIS OF THE NURSERY TALE, SAWS OF FOLK-LORE, ETC. A STUDY BY CHARLES De B. MILLS. " Thus, though tradition may have but one root, it grows, like a banian, into a whole overarching: labyrinth of trees."— Carlyle, as qiioted by Max Miiller. SYRACUSE, K. T. : C. W. BARDEEN, PUBLISHER. 1889. H Copyright. 1888, by C. W. Bardeen. FOREWORD. The following essay comes as the fruit of a love, a predilection long felt for that realm of man's thought and imaginings which finds its expression in what is named Mythology. It introduces us, as the -writer believes, to what is one of the most curious, and also significant chapters in the history of the human mind. Amid all that is fanciful, whimsical, childish, or seemingly idle and worthless, there is much, we might almost say everything, that is real, living, deeply vital in its interest for us all. This staircase from its humble homely beginnings, starting in the first dim dawnings of human thought and conscious- ness, leads to the starry heights, hints to us the sole mode of ascent to infinite and everlasting. The his- tory reveals to us the glory and the shame of the human mind, its conquest and its defeat, tells of its grand possibility, and its mortifying, never ending failure. It cannot be said that the theme even in its obvious and superficial aspects has become obsolete, when the bale-fires are still kindled, as in Scotland and Nor- (iU) IV FOREWORD. way, on each return of the solstice; when the peasant as in Germany, still fodders wind and flame in depre- catory offering, and hunts on St. John's night the witches from house and stall ; when as in our own country, the superstitious regard for signs, omens, &c., still holds so strongly ever) in intelligent and comparatively freed minds, and survivals almost in- numerable of old mj'thological beliefs exercise to this hour powerful sway both over opinion and conduct. This essay is tentative ; it seeks to ascertain some- thing of the origin, the nature and the growth of myth, what it primarily was and what has come of it. It hardly more at best than feels around almost grop- ingly, to catch some impression of the objects with which this dim realm is full. A vast deal of explor- ation is yet to be done ere the problem of the primal nature, the first origin and meaning of myths shall have been solved, a comparison unending of the mythic tales of the advanced races with those of the savage and barbaric, a study in fact of the mytholo- gies of the whole world. We may well hold a great deal of our hitherto opinions upon this question of the primal nature and sense of these tales provisional, when w^e find such unexpected correspondences in remote quarters of theglobe. Undine and Melusina, distant descendants of the Sanscrit Bheki, of Ushas, Psyche, &c., are FOREWORD. V found with little variation among the Ottowas of North America, and Pandora's box reappears in a tale of the Indians of Labrador. There seem clear remnants of an early zoolatry in the myths of the classic races, and it is yet early to determine how far this element is to have accorded recognition in the interpretation of myths say among the Greeks, that seem to. have had their spring in higher, more spiritual sources. Some universal principles will be discovered as the myths of all peoples are studied, some attainment be made of a science of symbols, far more worth than Swedenborg's doctrine of Correspondences, for it will be based in careful study of the universal ex- pression of races. Every day's inquiry reveals ever more clearly how much alike man is the world over. He has like experiences, frames the like concepts, speaks in much the same dialect in the mythologies in all ages and climes. More deeply, clearly than ever before, we are coming in this age to see the oneness of Humanity. It is a wonderful fact we have in this piece of history we call Mythology. It is on its finer, nobler side, the celebration by the soul of its sense of the mystery, the indescribable beauty of nature and of life, the uttered song of its wonder and its love. Seen on another side, it shows to us the degradation and com- pletest enslavement of the spirit, its almost utter VI FOREWORD. Stultification and subjection to nightmare and terror. The Greek mythology itself reveals to us one beauti- ful poem. Scarcely less delightful to the mind is the Norse, the Teutonic, — and to this by descent and blood we feel most nearly related of all. The writer freely acknowledges his indebtedness, in some points very great, to Sir G. W. Cox,. Rev. S. Baring Gould, Dr. E. B. Tylor, Mr. Robert Brown, Prof. Max Miiller, Prof. De Gubernatis, and others. It is hoped that this little volume may be accepted as a contribution slight indeed but earnest, to this most interesting and pregnant study. It is of a theme that must engage and fix the attention more and more as the mind of man is opened, and drawn with ever increasing curiosity and instruction to read the record of his past, and the intimations told in proph- ecy of his future. Syracuse, N. Y., December 15, 1888. ERRATA. On p. 35, 8th line from top, for " winter" read "writer." On p. iiS, 1st line at top, for " Dealers of gems " read " Deal- ers in gems." On p. 133, 3d line from top, for "burned" read "buried." On p. 168, in foot note, ist line, after Dionysos, for "in"' read "is." There are a few other typographical errors of minor im- portance, which the reader's eye will readily correct. CONTENTS. PAGES. Foreword, - - - iii-vi I. Source, . . . . 9-19 11. Myths of Explanation, - 20-40 III. Myths arising from Metaphor, 41-72 IV. Heroic Legends, - - 73-93 V. Nursery Tales, - - - 94-109 VI. Proverbs, Folk-Lore, ETC., - 1 10-126 VII, Survivals and Reminiscences, - 127-155 VIII. Shadow and Signification, - 156-176 IX. Didactic, Ethical, - - 177-204 X. Symbolism, . . . 205-227 XI. Symbolism, continued, - - 228-253 XII. Excelsior, - - - 254-281 Index, .... 283-288 (vii) I. SOURCE. Nothing has played a more conspicuous and decis- ive part in the annals of humanity than this that we call Mythology. It appears in all the stages of culture, but especially in the ruder and more primeval. Yet it is by no means extinct to-day even in midst of the most advanced civilization. It has awakened an unending curiosity, propounding, like the Sphinx, questions which no man could answer, and to this day presents problems and puzzles that cannot find solution. The theme has not only a speculative or theoretic, it has a near and practical interest for us all. Myth- ology represents on one side a condition in human thought that can never pass away ; nay, must be more pronounced and effective as the ages roll on : under anQther view it represents a phase which, however belonging to childhood and therefore temporary, still continues and exerts marked influence in society, and carries ineffaceable impress upon us all. There 10 SOURCE OF MYTHS. are survivals, perpetuations everywhere of the long- distant past, more and more obvious to us as we shall study the thought, the beliefs and expression still current. We yet live in the shadow of this wide, world-covering tree. Mythology seems to carry us back as Mr. Grote well describes to "a past that was never present"; we cannot find the beginning of it. It is earlier than history, earlier than the first glimmer of tradition. Some of the wisest of the Greeks have left on record their thoughts and conclusions upon this difiScult subject, — Sokrates, Plato, Anaxagoras, etc., — and to this day their views are deeply interesting. The Greek mind was by far the finest bloom in the an- cient world, and the mythology it grew was incom- parably the richest, most elaborately and exquisitely wrought out, most pregnant and suggestive ; why should not these people be the ones to give us the explication ? Yet they did not, even the most penetrating and sagacious among them, get the key that unlocked their own myths, and Sokrates pame to feel that there was little profit in the study. The views of Euhemeros who'lived at about the time of Alexander, who interpreted mythology as history clothed however in the garb of marvellous and fabulous, have had many followers and exposi- tors from his day to ours, but the number at the prasent time is not large. Comparative studies begin- SOME POPULAR DEFINITIONS. II ning with the extension of the science of language and carried to the examination of the mythologies among different races, popular legends, folk-lore, etc., have shown the inadequacy of the theory, though not its utter falsity. The solution is too cheap, the key unlocks few only of the riddles. There is some measure of truth here doubtless, |nd perhaps the dis- credit and disrepute brought upon Euhemeros and Abb6 Banier in this regard may have closed the eyes to the recognition of the degree of worth their doc- trines do really possess. This mortal is ever putting on immortality, the common, the seen, sublimating into wonderful and unseen. "The gods," says Herakleitos, " are immortal men, and men are mor- tal gods." " The gods of fable," says Emerson, " are the shining moments of great men." And there are many things in the mythic relations in which his- toric has combined and intermingled. But as a key for unlocking all these secrets, Euhemerism is an utter and hopeless failure. It is -not uninstructive to look for a moment at some of the definitions given by writers of our own age. " Myth," says Mr. Tylor, " is sham history, the fictitious narrative of events that never hap- pened."* Simrock : " Myth is the earliest form in which the mind of heathen peoples recognized the universe and things divine." Ruskin says, "A myth. ' Anthr(^ology, p. 387. 12 SOURCE OF MYTHS. in its simplest definition, is a story with a meaning- attached to it other than it seems to have at first, and the fact that it has such a meaning is generally- marked by some of its circumstances being extraor- ordinary."* Bunsen describes it as " Pure popular poetry of the feeling for nature." Goldziher's view- is similar : " As soon as he f'the speaker^ perceives physical phenomena as events in human life he has at once made a myth ; and every name by which he designates a physical phenomenon forms a myth."f " We define a myth," says John Fiske, " as in its or- igin an explanation by the uncivilized mind of some natural phenomenon, not an allegory, not an esoteric symbol, but an explanation."! " Mythology," says Prof. Max Miiller, " which was the bane of the an- cient world, is, in truth, a disease of language." The origin of such mythological phraseology, he declares, " is always the same ; it is language forgetting her- self." Elsewhere he affirms that it "is in fact the dark shadow which language throws on thought, and which can never disappear till language becomes commensurate with thought, which it never will." Again : " Mythology in the highest sense is the power exerted by language on thought in every possible * Queen of the Air, p. 2. t Hebrew Mytlwlegv, P- 39. t Myths and Myth-makers, p. 21. Elsewhere he says (p. 238), " Since the essential characteristic of a myth Is that It is the attempt to explain some natural phenomenon by endowing with human feelings and capaci- ties the senseless factors in the phenomenon," etc. THE MYTHIC FORM OF EXPRESSION. I J sphere of mental activity, and I do not hesitate to call the whole history of philosophy from Thalesdown to Hegel, an uninterrupted battle against mythology, a constant protest of thought against language."* The term in its full sense, may be quite difficult to define, for it has as used a wide range of meaning. Doubtless all the above are definitions in a degree, but all seem to me somewhat partial, especially the last two. There is what has been called by an emi- nent anthropologist ' the mythological temper ' in contradistinction from ' the historical temper,' and that unquestionably lay at the basis of the character- istic qualities of expression, as it was also in the thought, of the myth-framing people. For one thing, childhood, and so the child-mind of humanity, views every object about it as having con- scious life, as endowed in some strange or perhaps vague way, with personality. " Did you never observe," says Gray, " while rock- ing winds are piping loud, that pause as the gust is recollecting itself, and rising upon the ear in a shrill and plaintive note, like the swell of an ^olian harp ? I do assure you there is nothing in the world so like the voice of a spirit." Hence came Echo, the Wind- god and the Storm-god, the Spirit of the stream and water-fall. Otfried Miiller speaks of that form of * Science of Language, II. 21. Chips, II. 175 . Do., V. B5, 66. 14 SOURCE OF MYTHS. expression, " mythic," he calls it, " which changes all beings into persons, and all relations into actions." And this we find especially in the early time. Mr. Tylor well says that " infants take their first steps in mythology by contriving like Cosette with her doll, ' se figurer que quelque chose est quel- qu'un.'" To Casper Hauser, infantas he was at seventeen, the snow was a person; "naughty," he said, " it bit his finger." " The mythic animals," says Mr. Kelly, " were for those who first gave them their names no mere images or figments of the mind. They were downright realities, for they were seen by men who were quick to see, and who had not yet learned to suspect any collusion between their eyes and their fancy."* And throughout all our life, it is hard to conceive or apprehend any thing, even reality most purely spiritual, except as concrete and also personal. Reminiscence of this state of mind which was once so prevailing and controlling, we still bear in such terms as spontaneously we employ: the howling wind, the angry flames, the raging flood, the pitiless storm, laughing waters, etc.f * CurioeiUes of Indo-Ewopean Tradition and Folk-Lare, p. 8. t In the large we may say there is always lllusioD, some refraction In the ray that meets the eye, some misconception, awry or perverted rep- resentation In every form and type of mythology. It never could arise In a perfectly pure and clear medium. ANIMATION AND PERSONIFICATION. 1 5 To the New Zealander, Maui is the personal hea- ven, or personal sun, as indeed Dyaus seems origi- nally to have been the personal sky to the old Hindus. Of the common names among our own ancestors, Zio, Tiu, or Deity, we may say doubtless the same. A North American Indian prophetess re- lates how she really saw once the Red Indian Zeus. At her solitary fast at womanhood, she fell into an ecstasy or trance, and was conducted up to heaven, to the opening of the sky. She saw the figure of a man standing near her and heard his voice ; there was a brilliant halo about his head, and his breast was covered with squares. He said to her, " Look at me ; I am Oshauwaugeechick, the Bright Blue Sky." Such concrete realistic presentations seem essential to the rude mind, that it m&y in familiar phrase ' catch on,' or in relation to the object be able to grasp it at all. This animation and personification continue down late in history, even among races of the best en- lightenment. In the time of the church father Ori- gen, the stars were believed to be animate and per- sonal beings. This was Origen's view, and it obtained so late as the seventeenth century, being firmly held by the great astronomer John Kepler. Nay, in our own day, DeMaistre has stoutly defended it. The electrical power of amber was long ascribed to a spirit residing in it, and the same explanation was l6 SOURCE OF MYTHS. invoked to account for the control of the ^magnet over iron. So the Egyptians, according to Herod- otos, believed fire to be a live beast. Survivals of this and such like beliefs remain, as we shall see, in many words and phrases still current in our common speech. Then for another thing, the disposition is univer- sal perhaps in early life in the individual and so in the race, to see things in large way, to deal in exag- geration. Childhood affects, delights in such stories. In everything told, the mythic, the grotesque, the exaggerated, coraes in and mingles with the normal and the actual. This in part consciously, and in part unconsciously. 'The fondness for enlarging, tendency to overdraw and overstate, is most marked where the religious sentiment is involved, and that part of our nature is called into play which deals with spiritual, unseen and transcending. Here the leaps and sports of im- agination are most bold and vaulting, and the reli- gious has always been the realm in which has arisen most conspicuously mythology. " Religion," says Mr. Keary, " being the greatest concern of man, the myths which allied themselves most closely to his religious ideas would be those which maintained longest life and most universal acceptance."* • Dawn of Bistory, p. 159. "Divinities form the core of all mythology. Grimm, Teutonic MytJvology, Stallybrass's trans., Preface, p. xvil. A PRE-SUPERNATURAL PERIOD, ^^ Undoubtedly much of what we see, very much, especially among savage races, has originated in the way which John Fiske describes, viz.: from the at- tempt of the uncivilized man to explain what he sees about him, and largely by invoking the intervention of personalities for solving what he perceived no accounting for on other grounds. With nothing of science, no method of checking the free, wild reign of his fancy, it was natural, was inevitable, that these ■explanations should bear all the marks of this man's mental condition. They would be grotesque as was his mind's imagination, fanciful and whimsical as was the range of his own natural thoughts and feelings. In themselves very interesting, they furnish an in- structive chapter in the history of the human mind. They carry us back to a time when there was no supernatural, since there was not yet any philoso- phy of nature, nothing that could be termed natural. The illusions of mythology grew withal as the original appellative sense of words descriptive of ob- jects in nature was lost, and the anthropomorphism and personification became more and more complete. So in many instances a name merely designating originally some inanimate object becomes at length •detached in the general mind from that object, or only faintly related to it, and so stands for some imagined person, and plays a prominent role in mythic representation. It has been thus in the case l8 SOURCE OF MYTHS. of Zeus, Phoibos, Herakles, Here, etc., in the Greek? with Odin, Thor, Freya, Hela, etc., in the Norse. Odin, the wind, celestial energy, the supreme, was personified, made the God in heaven, sometimes spoken of as the bearded god, the sun. A monarch ruling over all, he sits in his heavenly home, Freya by his side, looking down on the earth through a window. The heaven has but one eye, the sun ; so as he was considered personal, human, the loss of the other must be accounted for. The story goes that he left one eye in pledge as he drank in Mimir's well. The reflection of the sun in the water easily sug- gested such explanation. Hence the tales almost without number of the one-eyed man, suddenly ap- pearing, then disappearing in an instant; sometimes described as barefoot, with "linen breeches knit tight even unto the bone," riding on his eight-footed horse Sleipnir, etc. Heimdall, the watchman upon the trembling bridge, Bif-rost, the rainbow, is a very concrete per- sonality. He dwells in Himinbiorg, the Hill of Heaven, needs less sleep than a bird, and has ears so acute he can hear the grass grow on the meadows of earth, and the wool on the backs of sheep. His ward- er's horn is so long that it rests on the root of Ygg- drasil, he has golden teeth, and rides a horse with a mane of gold. Like descriptions we find in the accounts of the gods and goddesses of Greek, indeed of every mythol- CONVERSION OF NAMES INTO PERSONS. 19' ogy, Pramantha, in the ancient Sanscrit, meaning properly fire-drill, becomes at length as we have it in the Greek, Prometheus, bringer of the spark from heaven, and conspirator against Zeus. " In India, as in the western world," says Mr. Cox,, "there was a constant tendency to convert names into persons, and then to frame for them a mythical history in accordance with their meaning."* Thus this tree of mythology has grown and spread until like Yggdrasil, it has covered the earth and filled the universe. • Mythology of the Aryan Nations, p. 421. II. MYTHS OF EXPLANATION. These myths of explanation, as we may name them -we may now instance in a few examples. They are. very numerous, have sprung up in all quarters of the; globe ; among all men, savage or civilized, they are essentially of the same type and texture. In due time we shall find how they approach, resemble, and sometimes appear to blend with those that, originate from the other source, that has ever been fruitful in mythologic growth. To the early men and women a thousand things "would come that demanded some explanation, some intelligent or at least plausible theory or account to be found of them, so that the mind might become seized, so to speak, of its facts, have them in form so it should in some sort apprehend them. Nature poses and presses with her riddles, and the thought must con- struct something to appease the curiosity. The same matters that came in the old days to all, come in a sense to all to-day, and especially to those races who (20 ) THUNDER, LIGHTNING, WINDS, ETC. 21 are on lower and lowest planes of culture. Their myths and legends instruct us in regard to the origin- of stories that have in immemorial times sprung up among our own ancestors. A tale among the Algonquin Indians told of the Sun-god Michabo ('the Great White One J that he sleeps during the winter months. When the leaves fall in the autumn, or as they say it, " in the moon of the falling leaf," preparatory to his taking the long nap, he fills his great pipe and leisurely smokes, the blue clouds, as they rise, filling the air ; and this ac- counts for the haze that marks the Indian Summer. The natives of the North-west explain the thunder as the flapping of the wings of a giant bird : the lightning, as the flash of his eye. With the Dakotas,. who consider the thunder " the sound of the cloud- bird flapping his wings," the lightning is "the fire that flashes from his tracks, like the sparks which th& bufialo scatters when he scours over a stony plain."* Quaintly enough these people have fancied there are several birds concerned in the thunder, the old bird and the young birds. The old bird begins the peal,, and the young ones take it up and continue it ; hence the rumbling. So the eagle was the thunder-bird of Zeus with the Greeks, and the Edda says that the winds are produced by the shaking of the wings of a giant wha * Brinton, Myttis 0/ tin New World, p. 108. » .82 MYTHS OF EXPLANATION. sits in the form of an eagle at the extremity of the sky. The name for the north wind among the Rom- ans, Aquilo — same word really as aquila, — points to the fact that a like mythological notion obtained among the ancestors of the Romans in a distant time. The writer recalls that in very early childhood, he con- .ceived and for some time thoroughly believed the •thunder to be the sound of some tremendous wagon rumbling over the roads of cloud. The Hindus to- day say water-spouts are Indra's elephants drinking water. The Sioux give this account of the origin of fire : their first ancestor obtained his fire "from the sparks which a friendly panther struck from the rocks as he scampered up a stony hill."* This is in all probabil- ity a lightning myth. The Kamchadals say that when the God in heaven has heated up his yurt or house, — as when it is summer on earth it is winter in heaven — he throws the spare fire-brands out at the chimney; hence the lightning. The volcanic erup- tions they account for in like way. They are caused by the mountain-spirits who when they wish to shut up at night throw out their brands ; these are the burning lava. These goblins also go down at night and catch whales, a single one taking from five to ten of them, one hanging to each finger. They cook them in the fire of their yurts, i. e., the volcanoes, and * BriDtOD, Myths of tJie New World. THE DARKENED FACE OF THE MOON. 23 this accounts for the bones of the whales seen to-day on the mountains. If inquired of how they know this, they reply that their old people always said so and they believe it themselves. And moreover the bones are there to speak ; how else could they get there ? " The bricks are alive at this day to testify it; therefore deny it not." The Shoshone Indian conceives the domed firma- ment to be ice, — it has the color of ice, — and from time to time, as he has it, a monster serpent-god coils his immense back up against the firmament, and with his scales scratches and wears off its face. The ice-dust that falls we see in the winter as snow; in the summer season, melting during its descent, it comes as rain. The Oraibi Indian in Arizona, says that Muingwa the rain-god that lives in the world on high, dips a great brush made of the feathers of the birds in heaven in the lakes of the skies, and sprinkles the earth with the water. In winter he crushes the ice of these lakes, and scatters it over the earth ; this gives us the snow.* Among the Khonds of Orissa, it is Pidzu Pennu, the rain-god, who, rest- ing upon the sky, pours down showers through his sieve. Perhaps the story of the daughters of Danaus, condemned forever to draw water with perforated vessels, is of like origin. * Major J. W. Powell, Mythx>logic Philosophy In Pap. Science Monthly, Vol, XV. p. 801. 24 MYTHS OF EXPLANATION. Among'the Esquimaux is a story giving the origin of the darkened appearances on the moon : " There was a girl at a party, and some one told his love for her by shaking her shoulders, after the manner of the country. She could not see who it was in the dark, so she smeared her hands with soot, and when he came back, she blackened his cheek with herhand. When a light was brought, she saw it was her brother, and fled. He ran after her, followed her, and as she came to the end of the earth she sprang out into the sky. Then she became the sun, and he the moon, and this is why the moon is always chasing the sun through the heavens, and why the moon is sometimes dark as he turns his blackened cheek to the earth."* The Khasias of the Himalayas account for the moon-spots by saying that the moon falls monthly in love with his mother-in-law, who thereupon throws ashes in his face. The Buddhists in Ceylon ascribe them to the form of the pious hare that Buddha in recognition of its great devotion and spirit of self- sacrifice took and planted in the moon, a perpetual witness to men of its unexampled piety. Among the Salish Indians in north-west America, it is a toad which is seen. The little wolf was in love with the toad, pursued her, and as a last desperate resort, she jumped upon the moon, and there she is still. The Utes say the moon was made from a frog who sur- * Clodd's Childhood of the World, p. 62. ECLIPSES AND EARTHQUAKES. 25 rendered himself a sacrifice for this purpose, and the frog can now be seen riding the moon at night. In some parts of Europe Isaac can be seen in the moon, carrying up the bundles of wood to Mount Moriah ; also Cain bringing a load of thorns for his offering to Jehovah. The Swedish peasants relate to this day that it is Jack and Gill we see there, two children that the moon once kidnapped and took up to her- self.* And finally in the Jewish Talmud it is related that in Satan's fall from heaven, he spat in his hatred against God, and his spittle stained the moon. Hence the spots. The Algonquins informed Father Le Jeune in the seventeenth century, that an eclipse of the moon was caused by her taking her son in her arms. So the sun was eclipsed by the occasional taking of the same son into his arms. That sun or moon was being devoured by a monster, in the phenomenon of eclipse, has been widely believed over the globe. We find reminiscence of this in the mythology of the ancient Hindus, and the Romans held the same. They were at pains by all means in their power, — throwing of fire-brands into the air, clanging of "b/azen pots and pans, etc., — ' to assist the struggling moon ' — succur- rere laboranti lunm. Various explanations are given of the earthquake, all however showing the same stage of mental condi- » Tylor, PrlmMive, Culture, I. 30. Fiske, Myths, p. 161. 26 MYTHS OF EXPLANATION. tion. The Caribs said it was their mother earth dancing and signifying to them to be merry and dance also. The Tongans of Polynesia say that it is Maui, the great god who supports the earth on his prostrate body, attempting to turn over, and so gain an easier position. The natives of Celebes, that the world-supporting hog occasionally rubs himself against a tree, and thus produces an earthquake. The Chibchas, that it is their god Chibchacum, shifting the earth at times from shoulder to shoulder. And the natives of Kamschatka have a story that Tuil, the earthquake-god, sledges below ground, and when his dog shakes oflf fleas or snow, there follows an earth- quake. Such words as rainbow, thunderbolt, etc., tell us of the times when among our own ancestors there were beliefs very much such as obtain among rude races to-day in regard to these phenomena. The North American Indians call the Milky Way the " Path of Spirits," and the " Road of Souls." Upon this they travel to the land of the unseen, and the brighter stars show us the camp fires they have kindled on the way. The Lithuanian myth de- scribed it also as the" Road of the Birds," conceiving that the souls of the good, flitting away like birds to the end of it, dwell in heaven in peace. With the Siamese it is the "Road of the White _ Elephant." And the Greeks explain the appearance presented by that band in the heavens, by the story that Here, THE MILKY WAY. 27 the bright upper air or the clear ether, once nursed at her breast Herakles, but that, offended with his be- havior she threw him from her, and the milk flowed out on the sky. In Frisia, it is said, the way is still called the cow's path, and the milky appearance is supposed accounted for by the dropping of her milk by the red cow of evening as she passes in the night over the path of sky. The German proverb hath ; it, " Even red cows give white milk." Among the Hottentots the following story is told in explanation of a feature that had struck them in the appearance of the hare : — " The moon sent an in- sect to men saying, ' Go thou to men, and tell them, as I die, and dying live, so ye shall also die, and dy- ing live.' The insect started with the message, but whilst on his way was overtaken by the hare, who asked, 'On what errand art thou bound.' ' The in- sect answered, ' I am sent by the moon to tell them that as she dies, and dying lives, they also shall die and dying live.' The hare said, ' As thou art an awkward runner, let me go, f'and take the message^.' With these words he ran off, and when he reached men, he said, ' I am sent by the moon to tell you, as I die, and dying perish, in the same manner ye also die and come wholly to an end.' Then the hare re- turned to the moon and told her what he had said to men. The moon reproached him angrily, saying, * Barest thou tell the people a thing which I have not 28 MYTHS OF EXPLANATION. said ? ' With these words she took up a piece of wood and struck him on the nose. Since that day the hare's nose is slit." One version is that the moon took up a hatchet to split his head. Missing that, the hatchet fell upon the upper lip and cut a deep gash in it. Hence it is that we see the ' Hare-lip.' The story goes on to say that the hare maddened at such treatment, flew at the moon and scratched her face, and the dark spots which we see now on the moon are the marks, the scars left from that scratching. Among the Dog-Rib Indians the blindness of the mole is accounted for in this wise. An Indian chased a squirrel up a tree until he reached the sky. He set a snare for him and came down, but found next day that the sun was caught in the snare, and this brought on night. He saw the injury he had done and was anxious to repair it. He sent up great numbers of animals in the hope that they might cut the noose and release the sun, but the intense heat burned them all to ashes. At length the slow mole succeeded ; he burrowed under the road in the sky till he reached the place of the sun, gnawed in twain the cords, and released the captive. But the sun's flash put his eyes out, and this is the reason why the mole is blind. The tale adds the effect has ever since been apparent also on his nose and teeth ; they are brown as if burnt. From that time on, however, the gait of the sun has been more deliberate and slow. THE MOTION OF THE SUN. 29 The regulating the movement of the sun, so that it shall be uniform and measured, has received frequent attention in the savage mythologies. He must be bound or compelled in some way to a deliberate and steady course. The Polynesians, noticing the resem- blance of the sun's rays to qords, when as we say the sun is " drawing up water," describe these as ropes he is fastened by, and they tell how a god once set a noose at the horizon and caught him ; hence he now travels bound and compelled to go slowly and in orderly manner. " Behold," they say as they look at the sun in the morning or the afternoon and see the phenomenon, " behold the ropes of Maui." Among the Algonquins, Michabo, the supreme god, was a mighty hunter ; one of his steps measured eight leagues in length ; the great lakes were his beaver dams. He was lord of the cataracts; when they ob- structed his progress, he tore them away with his hands. In this relation, however, there may have been higher elements entering than simply the sav- age's attempt at some crude explanation. We are not sure whether it is letter or metaphor. Quetzalcohuatl, the Toltec deity, learning that his father had been slain by the cloud-snakes, rose upon them and rushed into their temple with his tigers. He slew many, the guiltiest of them he hewed and hacked, and throwing red pepper on their wounds, left 30 MYTHS OF EXPLANATION. them to die. This is the explanation they give of the ruddy and crimson hue of the clouds in the eastern sky. The legend tells of him other things which describe his oflBce. " He brought with him builders, painters, astronomers, and artists in many other crafts." "He is the helper of travellers, the maker of the calendar, the source of astrology, the beginner of history, the bringer of wealth and hap- piness. He is the patron of the craftsman, whom he lights to his labor." And his funeral pile is on the top of Orizaba, where, overcome at length by his enemies, he lay down to die. Wrapped in the flames, his body rose up to heaven. We have the like in the Greek mythology in the tale of Herakles. Quaintly the Indians in the neighborhood of Mount Shasta explain the mixed nature of man, describing his origin from the union of a goddess with a grizzly bear. The Great Spirit made this mountain, Shasta, first of all. He bored a hole in the sky, using a large stone as an auger, pushed down snow and ice until they made heap high enough for him, then he descended, stepping from cloud to cloud, down to the icy pile, and then to the earth. He planted the first trees, making a hole with his finger in the soil for them to stand in. Mount Shasta he hollowed out and chose it as a wigwam for himself. The daughter of the Great Spirit disobeyed his in- junction on one rough day in looking out over the THE ORIGIN OF MAN. 3I top, and was seized by the wind and dropped down upon the earth at a distance from her home. Taken up by a patriarchal grizzly, she was carried to his house, carefully nursed and tended there, and finally united in marriage to his son. "Their oflF- spring was neither grizzly nor Great Spirit, but man." These grizzlies did not go on all fours as their descendants do to-day. They walked on their hind legs like men, talked, carried clubs, using their fore legs like arms. Having displeased the Great Spirit by contaminating his race, they were condemned to go on all fours, and suffer the loss of speech. Here then we have a bit of Darwinism coupled with some- thing of an earlier doctrine, from the Red men of the Sierras. Among the Iroquois is this myth. A party of hunters were once in pursuit of a bear, when they were attacked by a monstrous stone giant, and all but three destroyed. The three together with the bear were carried by invisible spirits up into the sky, where the bear can still be seen, pursued by the first hunter with his bow, the second with the kettle, and the third who farther behind is gathering sticks. Only in the Autumn do the arrows of the hunter pierce the bear, when his dripping blood tinges the Autumn foliage. 32 MYTHS OF EXPLANATION. Among the Norsemen is a tale of Frodi and his quern, to explain the saltness of the sea. Frodi had a wonderful mill which ground out peace and plenty, and abundance of gold, so that it lay strewn like pebbles everywhere. Full of avarice was Frodi, and he compelled his maid-servants to grind night and day, until out of all patience and desperate, they began to grind out a different product, — hatred and war, A mighty sea-rover came, who slew Frodi, seized the mill and the servants, put out to sea, and bade them grind out salt. They ground the ship full and sank it, and the sea full. The quern was lost, but the sea remains salt to this hour. Accord- ing to one version, the quern is still grinding and keeps the sea salt, and the place where the ship sank, is marked by the maelstrom. By a prettier myth the music of the ocean is ac- counted for in the Finnish epic. Wainamoinen caught a pike that was swimming below a waterfall and constructed a harp of its bones, as Hermes made his lyre of the tortoise shell. Unfortunately he dropped this instrument into the sea and lost it; it came into the possession of the sea gods, and this ac- counts for the music of the ocean upon the beach. Somewhat so we have it that Orpheus and his lyre were thrown upon the shore at Lesbos, imparting their musical qualities to the Lesbians. The Australians believe the seven sister Pleiades a VARIOUS NATURAL PHENOMENA. 33 group of girls playing to a corroboree, and the stars in Orion's belt young men dancing a corroboree. The Esquimaux call these stars the Lost Ones, and they describe how they were seal-hunters and missed their way home ; indeed all the stars they think in old times were men and animals, afterward taken up into the sky.* Like beliefs we probably carry in reminiscence in the names by which we still desig- nate the constellations. Fables abound describing the transformation of certain persons into stone, based apparently upon the fancied resemblance of certain rocks and " standing stones " to the human figure. Thus in the Perseus myth, the Gorgon's head is said to have turned all who looked upon it into stone ; in the Scandinavian myths giants and dwarfs were trans- muted by the rising sun into stone ; and like things are told in Quiche legend of ancient animals pet- rified. Of the same origin presumably is the legend in Hebrew of Lot's wife converted into a pillar of salt. Meteorites and stone celts found in various places are explained as thunder-stones and thunder-axes, thought to be dropped down with the lightning. This is still believed in regard to the "thunder-axes" in the west of England, in Brittany and the Shetland Isles. In Japan the stone arrow-heads are thought to be rained down from heaven, or dropped by flying * Tylor, Prim. Culture, I. 268. 34 MYTHS OF EXPLANATION. spirits who shoot them, while in Europe they are elf- bolts, shot by fairies or magicians. The rainbow in Norse mythology is described as Bif-rost, ' the trembling bridge, timbered of three hues,' whereon passed the heroes to the skies ; to the Greek it was the personal Iris, or the road or bridge upon which that messenger with flashing feet passed, bearing communication from the gods to men. In the German folk-lore to-day it is the bridge whereon the souls of the just are led by their guardian spirits to paradise. Among the Shoshones, as we saw, it is conceived a monstrous serpent ; among the Finns, the bow of Thiermes the Thunderer, wherewith he shoots and slays the sorcerers ; among the Esthoni- ans, it is the sickle of one of their deities, and the Kamchadals say it is the hem of Billukai's garment. In the Norse mythology again it is the necklace or girdle worn by the goddess Freya. Such conceits and stories are to be found all over the world, and especially among rude and barbarous or semi-civilized races. They appear to have been framed and accepted in good faith, sincerely believed in by those among whom they were told, as relations of actual fact. It seems hard to persuade one's self that the Finn cosmogonists could actually have thought that the world was one huge egg, the sky the shell, and the yolk the earth, or that the Hindus ever really supposed that the world stood on a turtle's FINNISH AND NORSE COSMOGONY. 35 back, or the Norsemen that the sky was the skull of" the giant Ymer, the earth his flesh and the rocks his- bones.* Of course it is impossible to determine how- far these relations were taken as verities, but doubt- less every one of us can recall in early childhood like dreams of fancy which seemed real truth. Mention has already been made of the early child belief of the winter in regard to the thunder ;. another fancy equally gratuitous and more absurd,, he remembers for a while to have held as fact, viz.,. that we were all living in some huge body, that, like a human being, bore, nourished us, and carried us about. In the soil of such thinking have grown up- these myths. " These ' natural philosophers,' " says Mr. Kelly, speaking of the early Aryans, " had in full *Ymer aeems, however, originally to have meant sea,— the word being- akin to the Latin mare— and the whole thing may have been at the begin- ning rather a 1 playful conceit, than a serious belief, the story telling how all came from one matter, or the cosmos from chaos. So with refer- ence to the turtle, there is probability in the view that the name of this animal was first given as a symbol of the world, the upper shell repre- senting the sky,—" the tortoise shell, the image of the dappled concave of the cloudy sky," says Buskin,— the under shell the earth, and the body between the two the atmosphere which connects them. After a time it came to be fabled that the world itself rests on the turtle's back. Or, possibly a more subtle conception still lay at the foundation of this repre- sentation. Perhaps the Hindus, who were a very thoughtful and poetical people, designed to signify the utter futility of attempting to name the basis upon which the world reposes. The Finnish conception of the egg withal seems to bear a near relation to the Egyptian idea expressed in their Orphic myth of the cosmic egg, from which by Its breaking heaven- and earth were formed, the upper half becoming heaven, and the lower half earth. See Cooper, Serpent Myths, p. 17, Note. 36 MYTHS OF EXPLANATION. perfection the faculty that is given to childhood, of making everthing out of anything, and of believing with a large and implicit faith in its own creations." Of course, when the fancy was once set loose upon these weird and extravagant stories, there was no limit to their possible enlargement and transforma- tion. They would be embellished, changed, turned, without end. This is abundantly illustrated in the myths, say among the Greeks, and especially we see it in the nursery tales. Here the variations and refractions are innumerable. The light fleecy clouds were conceived as mermaids, or as swan-maidens, and they become the Valkyriurs ('Choosers^ of the Norse mythology. They hover over battle- fields, choosing the souls of heroes they will bear to Valhalla. These again became in part the original of the conception of angels as pictured to us, women in flowing white robes, with large wings, coming to convey the dying to glory. And various stories are told of the swan-maidens, sometimes secured by men for wives, in case their captors were able to take them at a time when they had laid off their swan-dress. But it always behooved the hus- band to maintain strict watch over that dress, keep- ing it in concealment, for if the wife should chance to get eye on it again, she would fly into it and soar away in an instant, leaving husband and children, never to return. STORIES OF THE DAWN-NYMPH. 37" Very like story was told of the dawn-nymph, as in the instance of Melusina, who must never be seen by her husband on a certain day of the week, in which she took to her retirement. The penalty of his curiosity in looking into her room on that day, was the loss of his wife forever. A similar tale is that of Urvasi in the Hindu, where the wife disappears- from her husband Puraravas, instantly when she has once by accident seen him nude. This is plainly a story of the dawn, which like Eurydike in the Greek, vanishes, Urvasi disappearing the moment she beholds- the naked glory of the sun. Of similar meaning is the story of Psyche and Eros in the Greek. Indeed in all the myth through the various disguises, — exposure on the rock to the mon- ster, admission to the palace and attainment of all its wealth, her consignment after the abandonment to the realm of Persephone, and the awakening by Eros,. — in all these we have the world-old tale of the dawn. From the same source is derived the story of Beauty and the Beast. The human imagination has been busy and fruitful in all ages ; the quaintest fan- cies and conceits have been wrought into tales, and these are told in England, Germany, Russia, India,, in fact, all over the world. They are based as we shall see more clearly farther on, upon those curious myths. Another and a fruitful source of mythology, that. 38 MYTHS OF EXPLANATION. may be classed under this head, is the confusion, the ■deception,wemight say, that comes from the same, or even alike name, to describe two and these quite differ- ent objects ; Homonymy, as philologists term it. We see the germ of such mythology in our own language, in the confusion introduced in the mind by mispro- nunciation of certain words. Thus it is not unfre- -quently the case that one will hear (?«^/«e pronounced injun, and presently this piece of mechanism will come to be regarded as in some sort a person, or at least as taking its name from some supposed resem- blance to an American Indian. Scions will be pro- nounced science, asparagus, sparrow-grass, etc. Sweet- heart, according to Professor Max Miiller, was origi- nally sweet-.ard, the second syllable the same as we have in drunkard, blinkard, etc., and contracted from the German hart, Gothic hardu, meaning strong. The literal sense of sweet-heart therefore is a very sweet person ; but in the form the word has taken, we have indicated a bit of mythology. Among the American Indians the term Michabo, literally the Great White One, means also in some -connections the Great Hare, and so manifold tales have sprung up in the attempt to explain why this appellation should have been used for the supreme. So a like illusion in Greece was due to the impression that Zeus Lykaios, literally the ' Light One,' was Zeus Lupine, from the xessmhlsinct oiLukaios to Lukos. As INDUCTIONS FROM FALSE ETYMOLOGY. 39 Phoibos Lykegenes, literally offspring of light, was supposed wolf-born, simply from the mistake made in interpreting the name. A horrid tale sprang up about a certain Lykaon, King of Arkadia, inviting Zeus to dinner and serving up for him a dish of human flesh, i. e., his own offspring, the fruits of the earth, and the terrible punishment that he suffered at the hand of the god in consequence. So there arose a bit of mythology, it is said, about the constellation we call the Great Bear, from the confounding of the name of the constellation Arktos, in the Greek, or Rik- sha in Sanscrit, viz., the Bright One, the Shiner, with the name applied to the bear, riksha also, so called perhaps from his shining or fuscous coat. In using the word Arctic, Antarctic, etc., we are unconsciously keeping up a reminiscence of that early illusion that took place probably before the Aryan separation. There are modern examples of the same misunder- ing and illusion. One striking example is the Eng- lish proverb, " To know a hawk from a handsaw," which originally was " to know a hawk from a hern- saw," a kind of heron.* In Germany the word usu- ally employed for deluge is Sundfluth, which is pop- ularly supposed to be literally sin-flood, whereas the original term is stnfluot, the great flood. Such in- stances abound everywhere ; they are found in the Old Testament, as for example in the interpretation * Mailer, Scieno) of Languagt, 2i Series, 652. 40 MYTHS OF EXPLANATION. given the term Moses, ' the drawn out,' on the suppo- sition that it was a Hebrew word instead of an Egyp- tian. It seems plainly Egyptian, the term there mesu signifying child or boy.* In the days of Sir Francis Drake it was popularly supposed that the world was made up of two parallel planes, the one lying at some distance from the other. It was also commonly said that Sir Francis had " shot the Gulf," the meaning being that his ship had turned over the edge of one plane, the upper, and passed into the waters of the other. "There is," says Mr. Davis Gilbert, "an old picture of Drake at Oxford, representing him holding a pistol in one hand, which in former years the man who acted as showman to strangers was wont to say ('still improving upon the story^, was the very pistol with which Sir Francis shot the gulf."t Mythology in this kind does often, but not always involve the personification we have spoken of. In- deed everthing may become mythology ; there is no language safe from this possible refraction and the various illusions it implies and entails. * See Gesenius' Thesounw, su6 wee. tJones' Credulities Past cmd Present, p. 4. Somewhat similarly the story ol Dick Whittlngton and his Cat, familiar to the childhood of us all, is said to have originated. In the fourteenth and beginning of the fifteenth centuries, trading or buying and selling at a profit, was known to the more educated classes in England under th& French name achat. This as pronounced, was soon probably conf onnded with the term a cat. Dick Whittlngton was a successful tradesman, ac- quired his wealth by achat, and so erewhlle the tale sprang up of his great fortune acquired through the wonderful cat. This, as accounting for the story, has been suggested, and the explanation seems not im- probable. III. MYTHS ARISING FROM METAPHOR. But a wider, and far more interesting, instructive source of mythology, or rather occasion perhaps, is found in that other disposition of the human mind, which inclines to read the world in symbol, and de- scribe by trope or metaphor. It may be, it is, in many cases, difficult or impossible to draw the line and de- termine confidently which is of the one and which of the other, whether the relation is the statement of what was supposed a literal fact, or is the language originally of imagery. We may never be able to determine this, as it lies quite out of our power to throw ourselves even into the condition of our own childhood, much more that of humanity. But of some we can certainly say that they belong to symbolism. There were poets in the olden time, and the oldest. There is more of this element than we should naturally suppose, in rude races. School- craft says of the savages of North America, " There is always something actual or physical to ground an Indian fancy on." And of the rude Kirgis, the Rus- (41) 42 MYTHS ARISING FROM METAPHOR. sians in Siberia listening amazed to their endless poetic improvisation, said, " Whatever these people see, gives birth to fancies." It attaches more or less to all people in like condition, and the same goes on in higher growth and highest. For the poet is the maker, he stands for the loftiest type, or perceptive and creative power. Of the best civilization he is the best fruit. And for ages to come it shall be so. "Nothing so marks a man," says Emerson, "as imaginative expression." We instinctively delight in a fine image or similitude. Here lies the charm of speech, the power in all style or discourse. "The creation of every word," says Max Miiller, — he is speaking of the Greeks, — "was originally a poem, embodying a bold metaphor or a bright conception." Language carries us more and more to this as we penetrate to the first meanings. Day, sun, star, moon, earth, man, parent, house, daughter, etc., each had an appellative or descriptive sense, as day, the bright or shining one ; sun, the begetter ; moon the measurer or meter of time, etc. And in instances, that sense is highly picturesque and poetic. There was constantly impersonation, and distinction of sex in everything. In some ancient languages, as in Hebrew and Sanscrit for example, we see to-day that there is no neuter gender, all nouns are masculine or feminine. There are cases that seem very plainly those of SYMBOLISM AMONG SAVAGE RACES. 43 symbolism in savage races; everywhere with those of higher culture they come more and more abun- dant. The Aztecs painted the earth as a woman with countless breasts. So the Greeks represented Diana of Ephesus, and the Egyptians their Isis, as having many breasts. We still speak of nature as our mother, the universal mother. " Their fire burns forever," was the Algonquin figure of speech, to express the immortality of their gods. "The god of fire," say the Aztecs, " which is in the centre of the court with four walls, and which is covered with gleaming feathers like unto wings;" — "dark sayings of the priests," says Mr. Brinton, " referring to the glitter- ing lightning fire borne from the four quarters of the earth." The Quiche legends tell of the ' four men who were first created by the Heart of Heaven, Hurakan, the air in motion. They were infinitely keen of eye and swift of foot, " they measured and saw all that exists at the four corners and the four angles of the sky and the earth," but they did not fulfil the design of their maker " to bring forth and produce when the season of harvest was near," until he blew into their eyes a cloud, " until their faces were obscured as when one breathes on a mirror." Then he gave them of wives the four mothers of our species, whose names were Falling Water, Beautiful Water, Water of Serpents and Water of Birds.' 44 MYTHS ARISING FROM METAPHOR. Michabo, or Manibozho, the Great White One, is " grandson of the moon, his father is the West Wind, and his mother, a maiden, dies in giving him birth at the moment of conception. For the moon is the goddess of the night ; the Dawn is her daughter who brings forth the morning and perishes herself in the act, and the West, the spirit of darkness as the East is of light, precedes and as it were, begets the latter, as the evening does the morning."* Reference has already been made is a former chap- ter to Quetzalcohuatl, the great god of the Toltecs. He was the son of Camaxtli, the sun f'sun of yes- terdayj. His mother, a virgin, died at his birth. In his childhood he was cared for by the virgin priest- esses, who kept up the sacred fire, emblem of the sun. He fought the enemies that had risen against his father, and attacked the temple of the Cloud- Snakes' mountain where they had buried him, and overcame them. He was tall, of white complexion^ pleasant to look upon, with fair hair and bushy beard, dressed in long flowing robes.f " He was the signal benefactor ; the beautiful land of the Toltecs teemed with fruit and flowers, and his reign was their Golden Age. He was the founder of * Briuton, Myths of the New World, pp. 83, 180. tSo the Mandans " speak of their first ancestor as a son of the West, and whose garb was always ol four milk-white wolf ikina." Brinton> Myths, p. 200. LEGENDS OF THE SUN. 45 history, the lawgiver, the inventor of the calendar; he; regulated the times of the solemn ceremonies, the festival of the new year, and the fifty-two years' cycle."* He too was pursued by enemies and obliged to fly. Tetzcatlipoca, a splendid youth, a kinsman of Quet- zalcohuatl, but his bitter enemy, "the smoking mirror," — another name for the sun of to-morrow — was their head. Quetzalcohuatl was pressed from land to land. By some accounts he disappeared in a boat on the sea ; by others he perished on the snow- covered peak of Orizaba, mounting to heaven on the smoke of the funeral pile. When he vanished, the sun withdrew his shining. How transparent this is, there is hardly need to say. This personage is the sun ; he is tended in his child- hood by the guardians of the sacred fire, as Phoibos after his birth lies swathed in golden bands, and wrapped in white and spotless robe by the nymphs ; he sails away on a ship like Helios in the sun-boat, like the Egyptian Ra, like the Polynesian Maui ; or like Herakles perishing in the grand pyre on the summit of Mount Oita, he disappears in the flames at the dying of the day. The Finns said of Ukko, the heaven-god who was the Thunderer, that his fiery shirt is the lurid storm- *TyIor, Early History qf MamMtid, p. 154. 46 MYTHS ARISING FROM METAPHOR. cloud ; he flashes his fiery sword and it lightens. The New Zealanders tell of Maui that he catches and imprisons all the winds save one, the wild West- wind ; the others he shuts up in a cavern and rolls a stone against the mouth to hold them ; this he can only run down sometimes and drive temporarily into the cavern. This states in plain language of figure that while all the other winds are held under restraint, the wild West-wind is the prevailing and strong one. Maui fished up the land ('New Zealand^ from the ocean with an enchanted hook. That hook was made from the jaw-bone of his own son, the morning f'whom he had slain and whose eye he had taken and hung up for the morning star^, and was smeared with his own blood. This blood-stained jaw-bone in the savage fancy is figure of the ruddy dawn. The Gold Coast negro describes the Heaven as opening the great gate in the morning for the sun. In Algonquin tale the hunter Ojibwa sees and wounds the beautiful red swan. He was just about to skin a bear that he had killed, when his attention was arrested by a phenomenon of ruddy or crimson appearance that tinged all the air around. Coming near he saw on the bank of a lake that it was a beauti- ful red swan, whose plumage glittered in the sun. He tries all his arrows upon her long in vain, but finally the last of his three magic arrows that had been his father's, hit the bird. She flapped her wings THE RED SWAN OF THE ALGONQUINS. 4? and followed the sinking sun. He pursues but cannot find her. He learns that many had seen her pass, but none who had followed had ever returned. Her father, he finds, was an old magician who had lost his scalp. Ojibwa recovers this and places it on his head; the old man rejuvenated has all the freshness and splendor again of youth. He calls forth the beautiful maiden, who now is no longer his daughter, but his sister, and bestows her upon Ojibwa as his bride. Afterwards upon a time Ojibwa journeyed away, and visited the land of spirits; he saw the bright western region where dwell the good, and the dark and drear abode of the wicked. While thus from home he was informed that his brethren were contending for the possession of his wife. He wandered long, endured many hardships, but finally returned to his home, and with his magic arrows slew all the wicked suitors. His exploits parallel those of the Greek Odysseus. It is a myth of the sun-set, and the re- covered, wedded dawn. Longfellow has felt the spirit and expressed it well in one of his Indian poems. This symbolism, rising not seldom to great- est beauty, is present among all races, even the rudest. But richer, more varied and suggestive, do we find in the eastern world, and especially among the Greeks, that race who were the most generously 48 MYTHS ARISING FROM METAPHOR. gifted, most clear-seeing, quick-witted, impressible, and spontaneously responsive, of all the peoples of antiquity. Nowhere else do we find such a bloom as this. There is much also in the Hindu and Norse mythology that falls little behind the Greek. Odin, the Norsemen said, wandered over the earth in a blue cloak, i. e. the sky. " Odin and Frigg," says the Edda, "divide the slain," — the sky-god receives the breath, the earth-goddess the body. Night and Day each are drivers, mounted on their car, with swift steed attached. Night drives first, her steed named Dew-hair; and the dew in the morning is the shining foam dropped from his bit as his journey is done. Day drives Shining-hair, and the light of his mane causes earth and sky to glisten. The sun's life, said the Greeks, or as the myth stated it, the life of Meleagros, depends upon the duration of a burning brand. — Asklepias has health as his spotless bride, and Panakeia, All-Heal, was his daughter. — Prometheus creates man by mak- ing a clay image, and infusing into it a spark of fire which he had brought from heaven.* With similar purport the Babylonian legend relates that Belus, the supreme god, cut off his own head, that the blood flowing from it might be mixed with the dust *Ancient traditions among the old Slavonians spoke ol the soul as a spark of heavenly fire, kindled by the thunder-god. THE ORIGIN OF MAN. 49 out of which man was to be made. In other words man is of divine blood and birth ; we also are his off- spring. In the Egyptian ritual it is declared that the sun mutilated himself, and from the stream of his blood created all beings. The same thought is declared in the mythology of the Pimas, Mexico. The earth they say, was made by Chiowotmahke, i. e., earth- prophet. In the beginning it appeared but as the spider's web stretching across the nothingness that was. Earth-prophet flew over all lands, till he found the place best fitted for the making of man. Then "the Creator took clay in his hand, and mixing it with the sweat of his own body, kneaded the whole into a lump. Then he blew upon the lump till it was filled with life, and began to move ; and it became man and woman."* In the Norse legend it is said that Freyr, — who is here the vernal sun, or spring, — wooed Gerda, name that signifies earth. Looking one day from the seat of Odin, which is called air-throne, out into Giant land far in the north, he saw a light flashing forth, as the aurora lights up the wintry sky. He saw that a maiden wondrously beautiful, had just opened her father's door, and this was her beauty which shone out over the snow. Freyr determined to send to the fair one and woo her to be his wife. He dis- patched Skirnir to carry his suit, but for all Skirnir's * H. H. Bancroft, Worlts, III. p. 78. 50 MYTHS ARISING FROM METAPHOR. pleading she would not listen. Skirnir had* been furnished with Freyr's magic sword ('the sun's rays^ ; he drew this and threatened to take the life of Gerda, unless she granted the request. Gerda yielded and consented to meet Skirnir nine nights thereafter in the wood of Barri. In the nine nights we have typi- fied here, as appears, the nine winter months of the northern year ; the name Barri signifies ' the green ' ; and as Skirnir meets Gerda first in the budding woods, the marriage of the sun and earth, the fruit- ful spring-time, has come. This magic sword plays conspicuous part in many myths. It is the same with the unfailing arrow of Phoibos Apollon ; of Tell, the infallible archer ; sword of Perseus and Sigurd ; the stout blade Du- randal of mediaeval romance ; the brand Excalibur, which King Arthur alone of all the barons unfixed from the miraculous stone. In like conception it is said of Hymir, the great giant in Norse, " his grey beard full of hoar frost," that he " splits pillars with the very glance of his eye." Bohemian and Slovak stories tell of a giant named Swift -eye, whose ardent glances set on fire whatever they alight upon, and generally he is obliged to wear bandages over his eyes, lest their ray destroy all things ; the Servians tell of the mysterious Vii beneath whose glance men and whole cities are consumed to ashes, — personifi- cation here of the lightning. Roland's blade had THE MAGIC SWORD. 5 1 such marvellous virtue that its owner could cleave- the Pyrenees in twain at a single blow. Odin has for his bride the beautiful Freya. He sets out on his wanderings; she sheds gold-gleaming tears, — the bright glearns seen shooting up across the morning sky. The child born of this pair is Hnossa, the jewel, — the world beaming, radiant, with beauty. Equally clear poetic sense we find in the tales of Pan, lover of Syrinx ; Selene kissing Endymion into sleep ; Orpheus recovering his lost spouse Eurydike f'the dawn^, and losing her in an instant by an incau- tious glance of the eye upon her ; Pan wooing Pitys, and Boreas jealous of Pan, casting Pitys down from a rock ; Apollon loving and embracing Daphne,, who flies from his arms and is changed into a laurel tree. Pan, the gentle breeze, — the purifying or sweep- ing wind, as its etymology indicates — plays upon the reeds by the river's bank, and this possibly at some time gave the suggestion that ripened into the shepherd's pipe ; hence as the poet puts it, Syrinx was transmuted to a reed. Or, again, Pan wooed Pitys, the pine-tree, but Boreas, the north wind, in a fit of jealousy hurled Pitys down from a rock. Daphne, the dawn, trembling and fleeing from the rising sun, was changed to a laurel tree. Here is mythology that comes from Homonymy, for in the Greek the name for laurel, Daphne, is the same as 52 MYTHS ARISING FROM METAPHOR. that of this nymph, and hence the fable came to be that Daphne was transmuted to a laurel tree.* This last tale shows how fruitful was the imagina- tion, and how likely the fancy was to run riot, and spin all sorts of fables, when it was once set loose in this realm. The field of Greek mythology and Roman too, seem^ a labyrinth, a confused jungle. It is quite impossible at this late day, to unfold and explain all the strange and wanton conceits, the quirks of fancy, the fictions and fabrications and strange distortions of busy imagination. And many of them appear utterly irresolvable. But we have certainly found the spectra of a number of these dis- tant stars, and discover that the same elements enter into them with which we are familiar in our world of €very day fact. Thor once visited Jotunheim, the home of the giants," and was invited there to take share in the games going on. A drinking-horn was handed him, which he noticed was rather long, tapering at the small end a good way, but he thought he could easily exhaust it. Try his best, he could only lower the liquid a little; he was baffled, disappointed. But this he found was the sea, and at utmost it could only be made to ebb slightly. He was invited to lift a cat that he saw before him. By dint of hardest effort he * See Max Mflller, Chipa, II. 162. THE TASKS OF THOR. 53- was able to bend the back a little, and to raise one- fore foot from the ground. He had attempted to lift the great Mit-gard Serpent, — " That Sea-Snake, tremendous curled, Whose monstrous circle girds the world." It was Time, and who could lift it from its feet.? He was bidden wrestle with an old woman that was present. But she was too much for him, he could not by possibility throw her down. He had attempted to wrestle with Old Age and she is too powerful for anybody. Even the gods in the skies, said Buddha, must succumb to her. Herakles once, said the Greeks, did bring up Kerberos from the un- der-world; he did lift the cat. Also, he once wounded Hades himself, and " brought grief into the land of shades." Nay, he grappled with and wrought the victory over Thanatos, Death himself, and res- cued Alkestis. Herein is hinted the difference be- tween the two minds, Norse and Greek. All these tales describe feats attributed to the sun, or supreme power. Other myths more complicated, and involved in a seemingly impenetrable obscurity, have some proxi- mate solution. Herakles in his last journey is per- forming his sacrifice to Zeus, on the Kenoian promomtory of Euboia, when Deianeira sends to him the fatal garment that had been tinged with the blood of Nessus. He puts on the tunic, and in fury of the- ■54 MYTHS ARISING FROM METAPHOR. smart, he seizes Lichas, the ill-fated bearer of the garment, and dashes him into the sea. He crosses over to Trachys, goes to Mount Oita, where his pile is raised, the robe which clings all the more closely, the more he tries to tear it off, takes fire and con- sumes him. Through the crimson clouds and vapors the dying hero is seen struggling with the irritating, eating, burning garment, until at last he expires in the flames, — " lole, perhaps the violet-colored evening clouds, being his last beloved," says Professor Miiller. He rises to the seats of the immortals, him- 'self an immortal now, and Hebe, the goddess of youth, becomes his bride. In the Veda the mothers ' weave a coat for their bright sons ' ; Penelope plies at her loom upon the web that is never finished, the clouds ; and in the Finnish poetry "the fair virgins of the air, the rich and gorgeous sun, the gentle beaming moon," "wove with the golden shuttle and the silver comb." This, the clouds, was the garment that envelops the dying hero. The death was like the departure of Quetzal- -cohuatl on Mount Orizaba, like that of the hero in Beowulf, who, as the historians say, burnt by the sea- shore, " wand to ■wolcum" — curled to the clouds. " He who from a mountain summit," says Mr. Cox, "looks down in solitude on the long shadows as they creep over the earth, while the sun sinks down into the .purple mists which deaden and surround his splen- THE TENDON OF ACHILLEUS. 55 dors, cannot shake off the feeling that he is looking on the conscious struggle of departing life." Achilleus was invulnerable in all parts save the heel. This hero seems indubitably to have been the solar deity, and as in the case of Baldur, Siegfried, Rustem, etc., could be wounded only in one place. The heel here is symbolic, indicating that he is vul- nerable only from behind.* So Baldur falls struck by a dart from his blind brother Hodr f the darkness^. Siegfried is wounded by Hagene fthe thornj in the spot between his shoulders where the broad linden leaf had stuck when he was bathing himself in the dragon's blood, by which he was made in all other points invulnerable. The Greek explanation corresponding to the Norse, is that Thetis when she plunged her infant in the bath of fire, left one point, that at which she held him by the heel, untouched by theijflame, and there- fore he was vulnerable here. That this Thetis the mother was also a sea-nymph is significant, for from the midst of the sea rises the new-born sun. The death of th? sun is also connected with the water in * So In tlie Algonquin myth of the Summer-maker who had broken through the sky into the heaven-land beyond, and brought down to earth the warm winds, the birds and the summer, It Is said that, pursued by the dwellers In heaven, he was at last wounded by their arrows In his one vulnerable spot, viz., in the tip of the tail. The shining Manltu and Kwasind also could be wounded only in one place, in the scalp or the ny of thm« tal«* may not have ipruag from eotiiUtlont ot lite tar mor« VAvtiiiti attA groMly brutal ttiaii any that we know a« MIonglnK to lim iHnfM*. 'nt<: urifutiuttlt of wr)ter» like Mr. Aiuifiw Lang, that In tt»e cla»»l« rnrtbol«^l«f w« bar* KRONOS; OURANOS. 65 dren and casts them up again; Time consumes, devours all, yet reproduces all. 'Tis perpetual de- struction and renewal. Doubtless a like significant meaning was in the story of the mutilated Ouranos, whose blood, falling upon the sea, produced the beautiful Aphrodite, child of the foam, beneath whose feet the grass sprung up as she walked, at whose side went Eros, Love, after whom Himeros, Longing, perpetually followed, — only we do not at this distance see clearly how to evolve it. The Greek mythology is a forest of such tales, some of them so much amplified, metamorphosed, or re- fracted and travestied, as now to permit no recovery of their proper meaning; others, bizarre, outre, and grotesque, as they often are, that are still capable of being penetrated and partly understood. One of the tiie sorrlTals, at least the reminiscences, of mnch tbat belonged to tbe bar- baric, and in many respects revoltingly brutal lUe of the ancestors of those people, has mnch force, and must be received as glTiog a part of the explanation of our riddle. There is mnch in Homer that seems clearly to point in tbat direction, as for instance, in his account of the methods of warfare among the Greeks. Language is toll of these remin- iscences, fossil remains and lirlng remains also of a far distant past. Our own tongue, all the tongues of modem Europe, abound with analogous expressions coming down from Tery rude ages. This, however, by no means involres any thing inconsistent with the attainment of a true poetic conception, and the appropriation of those materials for represen- tation of a genuine symbolism, among the Greeks not only, but many races far lower than they upon the plane of development. Indications of this we shall find farther on even among the Finns, Tartars, and ilaoris. 66 MYTHS ARISING FROM METAPHOR. most interesting features of these studies is in noting: what marvellous fertility there has been in the human mind, how variously it has conceived in its thoughts upon these powers and spectacles in nature that have arrested its attention, and challenged some descrip- tion or attempted explanation. Orion, the mighty hunter, pursues in the under world the phantom animals of the ' lone heights ' and 'windy halls' of heaven, "armed with mighty club, a glowing torch-mace soon to burn with the augmented splendors of the dawning day."* The eyes of the dead Argos were placed by Here in the peacock's tail; this seems a figure again of the sky. So among the Mexicans, the American tiger or the ocelot, dotted over with spots, is appro- priately taken as symbol of the sky. The tiger, as their mythology put it, destroyed the subjects of Quetzalcohuatl, i. e., the night extinguished the rays of the sun.f Orion's belt has been conceived as Frigga's or Mary's spindle, or Jacob's staff; among the New Zealanders, the elbow of Maui. The account already mentioned, given by the Iroquois to explain the tints of the autumn foliage from the dripping blood of the wounded bear, is very likely one of these pictures of the imagination, and therefore comes *Brown, Oreat Dionysiak Myth, II, p. 275. tBrlntOD, American Hero Myths, p. 119. TWILIGHT AND THE DAWN. 67- properly under the head of metaphor. The same thing may he true of the Indian's f Algonquin's/ description of the great Lakes as Michabo's Beaver- dams. We saw in the myth of the Red Swan that the old Magician had lost his scalp; this was re- covered by Ojibwa and restored to him, he stood renewed and radiant in all the freshness of youth. Reference is made thus to the Sun, father of the Red Swan, discrowned at night, recrowned and rehabili- tated in the morning. Among the Minussinian Tartars, Katai Khan, who lived on the coast of the White Sea, had two daugh- ters, Kara Kuruptju f'black thimblej and Kesel Djibak ('red silk/ — the evening twilight and the morning dawn. One was in league with the powers- of darkness, and she marries the son of the evil- hearted swan women, Djidar Mos (broazen) the thunder-cloud. The other was beautiful and good,, and ofttimes she riseth "in a dress of snowy swan," and with the Kudai's daughters — " Sportetb Kesel DjibSk, Swimming on the golden lake." " The seven Kudai, gods of the Tartars," says Baring Gould, " are the planets." The Norsemen said in their characterization of Hel, the death god- dess, dwelling in her high and strong-barred house,, and holding with sternest gripe in her worlds the souls of the dead : — " Hunger is her dish, Famine is her knife. Care is her bed, and Misery her curtain."' 68 MYTHS ARISING FROM METAPHOR. The rude races are by no means destitute of imag- ination ; it is sometimes with them as vigorous, as apt and striking as with those of highest culture. There are conceptions among Finns and Maoris as fine as we see with Greeks and Hindus. The very thick of mythology is reached when the original appellative sense of the words that have been given as names is lost, and these names are conceived purely as personal designations. When the last faint consciousness of this description as im- agery is gone, when the memory of the fiction pure and simple in many cases that lay at the bottom of certain tales, is entirely forgotten. For example, when the Greeks, forgetting the meaning of their word for the supreme, — the resplendence, the sky, — came to conceive of him wholly as a monarch, king of all the gods, and sitting on mount 01ympos;or when they came to believe that Daphne was trans- mitted into the laurel tree, believed and taught this, and let loose the reins of wild fancy upon it, increas- ing all the time the obscuration, then the process of decay, and we may add of illusion and demoralization, had well set in. The beginning was made that led to unending stultification and bewitchment. Any thing may become the occasion of mythology, any figurative or metaphorical expression taken in the letter, will prove that stumbling block. There is an Arabic proverb that every man's fate is written GABRIEL AND MAHOMET. 69 on his forehead. With the Hindus, it is the mark inscribed by Siva. The Moslems to-day believe that the fate may be deciphered from the letter-like markings on the sutures of the skull. Mohammedan legend relates that the angel Gabriel once opened the prophet's breast when he was three years of age,, took out the heart, removed a black clot from it, then washed it in the Zemzem water, and filling it with the light of prophecy, replaced it. Anas Ibn Malik declared he had seen the very mark of the wound where the incision had been made, and the flesh afterwards was sewed up. In the Nismes district in France, the Huguenot has been nicknamed by the Catholic " gorgeo negro" "black throat," and so thoroughly has the belief taken hold that this is literal truth, that not seldom the heretic chiWren are compelled to open their mouths, that it may be seen whether their throats are of the same color as other people's. Max Miiller tells us- that the myth with regard to St. Patrick having de- stroyed all the serpents, so that to this day there are no snakes in Ireland, originated from the language which described the saint as having crushed out the venomous brood of heresy and heathenism. Mr. Tylor, who for most part is an author who holds hard by the literal fact, and writes accordingly,, using generally the language only of stern, severe ^ prose, does however say that in our childhood we 70 MYTHS ARISING FROM METAPHOR. dwell " at the very gates of the realm of myth." Ex- pressions like these we not seldom meet : — Day has ' oped the eyes of night ;' 'Jocund morn stands tip-toe •on the misty mountain tops.' Byron says: " Uont Blanc is the monarch of mountains, They crowned him long ago, On a throne of rocks In a robe of cloud, With a diadem of snow; Around his waist are forests braced, The avalanche in his hand." An Indian poet sings : " Seemed as the mountain In a loving grasp Baised high his peats the Sky's fair zone to clasp." And Bryant speaking of the hurricane : — " And his huge and writhing arms were bent To grasp the zone of the firmament." Such expressions might in certain stages of the human mind give rise to mythology. And especially is the mischief sure and radical when the most purely abstract conceptions, or phe- nomena strictly physical, are so clothed in person- ality that they seem, are taken, as veritable persons. In this way sprang up the gods of the pantheon, a numerous family, of multiplied and very various progeny, and with such persistence, such tenacity of life as no other race that ever appeared on the planet has possessed. Dark superstitions have taken root and grown up, many that have rested like a withering blight and BLIGHTING SHADOWS OF MYTHOLOGY. 7 1 nightmare upon the human mind. The incuM and succubi of the middle ages, the vampires of the Slavons to-day that like huge bats come and sit upon the unconscious sleeper and suck his blood and life away, are not more dreadful than these horrid spectres that have so haunted ; indeed they are of that same brood. The disposition has ever appeared to dwell in the sinister, to worship the sombre, the gloomy, the harm-inflicting powers, or in other cases to offer at the shrine of the foulest sensualism. And the grossest of paganisms have sprung up and luxuriated on this prolific soil. There is less of this element, particularly of the first mentioned type, in the Greek than in most other mythologies, — it is said to be doubtful that the god Thanatos was ever represented in Greek art, and Herakles, as we saw, is depicted as having struggled victoriously with death itself, — yet it is by no means absent there. The early Aryans also, were in the main, worshippers of light, and the sinister aspects, the dark powers, come little to the foreground. But with many races, with all savages and barbarians, this side is not only represented, it is predominant. And it opens the way to all types and forms of super- stitions and degrading witcheries. These abundantly appear in the religions of the red races in America, the Maoris, &c. Nay, other faiths, and those occupy- ing prominent place in the history of civilization 73 MYTHS Arising from metaphor. and religions, Hebrew and Christian, have not been, are not, free from this dark and blighting shadow. The sinister and malevolent powers or forces per- sonified have unequivocal position in the beliefs of Christendom. It is the mythology which is not purged out, and still rears its structures of terror to paralyze and enslave the souL The myth-making faculty has been busy, filling the realm of the unseen with spectres, peopling the universe with person- alities, many of them as truly Gorgons, Ogres, demons, as any that were ever conceived in the past, or rule to-day in the South Seas. The dreadful power of these nightmares, grim ghosts of the im- agination, to stifle and throttle the best life of the soul, cannot be exaggerated. IV. HEROIC LEGENDS. It would be very interesting to trace the stories, myths, in their transformations and their various ad- ventures as they go down in history and spread over the world. Something of this has already been seen in the last chapter, but there is much more than could there be touched upon. They are very tenacious of life, and they survive long, turning up in shapes and places where we least expect them. The human mind tends ever to localize and individualize; it likes the concrete, the tangible and determinate, and hence almost all the stories, many of them at least, have been attached to some historic person, been made to do duty in some specific history. Herakles must belong to the royal family of Argos, must be leader of the Herakleidai, go through twelve mortal labors, &c. There may have been an Endymion King of Elis, and there must in all probability have been an Achilleus, a great military chieftain among the Greeks. The story of Sigurd, Brynhild, and the Niflungs, is historicised in the Nibelungen Lay; personages (73) 74 HEROIC LEGENDS. known to history have been woven into the narrative. The story of Hamlet is founded in a myth from the Norse, and the like fact holds in all probability with the Iliad of Homer, in its relation to old Greek or Aryan mythology. Language has been aptly called by Richter, " A dictionary of faded metaphors." So, as John Fiske felicitously expresses it, these poems may be characterized "as embodying 'faded nature- myths.'" The disguises, metamorphoses and inver- sions are, have been, so deep, that the real germ and kernel at bottom long since ceased to be suspected. " The gods of ancient mythology," says Prof. Max Miiller, " were changed into the demigods and heroes of ancient epic poetry; and these demigods again became at a later age the principal characters of our nursery tales." Again: — "The divine myth becomes an heroic legend, and the heroic legend fades away into a nursery tale. Our nursery tales have been well called the modern pafois of the ancient sacred mythology of the Aryan race." * In the old Vedic mythology we find the Ribhus, the winds or the summer breezes, are deified, and as they waft the smoke of the sacrifices to heaven, they are addressed as assisting at the sacred offerings, but in a later age, when their real signification was lost, they were anthropomorphized into a sacred caste of priests. Wunsch f'Wish or Will^ figiires in * Chips, II, 247, 263. HISTORIC INTERMINGLED WITH MYTHIC. 75 the mythology of Northern Europe, and to it the poets of the thirteenth century assign hands, eyes, knowledge, blood, passions, &c. In olden times men mtist have said as they stood witnessing in any one great power, or great courage and performance, ' He is a Sampson,' ' He is a Hercules '; or of a beauti- ful radiant maiden, ' She is fair as the dawn,' and thus erewhile the myth became attached to and inextri- cably interwoven and mingled with a person. There are relations of this quality doubtless in the old Greek and Roman mythology, and it became long ago quite impossible accurately to discriminate and separate away the fiction from the fact. There are grains of history pretty surely or quite probably imbedded in the legends of Herakles, Meleagros, Endymion, &c., but we have no solvent whereby to detect them. So in this remote past, we have to tread to an extent on ambiguous ground. Among the savage or semi-barbarous races, we find it impossible to determine whether historic elements may not be present in their myths, as for example the Toltec tale of Quetzalcohuatl. It is easy to see that there must have been various reciprocity of influence, the two sides acting and reacting on each other ; what was told and truly of some person, would be transferred and attached to some god or goddess ; and, viceversd, what was conceived of a god, would be brought to earth and attributed to a person. Hence there would 76 HEROIC LEGENDS. be no end of inversions, transmutations, and whimsical or grotesque conceits. But coming to more recent times, where our per- spective is nearer, we find that the heroic legends are in a large degree, perhaps in many cases wholly, fictitious and groundless as history ; they have been drawn from the myths, and in them alone have their life. Some of them have a kernel apparently, others not even that, of historic truth deep' within the various husks and wrappages. England's patron Saint George may have been a Christian martyr who suffered nobly in Asia Minor near the beginning of the fourth century, but Saint George and the Dragon are a myth borrowed from the tales of Orient and Occident. We have one prototype in the myth of Apollon and the Python, or perhaps more original still in tale of Indra and Ahi in ancient Hindu. Analogues and equivalents we have in Herakles and the Hydra, Perseus and the sea-monster, Sigurd and Fafnir, Beowulf and Grendel. All this is descrip- tive of the deliverance of the earth from the fangs of a monster, either the storm-cloud, — in the case of Herakles the throttling serpents of night, — or the icy prison of cold, of winter. What causes surprise is the universality of this speech. It is everywhere, certainly wherever any of the Aryan race are found. Nay, there are traces of SAINT GEORGE. ^^ the same essential story in the literatures of the Phoenicians, Egyptians, and Babylonians. In Saint George we have the myth Christianized, touched afresh with new colors, and the hero thus presented has become one of the most venerated and popular of all the saints in the calendar. The patron saint of England now since early in the fifteenth century, he has been that of Aragon and Portugal, and the order of the knights of Saint George has been widely in- stituted. In the time of the crusades he appeared once in light on the walls of Jerusalem, waving his sword, and led the victorious assault on the Holy City. It is not wonderful he has been long and gratefully remembered. The belief in Saint Ursula is widely spread in the Christian world. She has a church at Cologne, and thither thousands pilgrim to seek the intercession of the saint. The bones of the virgins are shewn in that city to-day to the pious worshipers. Ursula, the relation goes, was the only daughter of Nothus, an illustrious and wealthy British prince, and was sought in marriage by the son of " a certain most ferocious tyrant." Ursula had dedicated herself to celibacy, but as there were perils in the way of refusing accept- ance of the proposition, she consented to the mar- riage on one condition: she should be permitted first for the space of three years to cruise over the seas in eleiven elegantly furnished galleys, that were to be supplied 78 HEROIC LEGENDS. by the tyrant, and should be accompanied by ten peerless virgins, each of them besides herself to have a thousand damsels under her. The condition wa& aecepted, the galleys and virgins obtained, and for three years these damsels traversed the seas. The wind once blew their ships up the Rhine to Cologne, to Basle, whence they crossed the Alps on foot, de- scended into Italy, and visited the tombs of the apostles at Rome. On their return they encountered the Huns at Cologne, and were all, the eleven thousand, ruthlessly slain. This the chronicler Sige- bert of Gemblours, close of the eleventh century, puts at 453.* Early in the twelfth century, in digging to relay the walls of the city, an old Roman cemetery was struck upon, and the abundance of bones discovered here furnished, after various diiEculties and the clearing of them up by special revelation,^for there were found heaps and heaps of bones, not women's only, but men's and children's as well, and so a fear- ful scandal at one time was imminent, — the authentic relics of the martyrdom. In Thinis in Ancient Egypt, the tomb of Osiris was shown ; who could doubt that the god had actually been slain and was buried, since here were palpably his bones ? The teeth of the Kalydonian boar were ^Baring Gould, Cvrious Myths, 2d Series, p. 58. SAINT URSULA. 79 carried by Augustus Caesar to Rome, and Pausanias had been priviliged to see the hide of the animal in a temple at Tegea. Who should any more doubt the story of the terrible conflict of Herakles with the savage beast, and his victory too, since here were the proofs laid indisputably before the eye ? And these bones plainly exhibited to all in the cists reaching all round the spacious church of the saint, — they stand as witnesses unimpeachable of the visit here, and the slaughter by the murderous Huns, of these more than myriad virgins. But curiously enough we find it all, so far as the pretended piece of history is concerned, a fabrication ; the saint never existed, and the entire story has grown out of a myth of the ancient Germans in regard to their moon-goddess, Holda or Horsel. Journey- ing from cloud-land and night, — and England was deemed that cloud-land and region of phantoms by the Germans, as it is believed the land of souls by the peasantry to this day, — attended by her thousands of companions, the pure stars, she suffered martyr- dom; herself and her attendants are extinguished in the light of the risen day. Various other tales have arisen from this myth, or stand as its counterparts. The story of Tannhauser, a renowned knight and troubadour in the thirteenth century, is one. Once on his way to Wartberg in the twilight of evening he passed the Horselberg, or 8o HEROIC LEGENDS. mountain of Venus, and was allured by the appari- tion of a female of surpassing beauty, none other, he presently saw, than the goddess herself. He followed her beckoning him forward into the cavern called the cave of Venus, and there spent seven years in junketing and revelry at her court, oblivious of all beside. Similar stories are diffused widely through Europe ; there are several Venusbergs in Germany, one in Italy, and in Scotch, Norse, &c., are tales of heroes who had like experiences with Tannhauser's. Thomas the Rhymer, or Thomas of Ercildoune, — Horsel's hill or mount, — was enchanted by a strange lady of elfin race beneath Eilden tree, and remained with her in the underground land for seven years. The myth, originally of solar character, — compare the story of Odysseus in the cave of Kalypso, night, ('Greek Kalupto, to cover^, — then in the case of Hor- sel, lunar, has undergone great change in Christian hands to come to bear the form that we have in the story of Tannhauser. For there is a long relation of his satiety and home-sickness in the cave, his return to the fresh earth and light of day, his journey to ;^ome for absolution, and its refusal by Pope Urban, the miraculous budding in his hands, of the pastoral staff within three days, and the attempt on his part in vain to overtake and recover the disheartened wan- derer, who returned to the cave that seemed his sole refuge. TANNHAUSER. 8l In the Pied Piper of Hameln, we have another ex- ample of the heroic legend springing up from an old myth. The piping of this noted character was tragic for the town of Hameln, for the number of little children that were drawn by him into the side of the mountain, was just one hundred and thirty, and the time laid down in the year 1284, For long period the calamity marked the great epoch in the history of the town, public documents were dated from it, and no music was permitted even on wedding occasions to be played in the streets along which the piper had passed. Similar things are related of other places, of Brandenberg, Lorch, the Hartz mountains, &c. And singularly enough a like story is told in Abyssinia. The whistling of ghosts is widely believed in among the peasantry in England, and marvelous tales are told of the " Seven Whistlers," and " Gabriel's Hounds," mysterious specter-dogs that with fiendish yells haunt the midnight air. Among the colliers of Leicestershire, no monition is so quickly and im- plicitly heeded as the warning voice of the Seven Whistlers, birds declaring some impending danger. The same belief prevails in some part of our own country, at least it is found in the Blue Ridge region in Virginia. Once in the life of every man the Seven Whistlers' call is heard. They are birds upon whom no mortal eye has ever rested ; they visit generally 82 HEROIC LEGENDS. in the gloaming, and the weird whistle and rush of their wings always brings portent of something^ momentous soon to come.* In England, in the rural districts, angels are thought to pipe or to sing to those about to die ; in Germany this singing is attributed to the elves, and little chil- dren if they listen to it are caught up by Frau Holle and taken to wander in the forests. We have remin- iscence of this old belief in the hymnology ; angels are described as calling to the soul and bidding it away. In this tale of the Piper, is historicised the myth of the wind, or the wind-god Odin, coursing through the air, sweeping over the tree tops or past the win- dows, with his cavalcade of ghosts. And in the pi- ping is hinted the music not seldom heard in the breeze. This was thought to be ominous, signifying the call of souls to their home. The tale of the Jew in the Thorn-bush is one variant. In the story of the Piper, in its present form, is preserved quite possibly some dim remembrance of a pestilence or epidemic " The Gabriel hounds, as they call them In Durham and some parts of Yorkshire, are described as monstrous human-headed dogs, who traverse the air and are often heard though seldom seen. Sometimes they appear to hang over a house, and then death and calamity are sure to visit it." Henderson, Folk-Lore of the Northern Cowntiea of England, tfcc, p. 129. In Devonshire, Mr. Henderson tells us, the pack is called the " WIsht hounds," the name derived from Wodin's name Wunsch, cor- rupted into " Wlsht." THE PIED PIPER OF HAMELN. 83, that was especially fatal among children. In the part which describes the Piper as having piped the rats from the town and drowned them in the river Weser, we probably have a statement of the same fact, under a difiFerent version, which the closing part of the story relates. Perhaps the union of the two- came, as Mr. Keary suggests, from the meeting of the two peoples, Slavonic and German, and the joining together of their legends, giving us the two rolled up into one. At any rate the mouse seems to have been symbolic, signifying the soul.* A little red mouse, it is related, is sometimes seen to issue from the mouth of the sleeper ; it indicates the departure of the soul. In German superstition it is believed that when the head of a house dies, even the mice in the house abandon it. The river, f'the Weser^, and the mountain, are both symbols of death, and so botb statements are probably simply variants of one and the same thing. William Tell, as we now know, is another myth tarnslated into heroic history. His infallible arrow,. like the shaft of Phoibos Apollo, is the solar ray that never misses its mark. And his unrivalled power and skill as an oarsman, traversing the seas of night, and bringing to the land upon which he leaps with re- gained liberty, is no less significant as indicating his- *Xbe mouse among the Russians Isawell known figure forthe soul, says- Mr, Balston, Sonera of the Ruaiian People, 109. ^4 HEROIC LEGENDS. solar character. There have been almost as many Tells as peoples to record the course and conquests of the sun. We have him in our William of Cloudeslee; the Danes in Palnatoki ; the Norwegians, Russians, Icelanders, Finns, Turks, &c., all tell the same story, with some change of circumstance and name. In modified form it is in the Greek, in the legend of Lykian Sarpedon ; it was in Persia, and rather pro- bably was known in India. Max Miiller says of ^' William Tell, the good archer, whose mythological character is established beyond contradiction," that he is " the last reflection of the sun-god, whether we call him Indra, or Apollo, or Ulysses." In King Arthur also we have another instance of this. It is difficult, may be impossible, to determine how far there may be historic kernel in this legend. Possibly there is some basis in the actual occurrences of early times in Britain, for what is said of this hero and his court. But as Mr. Baring Gould well re- marks, " The Arthur of romance is actually a demigod> believed in long before the birth of the historic Arthur." The Round Table, the Queen, Lancelot, &c., reproduce to us elements that we find in far earlier time, that are mythic. In Arthur we have Sigurd, Perseus, Phoibos Apollo ; in fact every one of the bright solar heroes celebrated in Oriental or Occi- dental myth, reappears in him. KING ARTHUR, AND THE ROUND TABLE. Sj. His birth was miraculous; he was the son of Igraine, wife of Duke Gorlois, by Uther Pendragon,. as Herakles was son of Alkmene,.the afi&anced of Amphitryon, by Zeus. Soon as born he is wrapped in a cloth of gold, as was Phoibos by the nymphs, as was Cyrus. His brand Excalibur, which he alone of all was able to unfix from the anvil in the rock, — as Theseus alone availed to lift the stone beneath which were placed his father's sword and sandals, — where- with unaided he slew four hundred and seventy Saxons in a single battle, and which was thrown into the lake at the end of his life and attended with such miraculous omens, — was like Roland's blade Duran- dal, the workmanship of the fairies, and so powerful he could cleave the Pyrenees with it at a blow. It was like Beowulf's enchanted sword wherewith he kills Grendel, the monster. And for Guenevere and Lancelot, we have prototype in Paris and Helen,, or, going farther, in the Panis and Sarama in old Hindu mythology. In Arthur we note again an in- stance of the marvelous transformations effected by time, and the pronounced tendency to the ethical,, which we shall have occasion to refer to hereafter. In Hamlet also we have a similar example. This character has come down from the Norse mythology. It is in Haveloc the Dane presented in English story, this name appearing again in Higelac of the Beowulf Saga, and one of the heroes in that myth. Havelok- 86 HEROIC LEGENDS. is one of the fatal Children born to be kings, con- spired against, betrayed, but destined to destroy their enemies and come at length to their rightful estate. The plot to put him to death is defeated by means as miraculous as in the cases of Cyrus and Romulus. From a scullion-boy in Earl Godric's kitchen, he be- -comes the husband of Goldborough, daughter of .iEchelwald, — who had been conspired against and preserved in like supernatural manner, — and goes over to Denmark where he dispossesses the usurper, and recovers the throne of his father, King Birkabeyn. In an early French poem dealing with the same theme, the name of the heroine however being diflFer- ent, the hero is Havelok Curan, the same with the Danish hero whom the Angles call Anlaf-cwiran. The variants Anlaf, Anelaph and Hanelocke are in Latinized form Amlethus, and we are thus brought to our familiar name Hamlet. There are other features in the story that savor strongly of the mythic. Hamlet's father was poisoned while sleeping in his orchard on an afternoon ; Ham- let came to his death in the same manner. It was given out of the father, in order to cover the uncle's guilt, that he had been stung by a serpent. These both are features familiar in so many mythical stories, — the sleep of Endymion, the serpent in the tale of Eurydike and many others, the poison, sometimes the thorn, that slew such numberless beautiful maidens, HAMLET. 87 &c. Orendil, the father, who reappears in Hjarrandi, Horant, of the Gudrun Lay, is a marvelous singer, able to charm all men with his sweet sounds. The incidents in his life as those of his father Oygel, are as clearly of mythic type as those of Tell or the Achaian heroes on their way to Ilion. He becomes possessed of a grey coat, recovered from the body of a whale, which no one else can put on, but which fits him perfectly and makes him invulnerable. This coat is like and the equivalent of the sword which only one man in all the world can draw from its fastening; like the scabbard of Arthur's Excalibur which make its possessor invulnerable. That grey coat becomes at length the holy coat of Treves, where Orendil's father had been king.* The story of Hamlet, as Mr. Fiske fittingly says, is " unmistakably that of the quarrel of summer and winter." The prince is moody like Achilleus, and both of them are as veritably personations of the sun- god, as was Odin or Indra. But, as in the case of Achilleus presented in the Iliad, the character had long been supposed to be historic; all the circum- stances of veritable history had been woven about the name, ages and centuries ere the play of the great dramatist was written. Doubtless Shakspeare be- lieved himself, as many long time before had sup- posed they were, dealing with the life and deeds of *Cox, Mythology and Folk-Lore, pp. 304-309. 88 HEROIC LEGENDS. a flesh and blood hero, genuine prince of Denmark. And under the touch of this master's magic wand, everything herein seems very concrete and real. The prototype of Lear and Cordelia appears in the old Hindu epic, the Mahabharata ; and here the con- ception was originally mythic, describing the devo- tion of the young dawn or sun to the old father. In this epic the youngest son, Puru, for his self-surren- der in taking on the old age, out of regard to his father, for the latter's deliverance, is finally made heir of the kingdom. The two elder, having each refused when besought to do this, are expelled from it. The variation from this as told in the tale of Lear, is no wider than easily occurs in the develop- ment of the same myths by peoples distant from each other. The tale of Romeo and Juliet, we have in an Ori- ental form in the Tuti-Nameh, Persian; and this seems plainly to come from a primeval nature-myth. The beautiful girl and the lover, separated by what- ever hard fate here, are united in death : the evening aurora and the sun expire together, and are one in the world of the shades. The same thing is enacted in the loves and tragic end of Pyramos and Thysbe. The story of Portia also appears to have like origin. Her transformation is represented in the Gaelic story of the Chest, where the maiden disguises her- self as a gillie, in order to search for her lost lover. RECOVERY OF THE LOST MAIDEN. 89 The surrendered or lost ring is a feature that appears in very many myths. The legend of Lady Godiva, and her ride naked through the streets of Coventry, — laid in the eleventh century, — we find in one of the Calmuc and Mongol tales, these confessedly of Hindu origin, and the story throughout plainly mythic. The lady is the king's daughter, Light of the Sun is her name, upon whom no one must look, walking out as she does on a certain day in the month. The Vedic poets frequently represent the Dawn as ap- pearing nude, unveiled, as she ascends the skies. The Wooden Horse, which was so dire a calamity to the Trojans, and has so exercised the imagination of every school boy in Greek since, finds its inter- pretation in mythology. It forms, as Max Miiller says, "an essential part of a mythological cycle," and fits in well with other features of the story. It, or its equivalent, is very frequently employed to hint the concealment or disguise, sometimes in wood, then again in the skin of some animal, under which the warrior entered the domain of his enemies, and rose up and vanquished them. The whole narrative of the Trojan conflict, — what- ever of historical incident may in time have come to intermingle there, — is essentially mythic, and is told in not widely difiFering form in all the great epics of the world. Sigurd through nameless peril must rescue the imprisoned Brynhild ; Rama must storm Ravana's 90 HEROIC LEGENDS. castle and recover the stolen Sita; Wainamoinen must visit Pohjola and obtain the mystic sampo ; and with all this hold the numberless tales of " Sleep- ing Beauties," " Snow-white Maidens," &c., that are to be rescued by some hero from the power of the monster who keeps them imprisoned. " Blue Beard " gives us in part one of the variants. Like things lie to be said of Oberon and his horn, of Roland and his Blade, Horant and his Song, &c. Analagous cases to these are, besides the Ribhus al- ready mentioned, Orpheus in the Greek f'same word as Ribhu probably j, Gandharvas and Gunadhya in the Hindu, the sons of Kalew in the Esthonian or Finnish mythology. In each of these instances we have the myth historicised. Similar creations have come in the cases of Charlemagne, Frederick Barbarossa, Olger Dansk in Denmark, Olaf Redbeard in Sweden, &c. The imagination has been busy here, and the story in every case, as appears, has been built up from a solar myth. Charlemagne sleeps in the Untersberg, near Salz- burg, waiting till the times of Anti-Christ are ful- filled, when he will appear as a deliverer and avenger. Frederick reposes in a lofty mountain in Thuringia, and his knights around him, six of them, he too wait- ing for the hour to strike when he will come to release Germany from bondage, and place it first among the nations of Europe. Already his red beard FREDERICK BARBAROSSA. 9 1 has grown through the slab of the stone table on which his head is reclining. Once a shepherd pene- trated into the heart of the mountain by a cave, and discovered the emperor there. Frederick awoke from his slumbers and asked, " Do the ravens still fly over the mountains?" "Sire, they do." "Then we must sleep another hundred years." But when his beard has wound itself thrice around the table, he will come forth to deliver Germany. Many simi- lar stories are told in other parts of Europe. In France, even Napoleon Bonaparte is believed by some of the peasantry to be sleeping in like manner, wait- ing for the hour for his reappearance. And among us, the story of Rip Van Winkle gives a version where the scene is laid in the solitudes of the Cats- kills. The number seven has prominent place in these relations. There were seven Sleepers at Ephesus; Barbarossa changes his position once in seven years ; and Charlemagne starts in his chair, Olger Dansk stamps his iron mace on the floor, and Olaf Red- beard in Sweden, uncloses his eyes once in seven years. This seems originally to refer to the term of the winter, and the awakening in spring, as the earth lies at rest during the seven winter months. Lohengrin is one of those heroes, half unearthly, who come, men know not whence, and are first seen sleeping in a boat upon a river. Lohengrin was son 92 HEROIC LEGENDS. of Percival, and he heard once peal of the bell far away, untouched by human hands, in the temple of the Grail at Montsalvatch. That peal was signal that help was needed. He arose and was starting, not knowing whither he should go. Foot in stirrup, ready to mount his horse, he saw a swan on the river, drawing a ship along. " Take back the horse to its stable," said he, "I will go with the bird, whither it shall lead." Five days he was on the water, drawn in his boat not only, but supplied with nourishment by the faithful bird. At the end of this time, they came where the lists were opened by Frederick Von Telramund, a brave knight, who would fight against any champion she might bring forward, for pos- session of Elsa of Brabant, who had refused his suit. Lohengrin undertook the defense of the Lady, fought, prevailed, slew Frederick, and in return was offered her hand and the duchy. He accepted it on one con- dition : she must never ask his race. Happily they lived together for a time, but one night, piqued with curiosity and stung with insinuations and reproaches she had heard, she did put the fatal question. Lohengrin sorrowfully called his children to- gether, kissed them, and said : " Here are my horn and my sword, keep them, carefully ; and here, my wife, is the ring my mother gave me ; never part with it." At break of day, the swan reappeared drawing the boat, Lohengrin reentered and disap- peared, nevermore to return. LOHENGRIN. 93 This Story ought to be transparent enough. It is the reproduction of the old, old tale, the prince wedded to the dawn. He had rescued the maiden, marries her, but cannot remain with her ; he comes in a boat, goes in a boat, drawn by the faithful swan that swims the cerulean seas. There is close rela- tion of this tale with those of Melusina, of Undine, of Pururavas and Urvasi, Eros and Psyche, &c. Lohengrin is one of a family of stories celebrating Knights of the Swan. Una and her Red Cross Knight are Andromeda and Perseus, refined, spiritualized, presented to us clothed in the garb, under the concept of chivalry. V. NURSERY TALES. Nursery Tales come, most of them certainly, from the same source. Max Miiller calls them, as we saw, the " modern. Jiafois of the ancient sacred mythology." They are the Prakrit in relation to the high Sanscrit, a descendant, and of now inferior caste, from the ancient speech of the gods. Rightly interpreted, they conduct us to the same fountain-head, and are of exceeding interest, as showing what changes ages, the repeating from lip to lip through unnumbered generations, have wrought, and also what fadeless reminiscences they carry of the original thought. The gods and heroes of myth and legend become at length fairies and imps, or elves and ogres. These tales have been industriously gathered in our time; the brothers Grimm have done unrivaled work in Germany, picking up the stories in the spinning rooms of the peasantry; Campbell in the rude cotters' huts in the Scotch Highlands ; Asb- jornsen and Moe in Norway; Afzelius in Sweden; (94) LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD. 95 Ralston in Russia, and so on. Like work has been done in India. Something has been accomplished also in the same direction among the ruder races, Tartars, Zulus, KaflBrs, American Indians, &c. All have, though they may not possess a literature, household stories. We have a new province of knowledge opened, which is full of invitation and enrichment for the mind. Curious enough reminiscences or survivals are turning up, coming in phrases, saws, &c., cur- rent in our common speech. Saint George, Slayer of the Dragon, himself, as we have seen, a reflection of Indra or Apollon, be- comes in the nursery. Jack the Giant Killer, and Jack climbing the Bean-Stalk f'the tree Yggdrasil.?^ to the Ogre's Castle, whence he obtained the great wealth. Brynhild, after being wounded with a thorn by Odin, was doomed to a magic sleep, from which she was brought back to new life by Sigurd. So Little Red Riding Hood, with her scarlet robe — the twilight — was devoured by the wolf, but delivered by the hunt- er, who ripped open the beast, from whose maw she came forth bright and unharmed. Of similar purport is the story of Tom Thumb, who was swallowed by the cow, and came out unhurt ; of Saktideva in the Hindu, who was swallowed by the fish, but liberated by the servants of the king who cut the monster open.. And going into Hebrew, we g6 NURSERY TALES. find the story of Jonah swallowed by the whale, and erewhile thrown out sound and whole upon the dry land. The tale of the Wolf and Seven Kids in Ger- man folk-lore, is of the same meaning. Like stories are told among the Zulus and the Basutos in South Africa, and in North America among the Algonquins and the Greenlanders ; in Asia, too, among the Karens. The Karens say that Twa Wya, going to the Sun that he might make him grow, was so increased by the Sun that his head touched the sky. He went forth on various adventures over the earth, and was after a time swallowed by a snake; the reptile being cut open, Twa Wya came back to life. The Basutos tell that Litaolane their hero was swallowed by a monster, but that he cut his way out, and set free all the inhabitants of the world. The Zulus say the maw of the monster that devoured the Princess, and men, dogs, &c., has forests, rivers, hills, cattle, and people living there, and when at length he is cut open, out come they all ; the cock appears first, and he cries out in his rapture of joy, " Kukuluku, — I see the world." In the Algonquin, Manabozho angling for the King of Fishes, was swallowed up, canoe and all; he belabored the monster with his war-club, until he would fain have cast him out again, but Manabozho set his canoe across the fish's throat inside and dis- patched him ; the fish drifted ashore and the gulls VASILISSA THE BEAUTIFUL. 97 pecked a place by which the hero could come out. This myth of day, night, and dawn, under manifold variations seems to be spread over the globe.* So the Sleeping Beauty reproduces the story of Brynhild, and the image is almost as bright and clear as the original. In Russian, Vasilissa the beau- tiful is sent to the house of Bd,ba Yaga the witch, and is doomed to to wander long and lone and shudder- ing, in the forest. f Riders appear before her, one white, clad in white, and the horse under him white. ^'And the day began to dawn." Another rider appears, this one red, red in his clothing, and mounted on a red horse. " The sun began to rise." She was liberated, traveled all day, and towards night arrived at the witch's house, when a black rider mounted on a black horse appeared, and plunged suddenly through the gates of B4ba Yag^. The witch tells her, " The white rider is my clear Day, the red rider my red Sun, and the black rider my black Night." "The countless stories," says Max Miiller, "of all the princesses and snow-white ladies, who were kept * Going back far enough, we find the myth In substance, out of which this tale grew, rude and primitive as any one could wish. The Bank's Islanders (Melanesia) say that Qat in order to bring the day, when dark- ness had lasted quite long enough, took a knife of obsidian, cut the dark- ness and the dawn came out. t As In Cinderella the step-mother and the envious sisters, the moon and the clouds, appear, and try to keep the little maiden in the back- ground, so here Vasllissa's step-mother and sisters plot against her life, and. send her to get a light at the house of B&ba Yag&. 98 NURSERY TALES. in dark prisons, and were inevitably delivered by a young bright hero, can all be traced back to mytholo- gical traditions, about the Spring being released from the bonds of winter, the Sun being rescued from the darkness of the night, the Dawn being brought from the far West, the Waters being set free from the prison of the clouds." Cinderella, i, e.. Cinder-lass, and her Slipper, seems originally a myth of the dawn ; the presenting of the fair maiden to the prince of day, and loss of her by the prince when he would pursue her, reproducing here the story of Eurydike and Orpheus, of Ushas and Indra, &c. The same we have in the Hindu tale of Urvasi and Pururavas, so charmingly told by Kalidasa, and rendered fittingly into our own tongue by the late Dr. H. H. Wilson. Cinderella appears in the Greek, in the story of Rhodopis, and her sandal conveyed by the eagle to Psammetichus. Similar purport lies in the tale of Boots and the Princess. The oldest form of the myth, perhaps, is in the story of Apala, the water- maiden, and Indra. Apala draws Soma or ambrosia^ which she presents to Indra; he frees her from her ugly and deformed appearance, and she shines a princess. In the Norse tale of Bushy Bride, we have clear traces still of the original myth, the meaning almost throughout transparent. While the hero lay in a pit CINDERELLA, BUSHY BRIDE, ETC, 99. full of snakes f'symbol of the darkness j, a lovely lady came into the palace-kitchen and asked for a brush. " Then she brushed her hair, and as she brushed, down dropped gold."— Bushy Bride brushed her hair, and the gold was the tinge of day upon the morning sky. — The story says she had a little dog Flo — Hindu Sarameya, dog of the morning, Greek Hermes, the morning breeze ; him she sent out to descry the day. " ' Run oul5 little Flo, and see if it will soon be day." This she did three times, and the third time that she sent the dog, it was just about the time the dawn begins to peep." In the story of Jack the Giant Killer, we have plainly a transmuted myth of the morning. Jack had an enchanting harp, bags of gold and diamonds^ and a red hen which daily laid a golden egg. " The harp," says Mr. Baring Gould, " is the wind, the bags- are the clouds dropping the sparkling rain, and the golden egg laid every morning is the dawn-produced sun." By a similar figure in the Arabian tale, or rather the Indian, the roc's egg is the sun, the roc here however being the rushing storm-cloud. Jack and Gill represent to us a very old story, and probably in a modified and somewhat degenerated form, it has become that of the Man in the Moon. In the old Norse myth M4ni, the moon, stole two children from their parents and carried them to heaven. Hjuki and Bil were their names. They- lOO NURSERY TALES. were carrying water that they had just drawn from a well, in a bucket suspended by a pole from their shoulders. Children, pole, and bucket together, were transferred to the moon, and there they may be seen to this day. Thus were the moon-spots explained, and such account is given to-day by the Swedish peasants. The names were originally personifications of waxing and waning. They became eventually Jack and Gill, and the fall of one, then of the other, or the vanishing of the moon-spots successively, involv- ing the spilling of the pail of water, was invoked to explain the increased rain-fall in the waning phases of the moon. Our legend of Heme the Hunter, or the Wild Huntsman, extensively held in Germany and France, takes its source in the myth of Odin the Wind-god. A spectral hunter, he appears by night, the tramp of his horses' feet, the baying of the dogs, and his ' holloa,' being distinctly audible to the peasants. Like Odin, he is Hackelbarend, cloak-bearing. The two dogs reproduce the two hounds of Hindu mythology, — hounds of Yama, — where they were, as in the Hunts- man, the wind. In the middle ages, this legend is the story of the Phantom Army. Hosts were seen encountering hosts in mid-air, the tramp, the clangor, ?the heavy discharges of artillery were distinctly heard, and showers of blood afterwards falling on THE WILD HUNTSMAN. • lOI the earth, attested the fearful carnage. The life of this old belief appears not yet to have passed away, for the writer remembers in his early childhood to have heard from the lips of the seniors like relations. In the Hartz to-day, as Grimm tells us, the wild chase is heard thundering past the Eichelberg, with its 'hoho,' and clamor. of hounds. The march of the furious host has also been extensively connected with the Emperor Charles — Charles the Great, — and in Eng- land with King Arthur. The Wandering Jew also is descendant and repre- sentative of Odin. And finally we have in the grand veneur that hunts in the forest of Fontainebleau,* in the Harlequin of comedy, and the Robin Hood of the Nursery tales, the reappearance of Odin. If, as John Fiske supposes, our word God is etymologically Odin,, we have a noteworthy illustration in this of the changes in sense which a term may undergo, and see what an ancestry lies behind our words of most exalted ethereal sense. In the Master Thief, — Scottish tale of Shifty Lad, — we have Hermes, who is the most adroitly cunning,, and abounding in sly mischief, of all the gods in the old mythology. This noted Thief, as the story tells,, completely tricks a plain farmer who at successive times drives his oxen on the way, first steals one,, then another, and finally a third, all without the *Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, Stallybrass, p. 942. 102 • NURSERY TALES. owner's in the least suspecting at the time what is being done. Finally, he crowns his feats by practis- ing upon the sharpers themselves; he over-reaches the clan of thieves at whose instance he had under- taken his exploits upon the farmer. Paul Pry and Peeping Tom of Coven try give us reflection of the same god Hermes, capricious, mischievous and sub- tle, prying into all secret places, entering by key- holes and slinking back through the same, stealing Apollo's cattle, and then in coolest manner denying the theft, as if it were absurd and cruel to suspect it of one so small, yet with a roguish twinkle in the eye, and compelling a laugh even from the enraged god himself. In other tales, as of Blue Beard for example, we have with whatever of historic woof, the warp from mythic sources. Blue Beard, as Mr. Tylor informs us, was a historic person. His name was Gilles de Retz ; he was Sieur de Laval, Marshal of France, and nicknamed Barbe-Bleue, as he had a beard of blue- black shade. He was convicted of having murdered many infants, — a practice he had long pursued un- detected, that he might renew his strength by bath- ing in their blood, — and finally burned at the stake in Nantes, in 1440. His character of wife-murderer, however, carries back to a tale of a certain Count of Poher, who was, if he lived at all, a thousand years earlier. This count had murdered many wives, but BLUE BEARD. IO3 at last after he had killed the beautiful Trifine, retri- bution overtook him. The forbidden chamber into which none might look and live, is mythic. It is the treasure house of Ixion, which none might enter without being destroyed like Hesioneus, or betrayed by marks of gold or blood; it belongs with the lightning caverns of many a legend, rich in gold, diamonds, &c., whence few that went in ever escaped, none without disaster. Blue-Beard and his prototpye Count savor strongly of the devouring night monsters of mythology. The Babes in the Wood are of mythic origin. They carry remotely to the Asvins, the Twins in the Hindu mythology, represented there as two horses. They are dawn and gloaming, or day and night ; " Twin sisters are they," says the Veda, " one black, the other white." As horses they appear in the Norse tale of Dapplegrim. The German tale of the Two Brothers is in much, based upon the same elements as this of the Babes. The meaning is all transparent enough, — the journey in the forest, the coming of the younger brother to the town where all are in grief because the king's daughter on the morrow is to be given over to be devoured by a dragon, the recov- ery by the warrior of a sword that was buried beneath a great stone, the slaying of the dragon, and union in marriage on the mountain top with the princess. It repeats the old, old story that we have heard so oft I04 NURSERY TALES. in so many myths, tales of which as Mr. Cox has- well said, " Mankind will never grow weary." Sweet Briar Rose (Dornroschen) pricks her finger with a spindle — the sleep-thorn, — falls into a sleep of a hundred years, and is roused by the kiss of the pure knight. Snow-White and Rosy-Red tell their own story. Like the mother of the sun-child in the Marchen of the Almond Tree, " who is as white as snow and red as blood," the mother of Little Snow- White must die as soon as her eyes have rested on her babe.* There are many forms in which the marriage of the dawn with the companion it has not seen and may not see, is told. One conspicuous example we have in Beauty and the Beast, which again is the tale of Psyche and Eros. The same also in the Gaelic tale of the Daughter of the Skies ; it is found also in Hindu folk-lore. Boots, robbed of the en- chanting princess of whom he is in search, himself the brother of Cinderella, and who is shifty and effective in dealing with the Trolls, always outwitting these giants of darkness, is counterpart and repre- sentative of Odysseus, and later of Jack the Giant Killer. * In the Volsung-Saga the mother of Volsung,— who for six winters had carried him, and was delivered at last through her own order by Caesarian operation,— died as soon as he came to birth. Nevertheless, it is said, .the child " kissed his mother or ever she died." In the Toltec myth, the mother of Qnetzalcohuatl died the moment her son wai born. THE SLEEP-THORN. I05 In Rapunzel ('German^, the maiden, who here rep- resents Persephone, is shut up in tlie witch's garden, which is enclosed by high walls,— the earth locked in the icy arms of winter. The prince finds and reaches her, ascending to her home on the long golden locks of the maiden. " For Rapunzel had long and beautiful hair, as fine as spun gold," — which it was. In the House in the Wood, we have the tale again of Persephone ; in the Iron Stove, tale of Danae shut up in her brazen dungeon ; in the Glass Coffin, the Glistening Heath in which lay the sleeping, imprisoned Brynhild. In the Jew among the Thorns, we have reproduced the story of the marvelous harp of Hermes, the lyre of Orpheus and Amphion. The Jew cannot but dance, try he never so hard to resist the miraculous fiddler. The boar's tusk that slew Adonis, and the dart that destroyed Baldur and Sigurd, is, in the tales, the sleep-thorn or the spindle that pierced the hand of the maiden, and put her and all else about the palace, into death-like slumber which lasted a hundred years. The serpent that bit Eurydike becomes in the legend the adder that stung the foot of one of Arthur's knights, and so brought on the commencement of that fearful battle in which the king received his mortal wound. The winged sandals of Hermes and Perseus, become ' the seven leagued boots ' of the tales. The radiance of the dawn, Ushas, Eos, is, in the Io6 NURSERY TALES. tale of Cinderella, the dress contained in the nut, which, when opened, glowed with the splendor of stars and sun. In the aureole about the head of Christian saints, we see the golden glory which sur- rounded the head of Phoibos or Asklepios. The magnificent dawn is again, in the fairy tale, the prince's ball room. In the maypole is representative and re- miniscence of the stauros, cross of Osiris, the trident of Poseidon, the rod of wealth and happiness of Apollon given to Hermes, or back of all probably the phallic emblem. The disguises and metamorphoses are innumerable, the Proteus has changed form without end, yet in many cases it is quite possible to trace back to the original. Doubtless the belief universal once, and held uniformally by all savage races to-day, in the near afBnity, almost identity, of the animal creation with humanity, so that there may be, there are, per- petual metamorphoses and transmutations of beasts into men and men into beasts, has had much to do with introducing so constantly the presence of ani- mals as leading actors in all the tales and fables. Like thing may be said of plants, trees, &c., which we very frequently find, for they also were believed to be in- telligent and rational. In Grimm's tales very many have their interpreta- tions from mythic sources. The world, it is said, is THE WITCHES SABBATH. I07 well agreed that Scheherezade abundantly earned her life by her admirable stories told on the thousand and one nights in the Caliph's court. — And they, by the by, are to be unlocked in instances certainly not a few, by the key of mythology. — The authors of these capitally told tales, distant and unknown as they are, richly deserve the grateful remembrance of all that have come after them. In the account of the Witches' Sabbath, the old beldames riding on broomsticks through the air, speeding on for the Brocken, scene of their revels, we have the story of the Swan-maidens, hastening to join the flight of Odin. Old Mother Goose is a modern form of a middle-age witch, in this case good-natured, kindly, purged of the sinister and malign elements that make Witches and Ogres objects of terror. " Roland to the dark Tower came," gives us Orpheus descending to Hades, Perseus entering the den of the Gorgons, Wainamoinen going down to Manala, Tuoni's dwelling. The Wishing-Cap gained by Fortunatus, is the pe(asos or winged cap of Hermes, the giver of all good. The grey or gleaming robe of Orendil, which again represents the garment be- stowed upon Medeia by Helios, and the scabbard of Excalibur, each having the property of making its owner invulnerable, comes down in survival, as al- ready hinted, as the holy coat of Treves. Odin, if by one transformation he has given name to our supreme deity, is under another relation an I08 NURSERY TALES. Abgoit, ex-god, degraded from his throne in the old mythology ; the name in Christendom stands for a dreaded sprite. The nymphs of the waters and the trees of the olden time, are the fays, fairies, elves, or the imps and ogres of the folk-lore of to-day. The Loreley that drowns the unhappy boatman in the rapids, is the river-demon of old. The healing water- spirits of wells have only taken saints' names, and the old observance of rites at their sacred waters is still maintained in France, in Ireland, and in Scotland. So Puck, Bugaboo, Bugbear, Hobgoblin, Ogre,* &c., standing for little now in the general belief, names bandied in sport, were grave, yes, solemn realities once, and reveal their ancestry quickly to the discern- ing eye. There may have been things written for mere sport without aim, purport, or purpose, done in the wild random play of the imagination. ' The Song of Six- pence,' ' The Cow jumping over the Moon,' &c., may, for aught I know, be such ; or again, there may *OgTe, in the Edda Oegir, was originally name tor god of the sea. Akin to this is protatly the Greek Okeanoi, onr ocean, and perhaps Ogyges. The word seems to come of a root wide spread in the Aryan dialects, to which belong our words awe, anx-ious, choke, Latin anguis Greek angolvo (angche in Kwnangche, quinsy) Sanscrit ATii, old High Ger- man aW, ekd, fear, dread. The hemlet worn by Hreldmar, and also by Fafnir, is called Oegishialm, hemlet of dread. Considering the etymology therefore, the fact of the name's standing for a dreaded, horrible sprite seems not unnatural. Equally interesting results we shoald find in the endeavor to trace the terms Fuck, &c ., back to their original, or at least earlier meaning. A REASON- FOR BEING. IO9 be, as has been supposed by some, a mythic meaning at the foundation of most even of this. It has been well said, there is little sheer nonsense in the world ; most that seems such, proves to have had some sense when we dig down deep enough to find the original form of expression. Every quirk and conceit is cap- able of some rational interpretation, and all the trivi- alities of Nursery Tales bear what was once a serious and felt meaning. Even the strange, grotesque, and seemingly utterly senseless, features of some of the Hindu myths and legends, are found to have a reason for being, a ground real or aptly supposed in the fact of things ; none are to be dismissed as chimeras and fictions of a disordered or imbecile brain. Often what they give is, where we may least suspect it, rich and suggestive. These studies inspire us with new respect for the human mind. VI. PROVERBS, FOLK-LORE, ETC. A Proverb, it has been said, is often a chip of mythology, and some of our familiar saws and sen- tentious sayings carry clear reminiscences of what were once spoken as solemn and stately myths. The mythic expressions, and to some extent the ideas, the beliefs, thus have an immortality, and go down age after age in the enlarging civilizations that leave behind so much in the faded, effete past. There is great tenacity of life in what becomes couched in a proverb. Our speech is full to the brim with these reminiscences; we are using them often quite un- consciously. ' When you dance, you must remember to pay the piper,' takes origin doubtless from the story of the Pied Piper of Hameln, or some equivalent, and this is a legend descending from the myth of Odin, the piping wind. 'To go to the bottom of Davy's Locker,' is to go to the bottom of the sea, for the water-imp that ruled there was a deva, or as we have it in our speech (110) THE WATER SPRITE. Ill Davy. ' The Old Nick ' comes from Nixy, also name for water-imp, the nicor of Beowulf, the nix or nixy of German fairy tales.* In the belief of German peasants the Nixies inhabit lakes and rivers, and when any person is shortly to be drowned, they may be seen dancing on the surface of the water. And hence doubtless has come the superstition that harm will fall to him that saves the life of a drowning man, since it was believed the nixies will be offended with such interference with their purposes when they resolve to take a victim. Bohemian fishermen will not now, or so recently as 1864. would not, rescue a drowning man, from fear that the water-demon would in retaliation drown them. A similar superstition obtains among the Slavons; it is Topielic, the ducker, they say, by whom men are always drowned. In Germany to-day when one is drowned, the people say, " The River- spirit claims his yearly sacrifice," or " The Nix has taken him."t Like belief prevails among the Shet- landers, with English and French sailors, &c. In- deed this persuasion of a presiding spirit or demon in the water, and fear of oflFending him, or neglecting to placate his ill-will, is one widely spread over the * The word according to Mr. Cox Is from a root that we have In the Greei.i'f/X'^, to swim. Aryan Mythology, p. 567, Note. t Grimm, Dmstche Mythologie, p. 462. 112 PROVERBS, FOLK-LORE, ETC. world, and found almost alike in savage or barbaric, and civilized stages of culture. In New Zealand they conceive of huge supernatural reptile monsters that inhabit river-bends, and those who are drowned are thought to be pulled down by them ; in Kamchatka a like superstition. The custom among the Greeks and Romans of making an offer- ing to Poseidon or Neptune, for instance, when a general was about to embark on a dangerous expe- dition, is well known ; the same in substance obtains in Guinea to-day, and with North American Indians, throwing in an oblation of tobacco as the canoe is to pass a dangerous eddy ; the same in Europe in the lingering belief in the guardian spirits of wells and fountains, and the offerings, e. g., by the Cornish people in the old holy wells, of pins, nails, rags, &c., that they may get healing from these waters for dis- eases, and omens on health and marriage. We speak of 'a noise loud enough to wake the seven sleepers.' Originally the myth that was told related to the deep winter sleep of nature, or the earth. But in the Christianized form it was framed of seven. youths, who fleeing from persecution in the time of the Emperor Decius, entered a cave, whose mouth was presently thereafter closed with a wall, so that there was no means of escape. There they slept for two hundred and twenty-nine years, to the time THE SEVEN SLEEPERS. 1 13 of the Emperor Theodosius. They awoke in A. D. 479.* bore their testimony to the resurrection, much drawn in doubt at the time, and then disappeared in death. Another reflection of the same myth we have in the sleep of Rip Van Winkle in the Catskills ; indeed there are various legends of sleepers, all from the same source, as Charlemagne, Frederick Bar- barossa, &c., already mentioned ; Olger Danske ('the Dane^ sleeps in Avallon, biding his time for return ; Thomas of Ercildoune, beneath the Eilden hills in Scotland; William Tells, three of them, wait their hour. The phrase is often heard, 'To be in the seventh heaven.' There were seven planets reckoned in the ancient astronomy, including the sun and moon. These were supposed among the Babylonians to be carried around upon seven crystal spheres, and to be in the seventh was to be in the highest. The expression, ' Talk of the devil, and he will be sure to appear,' is quite likely a reminiscence of an old Fetichistic superstition. In savage thought the name is somehow mysteriously associated with its owner, and any liberty taken with that, it is supposed would be resented by him. A like mysterious con- Some defective chronology here, for Theodosius II. died, as given In the history, In 150. However, one must not expect always chronological accuracy In legends. 114 PROVERBS, FOLK-LORE, ETC. nection of the picture with the person is widely be- lieved in. A savage will not allow his likeness to be taken, lest an enemy may injure him through con- juring with it. In Russia, at the present day, there is objection felt to having the silhouette taken, lest cal- amity, death, should come to the person so copied, before the year is out. The superstition in regard to images as well as names is very general. Perhaps the dread and shrinking of the Jew from repeating the sacred name of his supreme deity, the Jehovah, had its origin in a like feeling with that of the savage, just referred to. In Shetland it is almost impossible to induce a widow, freely as she will talk about him, to speak the name of her deceased husband, however long he may have been dead, and this comes from the same super- stitious fear that we find in the rude races. The cur- rent maxim in regard to speaking of the dead, '■^De mortuis nil nisi bonum" had at one time, as John Fiske suggests, " most likely a fetichistic flavor." A North American Indian, eager to kill a bear to- morrow, will frame a rude image, an effigy, set it up and shoot at it. If he hits it, especially riddles it with his arrows or balls, he makes sure of success in the hunt. In Borneo the practice still exists, familiar in European history, of constructing a wax image of the one who is to be bewitched, that as the wax is melted his body also may waste away. BURKING IJT EFFIGY. II5 An ancient German practice is known as " earth- cutting, " Erdschmtt. A piece of earth or turf that had been pressed by the foot of the obnoxious person,, was cut and hung up in the chimney, that as this print dried and cracked in the heat and smoke, he also might perish. There are people to-day in Eng- land, and on the continent many, who thoroughly believing that some one's ill-wishing has killed their cow, or done them other injury, will take a heart of some animal, pierce it all over with pins and suspend it in the chimney, that the heart of the neighbor may in like manner be pierced, shrunken, and destroyed. The last relic of this old savage practice, probably i& hanging or burning in eflBgy, — this now apparently a reminiscence rather than a survival. And som& dim impression of the old belief in regard to the picture, is, I judge, to be seen in this expression, a coarse and vulgar phrase now, but not seldom heard among boys, " Blast his picture!" The feeling, per- haps universal, present even in the minds of the most intelligent, that the falling of the portrait of a friend from its place on the wall, bodes some ill, attests how tenacious this once powerfully dominant belief. A similar superstition exists with reference to some connection of a clipping of the hair or nails with the person from whom it may have been taken. The Parsis have an elaborate ritual pre- scribing the method for burying their cut hair and Il6 PROVERBS, FOLK-LORE, ETC. nails, lest demons and sorcerors should work injury upon them through these. A like belief obtained in .Rome, as is seen in the injunction laid upon the Flamen Dialis in regard to the burying religiously un- der a lucky tree, of all the parings of nails and clippings of hair. The same belief prevails to some extent in England, in Italy, in Germany, and as we might easily expect, it bears full sway in Australia. An Italian will never trust a lock of his hair in the hands of anyone, lest through this in spite of himself, bewitch- ment may be inflicted upon him. The Tasmanian, who wished to harm or bewitch anyone, would pro- cure something that had belonged to him, particu- larly a lock of his hair, envelope it in fat, and put in the fire, that as the fat melted the man himself should waste away.* And I well recall that in my own child- hood, I was strictly enjoined never to leave any clip- pings of hair above ground ; neither were they to be burned, they must be carefully buried. So the sup- erstition survived to my time, but doubtless the reason of it then nobody knew. Indeed the belief in a strange magical sympathy, closely related to what we have had above, is very wide-spread, and appears in many ways. The rub- bing of a knife-blade with which a wound has been inflicted, with fat, that as this dries the wound itself * See Dyer's JSrafflishFoli-Xofe, p. 27B; and Tito Vignoll's Myth and Science, p. 43. MAGICAL SYMPATHY. 11/ may heal, is a custom that still obtains, and is a sur- vival of the faith once, and that not long ago, univer- sal, in the power of sympathetic ointment for cure. Lord Bacon says, "It is constantly received and avouched that the anointing of the weapon that mak- eth the Wound will heal the wound itself," and the " sympathetic powder " prepared by Sir Kenelm Digby " after the Eastern method," was applied by him for cure not to the wound, but to the bandage taken from it. A Northumbrian reaper is cut by his sickle; the instrument itself is taken, cleaned and carefully polished. Quite recently in the village of Stamfordham a boy was hurt in the hand with a rusty nail. That nail was immediately taken to a black- smith, the rust carefully filed all away, and then the nail was assiduously rubbed every day before sunrise and again after sunset ; in consequence the injured hand was perfectly healed. I have been informed of like instances in our own country. A gentleman who was reared in a Quaker community in Pennsyl- vania, tells me that in early childhood he had the misfortune to pierce his foot with a lath-nail upon which he had jumped from the window of a house. The grandmother instantly seized him, drew out the nail, and most carefully oiled it to insure quick heal- ing of the wound. There are innumerable stories which tnrn on sympathetic trees, gems, stones, and the belief in the virtue of these things survives in the Il8 PROVERBS, FOLK-LORE, ETC. folk-lore of to-day. Dealers of gems will state that the sale of certain stones is much affected by the <;urrent beliefs in regard to their magical qualtities. The opal deemed " unlucky," finds very slow sale, while the moonstone as one of the "lucky,"' is sought. Another form is the superstition about the clothes of a man who has died. Whoever receives and wears them, will find they do no service, but will decay and go to pieces, as the body of their former owner wastes. Hence in Essex ("England^, goes the saying that "the clothes of the dead always wear full of holes." In Denmark a corpse is not allowed to be buried in any article of apparel that has belonged to a person still living, since as the clothes should go to decay in the grave, the owner from whom they had been received would certainly waste away and die. The Tyrolese hunter wears tufts of eagle's down in his hat, that he may obtain the vision and the cour- age of the eagle. The Basuto child in South Africa wears the kite's foot for swiftness, the lion's claw for strength and safety, and an iron ring to impart an iron power of resistance. The Dakota Indian eats the liver of a dog to gain his sagacity and courage. A Chinaman not long since was found to have eaten the heart of an enemy he had slain, so as to secure his bravery. A like superstition obtained among the Romans, as is seen from a charm described by Pliny, that was used by magicians for imparting invinci- SACREDNESS OF THE ROBIN. II9 bility : — head and tail of a dragon, marrow of a lion, claws of a dog, sinews of a deer, &c. Probably enough our familiar proverbial phrase of 'part strengthening part,' repeated jocosely now often at the table, may have its origin from such an old savage belief. It is a common phrase that ' 'tis wicked, — specially wicked — to kill a robin,' but few are aware that this carries a reminiscence of the worship of Thor, god of the thunderbolt and the lightning. The robin probably because of its red breast, was selected as sacred to that divinity, and indeed the lightning itself was figured as a bird, dropping a worm from its beak, whereby rocks were riven and treasures disclosed. The wren is also one of the birds repre- senting the storm-cloud, and in some parts of France it is believed that robbing a wren's nest will bring upon the offender the fate of being struck by light- ning. The same was also believed in Teutonic coun- tries in regard to the robin. The saw that ' a witch will not sink in water,' car- ries to the time when ordeals were made by fire and by water, a judicial rite found in the old Hindu law- book of Manu, and obtaining in England as late as the beginning of the thirteenth century, as a legal means of trying those accused of murder or robbery. It was fully believed that the sacred element would IZO PROVERBS, FOLK-LORE, ETC. reject the guilty, permitting the innocent alone to be received in its bosom. To this day the belief pre- vails in some communities both in the old world and in the new, and instances do not seldom occur in our own time of ordeals by this absurd and cruel method. 'May this bit choke me if I lie,' is a reminiscence of an ordeal very ancient, and still practised in India. There all of a household on which suspicion rests are required to swallow a mouthful of rice. The guilty, through his fear to swallow the rice, is to be detected. The same obtained in England and elsewhere in the use of the trial slice of consecrated bread or cheese. The morsel, it was held, would stick in the throat of the real thief, and so he would be exposed. We speak of ' night-mare,' i. e., the night mara or sprite, bearing thus unconsciously in our speech re- membrance of the belief in an imp which was sup- posed to come and sit upon the chest of the sleeper and obstruct respiration. Indeed the Slavons to-day believe in vampires, conceived as horrid nightmares, demon-souls, that are resident in corpses, and come by night and suck the blood of certain persons. In this way they account for the condition of those who are pale, bloodless, and steadily wasting away. 'Telling the bees,' still prevails in England and Germany, and I have heard of it in more than one instance as practised in this country. The bees in "telling the bees." 121 the hive must be informed when the master or the mis- tress of the house is dead. In Germany the news is told not only to the bees, but also to every beast in the stall; and every sack of corn is touched, every thing in the house shaken, that it also may be made acquainted with the sad event. In Devon ('England^ recently, after the funeral cort6ge had started from the house, a boy was sent back by the nurse to tell the bees, as that indispensable duty had been forgot- ten. In Derbyshire the same custom obtains withal in cases of marriage. The hives are frequently decorated with a favor. If the observance is omitted, ill-luck will attend upon the union. We have here a survival of the old savage belief in the personality and rationality of everything animate and inanimate. Reminiscence of the same probably is carried in the phrase, ' A little bird told me.' The animal fables are founded in the main upon this ; they carry back to the time when all animals were supposed to have intelligence and power of speech. ' To set the cap' for one, — generally with us for a husband, — bears reference to the belief wide-spread through Northern Europe to this day, in the nixies, brownies, trolls, fairies, &c., who are represented as sporting their red caps, throwing them at times here and there on the ground. On the coasts of Ireland it is thought a thing not uncommon for sea-fairies to come to shore, and throw down their red caps for 122 PROVERBS, FOLK-LORE, ETC. young men to pick up. The youth thus gets a mer- maid for a wife, but he can keep her only on difficult conditions,— the red cap must be held concealed from her eye. If she perchance sees that, she dons it, and is oflf in an instant. So generally the wife was lost and the children left motherless. In Scandinavia the Trolls were figured as going about in pointed red caps, which made their wearers invisible, as in Germany the Dwarfs were invisible with the Tarnkapfe, i. e., cap of darkness on.* The Faroese say that female seals are sometimes secured for wives, as, coming to the shore they lay off their seal-skins and appear as women. But the wife in- stantly vanishes away in the sea again, if by chance she espies the carefully hidden seal-skin. These tales are all distant descendants, from the myths of swan-maidens, — the fleecy clouds, — with their coats of feather or down sometimes laid aside as they go to bathe in the blue lake. Myths very wide-spread, for the Turanians have them as well as Aryans. The numerous stories of water-fays in modern Europe, — as Melusina in French, Undine in German, &c., — are of the same origin. And all are closely related to this very prevailing belief in the ready metamorphosis of animal into human, and vice versd, to which we have already referred. *Thls Tamkappe l3the helmet of Hades of the classic mythology, which made its wearer invisible. In S';oUarjl)!ikc 1 littir little l»f;'l», the (lake* arc the 'lown fcathem, hut iiiiiiiy rlrop past and get down to our earth,' 'i'lic ';o)ijp;irit)0(i of r)iiow-fliike» to fcathcri) ii an ancient oiii:, iiii'l Iti found in (>rvM hl^>tory, Hcrodotoii says llic Soythliinii dcoliircJ the resigns nortti of them Inac- ocMhlhle, \)i:i/.mhf, they were filled with feathers. The w/iler reoiills lliiit in the early wchool-boy (layt), li<; liiiti Ijeiinl the l! conic down inio the sohool-rooiiKi of our tinie. in ilie jiliiage, 'The Milky Way,' wc carry remln- Irtoeiioe, 'jiille liUely of what is rc';orded in (jreel< niytliolo(/,y of the Infant lierakleii, ouckled by llcrc, but for un olfenfie rcocivcd fioiu the ';ljild, thrown Ijy her l)a';k lo Athene. Another explanation Ih that I'liaethon, drlvin)jf his lather's tjun-<;liariot wlji(;li he was ijnalile to guide, linrnt a Ifroad iifreak In tlie sky, arid llial l» wliat we (/all llie Milky Way, It appears lliat in I'rlwla this way is nauicd Knii-put, cow's path. Ii Im so<-alled iieoaune It is supposed the red cow of ovenltig passoH by nl^^lit along the way, and scatters 124 PROVERBS, FOLK-LORE, ETC. her milk over it. De Gubernatis conjectures that per- haps the familiar German proverb, "Even red cows yield white milk," had its origin from this. ' You got out of bed wrong foot first this morning,' — an expression often used by nurses to children that are out of humor and pettish generally, — carries ta the old superstition held almost all over the globe, among civilized as among savage, that the left is of sinister omen, while the right is of auspicious token. In German folk-lore it is declared that to get out of bed left foot first will bring a bad day, and the negro of Old Calabar reads impending ill in the cry of the great kingfisher, if it is heard on the left, while on the right it predicts to him good fortune. The phrase 'Moon made of green cheese,' has its source in an old fable of the wolf and the fox, pre- served to-day in one of the tales of the Scotch High- lands. ' To sow the wild oats,' — Loki, the mischief- maker, is proverbially said in Jutland to-day to sow his oats; — ' Hair of the dog that bit you,' — the Scan- dinavian Edda hath it, ' Dogs hair heals dog's bite ; ' — ' To be ready to jump out of one's skin,' — carrying back to the doctrine of changelings, and this con- nected with that of werewolves; — ' To haul over the coals '; 'To raise the wind'; 'To find a mare's nest '; 'Devil a bit', i. e., nothing at all, f the term tiuvel is used in the sense of nothing in the Nibelungen Lied^, &c., — the instances are almost without number, — these SACRED TREES AND GROVES. 125 are all expressions having mythological allusion. Such exclamations as 'Thunder! ' in English, 'Don- ner! ' and 'Hammer !' in German, come of the old Northern mythology; as Grimm says, "The names of the gods have found here a last lurking place in disguised ejaculations, oaths, curses, protestations." Brag is a degenerate descendant from the old Teu- tonic god Bragi, the brilliant. He was the god of poetry and of eloquence, but by successive steps of degradation, the word has come to stand as we find it now, for a babbling vain boaster. Termagant points to a like history. Traced through the Saracenic idol it goes to Trismegistos, an epithet applied to Hermes. '■ Hell-hound,' ' Hag-ridden,' ' Old Harry,' ' Thunder- struck,' &c., carry each plain mythological remin- iscence. Such names as Holyoake and Holywood preserve to us memory of the sacred trees and groves, and the ancient sacred wood Grimm finds perpetuated or represented in the royal forest, the grove long held inviolate for the god, kept inviolate now for the king's game. Names of plants, flowers, &c., carry clear reminiscence of the old worships, — such as Lady's Thistle ( Carduus Marianus ), hady'sFinger (AnfAylh'sJ Lady's Slipper (Cypropedium), Virgin's Bower (Cle- matis), Maiden's Hair (Capillus Veneris), &c., the plants having originally been sacred to Venus and 126 PROVERBS, FOLK-LORE, ETC. Freya, and afterwards made sacred to the Virgin Mary. We speak of epilepsy, — seizure by a demon, — cata- lepsy, genius f'the daimonion), — thzgenius of Shakespeare, of Newton, &c., — j/>mVj of hartshorn or of nitre^ lunar caustic, mercury, lunacy, &c., little conscious that in such words we are borne back to the myth-framing^ and myth-believing times. VII. SURVIVALS AND REMINISCENCES. These saws, phrases, &c., indicate not only what has been belief once, but also what is largely belief now, exercising powerful sway over the general mind, and determining in important degree the con- duct of people. There is wonderful tenacity of life in old impressions and opinions, especially when in- vested with the sanctity of religious sentiment. Hence they go down through long reaches of civil- ization and advancing intelligence, the mind here being under spell, unable to rid itself of its outgrown and dead past. Carlyle somewhere speaks of the fact that seems to hold universal, that where the brains are out, the creature must die; but adduces one example where the rule does not operate, some cer- tain absurdity or lie that will live after the brains are gone. We have an instance here. Indeed it would be hard to convince many to-day that there is not a solid ground of truth in the multitude of mythologi- cal saws and proverbs that go current in society. To a few of these that come in connection with this large theme of folk-lore, &c., we will here refer. (127) 1 28 SURVIVALS AND REMINISCENCES. There is still a general belief among ourselves in the sinister quality of certain numbers and days. It is considered ominous or fateful to sit at a table where the number is thirteen ;* of ill fortune to start upon ajourney or begin any work on Friday, — a supersti- tion that the proprietors of Railroads and Steam- ships find, to their cost, has yet a strong hold on the public mind. The belief that May is an unlucky month for marriages, prevails in England, — a belief that has its origin from a time as far back as the period of the Romans. For Ovid mentions that in that month occur the funeral rites of the Lemuralia; hence he says, it was unfitting that any woman, widow or virgin, should marry in that time. There is an old saw that — ' If you marry in Lent, You win live to repent.' In the North of England, it is ominous of ill luck that a couple be married while there is an open grave in the church-yard. It also bodes misfortune to be married in green. In the Scotch Highlands the ut- most care is used that a dog do not pass between the couple about to be married, and the bridegroom's left- shoe must be left without buckle or latchet, to prevent the secret influence of witches. In Russia, the pas- sing of a .^ar^ between the wheels of a vehicle that • Ttiis superstition comes prol)abIy from tlie Norse mytliology, thir- teen being tlie number of gods that sat at table in Valhalla, one of whom, Baldur, must die within the twelvemonth. VEILING THE MIRRORS. I 29 carries a newly married couple, portends misfortune to them; an old belief apparently connected with a mythological superstition about the moon. There are not a few that still think that monition of death is brought by the wail of the wind, or the chirping of a cricket, or the tick of the death-watch, — a very innocent sound indeed, for it is but the call of the beetle for its mate. "Akin to this is the supersti- tion that a cow breaking into the yard, announces ap- proaching death to some one of the household, — a survival from the old belief that clouds figured as cows in the ancient symbolism, were psychopomps. The breaking of a looking-glass is deemed of like sinister omen, and the fearful superstition of Napo- leon Bonaparte in regard to the breaking of a glass over Josephine's portrait is well known. Dr. John- son, we hear, from a like feeling, would never under any circumstances allow himself to walk under a ladder. . A friend of mine, a gentleman of great in- telligence and full mental liberation, recently said to me that never did he break a glass without dimly feeling that it boded misfortune, as told in the old saw. It is a frequent if not general custom in our own country, as it is in England, to veil the mirrors in a house at the time of a funeral, — a custom connected seemingly with a superstition about the image or ap- parition of the deceased appearing in a glass. 130 SURVIVALS AND REMINISCENCES. Angels, among the Wesleyans in England, as al- ready Stated, are believed to pipe to the children that are about to die, — another reminiscence of the super- stition in regard to the wind. One of them told Baring Gould upon a time, that he was sure his little servant girl was soon to die, for he had heard the night before, in an adjoining room, an angel piping for her. " The music was inexpressibly sweet like the warbling of a lute. 'And when t'aingels gang that road,' said the Yorkshire man, ' they're boun to take bairns' souls wi' em.'" A like belief prevails among the Northern races — in Norway, Sweden, &c., — in regard to the songs of the elf- maidens. It is a widely current belief, found generally in our own country and in Europe, that the howling of a dog under the window foi-etokens a death in the family. A clear trace here of the old mythological concep- tion of the wind-god, who was likened to a dog, and in whose hoarse blast was heard the howl of the hound. Odin was a psychopomp. It is plainly a survival from this very ancient belief, that we find in India and Persia to-day, the bringing of a dog to the bed- side of one that is dying, that the soul may have its needed escort. Nay, we discover the same nearer home. "All over Armorica," says Grimm, "people believe that souls at the moment of parting, repair to the parson of Braspar, whose dog escorts them to Britain." EGRESS OF THE SOUL THROUGH THE WINDOW. I3r In portions of Northern Europe at this day it is the custom when Odin rides by with his furious host, i. e., when the wind blows, especially at night, to open the windows of all the sick-rooms, that the soul of the sufiferer may, if it will, join the mystic cavalcade. In former days men hovering over their winter fires at night, and hearing the wind bay and howl, were wont to tell the listening group of Odin hastening with his troop to some distant battle-field, to choose from among the fallen those who should accompany him to Valhalla. Of the same belief comes the usage perhaps univer- sal with ourselves, certainly very common in Europe,, of opening the window or the door, as a dying per- son is breathing his last. The soul must have oppor- tunity of egress that it may joi-n and travel with the wind. "Often," says Mr. Gould, "have I had it re- ported to me that the person in extremis could not die,, that he struggled to die, but was unable till the case- ment was thrown open, and then at once his spirit escaped."* Of similar nature and probably of like- origin, is the belief in regard to the cross-beam of a. house, obstructing the departure of the soul of the * There is a very pretty application ol this idea In a poem entitled "An Ode to a Wall-FIower," by Henrlok Arnold Wergeland, quoted ty a. writer in the Notti and Queries. " But when they open the window for me, My eyes' last look shall rest upon tbee, And I shall kiss tbee as I pass by. Before I fly." 132 SURVIVALS AND REMINISCENCES. one lying under itj and causing very painful and slow death. Instances are given in English folk-lore of persons who lying under the cross-beam were subjected to many hours of suffering in their de- parture, — under ' hard dying ' as it was called, — being instantly relieved when removed from under the 'beam. Bale fires commemorating the bale or death of Baldur, are still kindled in Norway, Sweden, and also in Scotland, — some parts of it, — being lighted each year on the day when the sun passes the highest point in the ecliptic. A very old and long continued custom has been the burial with the man of what was thought to be essential or valuable to him in the other world, as weapons, implements, slaves, wives, and horse for him to ride. We find it among the rudest races, and it came down in the Greek and Western civilizations. Trojan captives, horses, and hounds were sacrificed at the burning of Patroklos; for Baldur's service were burnt his dwarf foot-page, his horse and his saddle ; King Harold who was slain in the battle of Bravalla, had his war-chariot with the corpse upon it, driven into the mound; his horse was killed beside it, and King Hring gave his own saddle, which was deposited there also, that the dead man might either ride or drive to Valhalla, as he should choose. Such THE "HELL-SHOON, I 33. burial custom survived almost to our own time, for so late as 1781 a cavalry officer, Friedrich Kasimir,, was burned at Treves with his horse laid beside him in the grave. The reminiscence of it we keep in the practice still general, of leading the favorite horse saddled and bridled for the owner's use, to the tomb, — this especially in the case of the soldier. The- custom of suttee, or widow-burning, known to us more- particularly in India, though it has been found in other countries as well, is doubtless a survival of the old savage rite of sacrificing the wife at the tomb of her husband. The king of Ashantee at the present day has a very prodigal immolation of attendants made for his use in the other world. The souls of the Norse dead took along with them: out of the world not only servants and horses, but boats and ferry-money, clothes, &c. The old custom^ in respect to these last two still continues. In Alt- mark in Germany, the peasants place a penny in the mouth or hand of the corpse ro pay his way with. Elsewhere in the same country it is customary to put shoes on the feet of the dead, — the "hell-shoon" of the old Northmen, — that they may have the service of these on the rough way to the next world. The Lithuanians bury bear's or lynx's claws with the dead, that by their aid he may be able to climb the steep crystal mountain Anafielas. The Esthonians lay beside the corpse a needle and thread with which. 134 SURVIVALS AND REMINISCENCES. to mend the torn clothes, a hair brush and soap, bread brandy, and a coin ; if it is a child, a toy.* It is said to be the custom always at an Irish wake to put a coin in the hand of the corpse, to enable the departed thus to meet the expense of the ferriage. Baring Gould states that in Cleveland, in England, only two years before the time of his writing, as he was credibly informed, a man was buried beside whose remains were placed a candle, a penny, and a bottle of wine, the explanation given our author by one who was present being that "the candle was to light him on his way, the penny to pay the ferry, and the wine to nourish him as he went to the new Jer- usalem." I am also advised from trustworthy sources that in some of our American cities, certainly at He- brew burials, towel and soap are deposited with the dead, for service required as the soul crosses the river Jordan. The Maoris conceive that the souls of the dying speed away from the westernmost coast of New Zea- land. So in Brittany to-day, near where Cape Raz stands out in the ocean is popularly believed to be the launching place of souls. The bay is called the "Bate des Ames," Bay of Souls. A headland is near * Among the Eussian peasants it Is still customary to throw small copper or silver coins into the grave at a funeral, and a corpse is some- times provided with a pair of boots also for the journey. Kalston's Rus- sian TaUi, Sm., p. 108. " THE BAY OF SOULS. I35 this bay where were gathered the spirits about to set forth for their new home beyond the sea. " The bare desolate valleys of this cape," says Mr. Gould, " op- pose the island of Seint, with its tarn of Kleden, around which dance nightly the skeletons of drowned mariners, the abyss of Plogoflf, and the wild moors studded with Druid monuments, make it a scene most suitable for the assembly of the souls previous to their ghastly voyage." Procopius, stating the belief in his time ('sixth century^, says that on the shore dwell a few fisher- men, to whom is granted the singular office of ferry- ing the souls of the dead over to the land beyond. For this service, they are exempted from payment of taxes. In the dead of the night are they sum- moned, one after another in rotation by a knock at the door of the cottage, and a call in a low muffled voice. The ferryman hastens to the beach, and there sees lying a strange skifiF, not his own, and with nothing in it. - He takes the oar and sets forth, the boat is full, and its depression to the water's edge shows him the weight of the load he is carrying. No form is seen, but a voice is heard inquiring after the name and coun- try of each. The boat glides through the wave, and the journey to Brittia f Great Britain^ is accomplished in an hour, whereas with the ferryman's own craft it would have taken twenty-four. Arrived at the strange shore, his bark is unloaded as quickly as it 136 SURVIVALS AND REMINISCENCES. had been filled, and returning back to Brittany, it is so light that it scarcely touches the water. It is an old belief, this of the promontory and the bay, whither the souls resort. It is grounded in an ancient Celtic myth, and is held fast in the Breton folk-lore to-day. It may have wider diffusion on the continent than simply over this province of Bre- tagne. All over the world, with savage and barbaric peo- ples, the belief prevails that a cure of maladies may be effected by the sorcerer or the medicine-man sucking out the evil, and this is pretendedly exhibited in a stick or stone, sometimes a ball of hair, or grains of corn, or a lizard even, produced from the sorcerer's mouth. In the North of Ireland, the wizards still extract elf-bolts, — that is, stone arrowheads, — from the bodies of bewitched cattle. Sir John Lubbock suggests that this old method of cure may linger in survival among ourselves in the universal nursery remedy of ' Kiss it and make it well.' The talismanic virtues ascribed to the witch-hazel are well known. The forked stick is thought to have miraculous power for pointing out the presence of water beneath the surface. Like efficacy is sup- posed to reside in the ash, mistletoe bough, &c. In Selborne stood for long time a row of pollard-ashes that became very celebrated for the cures they had performed. Young children were thrust naked TALISMANIC TREES : ASH, ETC. 1 37 through an opening made in the tree when it was young, to cure them of rupture. The same method is employed in Cornwall for the healing of children at the present time. A blow from an ash stick is believed to be instant death to an adder, while if struck with stick of any other wood, the reptile will show signs of life till sundown. This belief in regard to the life of a snake continuing till the sun sets, even though he should be decapitated and crushed to a jelly, was current within my recollection. I have often heard it in childhood, and probably the same impression popularly obtains yet. Pliny speaks of the well-known antipathy of the serpent to the ash. In Staffordshire the ash has a superstitious venera- tion ; it is very perilous for any one to break a bough of it. In Cornwall a piece of the wood of the moun- tain-ash is frequently carried for years in the pocket, as a charm against ill-wish, and a cure for rheumatism. A like veneration was shared by the elder. In Somersetshire they never burn the elder-wood for fear of ill luck ; and the tree is seen planted in Eng- land beside many rural cottages, not unfrequently also in our own country, especially in New England, the reason originally being in its supposed protec- tive power against witches. " Hazel," says Grimm, " served of old to hedge in a court of justice, as they still do our corn fields." In England, and in some parts of our own country, it is believed that a bush 138 SURVIVALS AND REMINISCENCES. like a bramble, which arches over and has root at both ends, is potent to cure a child of hooping cough, if he is drawn a certain number of times through it. In Germany, a child that will not learn to walk is treated in the same manner, made to crawl under blackberry vines that form an arch. A survival here of the old superstition in regard to the shoe or ring, joined probably with a very ancient veneration be- stowed upon the wood of certain trees. We all draw at wish-bones, recognizing, though now mainly in sport, the long prevalent faith in the power of this bone — forked in its shape and therefore talismanic, from conceived resemblance to the lightning, — repre- sentative of the Wish-god, to confer upon one what- ever he may wish. The little blue flower " Forget-me- not," growing upon a forked stem, tells in its name, its relation to mythology. The weather-cock upon the church spire, accord- ing to Grimm, may carry mythological reminiscence ; and the same may probably be said of tolling the bell at time of burial, and the practice of throwing clods upon the coffin, before the friends depart.* * The cock, the bird of the sun, the fowl of Swantewit, Slavic god of light, was worshipped by the Pomeranians, says Wuttke, after their con- version to Christianity. Hence the gilded cock on the steeple. The 'pass- ing bell ' even now in some parts of England, Is thought to be potent to drive away the evil spirits that may beset, and expedite the soul's Jour- ney to its home. See Henderson, Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties, &e., pp. 62, 63. The superstition is grounded in the same belief as that which prompts the burning of candles about the corpse in the families of Catho- THE DOVE ON THE TOMBSTONE. 1 39 The three strokes of the hammer dealt in the cere- mony of laying the corner stone, likewise the three strokes of the auctioneer as he knocks off an article on the sale to the final bidder, — these perpetuate Thor's striking down of his hammer in symbol of possession. The sun and moon figured by discs with human faces, seen for instance on the pages of our almanacs, come doubtless from the foretime worship of these bodies as personal deities, the same represen- tation of the same thing in full survival being found in Peru. The pharmaceutical sign 9, — an altered form ofV — seen in our physicians' prescriptions, sur- vives still to tell of the astrological belief in the planetary influence of Jupiter, and repeats the invo- cation for the blessing of his benign power on the patient. The familiar dove on the tombstone carries to the old conception among our Teutonic ancestors of the soul as a bird, that at death flew away out of the dying person's mouth. The pine cone seen on the Cashmere shawls comes through the Arabs, who lies. Indeed the burning ol candles in the churches comes presumably of the same origin. And the use of wax candles has arisen from an old myth about the bee. Bees, says the legend, draw their origin from Para- dise. As they left it on account of man's transgression, God gave them his blessing. Therefore mass cannot be sung without wax. Grimm, Teuton. Mythnl., 905. The sound of the first three clods on the coffin gives omens in regard to future visitations of death. Probably enough this practice may also be connected with a belief in regard to the nascent life of the departed, as the Germans preparing their seed-eom for germination, mix with it three sorts of earth. See Grimm, 1. c. 644 and 1137. 140 SURVIVALS AND REMINISCENCES. employed it as an ornament in architecture, from mythological sources. It was a symbol in the Diony- siak mysteries. The practice of orientation in burial still obtains, though few probably are now aware of the fact. In all the rural cemeteries with which I am acquainted, the graves are laid in one direction, due east and west, or as nearly so as may be. The custom prevailed widely in Europe through the middle ages, and it is still known there. The ancient Greeks buried in the same way, sometimes with the head towards the west, sometimes the reverse. Savage races in the present do the same, — Australians, Fijians, Indian tribes, the Ainos in Japan, &c. More commonly with us the head is laid toward the west, face looking toward the east. The practice was grounded in the thought of the soul's finding its new life in the east. Yet probably of those who bury, hardly one in ten thousand may have asked, or if asking, been able to answer, — why all in this direction.' Thus unconsciously to this hour, we are continuing in this simple and little noted observance, a worship very ancient in the history of humanity, and of wide, almost universal diffusion. Our pagan ancestors had the custom of devoting meats to their deities, and this chiefly at Yule tide. THE CHRISTMAS TREE. I4I Our Christmas banquets appear as the representative and successor of this observance. So the Christmas ■ tree may quite likely have come down to us from the world-tree Yggdrasil, of the Northern mythology. There is a deeply grounded faith in regard to " wraiths," " fetches," " doubles," &c. The literatures of the world and the folk-lore of all races are full of relations of their appearance, and there are minds haunted and harried with the impressions they carry of them. The gift of wraith-seeing still flourishes in Silesia and the Tyrol, and it is by no means unknown in our western world. Probably it may still be found more or less prevalent throughout Europe. A phantom shroud seen in spiritual vision upon some one still living, indicates by the height at which it appears upon the person, the length of life that yet remains, — his death will be immediate, if the garment reaches up to the head, is more distant, if it comes only to the waist, &c. Seeing the form as if the body were laid out, or the apparition of the face as in a window, is very frequently mentioned as in the ex- perience of some friend, at or about the moment when, as was ascertained, the death of the person ap- pearing took place. Sometimes the voice is heard in distinct call, when no apparition occurs. The writer remembers to have heard in early child- hood, in the home, an account, very remarkable, of the experience of a man well-known throughout that 142 SURVIVALS ANT) REMINISCENCES. section, stacding eminent for piety and high religious character, receiving distinct communication from time to time through apparitional visions informing him of the length of life before him, and quite likely the particular circumstances that should attend apon his death. A like account was gfiven, and I believe published, from the pen of a near relative, — a brother I think, — touching McDowall, widely known a gen- eration and more ago, for his prominence in behalf of Moral Reform. That an apple tree should have blossoms upon it at the same time it has ripe fruit, is considered in North- amptonshire a sure omen of death. The same sign is "SO regarded in this country. The raven is wide- ly reputed a bird of ill-omen. In Denmark the peasantry believe the appearance ot a raven in a vil- lage, to portend surely the death of the parish priest, or the burning of the church within that year. There are many omens of sinister character, particularly as foreshadowing the approach of death, too numerous to mention here, — as the first note of the cuckoo heard by an invalid, green broom picked when in bloom, vew accidently brought into the house at Christmas among the evergreens, the old house clock departing from its usual precision, and striking an extra num- ber, &c., &C. The Russian peasant thinking the souls of his fore- fathers creep in and out behind the saints' pictures DISEASES CAUSED BY SPIRITS. 1 43 on his icon-shelf, puts there crumbs of cake for them to eat. In the cemetery of Pere La Chaise in France, they Still place cakes and sweetmeats on the graves at the time of the festival of All Souls, and in Brit- tany the peasants on that night as they retire, leave the fire burning and fragments of the supper on the table, that the souls of the dead, coming in the night, may also partake and be refreshed. Great dread is felt in regard to the spirits of the departed, as it is supposed they may have untold power for injury. This obtains especially among savage and barbaric races ; it survives with the civil- ized. We have seen what the feeling of the Slavons with reference to the vampire that was supposed to inhabit a certain dead body, and make excursions by night to the living, sucking their blood and life away. The watcher beside a corpse in Russia is armed with charms to protect against attack from it at midnight. Diseases are accounted for on the ground that they are attack of spirits upon the living, — this view is familiar both in the Old Testament and the New, — and these spirits are frequently human souls. In New Zealand every ailment known to flesh is caused by a spirit, more generally that of an infant, or some one undeveloped, that enters the body of some rela- tive and feeds upon it. In Spain to-day the priests practise exorcism to expel epilepsy from the mouths and feet of their patients. So the exorcist in New 144 SURVIVALS AND REMINISCENCES. Zealand, finding by his magic devices whence the troubling spirit came, will manage by a charm to get it mounted upon a flax-stalk and posted off home. It is authentically stated by a prominent physician in the city of Chicago, that the body of a woman there who had died of consumption, was actually taken out of the grave, and the lungs removed and burned, because it was believed she was drawing after her in the grave some of her surviving relatives.* The practice of watching beside the corpse during the nights intervening between the death and the burial, — a custom well known among ourselves, — comes of a mythological survival. It is related to the superstition from which the burning of candles about a corpse, already referred to, originated. Very interesting results we should find in tracing to their sources other customs, quaint and whimsical, trivial in seeming, yet standing for matters of gravest reality once, and largely held so now : such as binding a piece of red flannel upon the throat for example, to cure irritation or inflammation there, — the color must be red, no other will answer ; or winding a stocking about the neck for the same purpose, — the garment must be taken fresh from the foot, this is one abso- lutely indispensable condition ; putting on new clothes — some article of apparel at least new, — on Easter day, held an imperative obligation in the north * Conway, Demonologi/, I, p. 52. SPILLING SALT ON THE TABLE. 1 45 of England, and not to be neglected except on severe penalty; throwing a shoe to assure luck to a depart- ing friend, or laying the shoes crosswise in relation to each other beside the bed at night to secure charms against cramp, and " rheumatics," &c. In some parts of Scotland a horse-shoe, one that has been found, if nailed to the mast of a fishing boat, is believed to in- sure the boat's safety in a storm. The Welsh house- wife makes the sign of the cross over the dough she is kneading, lest the evil spirits infesting, should prevent its rising, and the dairy-maid in Wales lays two sticks of the roan or mountain-ash wood running cross-wise under the churn, to guard against the witches and secure the bringing of the butter. All these and many more have their basis in my- thology, and carry us back a long way towards the infantile, at least the child condition of the human mind. The spilling of saU on the table is interpreted of ill omen. 'Tis an old impression and holds with great tenacity. A Pythagorean symbol enjoined, " Always keep salt on the table." Salt among the Germans had great veneration as possessing wonderful pro- phylactic and protective power. Infants that were unbaptized, and so were considered more exposed, had salt placed beside them. Leonardo da Vinci, in his picture of the last supper, has represented Judas Iscariot overturning the salt, — thus showing that 146 SURVIVALS AND REMINISCENCES. the significance of the incident as an omen, was mat- ter of belief at least as far back as his time. That the cat will, if permitted, suck the sleeping infant's breath, and thereby cause its death, is a piece of folk-lore widely diffused, and well remembered by the writer as current in the time of his childhood. It received most careful heed from mothers and nurses. It is one of the mythic fictions, related doubtless to the old and general superstition in re- gard to the cat as one form that the witch is wont to assume. Among the ancients it was said that as witches, cats come and suck the blood of children. The appearance of a black cat on the cradle of a child, or upon the bed of a sick man, is thought in Ger- many and elsewhere in Europe, a premonition of death. If it is seen upon a grave it tells that the soul of the departed has passed under the devil's power. In Shakspeare's Macbeth, when the witches are to prepare their evil enchantments, the first witch com- mences with repeating the words, — ■' Thrice the brinded cat hath mewed." It illustrates the power of survivals, that this old and utterly gratuitous superstition should have come down sending its shadow into the nurseries of our childhood. The belief in regard to the herpetic disease called the Shingles ('from Latin cingulum, a girdle^, that if the ■ eruption passes quite round the body of the child, it THE RAINBOW POT OF GOLD. I47 will surely causehis death, is also of mythologic ori- gin. I recall this also in my early childhood, very dis- tinctly remembering the dread apprehension with which anxious mothers watched and awaited the is- sue, when this malady had entered the household. The disease was originally attributed by a not unnatural creation of the fancy, to the presence of a kind of coil- ing snake, and it was supposed that if the reptile wound quite round the body so that the head and the tail should meet, the patient must die. The same super- stition has been observed in Cornwall. Children believe at this day that a golden cup or a bag of gold lies at the end of the rainbow. The story comes from the ancient sun-myth so widely diffused, of the golden orb sinking into the waters of ocean or stream or lake. In one transformation it was the legend of a golden treasure buried in the Rhine, as we have it in the Nibelungen Lay ; then finally, changed as it is in the nursery tale, we see the old myth again. Their name is legion. To enumerate them all would be impossible. In Brandenburg omens are taken from pig's spleen, as they were by diviners in the time of Augustus, from the livers of the victims. In Carinthia the peasant fodders the flame, offering lard or dripping to it, that it may take that and spare his house ; fodders the wind, setting out a bowl of various meats near by that it may eat and be ap- 148 SURVIVALS AND REMINISCENCES. peased. In Swabia, Tyrol, and the upper Palatinate, when the storm rages, they throw a handful of meal in the face of the gale, bidding it eat, and cease to blow so hard. In Franconia, a baker before com- mitting his biscuits to the oven, will throw half a dozen of them into the fire, with the exclamation, " There poor devil, those are for you." Questioned, he will admit the fear that but for this his biscuits will be burned in the oven. The Brandenburg peas- ant pours out a pail of water by the door, soon as the cofEn has been borne out, to prevent the 'walk- ing ' of the ghost. In Lancashire, the good house- wife to drive the witch out of the cream, puts a hot iron into it during the process of churning.* The belief in amulets, charms, omens, &c., is so widely extended, we may say it is substantially uni- versal. Innumerable are the saws current in Europe and in our own country also, touching signs and presages, repeated on the lips of the people, some of them now sportively, yet most held in deep serious- ness, and every one, even the most trivial, felt to have some background of truth, and accorded for the most part a certain respect and recognition in conduct. Over multitudes throughout Christendom they carry potent enslaving sway. And few among the intelligent dare quite disregard them. The ghost or shadow of their impression lingers with all. * Tylor, Prim. Cvit., 1. 112; II. 24, 369; Dyer, Domestic Folk-Lnyre, 170. TRANSFER OF DISEASES. I49 Charms are used for dispelling tooth-ache, remov- ing warts, wens, &c. Diseases are cured by such magic. An ague or a fever is transferred to some object, as a craw-fish or a bird, a willow shrub or a tree. "Ash tree, ashen tree, pray buy this wart of me," is a frequent formula. Wens may be taken ofiF by wishing, and a charm repeated over them. Warts may be transferred to pebbles by touching, and the pebbles left by the road-side to impart their maladies to the unfortunate wight that fiqds them. In Wales, the wart-charm is to be secretly left on a spot where two roads intersect, taking the form of the cross, and any poor victim picking the spell up insures upon himself the ailment. In Thuringia it is believed that a string of rowan berries, or any small article, touched by a sick person, will receive his disease. With the Servians, says Grimm, magic spells banish the ague into Frau Fichte, — the pine. An ailment has sometimes been plugged into a tree- trunk, or conveyed away through some lock of hair or nail-parings and so buried.* How very like, nay, identical, this is with what we see among all the rude and low races, there is no need here to illustrate. The same thing goes over inevitably into the sphere of religious belief, and here with far giaver, more tragic efifect. What we call the pagan, the *See Tylor's Primitive Culture II. 136; Giimm, Deutsche Mythol. 1118-23. 150 SURVIVALS AND REMINISCENCES. savage and barbaric religions are charged to the brim with it ; they become not seldom one great mass of incantation and sorcery. It survives, continues with wonderful tenacity of life up into higher and the high- est stages of civilization. Looking into the history of the Hebrews, we find much of this belief in spells, the magic transfer of maladies, sins, &c., from their proper subject to an- other. The brazen serpent set up in the wilderness, is one example ; the scape-goat which received and carried the sins of the people into the desert, is another. And what is the belief now and for long widely current through Christendom in the magic virtue of Jesus' blood to take away all sin, to extin- guish both the guilt and its consequences, but the belief in one omnipotent charm, — a spell powerful as that which carries off warts or ague or a fever in the blood, transferring them wholly to some other, only operating here upon a far deeper, and infinitely more intractable disease.' Like one great Olosaonian that cures everything, it is effective to cleanse all stains, all penalty away, and relieve the offender of every burden of his transgression. ' My sins, — he bore them all upon the tree,' is the so frequent, constant declaration. What is it but the extension of the worship of the Jews of their sin-offerings and charms of substitution, to the beliefs and worships of Chris- tendom.? Thus is this great transaction on Calvary, which justly seen, is of sublime significance in human MAGICAL SPELLS. 151 history, made a comprehensive juggle, one monster incantation. A correspondent of the Notes and Queries tells us, that he found upon the road one day a piece of paper bearing this inscription, " Jesus Christ, that died upon the cross, put my warts away." Upon inquiry he found that it had been given by an old Irish ser- vant in the family, to a young girl who was af- flicted with warts. He had passed his hand over the warts, made the sign of the cross over them, and offered an invocation. As the paper, which was to be dropped by the roadside, should waste, so would the warts disappear ; and this was actually taking place. We have a new element introduced here in regard to the perishing of the paper, imported from an old pagan superstition already noted. But this of the virtue of Jesus' blood, is but an extension of the pre- vailing doctrine. And who shall say that it was either illogical or unnatural .' A like idolatry obtains in respect to belief of the Bible, reading its texts and chapters, obser- vance of the forms prescribed for worship, the positive ordinances, &c. Indeed the religious faith of the world in its fundamental elements is touched and colored largely with mythology;— conception of God as personal, individualized Deity dwelling in a place; heaven a locality, fixed, definite, of as determinate a character in this regard as Lon- 152 SURVIVALS AND REMINISCENCES. don ; the spiritual world inhabited by angels, arch- angels, and spirits from earth, having its city and royal court, wherein stand the bands of players upon their harps for the delectation of the sovereign ear forever, and hosts of ministrants girt and ready to execute on the instant the behests of the royal mon- arch seated in the midst on his throne of an infinitely more than Oriental splendor. And the character ascribed on one side of his nature to the Supreme, a relentless, pitiless rigor, an implacability and vin- dictiveness, refusing to look or hear for an instant except first there be offering of blood, — what shall we sa3' of this, mingling with the civilization, the en- lightenment of our nineteenth century? These are all cases of survival, and they show how tenacious, how unendingly persistent, the old mythic conceptions in the mind. In fact the present is penetrated through and through, and written over with the past. Barbarism extends into civilization, and there is no department of man's life anywhere, that is not colored and molded, dominated largely from barbaric time. Our speech bears the marks of the first rude articulations of savages ; our institu- tions, customs, are inscribed with- the impress of those times ; our faith, our worship, our religious ideas and doctrines, carry the imprint of the beliefs of rude low races in their every feature. There is survival and also revival of the old in the varied stages of civilization. LINGERING GHOSTS AND SPECTRAL SHADES. 1 53 The German goddess Holda or Holle, still holds sway, says Mr. Gould, over the imaginations of the German peasantry, and it is probable that there is not one among us that is thoroughly free from super- stition. The shadows still cling amid all the noon- day light. It is said of the late President Garfield that he had a superstition in regard to a certain num- ber that was fatal to him, and his apprehension seems strangely realized in the significant events of his life. There are few or none that do not give heed to some things taken as omens. Everyone has his spectre, some object of shrinking or dread. And those vague haunting forebodings, hovering appre- hensions of ill, perhaps of some calamity impending, that come at times probably in the experience of all, unaccounted for and unaccountable, purely gratui- tous, yet casting sombre shade over the whole hori- zon of life, paralyzing the strength and depressing the spirits, — are doubtless the elongated shadow from the life of the savage, who, beset, densely igno- rant and perpetually exposed, was the victim of alarm and unknown terrors everywhere from begin- ning to end of his existence. They are the regis- tered record of a long, dark past. They are the lin- gering ghosts of old fancies and beliefs, not yet exorcised from the mind. Man has been in effort slow and painful to civilize 154 SURVIVALS AND REMINISCENCES. himself; he is not yet civilized. He has assayed and struggled to outgrow the " Clouds of doubt and creeds of fear," but he has not yet put them under his feet. We have never any of us escaped or surmounted fully the old and inherited, ingrained dreams and illusions and nightmares of mythology. This tree will cast its shade and send its breath over society for ages to come. There is however, as we view from one side these th4ngs we have seen, a ground, a raison d'etre for them. They have some explanation and partial justification. When we recall the extreme uncertainties that hang, as appears, over all our life, the power of accidents for aflfecting destiny, so much that seems in keeping of the casual and fortuitous ; when we are brought conscious, as ever and anon we are, of the immense destructive force that lies in the hands of the elements, the cyclones, floods, earthquakes, that, let loose from time to time, devour entire populations in an hour ; when we learn by the illuminations of science, some- thing of the amazing reproductive energy of the microscopic germs and spores that carry fevers, typhoid, yellow, and other, diphtheria, malaria, con- sumption, cholera, — " there is nothing to my knowl- edge in pure chemistry, which resembles the power of self-multiplication possessed by the matter which produces epidemic diseases," says Tyndall ; — we are THE CHILD STAGE OF HUMANITY. 155 almost made to feel the dread reality of that world be- fore which the primitive man trembled,* the presence of the horrid monsters that everywhere beset, or the one sinister omnipotent spirit that overshadowed, and to regard the charms and incantations to ward ofiE", the invocations and sacrifices to appease, to pro- pitiate and placate the enemies many or one, however gratuitous and idle, yet not unnatural. They are all exceedingly interesting and instruc- tive withal, as belonging to the natural history of the mind. Even the monstrous errors and illusions that have been glanced at in religion, are to be regarded with consideration, with a compassionate and pitying tenderness. They appertain to the child stage, they are inevitable to that, yet they must surely fade away and disappear in the growth of advancing humanity., * The mere thinking of a, thing, especially If it is an object of dread, seems sometimes to bring It on. Particularly Is this the case in reference to certain physical ailments. Fear invites attack, and Is very likely to insure it. Hence might have originated the superstition in regard to the approaxih of an enemy when the mind suflered itself to think about him. A reminiscence of that we have doubtless in the proverb, "The devil never so near," &c. there is a subtle and still unexplained connec- tion between the remembrance of some absent and supposed to be tar distant person, coming suddenly and freshly to the mind, and the vicinity or unexpected appearance of that person before us. The beliefs that have grovm up about this piece of experience, have quite ready explana- tion in what we still see, and find considerably beyond our science as yet. VIII. SHADOW AND SIGNIFICATION. Reference has already been made briefly to two or three of the symbolic terms employed very fre- quently in the old myths. Those terms are very various, and seem many of them to defy all attempts at rational explanation. In other instances, and these we may also name many, there appears, as we look carefully and with some thoroughness of comparison in the expression of different peoples, a beautiful fitness in the selection of designations that at first blush seemed purely fanciful or arbitrary. "There is in alinost all really ancient myths," says Mr. Brown, "a profound appropriateness of simile, based, among other things, upon most careful observation of nature." Ruskin also speaks of " an instinctive truth in ancient symbolismj" and of " mythic expres- sions of natural phenomena which it is an utmost triumph of recent science to have revealed." The house of glass, crystal palace, or seven hedges of spears, or wall bristling with spikes, — all used so frequently where mention is made of the sleeping maidens that lie imprisoned, — we have seen to have (156) THE sleep-thorn; the spindle. 157 one meaning, being fittingly referable to the ice- crystals, walls of ice, formed in the winter cold. So the glass mountain, Ana.{ie\a.s, in Slavonic and German myth, has from this hint come easily to signify the world of the dead, or primarily death, but by easy transition the paradise for souls ; for they said that in this abode was a large apple orchard, in the midst of which rose a glass rock, crowned with a golden palace, and to enable souls to make that steep ascent they buried bear's or lynx's claws with the corpse. In the tale of the Sleeping Beauty, we are told that in the palace naught throve save the ivy, a sufficient indication of the reign of winter. The term sleep- thorn is employed, and sometimes in its place spindle, to indicate the instrument that brings death. The reason of the use of either of these words is not quite clear. It would appear to have come from the cus- tom which prevailed universally among our own ancestors certainly, in a distant age, of burning the dead. The thorn was with the Aryans in Europe, the invariable concomitant of the funeral pile, the bush being laid as the foundation for the fire. Hence the thorn becomes the symbol of the funeral, and so of death. This afterwards gets exchanged for the spindle, f the Princess in the tale is said to have fallen asleep from the prick of the spindle^, and thus the meaning of the symbolism is lost. In the Hindu, it is a raksha's claw left in the crack of the 158 SHADOW AND SIGNIFICATION. door by the demon, which afterwards pierces the hand of the beautiful maiden, Surya Bai, as she opened the door of her dwelling in the morning, and this claw caused her death. Other terms of like import are the serpent by which Enrydike was stung, the arrow or thorn that slew Isfendiyar, &c. In the myth of Persephone, the same office is done by the narcissus, which seems to have been chosen on account of its benumbing qualities ; it produces narke, lethargy. In the tale of the Piper of Hameln, it is said that all the rats or mice were piped away, and plunged into the river Weser where they were drowned. Perhaps this is a vague reminiscence of some great pestilence which swept ofiFthe children of the town. Certain it is that in Slavonic legends, and also Ger- man, the soul is represented under the figure of a mouse. There are many stories illustrating this. One is of a servant girl in Saalfeld, in Thuringia, who at a party once fell asleep, while her companions were shelling nuts. A little red mouse was seen to issue from her mouth and run out at the window. Efforts were made to wake the sleeper, but without success, and in the course of the evening she was re- moved to another place. Soon the mouse returned, rushed hither and thither looking for the girl, but not finding her disappeared. At the same moment the girl died. THE beetle; the butterfly. 159 Another story is of a miller, who was cutting fire- wood in the Black Forest. He fell asleep in the midst of his work, and his man saw a mouse creep out of him and run away. Careful prolonged search was made, but the mouse could not be found, and the miller never awoke. Saint Gertrude, who was Holda, was represented under the figure of a mouse, and she led an army of mice, i. e., souls. And the legend of the Mouse Tower in the Rhine, and the wicked Bishop Hatto, who in the tenth century was eaten up by the rats, i. e., the souls of those whom he had wantonly murdered, has here its significance. Perhaps the mouse was selected as symbol of the soul, as has been suggested, from the fact that it hi- bernates, and thus from the continued life, hints immortality. So the Egyptian use the beetle', scara- baeus, uniformly as symbol of the soul, or the after- life, apparently from the fact that it buries its eggs in a ball of clay in the sand. These in due course of time become chrysalises and winged beetles, and thus, as the people thought, the scarabaeus stood as fit emblem of the renewed life. The butterfly is a famil- iar type of the soul, and the Danes still recognize a man as a werewolf by his eyebrows meeting, as he in this resembles a butterfly, and seems ready to fly off and enter some other body. Danae was imprisoned by her father Akrisios in a brazen dungeon, i. e., the prison-house of the night, and l6o SHADOW AND SIGNIFICATION. the same signification seems to be carried by the great Iron Stove which stood in a wood wherein the king's son was incarcerated, in the German tale told by Grimm. Phoibos Apollon was born in Delos, the bright land. He was bathed by the nymphs in pure water, and wrapped in a spotless, a white and glisten- ing ^0^1?, the same as Cyrus and Arthur are said to have been wrapped in, when carried away from the house in which they were born. In the same robe Thetis, rising from the sea after his death, wrapped her son Achilleus. This robe is plainly the beaming sky, or the fair shining heaven. Herakles is said to have been clothed at one time in 2l lion's skin, '' perhaps," says Mr. Cox, ''the raiment of tawny cloud which the sun seems to trail behind him as he fights his way through the vapors." The mystic Orphik dress of the votary of Dionysos was the all-variegated skin of a wild fawn, "a repre- sentation," says the author of an Orphik hymn, " of the wondrously wrought starsof the vault of heaven." Over this must a golden belt be thrown, type of the Homeric Ocean-circle, illumed from the rising sun. Dionysos himself was Nebridopeplos, cl&d in the spotted fawn-skin, as Herakles was Astrochiton, clothed in robe of stars. Both Apollon and Artemis are said to have been born in Ortygia, the quail-land. Is there reference here to the color, and so the signification might be THE WOLF THAT SWALLOWED THE MAIDEN. l6l the grey dawn ; or is it, as would seem from what Max Miiller tells us, to the bird, as the first messen- ger of spring, and so of the early morning? In the earliest myth of Herakles, the hero fallen into a deep sleep lies rigid, stiff like dead, until lolaos wakes him by holding a quail to his nose. And in the Teutonic tale Iduna was stolen like Perse- phone away, and was mourned by Odin and all the Aesir, even the trees shedding frozen tears, but Loki brought her back in the form of a quail. The forest is employed to signify night. In the Volsung Saga, Sigmund after being conquered by Siggeir, in the struggle for the possession of the sword Gram, runs with his son Sinfiotii as a werewolf through the forest. The same figure is used in the familiar tale of the Babes in the Wood. In the Russian tale, Vasilissa the Beautiful, i. e., the dawn, wanders in the forest, until she sees the two riders, one white and one red, in succession bounding up before her. In the Greek mythology as we have just seen, this is the brazen subterranean chamber in which Danae was confined, or again it is the Gorgon's den that Perseus must traverse ere he can come to the beautiful gardens of the Hyperboreans. Again, it is the wolf that swallowed the maiden in the scarlet cloak, and was met by the hunter and opened, and so Little Red Riding Hood was delivered unharmed. Or, it is coiling throttling snakes, as we see in the Toltec mythology, — the hero attacks the cloud-snakes' \6t ftiABOw A»v m&fitncArwM, monslain; in the Greek, H«rakle« ftranslef the <«> p«Bt* feot to dectrof Mm i» tli« crsuOe, !• die H^>re«r it i« tbe >fcw*r i^ ^ FWitthut, wbo§e ptthur* Sampton—SbemeOt^ ibe Suor-wretted and ther^ flew Mf enemies. In £»:!, tliere i* no en4 to tlie figure* nnder wbidi n^^ 0r dafknet* it repretemttd inibemfibsaadUfieadtoftheworid. Often it i>« ^iuuXf 3 dragoon, or a wifdi,'*' Reference iKwabiea^ been moAttotbtfMgU tw^i, Vexteo* i* armed wiOi it^ harfi^iiae 0k if> Mm oT Verate*, and it ^«f * wliat«c«ver it MU upon, Tbecetw ba* it welded of die «une saetal with the f word of Apollon, Uitihe tarn* witb tlie q>ear fA AdbiUea*, the arrows oif Pheibo*, ibe g/oSd fword Gram, bnried to it* Mlt in fJie tree trunk and Wi^ i»f for VcUmig to draw it oat; it i* Artknr'* tvand Excalitwr, and Boland'» Jhtrandalf amd the emciiatited twordwitb wiudb Be>!>wnlf kills Gr^ad^ And we finditagjinninflieMrord'nrfinfindiel^rf tide, U is tibe ' Glaive of L^tif in tlie $c« eonfllet. Feager- swlek, site great giaataad an. Fengosvlidc^ dags^, vUA waa of finest Eagsera ateel, " was bent like apieee a( sofi irca agaiiwt Jack's black feUe." Beal<«e«a2lioiiadal>:eto bead tbetongaadatnngbow.wUdi K «as t&ovgbt :ba£ oalr tbe gteat gtaat vas eqaal to. Hits afeo lemfada of BTtbie bMidentB that ve liare ia beroes of earBertfiBe,Od;3aeii3 and 164 SHADOW AND SIGNIFICATION. already seen the same in the ' seven-league boots' of the fables. The magic ring is a symbol of perpetual recurrence in all the mythologies, all certainly of the Aryan world. It carries back originally probably to a figure employed in the phallic worship, intimating the unending fecundity of nature, and it is present under many and very various forms. In the Yoni of the Hindus, also in the Lotos of Hindu and Egyptian mythology, in the can of the milkwoman in Hindu folk-lore ; in the ark, in the ship Argo, and ship of Athene, in the cestus probably of Aphrodite, the necklace of Harmonia, in the Brisinga-men, or Freya's necklace of Northern mythology, the horn of Oberon, Huon, &c., horn of plenty, the caldron of Ceridwen, the round Table of Arthur, the San Greal, and finally the shoe, type of good fortune, shoe thrown after a newly married couple, in Scotland after the sailor departing on his voyage, and the horse-shoe nailed over innumerable doors. These are a part only of the multiplied forms of the symbol employed in ancient times and modern, to represent or shadow in image the fruitfulness of the great mother. When the Aesir were captured and bound by the Sons of Reidmar, they could not get released except on promise to fill the otter's skin with gold, and to cover it so that not one white hair should be seen. This was done only when Odin laid the ring THE MAGIC RING AND THE GLASS. 1 65 that had been taken from the dwarf Andvari upon the last white hair that remained visible upon the otter's skin ; in other words, not until all nature had been fructified with the new life, were all the traces of the winter obliterated.* The ring occupies conspicuous place in the folk- lore, as is readily known to all. There is no end of omens associated with it. It typifies fortune to its favored possessor, and to lose it, or have it break on your finger, is unlucky. In German legend is a tale of a swan that swims on the lake in a hollow moun- tain", holding a ring in his bill. If he should let it fall, that mishap would bring the world to an end. This naturally reminds of the glass, which is but another form of the same symbol, in whose safe car- riage is bound up the luck of Edenhall. "If this glass do break or fall, Farewell the luck of Edenhall." Correspoading to this is the stauros, originally as would seem Xha phallos, and presented under various forms to symbolize the procreative and life-giving * See Cox, Aryan Mythology, pp. 854-358, to whom the writer cordially acknowlegdes deep Indebtedness not only here but also In many other places, touching the interpretations of Aryan mythology. If it may be said that sometimes he draws with undue freedom upon fancy in dealing with the problems of this often strange and very obscure realm, it is also to be afSrmed that he has a deep and delicate apprehension of the spirit from which the old myths were produced, a poetic sense, which gives him admirable equipment tor such work, and renders his volume upon the Mythology of the Aryan Nations one of the most rich and suggestive of any that hare thus far appeared. l66 SHADOW AND SIGNIFICATION. power in nature. Especially the Sun as father of all, as we find in Egyptian and Assyrian representa- tions. In the seistron of the Egyptian priests, the two figures, this and the one just named above, are com- bined, and the same we see in the stauros enclosed in a ring, i. e., a cross of four spokes in a ring, which was worn as an amulet, and this also had a significant symbolism. It seems to be present in various forms, such as the rod of Hermes, the trident of Poseidon, the ham- mer of Thor, and the divining rod. In modified form it became the serpent, symbol of life and healing, and as such is presented by the side of Asklepios, the great healer. We find it also in the Brazen Serpent, which was such an object of regard, of worship among the Israelites. We see it to-day on the barber's pole, — the ribbon painted spirally around it representing originally the serpent, — symbol as it was formerly of the healer. In the Old Testament narration of the temptation and the fall, the serpent and the tree of knowledge, — being different forms of the same symbol, — come before us. But here the serpent is held under repro- bation, he is accused as bringing the first sin, and thus is clearly indicated the coming in of a new and worthier faith that had subjected and kept in subor- dination the old phallic worship, while it did not, — THE CROSS OF OSIRIS. 1 67 and this is almost universally the case in such a change, — extinguish it. Doubtess circumcision in relation as it stood to the male symbol, had a mystic, a spiritual signifi- cance, imaging perhaps the cutting off, denial of the lusts of the flesh, renunciation of sense. The G-e- rairai and Vestal Virgins came as the successors by a spiritual transformation of the Hierodouloi and their equivalents in Greek and other temples. Thus also the cross, the stake or cross of Osiris, became at length the symbol no longer of sensuality, — probably it was always regarded as having a talismanic power, and as a sacred sign it is exceedingly old in the his- tory of humanity, — but of denial and self-sacrifice. Other terms are quite obscure, and one cannot eas- ily feel sure that he has found the proper meaning. In the myth of Persephone, the maiden has unwit- tingly in the under-world eaten the pomegranate seed, and therefore though she may return to earth, she may not stay there, but must after a time come back to the realm of Hades. Does the pomegranate seed hint here the fate of mortality, the term standing as Nork thinks as symbol' of generation .' * If so, we have the thought so prevailing in the Orient, espe- cially among Hindus, expressed by Buddha, 'AH that is born must die.' 'The very first night on • He finds a natural symbolism In the fruit, as It contains In Itself at once both seed and receptacle. It was employed, he says as type of pro- creation and conception.— B«ol WdrterTyueh, s. v. Apfel. l68 SHADOW AND SIGNIFICATION. which the man of valor took up his abode in the womb,' says the Hitopadesa, 'thenceforward he ap- proaches death, day by day.' Some such conception seems to be represented in this unique symbol. The sisters of Meleag^ros were converted at his death into guinea-hens, and mourn, weep now for the slain brother. These hens probably refer to the fleecy clouds at sunset, the mottled or variegated appear- ance being symbolized in the bird. There is no end to the symbolism that has been de- vised. Of itself it would make a theme for almost limitless study, as exhibited in myth, tale, painting, sculpture, &c. The Nursery Tales themselves fur- nish a field very fruitful and almost unexplored in this regard. With the Egyptians, the sun as the generative power of the world was represented in the form of a winged Fhallos, placed before the horizon.* The sun is an archer; a conquering, toiling hero; a Fish King, — in reference to his going down into the water ;f a Frog Prince; in one of the tales the Apple * In the Greek also Dlonysos in Pallas, winged, the sun rising on the ' golden pinions.' The same symbolism we note in Assyria and Kaldea, the winged solar circle. From the Assyrians the type was borrowed by the Persians, and it has had wide spread as we see on Boman tombs,— a human head with two serpents near it, these representing the wings,— and on tomb-stones in our own time,— the winged cherub. t In the Babylonian religion represented half fish, half man, to signi- fy the fact that half his time was spent above ground, and half in the sea. THE LYRE OF HERMES. 169 of life ; in the Arabian Nights, a roc's egg, &c. The moon is a fair maiden that watches Endymion as he sinks into his long slumber, a horned huntress, a heifer, and the beautiful eye of night, &c. The light fleecy cloud is a swan of whitest plumage ; a swan- maiden, and the beautiful nymph goes to bathe in the blue lake, — the sky. The glory or radiance of the sun is represented as a beard, or streaming locks. Quetzalcohuatl in the Toltec mythology is described when he landed — he came to their country in a ship — as tall, of white complexion, with fair hair, bushy beard, and dressed in long flowing robes. Other American gods, solar deities, have also this emphasized characteristic of the long beard. So ApoJIon had flowing locks, Helios is called by the Greeks the yellow-haired, and a Latin poet names the sun's rays Crines Phoebi. Sometimes horns also signified these rays, and Moses, says Goldziher, " who received many features of the solar myth, was imagined provided with horns, i. e., with beaming countenance, a symbol which sacred art has preserved only too faithfully." Hermes formed the lyre from a tortoise-shell, " which," says Mr. Ruskin, "is the image of the dappled concave of the cloudy- sky." The peacock's tail in which the eyes of the dead Argos were planted by Here, describes the star- spangled heavens, as the' Daidalean Labyrinth these 170 SHADOW AND SIGNIFICATION. Stupendous mazes in which the mind to this hour is lost. The Leopard 2l\so seems to symbolize the starry- night. So in the Hindu, one of the two dogs of Yama, god of the under-world, is Cerbera, the spotted, the other being Syama, the black. In Heraldry the Leopard is image of the night. He is the deadly foe of the Lion, type of the Sun, and as his antagonist hastens into the Den of the Two Entrances, in the "dark passages," as described by Homer, he falls upon him, does him to death, though the slain beast is soon to be reborn and appear victor at the Eastern Gate. The earth in Hindu tales is hinted in the figure of a milk-womati and her can, as in the Greek and some mythologies of saVage races, she is pictured a mother with many breasts. Hekate, with keenness of vision almost like that of the sun, and hearing acute like Heimdall's on the Bridge that leads to Valhalla, assumes successively three heads or faces, — though with what seem to us arbitrary figures, the horse, the snake, and the dog, — the three phases of the moon. Argos with his hundred eyes, Briareus with his many arms, had a clear meaning for the mind, as indeed the figures among the Hindus, many- handed and triple-faced, part fish, or boar, or eagle, have or had once some apt expressiveness in symbol. So the animal heads of Egyptian gods and goddesses, Anubis, guardian of the dead, jackal-headed; Har, or THE TWO FACES OF JANUS. I7I Horus, the youthful sun, hawk-headed; Hathar, the cosmogonic Venus, cow-headed; Teti, Thoth, thought, ibis-headed; and Hapi, or Apis, the sacred bull; — all signified something intelligible and once carried a striking force to the worshiper. Let one walk through the galleries of the Egyptian Antiquities in the Louvre, marking well the expression written in the statues, steles, reliefs, &c., and he will feel freshly and probably as never before, that the thought, the worship of that wonderful people was saturated in symbolism. The leonto-kephalic Isis, Sekhet, &c., according to M. Paul Purret, represent the power of the solar beams. The Uraeus, the avenging Cerbereii scourging the condemned with whips of living snakes, the Kunephaloi, dog-headed monkeys,* guarding at the pylon, entrance to hell, — we can see to have had an aptness of figurative meaning for the mind. In the Greek and the Hindu mythologies are androgynous representations of deity. They tell in symbolic expression that God was conceived as sexless, or of both sexes, the perfection of the crea- tion represented complete in him, or dual nature typified. "Ourfather and our mother too." The two faces of Janus, the bearded and the beardless, repre- * " Tlie emblematic monkeys of Truth and Justice," says Mr. Cooper. " A monkey the emblem of justice because all his extremities are hands, and all equal." Serpent Mythe cf Andent Euypt, pp. U and 77. 172 SHADOW AND SIGNIFICATION. sented him in his two aspects, the yanus Patuleius, and the yanus Clusius, Opener, and Shutter. In the morning and in the evening also he is with smooth beardless face, but in the middle of the day he is with large beard and hairy face. So does Dr. Goldziher interpret the symbolic figure. So in the Semitic: ' The four faced Karthaginian Baal,' — " the solar time king," says Mr. Brown, "in his four changing seasons." Nature, the poet of our century characterizes as 'living garment of God.' An old Greek writer describes it as veil, whereon were wrought figures majestic, beautiful, the living universe, earth and the heavens. ' Zas, i. e. Zeus,' says Pherekydes of Skyros, ' makes a veil large and beautiful, and works on it Earth and Ogenos, i. e., Okeanos.' Ogen includes here the Oversea, and we have again in this the starry peplos. The veil, says Pherekydes, ' Zas hangs on a winged oak,' — our old tree Yggdrasil again.* Is not this as good and per- haps as perspicuous, as the doctrine in the Kantian philosophy of all-conditioning Time ('or else Space^ in the perceptions and processes of the mind.' * So again It was an oak to which the Golden Fleece was nailed In the grove of Ares. An illustration we find of the transformation made as the myth passes into the heroic legend, and the secret unconscious fidelity withal to the old, in the declaration of Sir Tristram to Isolt, that the car- canet he had won at the last tournament was ■ Grown on a magic oak-tree in mid heaven.' WEAVING WITH THE GOLDEN SHUTTLE. 1 73 Mahomet had a wonderful horse Al Borah, on which he rode one night to the seventh heaven, where he beheld the very presence of Allah himself, and held converse with the eternal. Shall we not deem it thought, the inner consciousness of the soul, which at times rises and mounts with more than the speed of light to the very home and centre of infinitude, im- mensity, power, the supreme Soul.-" The relation tells that rising from his bed that night to mount the trusty steed, he overturned by accident a pitcher of water, but so instantly was the journey accomplished, that he had made the visit and returned to his couch ere the stream had time to reach the floor ! The lurid storm-cloud in Finnish poetry is Ukko's fiery shirt. Somewhat similar' the conception in the Greek, of the fatal Nessos-shirt worn by Herakles, as he was about to sacrifice on the Kenoian promontory in Euboia. The Russian tales describe Perun, the god of light, as sometimes lying for a while veiled in a shroud, — the fog, — or floating over dark waters in a cofiin, — the cloud. In Homer, In6, the rising moon, coming up from the deep as he describes ' with beauti- ful ankle,' gives to Odysseus her ' immortal kr'edemnon,' head-band, or flowing scarf-veil, line of waving light ' seen across the waters and issuing from her bright face, whereby the hero is guided to the land. In the Kalevala, not only all the beasts of the forest - and the fowls of the air came to listen, enchanted 174 SHADOW AND SIGNIFICATION. with the sweet song of Wainamoinen, but the fair virgins of the air, sun and moon, these also halted and hearkened, as they wove with the golden shuttle and the silver comb. But presently, transported with this voice, they forgot all, the comb and the shuttle fell from their hand, and the threads of their tissue were broken. And Homer says of the nymph Kalypso, that ' she was singing within in a sweet voice as she fared to and fro before the loom and wove with a shuttle of gold.' So Kirke was heard by Odysseus, 'singing in a sweet voice, as she fared to and fro before the great web imperishable, * * fine of woof and full of grace and splendor.' One of the Hindu tales describes Tara Bai, the star- maiden, or the splendors of the night-sky. " She was tall and of commanding aspect. Her black hair was bound by long strings of pearls, her dress was of fine spun gold, and round her waist was clasped a zone of restless, throbbing, light-giving diamonds. Her neck and arms were covered with a profusion of costly jewels, but brighter than all shone her bright eyes, which looked full of gentle majesty."* " A remarkable amulet Instanced by Mr. Brown, copied In Caylua' Collection of Antiquities, Illustrates well the occult but significant sym- bolism in many of the representations in ancient art. It belongs, It is stated, to the Greek-Egyptian period. It seems to represent the death or suspended llle, and resurrection and triumph of the sun. In the cen- tre of a circle a closed human eye, around it various representations, mainly figures of animals, all turned towards it. On the right or eastern side a cock, a serpent and a goose ; on the north a lizard and a thunder- THE SONGS FOUND BY THE WAY SIDE. 175 There is imagination in the rudest races, not a con- ception in the myths of any, how wild, grotesque, and gratuitous soever it may appear, which had not some ground in truth, or a lively stimulating fancy. These poets could declare, as did the author of the Kalevala of his epic ; — " These songs were found by the way-side, and gathered in the depths of the copses; blown from the branches of the forest, and culled among the plumes of the pine-trees. These lays came to me as I followed the flocks, — in a land of meadows honey sweet and of golden hills. The cold bolt ; on the west a scorpion and a phallos ; and on the south a lion and'a dog. The meaning, as Mi. Brown gives it, as follows: the closed eye rep- resents the Sun of the underworld ; the lion placed in the lower part of the design, indicates that " the flaming sun of day has sunk beneath the horizon,"— "the Lion, type of the diurnal Sun." The raging dog-star, his ally, stands beside him. The scorpion is the darkness that attacks andstings the light to death,— such is the significance of that figure with the Egyptians,— but the winged phallos seen below the horizon, indicates that the secret, generative power of the sun still remains. The Lizard, the moisture and the dews of the night ; the thanderbolt, his slaying by Apollon Sauroktonos. To the east Is the cock, solar bird of day, and directly east of hlra the serpent, serpent of light in Egyptian symbolism, and the creeping dawn beam In Greek,— compare Sarpedon, literally the creeper, 'the creeping light of early morning,'— while above the goose volant, flying from east to west, represents the soul of the Osirian, said by the Egyptian to ' cackle like a goose,' flying toward the sun-god Uasar, Osiris. An Ingenious Interpretation, seeming verisimilar, and making the device apt and striking. It is In harmony with the little we know of this occult realm. The reversed torch, so familiar among ourselves, and withal very expressive, derives, as appears, from mythology ; represented with the sable figure of night, it typifies the descent of the sun to the under-world . 176 SHADOW AND SIGNIFICATION. has spoken to me, and the rain has told me her runes; the winds of heaven, the waves of sea, have spoken and sung to me ; the wild beasts have taught me, the music of many waters has been my master." Nature had spoken to not unwilling or unreceptive minds, and in instances the tongue was able to report what the ear had heard, and the penetrating eye had seen. IX. DIDACTIC, ETHICAL. Of Plutarch it has been said that he is " the genius the most naturally moral of any that ever existed." Of man we may say, of the early, the myth-making man, that he is naturally, instinctively moral, that he inclines by spontaneous prompting to infuse in his* myths some moral, or at least didactic flavor or tone. Turned to such use, myth or fable becomes one of the most lucid and telling methods for stating truth. It is a method which has always been very much afiFected by the human mind. We are all taught by object lessons, we apprehend things in the concrete, and ethereal and invisable we see only in symbol. Illustration, or some form of expression in the objective, impresses us most, burns the thought in as it were by fire-print. " Nothing so marks a man," says Emerson, "as imaginative expression." "A happy symbol is a sort of evidence that you thought is just. A happy symbol always stimulates the intel- lect ; therefore is poetry ever the best reading." " The endless analogies between man and nature," says Mr. Tylor, are "the soul of all poetry." (177) 178 DIDACTIC, ETHICAL. Apologue, parable, a proverb with the color and flavor of a fine image, — these have always been the forms of speech most accepted and lasting with the multitudes of mankind. We find frequently with barbarous races such things done as neatly and aptly as with any. For an instance, the Zulus say that the hyrax, on the day when tails were given out, instead of going, sent for his, as the day happened to be rainy, and he would not encounter the wet. The consequence was, he never got any tail. It is told in our old English proverb : ' If you wish a thing done, go; if not, send." There are expressions, a single phrase only at times, in some instances almost but a word, which write themselves indelibly upon the memory; they give with such felicity and force the fact. Carlyle says, "Trifles are the hinges of destiny." The Arabians said, "The Destinies ride their horses by night," in- dicating the inexorableness and swift march of fate. The Greeks: "The feet of the avenging deities are shod with wool." There are phrases used on 'change, and current in 'slang' speech, tropical, figurative through and through, that are infinitely expressive. We could not well spare them from the vocabulary. Was it the Algonquin who said of the Great Spirit, — "Whose wigwam is the sky," and of the gods to express their immortality, declared, — " Their fires do always burn ? " There is an Indian proverb which it THE HEARING OF HEIMDALL. I 79 is said the French stole and appropriated, — felt doubtless so good, the pale face could not improve upon it: — "Let not the grass grow on the path of friendship." A writer in the Century magazine not long since described Herbert Spencer as "a sort of intellectual clearing-house, on a scale befitting the nineteenth century;" a bit of characterization we shall not so quickly forget. Characterizations by a great orator, as Wendell Phillips for example in some of his masterly 'philippics,' are so terse and telling, they can never fade from the remembrance. The Norsemen said of Heimdall, the watchman upon the walls of Valhalla, that he had ears so acute he heard the grass grow upon the meadows of earth, and the wool upon the backs of sheep. Like things are told of Pythagoras and of Zoroaster. In a Ger- man tale, the story of the Six Servants, it is said of one of them that his eyes were so piercing that they would split in twain whatever they looked upon ; he was obliged therefore to keep a bandage over them ; the vision of another was so far-reaching, he saw at a glance all round the world ; and the third could hear every thing, even the growing of the grass. The original for this picture it would not be hard to guess. The Russian tales tell of a giant named Swift-eye whose glances set on fire whatever they look upon, insomuch that he is compelled ordinarily to wear l8o DIDACTIC, ETHICAL. bandages over his eyes. One variant describes him as having huge overhanging eye-brows, and im- mensely long eye-lashes, completely intercepting, covering hig vision. When he wishes to look out upon any thing, powerful assistants are required to lift up the brows and lashes with great iron pitch- forks. In Servia the glances of the Vii reduce whole cities to ashes. Ordinarily, however, his eyes are covered by the closely adhering lids. But when these lids are raised by the forks, then his stare is fatal as was that of Medusa. Thus did these Slavonic tribes personify the dread lightning, and explain his fell destructive power by the unsheathing of the basilisk eyes. In Atlas with his broad shoulders supporting the world, we have hint of the greatness, the service of the large soul, the one who can bear all and do all, who supports, sustains us all by his exhaustless endurance and hope. Says our poet : — " Suns set, but set not his hope ; Stars rose, his faith was earlier up : And matched his sufferance sublime The taciturnity of time." Somewhat the same idea doubtless we have symbol- ized in Odysseus, the much enduring, ever persisting, the mind of unlimited resources, equal to anything. Originally undoubtedly the sun-god, Odysseus stands, as the myth has come down to us, for much more than any thing in the sun. He typifies a hero of performance, of endless tact, wisdom, skill, the THE AVENGING DEITIES. l8l power and executive force we should see in an ideal captain and deliverer. That there are coarser features in the character belongs to the age in which it was framed. That presentation in the concrete, of a mental conception, clothing it in flesh, in a human personality like our own, has strength and quicken- ing for us. We are able to see in some measure the stages and progress of this growth. First that which is natural or sensuous, then that which is spiritual. In India the conflict between Indra and Ahi is physical, the conflict of light with darkness, of day with night, of V sun with throttling cloud ; then in Persia, in the Zoroastrian faith, it is the battle of light with dark- ness, but here of Ormuzd with Ahriman, good with evil. It has been carried to the ground of the moral. So Herakles, the physical monarch, king of day, becomes in some of the myths an elevated moral hero. In the beautiful apologue of Prodikos, in which Arete and Kakia, Virtue and Vice, each profi'er their claim and solicit his obedience, the hero nobly chooses the rugged path of self-denial and generous performance for others' welfare. " The greatest of all mythical heroes," says Mr. Cox, " is thus made to enforce the highest lessons of human duty, and to present the highest standard of human action." The Erinyes, properly the dawn-rays, or creeping light of morning, become in the Greek mythology 1 82 DIDACTIC, ETHICAL. the avenging deities, who bring evil deeds to light, and mete swift inevitable retribution to the crimes of men. Like Ate, whose wrath may never slumber, so long as the murderer remains unpunished. Thus doth the mind ascend perpetually from lower to higher, and physical myths, in some cases coarse and even gross, are sublimated, and made the medium for inculcating the noblest and most vital lessons. The forces personified become whips and scourges of God, follow and overtake the wrong doer, with the relentless persistency and severity of the awful hounds of Yama. In the tale of Prometheus and the vulture or eagle preying without ceasing on his liver, which how- ever, held its own, growing by night as much as covered the loss it had suffered by day, is there not fit symbolizing of the mind, haunted with the divine unrest, preyed upon by the devouring thought, con- sumed and spent day by day, yet perpetually recov- ing itself, and returning fresh to its battle every morning ? The myth of Tantalos, originally physical, has, as it comes to us, a moral significance. Not more vividly could be described the baffling, the mockery and disappointment of a mortal whose life is an offense to the gods ; who is in the midst of abund- ance, yet cannot partake ; who is hedged, cramped, thwarted, at all moments when he seems on the HERAKLES' CROWNING CONQUEST. 183 threshold of suqcess. Hence our word '■tantalize;' very expressive its meaning, and known to the experience of all. Herakles brought up Kerberos from Hades, and restored Alkestis. Is there not here a hint of what the Greek mind saw, that to the brave, heroic soul, to great daring and doing, all things shall yield, death itself shall be overcome, the conquest at length be wrought over hell and grave, over all-devouring Time even.' Greek, if any in the ancient world, saw to this end. ' He must reign until he hath put all' things under his feet.' And 'the last enemy, death, shall be destroyed.' — A like force of meaning may doubtless be seen in Pandora's box, Kalypso's spell, Kirke's draught, &c. The tale of the exposed and rescued maiden is told in so many forms from the story of Herakles and Hesione, Perseus and Andromeda, to the countless legends of later time. We see something at least of this same influence, refining and elevating, in the story of Maiden Mergrete. Saint Margaret was the daughter of a priest at Antioch. Cast into a dungeon, she was beset by Satan, who in the form of a dragon, swallowed her alive. But she came off victorious; it was the conquest of the soul, everywhere superior to the beast force. She was delivered by the invol- untary act of the dragon ; he burst asunder, and she came forth unharmed. 184 DIDACTIC, ETHICAL, " Maiden Merin-ete upon the dragon «tood ; Blytbe was her beart, and joyful was her mood." In other mythologies than the classic also do we find the nobler sense. The Churning of the Ocean by the gods, in Hindu, whereby the Amrii, drink of Immortality, was found, conveyed a high moral mean- ing. The Norse story of the Norns or Fates, — the same office they bear as the Greek Moirai, — tells a great deal. There are three of them, Vurdh, Ver- dhandi and Skuld,— Past, Present, and To-be, They guard the place in the heavens where the gods hold their meetings, beneath the shadow of the tree Yggdrasil, and they water the roots of the tree from the well of Vurdh. When the second Helgi was born, the Norns came and fixed his lot, and their decree was in all cases irrevocable. 'Life, death, wealth, wisdom, works, are measured for one while on his mother's bosom,' says a Hindu apothegm,' ' Every man's fate hath God written on his forehead, says another. These are the Weird Sisters whom Macbeth saw, and in the legend of King Arthur we find them again in the three sisters who meet three knights by the fountain. The first has on her head a garland of gold, beneath which the hair shows white, for she is three score or more years old; the second is thirty, she also garlanded, and more richly in gold; the third a maiden of fifteen only, her head crowned with a chaplet of flowers. Once more, at the end of the THE FATAL SISTERS. 1 85 life of the good king, when he must to the vale of Avilion ' to heal him of his grievous wound,' the sis- ters apparently come again in the hooded queens in the barge. In other words, the king passes out of time, and is henceforth in keeping of the eternal. In the Greek, Lachesis, f literally the Allotter^, dispenses to each one his destiny, Klotho ('Spinster^, spins his portion of the thread of life, and Atropos ('Unchangeable^, severs. How more strikingly could the presiding power that stands over all life, and apportions to each his lot and measure, be represented than by this of the distaff and the shears ? Who that has ever looked upon Michael Angelo's Fates, has not felt impressed anew with sense of the momentous fact of this stern inexorable destiny.' The flax is being paid out, the thread is being spun; and Atropos with her unerring shears, is here, severing perpetu- ally. In the tree Yggdrasil, we have a majestic symbol. This tree seems to signify the Universe, or Existence. Its branches cover the whole world. The gods hold their meetings under its shadow in heaven. In the crown of the tree sits an eagle, and in the well Hver- gelmir lies the serpent Nidhoggr, and gnaws its roots. Between these, the crown and the roots, runs up and down perpetually a squirrel, seeking ever to sow dissension. The eagle, the serpent, the squirrel, all clearly have a significant meaning. 1 86 DIDACTIC, ETHICAL. The star-spangled /^//^J or robe of Harmonia, i. e., the luminous, glistening vault of heaven, is said by one of the Greeks to hang on a luinged oak, — the world-tree Yggdrasil. Aietes nailed the Golden Fleece that had been borne to his home by Phrixos, to an oak in the grove of Ares. There the dragon guarded it, and thence Jason, subduing the monster, must recover it. Odin is sacrificed and hung on this tree, offering, as he says, himself to himself: '• I know that I hung On a wlnd-roeked tree, Nine whole nights. With a spear wounded, And to Odin offered, Myself to myself. On that tree. Of which no one knows From what root it springs ." Even life itself must die, a sacrifice to life. There is no force or power we know that does not yield, on occasion, to a higher. There must be death, that from its bosom may spring the new life. Fate, the old Greeks said, was higher than Zeus, and even the supreme had to bow before its decree. , Man was framed from the sacred ask. Of this world-tree, De Rougement says that " it is one of the most magnificent emblems invented by the human mind." The story of the eye exacted from Wuotan f'Odin^, so that he has but one, by Mimir holding the other as THE MUTE TONGUES PUBLISH THE CRIME, 187 a pledge, ere he will give him a draught from the water which imparts wisdom, seems to couch a deep sense. An eye for an eye, you can have nothing unless you give something. Originally perhaps purely physical, — the reflection of the sun, or his eye left in the well, — the story long since began to have a larger, more home-coming significance. The gods in the Norse heaven could not bind the Fenris wolf. Steel he snapped, the weight of moun- tains was nothing beneath the power of his heel. But finally a limp band they put upon him, and this held. The more he struggled in resistance, the stronger and closer it drew. So doth fate, unfelt, unsuspected, until we resist and attempt to break away, hold us in tightening, invincible grasp. After the killing of Siegfried, and as the burial is to take place, Gunnar swears that /«i? is innocent, — he and all his men inthis regard, — but lo, what refutation is given to his lying words, when as Hagen passes before the dead body, these wounds bleed afresh! In the Kalevala we are told that when Leminkainen is slain in an expedition undertaken against the people of Pohjola, the black waters of the river of forgetful- ness bearing him down, his comb, that had been left with his mother, bursts out bleeding* * Mr. Henderson says that the custom of touching the corpse by those who come to look at It, is still kept up among the poor at Durham, and he is doubtless correct in bis view that it sprang from the belief once uni- versal among the Northern nations that a corpse would bleed at the l88 DIDACTIC, ETHICAL. The Bohemians believe that holy sparrowhawks will alight upon the boughs of the oak that springs from the grave of a murdered man, and publish the crime. In Swedish and Scotch folk-songs it is told that a maiden was drowned by an enemy. From her breast-bone a musician made a harp, from her golden hair the strings of his lyre, and the first stroke of this harp slew the murderess. Like is told in one of the Kinder mar chen of the slain brother from a bone of whom was made a shepherd's whistle ; every time that whistle is blown, it publishes the crime. The Eastern literatures are full of this. Nature is righteous and testifies her sympathy with the wronged. In the Ramayana, Sita is abducted by Ravana, borne away in his talons through the air for Lanka's Isle ('Ceylon^, there to be held his vassal, slave. She shrieks and screams for deliverance, but no human ear is there to hear. The poet finely tells how all nature sympathizes with this outraged lady, as she is carried crying for help faraway over forest, stream, hill and dale. " As he moves, the breeze is still with dread, tree shadows thicken ; the twigs stiffen, and beasts and birds stand mute, and the waves of the river tremble with terror." Afterwards Rama describ- ing to his recovered bride his pain at being separated touch of a murderer. It appears that this was one ol the tests used to determine guilt In the Courts of Justice, and that the bleeding of a corpse was urged as evidence in the high Court of Judiciary at Edinburgh so lately as 1668. Henderson, NoUx on tin Folk-Lore of the Northern, Counties^ (tc, p. 67. THE LOVES EARTHLY AND HEAVENLY. l8g from her, says : — " These creepers which could not speak, but which had pity on my grief, showed tne by their broken branches which way the Rakshasa had carried thee off. Affrighted I knew not whither thou wert gone, but the gazelles, forgetting to graze, and holding their heads lifted, directed me southward with their eyes. The clouds poured down fresh rain in the mountain, while I was shedding tears at thy absence."* The tale of Kephalos and Prokris in the Greek, we have in Hindu in the story of Krishna and the maid- ens. Originally purely a nature-myth, the relation has been wrought into a poem of great beauty and power by Jayadeva, — the ' Song of the Divine Herds- man. 'f This represents the loves of the spirit, and the conflict of lower nature with higher. Krishna is tempted, is intoxicated by the shepherdesses of the wood ('the senses^, and after various experiences, heart-longings and sorrows, he returns finally to his due allegiance, the divine Radha, his soul's true sat- isfaction and portion forever. That there is always an ogre, a sinister element everywhere, an evil eye, an ill-wisher, shadowing the steps of every one however good, no state assured, no possession perfect, seems to be told by the Norse- * Baglmvansa, XIII. t See Arnold's Gita Ckminda ; also Grfflth's Specimens of Old Indian Poetry. Extracts from this last may be found in the author's Oenu of the Orient, pp. 150-155. 190 DIDACTIC, ETHICAL. men in their myth of Baldur. Baldur stands origin- ally for the sun, the sun in his gentle, benign aspect. He is the best beloved among the gods, beloved also by all things on earth, living and inanimate. But Baldur dies, struck by a dart from the hand of his blind brother Hodr f'the darkness^, "and the shad- dow of death appears for the first time in the homes of Asgard." He has to go to Helheim, the dark abode of the goddess Hel, who reigns there. Odin sends his messenger Hermodr, to pray the goddess to let Baldur return once more to the earth. Nine days and nine nights he rode through dark glens, environed in impenetrable night, passed GjoU's bridge, fGjoll, the Stygian river ^, found Hel, and besought her that she would permit Baldur to come back. Hel consented on one condition, namely, that he should prove that Baldur was so loved as Hermodr told. " If all things, both living and lifeless weep for him, then shall he return. But if one thing speak against him, or refuse to weep, he shall be kept in Helheim." Hermodr delivered his answer; the gods send off messengers everywhere to proclaim the decree, and to pray that Baldur through the attested sorrow of all things, be delivered from Helheim. All things wept, "both men and every other living thing, and earths, stones, trees and metals, just as thou hast no doubt seen these things weep when they were brought from a cold place to a hot one." But when all seemed BALDUR S RETURN AND REIGN. 191 to have been done that Hel required, there was found an old hag named Thokk f Dokkhr, dark^, sitting in a cavern. She was begged to weep that Baldur might be delivered. But she replied : — " Tliokk will wail With dry eyes Baldur's bale Are. Naught quick or dead For carl's son care I ; Let Hel have her own." And Baldur must remain in Helheim. But, adds the myth, a day will come, the Twilight of the Gods, when in one final internecine conflict with the evil powers, the gods themselves shall be destroyed, and they shall conquer too. A new earth shall emerge from the all-engulfing deluge, Baldur liberated will come from Death's home, and God of Peace, reign benign, supreme over this regenerate world. So does the inextinguishable faith of the human soul in the final triumph of good over evil, life over death, and all calamity, sorrow, and suffering, assert itself. The myth sombre, shadowed, yet is sublime in its hope, its augury of the final end. The power of music, or in general, the power of spiritual over physical or material, is well told in the many stories of the effect of the lyre, &c. Ex- amples are in Amphion, Orpheus, the Ribhus among the old Hindus; in modern times Oberon, the Elves, and the innumerable tales of harpers in the folk- lore. 192 DIDACTIC, ETHICAL. The wind is sometimes music, which like the fine strains of an instrument, sets everything in motion and responsive. This the original meaning of the myths, — the poet would have seen new truth in his conception had he known what modern science tells us of singing flames, or the response in song of the gas jet to the tuning-fork, or of the window-pane to the notes of the organ, — the mind refines and ether- ealizes until the stories tell of the power of music, of serene truth and beauty to lift and enchant the spirit. At the transporting tones of Orpheus' lyre the ship Argo moved into the water, the trees and rocks were stirred, and the beasts of the forest were assembled to listen. Nay, says the ancient poetry, at the music of this " golden shell " the wheel of Ixion stopped, Tantalos forgot the thirst that tormented him, and the vulture ceased to prey on the vitals of Tityos. Amphion with his lyre built the walls of Thebes; the very si ones took themselves up and moved forward to their appointed places in obedience to the tones of his instrument. We have the Sibylline Books story in the Sanscrit, this also originally a tale of the wind. A celebrated poet writes with his own blood, a mighty book of tales in the forest. It contains seven hundred thousand slokas or verses. The poet offers the book to the king, Satavahana, but he objects pretendedly on ac- count of the dialect in which it is written. Gunadhya wainamoinen's song. 193 withdraws, repairs to a mountain, kindles there a great fire, and begins to read his tales, casting each page when read into the flames. Stags, deers, bears, buffaloes and roebucics, in fact all the beasts of the forest, gather and listen, delighted beyond measure and affected to tears. The king meanwhile has fallen sick, and his messengers scour the forest in vain in- search of the game that has been ordered for him. For every living creature of the woods is away listen- ing to the poet. The king is informed of the con- dition of things, hastens himself to the spot and offers at any price to buy the wondrous volume. But alas, now all of the seven hundred thousand slokas have perished in the flames, but one. A beautiful story and plainly the same, or only a variant of that we have in Roman history of Tarquin and the Sibyl. The song of the sons of Kalew had marvelous effect upon all nature; forests and orchards waked into fresh life and thrilled forth in blossom, nut, and fruit, their new joy, beasts and birds were enchanted and inspired, and every tongue was loosened also to sing. The Finns tell of the effect of the harping of Wain- amoinen. " The ancient Wainamoinen began to sing ; he raised his clear and limpid voice, and his light fingers danced over the strings of the kantele f'harp^, whilst jo}- answered to joy, and song to song. Every beast of the forest and fowl of the air came about him 194 DIDACTIC, ETHICAL. to listen to his sweet voice, and to taste the music of his strains. The wolf deserted the swamp, the bear forsook the forest lair; they ascended the hedge and the hedge gave way. Then they climbed the pine and sat on the boughs, hearkening whilst Waina- moinen intoned his joy. The old black -bearded monarch of the forest, and all the hosts of Tapio, hastened to listen. His wife, the brave lady of Tapiola, put on her socks of blue and her laces of red, and ascended a hollow trunk to listen to the god. The eagles came down from the cloud, the falcpn dropped through the air, the mew flitted from the shore, the swan forsook the limpid waves, the swift lark, the light swallow, the graceful finches, perched on the shoulders of the god. The fair virgins of the air, the rich and gorgeous sun, the gentle beaming moon, halted, the one on the luminous vault of heaven, the other leaning over the edge of a cloud. There they wove with the golden shuttle and the silver comb. They heard the unknown voice, the sweet song of the hero, and the silver comb fell, the. golden shuttle dropped, and the threads of their tissue were broken. Then came the salmon and the trout, the pike and the porpoise, fish great and small towards the shore listening to the sweet strains of the charmer."* Tears of bliss burst from the eyes of the god as he is playing, they fall on his breast, from breast to *Kalevala, Eune XXII, given by Baring Gould, Curious Myths, &c., Second Series, 177-179. freyr's cloud-ship. 195 knees, then from the knees to his feet ; they wet five mantles and eight cloaks. His tears transmute to pearls of the sea. In the story of the Jew in the Thorn-bush, the Jew, who here stands as representative or successor of Phoibos, in the old Greek myth of Hermes and the cattle, is compelled to dance in the bush until his clothes are all torn to shreds. The servant is arrested, tried and condemned to be executed, but, as he stands under the gallows, he makes one final request to be allowed to play a single tune with his fiddle that had shown such marvelous properties. It was granted, and lo, judge, hangman, accuser, spec- tators and all, join, forgetting everything else, in the magic dance. This lad comes near to the requirement of Thoreau. Some one was commending to him .^schylos and Pindar, whom he also admired. 'But .^schylos and the Greeks,' he said, in describing Apollo and Orpheus, ' had given no song, or no good one.' " They ought not to have moved trees, but to have chanted to the gods such a hymn as would have sung all their old ideas out of their heads, and new ones in." There is perhaps a like wealth of meaning and felicity of expression in the Norse tale of Skidbladnir. The sun-god Freyr had a cloud-ship called Skid- bladnir, and she is thus described in the prose Edda. " She is so great that all the Aesir with their weapons 196 DIDACTIC, ETHICAL. and war gear may find room on board her; but when there is no need of faring on the sea in her, she is made with so much craft that Freyr may fold her together like a cloth, and keep her in his bag." In the light of modern science we can read in this description, evolution, the world with all its teeming life unfolded from the atoms, and resolved again ; the cosmic vapor passing through the systole diastole of endless change, the Proteus of shapes. And when we learn in Tyndall that the sky-matter in atmos- pheric space beyond the height of the Matter-horn or Mont Blanc, all swept up and gathered in one recep- tacle, would not fill a gentleman's portmanteau, pos- sibly only his snuff-box, our myth borrows new significance. The fact established by Newton fur- nishes another and perhaps equally good illustration, viz., that the expansive force of atmospheric air is such that a spherical inch of it removed 4,000 miles from earth, would become a sphere more than filling the orbit of Saturn. Or this from Faraday ; — that a single grain of water has an amount of electricity which, liberated under due conditions, would equal that of a powerful thunder storm.* Truly science illustrates and also outgoes the fancies of the myth-makers. Fact is greater, more startling than the utmost dreams of the imagination. * See Tyndall, lAahi and Electricity, 154, 165. THE SAN-GREAL. 197 But there needs this language to hint something of its beauty and its gradeur. The tale of the Holy Grail, has a long history behind it. It started apparently as celebration of the wealth, the fecundity of nature under a very significant symbol, has been connected in various ages with a worship sensuous, gross, debasing, and has been in long course of time transmuted to an exalted poem, a worship of the highest, holiest, best, the soul can know. It is a story of surpassing richness and beauty, carrying a profound moral sense and uplifting power to the mind that can read it as it was oace written, in symbol. " The Grail," says Baring Gould, " is not a sacred Christian vessel, but a mysterious relic of a past heathen rite." It is connected by an early writer, Taliesin the poet, with bardic mythology. Taliesin says, " This vessel inspires poetic genius, gives wisdom, discovers the knowledge of futurity, the mysteries of the world, the whole treasure of human science." The Grail, we are told, was only visible to the baptized and perfectly pure in heart. A single thought of passion would obscure it to the vision. To Sir Launcelot who once saw the sacred vessel covered with red samite and with many angels around it, its presence was too bright and overpower- ing for his eyes, since he had been guilty of sin. "When he came nigh, he felt a breath that he 198 DIDACTIC, ETHICAL. thought was intermeddled with fire, which smote him so sore in the visage that him thought it all to brent his visage, and therewith he fell to the ground and had no power to arise." The Grail was food, drink, in full supply, and to each just what he most desired; * it was source of perpetual youth; those under its benignant influence could never grow old. For the entire day on which any of its guardians had sight of this vision, they were exempt from possibility of being wounded or in any way harmed, and for eight days thereafter, though they might be wounded, they could not suff'er death. This talismanic vase had virtue to heal all mortal ills, would stanch the flow of blood, and restore the dead. When the knights were seated with King Arthur at table one night at Camelot, and the beam " more clear by seven times than ever they saw day," shone into the room, the legend says, " Every knight began to behold other, and either saw other by their seeming fairer than ever they saw afore." f " But every knight," it says in another place, " beheld his fellow's face as in a glory." * The horn of Amaltheia the same ; it was filled by order ol Zeus with whatever heart could wish : it is expressly said that it gave in abundance all manner of meat and drink that one could desire. t In the legend of Krishna taking on incarnation and born of Devakl in the dungeon in which the tyrant Kama had imprisoned her. It is said that for a moment, a moment only, the veil is lifted from the eyes of his parents, and they behold in him the deity ; then it falls and they see only the earth-born child. THE WORD MADE FLESH. I99 This is an old, a very old symbol. We find it doubtless in thehornof Amaltheia just mentioned, in the divining cup of Joseph, the signet or the ring of King Solomon, the cup of Jemschid, the quern of Frodi, &c. In the Christianized form, it represents the fountain of all wisdom, greatness, possession and power. It is the magic staff which preserves the vision and strength everywhere; the well of youth ; the talisman of perpetual accomplishment, joy and victory. Well might Sakyamuni sit long and wait patient under the tree at Bodhimanda for the Bud- dhahood, for sight and power and repose, the true Nirvana ; well the Knights at the Table set out each on lone ways for the holy, ceaseless quest. The Grail has therefore in the high sense, unending meaning, and it has furnished through all the ages theme for loftiest poetry and prophecy. The legend of King Arthur also has undergone like change. In the original form a myth of the sun, story of the toils, achievements and sufferings of that monarch, the Herakles of the Greeks, it has become the story of a brave, persistent hero, a royal knight, who lives and rules on earth to avenge all wrong, and establish the right, and who is finally by the , weakness and falseness of friends, and the untiring machinations of foes, forced to succumb and pass on to Avilion, that he may be healed of his grievous wound, and at length return to rule again with more than pristine splendor and power. Tennyson has 20O DIDACTIC, ETHICAL. shown what sublimity of worth may be found in this character, when the word is made flesh, transformed into person, and clothed with these earth-worn yet sky-woven garments. The brand Excalibur must be returned to the lake from whose bosom it came, for the sun's ray sinks at night into the depths of the ocean whence at morn it emerged. The dusky barge, ' dark from stem to stern,' into which Arthur is received, has in it the three hooded queens, — are they not the Norns, the Fatal Sisters.? He sets forth for the Isle of Avilion, — isle of apples, — the home of the Blest, the abode of deliv- erance, fruition, and peace. Of this conception of the Western Isle, whither the souls of the departing are borne, a conception wide spread and glowingly described among the western races, Celts and Teu- tons, we may have more to say farther on. The Greek tragedians make effective use of the old myths and legendary relations. The fate of Iphige- neia broods like an avenging Nemesis over the house Agamemnon, bringing there unutterable woes and sorrows, only to be ended when there has been full expiation. It began apparently from a very simple nature-myth that told how the gloaming must die, ere the dawn could be brought back. The subse- quent form and cast of the story was wrought by the moral sentiment conjoined in action with an ever fertile imagination. SOPHOCLES ANTIGONE, 20I The tale of Oidipous has been wrought likewise into a story of tragic interest, carrying astern lesson. He slew, unwittingly indeed, his own father, married locaste his mother, and the retribution of heaven pursued that house. Nay, Thebes itself was afflicted with famine and pestilence, and the oracle declared the land must be purified of the blood which defiled it. The guilt was brought home to Oidipous. lo- caste in shame and remorse hung herself. Oidipous put out his own eyes, and a blind helpless wanderer, came to the grove of the Furies at Kolonos, where his life terminated. But the Eumenides look down kindly upon him there, and his last hours are comforted by the presence of his daughter Antigone, "she who is born opposite," — the pale light that ap- pears over against the setting sun. The traces of the original solar myth are clearly discernible in all. locaste, the mother, — the violet- tinted dawn, to whom Oidipous, having wrought his work, solved the Sphinx riddle, &c., was united again at end of day. Of Antigone Mr. Symonds says, " Sophocles has sustained her character as that of one 'whom like sparkling steel the strokes of chance make hard and firm.' " The Greek when he had pragmatized and historicised this myth so that the primary solar elements were almost or wholly for- gotten, must see the stern retribution that is indis- solubly bound up with broken law. 202 DIDACTIC, ETHICAL. The tale of the Sirens, the fortunes of Odysseus and Orpheus with them, tells strikingly a profound truth. Lord Bacon states it,* and it has been ren- dered into verse in our own language by Archbishop Trench in a poem of great beauty and force. f The story of Odysseus and his companions in the whole, their adventures with the Lotos-eaters, the Laistrygonians, Kirke, Kalypso, the wreck upon the Ithakan coast, conflict with the suitors, &c., is a wonderful product of the imagination. We marvel at the fertility and skill, apt felicity in depicting the scenes of human life shown by this early poet. A more vivid and impressive picture of the experiences of man's existence here, its exposures, perils, mis- fortunes, and the dear-bought final victory, has never yet been drawn. How true and graphic the descrip- tion of the life with the Lotos-eaters, — the sensuality significantly hinted, and the utter oblivion of all else, of wife, home, children, induced by these intoxica- tions of the passions ! Every feature of the Odyssey will well repay the most careful study, and will awaken fresh interest, not only by its hints of the old mythology, but by the vivid and striking lessons it conveys upon the career and fortunes of mortal men on this earth. *"0jplieus, laudes Deorum cantans et reboans, SIrenum voces con- fudit et summovlt; medltatlones enim rerum dlvinarum voluptates seusfls non tantuin potestate, sed etiam suavitate superant." t See Trench's Poems from Eattem Sourcet. THE PEST-MAIDEN. 203 The Story of the Sphinx too, a purely physical myth as we find originally, brings before us a great vital fact in human life. The same is true of ApoUon tending the flocks of Admetos, of Herakles bound to the will of Eurystheus; we see the counterpart of it all every day about us. Finally, perhaps there is not a more graphic illus- tration of the presence and power of this moral ele- ment, than is seen in the Slavonic tale of the Pest- maiden. This tale, by the by, is not found among the Slavons alone; Grimm has shown that it is current in Polish Lithuania and in Brittany. In the Breton lay it is a woman robed in white, sitting with staflF in hand by the ford of a river, wishing to be carried over. A miller bears her across the river upon his horse. The poor widow and her son alone are spared. "A Russian was sitting under a larch tree. The sun's heat was like the glow of fire. He espies some- thing approaching in the distance, looks again, — it is the Pest-maiden. Clad in a linen shroud only, the towering form advances. He would fly in terror, but the dreadful figure seized him with her long out- stretched hand. "Knowest thou the Pest.'" she said ; " I am she. Take me upon thy shoulders, and bear me tlirough all Russia, passing by no hamlet or city, for I must visit them all. Fear thou nothing, for thou unharmed and sound shalt be among the 204 DIDACTIC, ETHICAL. dying." With her long hands she clasped in firm hold upon the poor old man. He strode forward, saw the form over him, but felt no burden. First he bore her to the Cities; joyous dance and song they found there. Yet instantly she waved her linen shroud, that moment the joy and mirth fled. Wherever he looks he sees mourning, the bells toll, graves open, but the earth was insuflBcient to receive the dead. They lie in heaps where they fell, naked, unburied. On he goes and wherever he passes by a village, the houses become desolate, the faces blanch, and the shrieks and moans of the dying fill the air. But high up the hill stood his own hamlet. There were his wife, tender children, aged parents. His heart bleeds as they draw near this village. With powerful hand he grasps the maiden that she may not escape, and leaps with that he may submerge her in the flood. He sank : she rose again, yet quailing before this noble hero-valor, she fled far away into the wood and the mountain."* Hanusch, Die Wiaaenachaft dts Slawischen Mythus, &c., 322, 323. X. SYMBOLISM. The best, best possible, is by misappropriation and abuse easily the worst. Indeed, it seems univer- sally to hold true that the greater in any thing the value, its gift for help, the larger its possibilities for harm. We note it in the forces, the elements of nature. And so we see there has been no more blight- ing spell or nightmare, than has come from the mythologies taken in the letter, and colored by the superstitions of men. To the ignorant and dark mind, nature is sinister. The savage dwells in the midst of enemies, the hostile powers are everywhere, lurking about and on the watch to devour him. Life is shadowed by terror, and religion is one huge superstition. Sir John Lubbock draws attention to the fact that the very existence of the savage is an anxious one; exposed, beset, it is continually pervaded with apprehension and fear. " Wild animals are always in danger. Mr. Galton, who is so well qualified to form an opinion, believes that the life of all beasts in this wild state, is an exceedingly anxious one, that "every antelope in (205) 206 SYMBOLISM. South Africa, has literally to run for its life, once in every one or two days upon an average, and that she starts or falls prone on the influence of a false alarm many times in a day." So it is v/ith the savage ; he is always suspicious, always in danger, always on th& watch. He can depend on no one, and no one can depend on him."* The same feeling must neces- sarily prevail with him in his relation to the gods. His deity is much of the time angry, an enemy, in- definitely greater, more formidable than any man. It is so with ourselves, in proportion as we are un- enlightened or unintelligent. Nature is fate, and we seem beset by inimical forces. We are ground up and destroyed by the movement of this huge machine, or by the interposition of a capricious and vengeful will in Deity. As we become informed, intelligent^ the aspects change, we see it not sinister but benign, we pass from darknesss to light, from a horrible subjection and slavery, to liberty. We look nature in the face, accost her, get responses, draw service^ or learn more and more to feel sense of alliance, friendship, protection in this presence. And the more the eye is illumined, and the soul comes into harmonious relations with the world, the higher the freedom and the joy. Charles 'Kingsley once said in substance, marking the distinction between ancient and modern art, that in the former man was depicted • Lubbock's Prehietoric Times, p. 688. FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM. 207 as the victim of circumstances, the subject and sport of fate ; in the latter he comes to stand more and more victor over circumstances ; he subdues, or rises superior to fate. This characterization will hold as applied to the course of religion, and to the very history of civilization itself. We see the fact referred to above, in the religions of rude races, in which the universe is peopled with personalities, many of them huge, grotesque, most of sinister quality, enemies to be dreaded, not friendly souls to be honored and loved.. The doctrine of immortality, it has been said, will be taken by a coarse race coarsely ; so the filling of the world, earth, sky, air, with imagined persons, will, in the mind of the savage, fill it in the main with ogres and demons. Hence the extent to which the expiatory and depre- catory prevails in the worships of the primitive and the barbaric races. " Come now," says one of the oldest hymns of the world, and from one of the then most enlightened peoples, — they were our own Aryan ancestors, — "be good, and eat of this sacrifice." It is easy to see that the mythologies with such would be gross, full of terror, and enslaving. The more gods, the more trembling and dread. Even the more benign and kindly powers are on the plane of the sensuous and carnal, and all their benignity and favors are but earthly, mainly animal delights. With advancing culture come more poise and cheer, less terror, more of vision and trust. Higher place Zo8 SYMBOLISM. is gained by character, the world is in sympathy with manliness and excellence, this is at home throughout the universe, all the stones of the field felt to be in league with it. Nature changes in her aspect from frowning, angry and maleficent, to genial and beneficent ; man sees her through far kindlier medium as he gains Ijnowledge and is able to turn her forces from the tyrannous domination and destruct- iveness he has experienced, to companionship and service. The sources of his sorrow even are sweet- ened, and the mind rests in trust and love. Especially was this the case with the Aryan race, as they were before the separation. " But all the gloomier beings," says an eminent Oriental scholar,* " came but little into prominence. Our Aryan fore- fathers, like the gods whom they worshipped, were children of the light, and in it they love to dwell." They saw nature under the sunnier aspects, and the powers of sinister omen are assigned to the back- ground, when permitted to appear at all. Indra smites down Ahi, the light is stronger than the dark- ness, the good than the evil. This obtains even in the 2oroastrian religion, where Ahriman comes into unwonted prominence. The issue is not doubtful here, the final triumph shall be with Ormuzd. The horizon is lighted invariably with cheer and hope. Such was the case especially with the Greeks, those children of buoyant, bounding life. * Prof. A. S. Wilklns. " CHILDREN OF THE LIGHT." 209 The mythology was not thrown aside, but it was of more healthy and wholesome type. The traces of that character in the early Aryan mind are to be seen in the posterity, especially in the western races, in Europe and America, witnessed by the disposition to take cheerier views of life, see a more hopeful "outlook for the world, for humanity. Emerson in our own time, is a son of the morning, he is a typical man, a genuine child of that early, optimistic, up- looking Aryan. In this thought and religion is light, not any darkness at all. The best things of the nineteenth century we owe to that believing, light- some, optimistic spirit. It has the hope of the world in its keeping. The future for humanity is centered in it. Not by indifference, ignoring and shrinking pusillanimously from the ills and evils that are, but by facing, grappling with and overcoming them, will it fulfil its promise. It shall some day inaugurate the coming church, worships infinitely purer and higher than any we see now, that are to be. But the marks we perceive clearly of that other, the darker, more sombre, depressing outlook. Man does not quickly outgrow his earlier conditions; his habitudes of thought and believing will cling to him long after intellectually he has passed on and left them behind. Though the Greeks were a people the most clear-sighted, many-sided, large and bright of any in antiquity, living in wholesomejair, rejoicing in the cheer and exhilarations of life, yet they too had 210 SYMBOLISM. their Styx and Kerberos, world of shades and spectres dire. Among the more northern races, dwelling in lands where there seems a harder battle waging between darkness and light, the benign and the destructive in nature, there is perhaps more promi- nence given to the harsh and adverse ; at any rate, the picture drawn bears sterner features. The Giants and Trolls are great powers ; Sigmund is laid low by the spear of Odin, and Baldur dies by a dart from the hand of his blind brother Hodr; the Twilight of the Gods even must come, it is written in fate. Such impressions are very tenacious, they will hold long and crop out, like the wild grasses on the prairie,, even after there has been long seeding with the tamer grasses. What conceptions we still find current in Europe and America, it has already been briefly inti- mated. They obtain not only with the lower and more ignorant, naturally more superstitious classes^ they are to be found in greater or less degree with all; churches, the most enlightened Protestant com- munities, bear these marks of the rude and barbaric time. The fear and the worship of the sinister, belief in Ahriman, spirit of pure malignity and wanton per- petual mischief, trust in charms, talismans, miracu- lous virtue in book, sacrificial blood, observed rite and formula of salvation, prevail in the creeds and religions all abroad. It is no exaggeration to say that the heavy night still hangs dark. In these clos- THE EVER PRESENT PERIL. 2 11 ing years of the nineteenth century, we are still under the shadow of superstitions and ghastly dreams, that have descended to us from an age far less intelligent,, more benighted and barbaric than our own. Such the consequence of permitting, as Max Miiller happily phrases it, the nomina to become- numina, and withal making the numina as will inevitably be more and more the case, to stand for the weird, the ghastly, the terrible. A con- cept, dim and partial at best, in the rude mind necessarily gross and sensuous, is taken as reality of truth, measure and compass of the truth; a figure of speech held a literal fact of the actual ; the very- necessities of language, the line of limit to thought, — a hamper somewhat really at the best, — made a trap,, a stumbling-block over which the mind falls under anthropomorphism, and a crass bewitching idolatry. There is a danger here, ever-besetting, against which the guard cannot be too vigilant and perpetual.. Taken literally, an image, trope, symbol, may be among the worst, most harmful of all things, an ever-throttling snare; taken truly, in its character as picture in part, or intimation, it will be among the best, most exhilarating and helpful. Whenever we deem that speech, or thought even, can measure or be commensurate with truth and fact, that it can at utmost be more than shadow or hint, we fall into deception and paganism. And whenever we con- 212 SYMBOLISM. -found or identify the sensuous conception with spiritual idea, the work of the fatal Kirke-draught is well on. The worst of incantations are then not possible only, they are sure to mind. All history testifies to the subtle and ever present peril that lurks here ; the annals of man are the records of successive lapses and rallies for recovery. ' ' 'Tla the most difficult of tasks to keep Heights which the soul is competent to gain.' But fraught with danger as is this element, it is a necessity to which we are shut up ; it is inevitable, It may be our bane, may be our boon ; one or other it surely will. For our fate here is our freedom, or may be ; through this prison-house and school our liberty; our bond is our pinion whereby we rise and soar on to farthest heights. There is no such vehicle for service as symbolism; nay it is the only one through which may be communicated hint of the transcendent and unseen. ' And would the wise man proclaim the divine. He must the high thought in pictures define . ' We know the invisibleand spiritual only in form, or under type; unseen but in some determinate expres- sion. Our ideals we have to put in the concrete. Hence when we speak, yes, think of Heaven, we localize; when we speak or attempt to think of God, we clothe in the mold of personality ; nay, we are ■fortunate if we do not fix in form and place. ISLES OF THE BLESSED. 213: We have to remember that all such language, a necessity as it is, is in accommodation to the infirmity of our own thought, we might say it must partake of the limitations of thought whose product and image it is; it is but provisional and partial. So held, the expressions we may find are suggestive and beautiful. Language can hint with wonderful effectiveness what it cannot utter. The'Ojibwa Indians express them- selves well when they say the sky is the wigwam of the Great Spirit. Our distant forefathers could not reach a fitter symbol for infinite and eternal than Dyaus, the sky. The Greek and Roman mind wrote of Elysion, the home of the Blessed. " A region blessed with per- petual spring, clothed with continual verdure, enamelled with flowers, shaded by pleasant groves,, and refreshed by never-failing fountains. The bliss- ful company gathered together in that western land inherits a tearless eternity." * So the Hyperborean gardens, which sorrow, strife and death can never enter, where "amid verdant and grassy pastures, drinking ambrosial dew, divine potation, and all resplendent alike in coeval youth," the blessed ones- dwell. So the Celts had in their dream the Isles of the Blessed. "A place," according to one of their ancient poems, " of enchanting beauty. There youths *Cox. 214 SYMBOLISM. and maidens dance hand in hand on the dewy grass, green trees are laden with apples, and behind the woods the golden sun dips and rises. A murmuring rill flows from a spring in the midst of the island, and therein drink the spirits and obtain life with the draught. There all is plenty, and the golden age ever lasts ; cows give their milk in such abundance •that they fill large ponds at a milking. There, too, is a palace all of glass, floating in air, and receiving within its transparent walls the souls of the blessed." Very like representations we have in the New Testament, aad hear in churches in regard to the New Jerusalem, home of the redeemed, and the land beyond the river, where are joy and ecstatic delights in companionship, thanksgiving and praise forever. " There Is a land of pure delight, Where saints immortal reign ; Eternal day excludes the night, And pleasures banish pain. There everlasting spring abides, And never failing flowers ; Death like a narrow sea divides That heavenly land from ours. Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood, Stand dressed in living green : So to the Jews fair Canaan stood While Jordan rolled between." These and other similar conceptions current widely among ourselves, have as much and as little validity as those found among the peoples referred to, they SENSUOUS CONCEPT OF SUPERSENSUOUS. 215 are as much, not more to be accepted to trust. They are fruits of the imagination attempting to deal with the realities invisible. Good, received for what they are, picture partial, dim, and somewhat sensuous, yet such as language has been able to paint, adumbrating remotely and very faintly that which has no description, no state- ment; taken as biblical utterance of fact, very ill. Good, considered as shadow; bad, worthless, and worse, as substance. Loskiel, the Moravian missionary, tells us, that the native preachers among the Iroquois and Algon- quins, informing their fellow Indians of Heaven that it was the dwelling of God, confessed that they had never yet reached that abode, but had however come near enough to hear the cocks crow, and see the smoke of the chimneys in heaven. The conception if any less crude, is not less determinate and realistic among ourselves. To most, — indeed, to so nearly all that those not included -would be but the few of a rare exception, — to take away the idea of personal, individualized deity, would be to bereave their minds of God, to make them orphan. In like manner fixed, determinate, the thought within them of Heaven and its manifold glories. So tenacious is the mind of the palpable, the ob- jective and the concrete. An arrest and a blight does misapprehension of symbolic^and ^figurative, or 2l6 SYMBOLISM. failure to transcend the trammel and limitations of form, inflict on the soul, to be marked all the way from the beginning of anthropomorphism, to the coarsest idolatry and paganism. Transparent, the symbol reveals the universe; opake, or held wrongly to the axis of vision, it blots out the sun, and distorts, twists into perversion the form and feature of the nearest and plainest. Again, there is beauty and a genial quickening force in similitude and metaphor. " We like," says Archbishop Trench, — he is speaking of the satisfac- tion in rhyme and alliteration, — " We like what is like." Nature is one in the midst of this unending multiplicity. What a charm there is in finding the unity! Every new discovery here brings a fresh surprise. Lower, we find, hints higher, physical types and illustrates spiritual. All things are made on one fundamental pattern. Unlike but like, dif- ferent but one. Felicity in the use of this language marks the poet. We delight in a metaphor or a figure, for it in- timates what speech cannot tell, and discloses the utmost that speech can tell. It reveals and exhausts the possibilities of description. " The god who owns the oracle of the Delphian Apollo," says Herakleitos, " neither reveals nor conceals, hut semamei, — signifies in sign or symbol." An illustration, an apt, telling symbol fastens a thing in the mind so it is permanent there and un- POWER OF TROPICAL OR METAPHORIC SPEECH. 217 forgettable. It seems to burnish the plate, to make the tablet of the soul fresher, more impressionable, so that it receives and works with new life for indefi- nite periods. Nothing else so wakes and stimulates. Herein lies the power of proverbs, apothegms, apo- logues, &c. In proverbs the discourse is shotted, and quite generally glows and glistens with a felicitous symbolism. Lord Bacon describes them as "the edge tools of speech, which cut and penetrate the knots of business and affairs." Isaac D'Israeli de- clares that " centuries have not worm-eaten the solid- ity of this ancient furniture of the mind." They will ever by virtue of this strong character, have a fresh and powerful vitality. He is always the highest master and inspirer to us, who can best read and utter the similitudes or the identity, translating from matter to spirit, and vice versd. The illustration or analogy may be taken from a kingdom quite remote and foreign seeming, but let it be seen to be cognate, we are fixed and filled with delight. Dr. Draper shows the permanence of the ganglionic impressions, the abiding nature of these images within, never fading, though they may have seemed to have utterly vanished, reappearing in full distinctness when the circumstances arise to wake them forth ; he illustrates by reference to a known fact in physics. " If on a cold polished metal, as a new razor, any object such as a wafer be laid, and the metal be then 2l8 SYMBOLISM. breathed upon, and, when the moisture has had time to disappear, the wafer be thrown off, though now the most critical inspection of the polished surface can discover no trace of any form, if we breathe once more upon it, a spectral image of the wafer comes plainly into view ; and this may be done again and again. Nay more, if the polished metal be carefully put aside, where nothing can deteriorate its surface, and be so kept for many months, on breathing again upon it, the shadowy form emerges." "A shadow," he says again, " never falls upon a wall without leav- ing thereupon a permanent trace which might be made visible by resorting to proper processes." Who does not find his old and well-known fact freshly illumined, at least made more vivid and living to him, by the apt analogy presented ? All the experiences of life, does not science tell us, every- thing in vision or in sound, is literally printed on the substance of the brain, and leaves its indelible image on that impressible tablet, to be recalled, to rise to consciousness long years after perhaps, when the right conditions meet. It writes its superscrip- tion and impression there, as does the falling leaf upon the flagstone on which you walk. We never weary of such landscapes as are opened before the imagination ; rather we are charmed and exhilarated without end. THE MAIDEN IN THE EAGLES NEST. 219 " God has so copied forth Himself into the whole life and energy of man's soul," says one of the older writers, " that the lovely character of the Divinity may be most easily seen and read of all men within themselves : as they say Phidias, the famous statuary, after he had made the statue of Minerva with the greatest exquisiteness of art to be set up in the Acropolis at Athens, afterwards impressed his image so deeply in her buckler, ' that no one could delete or efface it without destroying the whole statue.' "* Penetrated, made transparent to us, as is instantly and without effort, this language of figure, the myths, nursery stories, &c., become very significant and quickening. They show the endeavor of the human mind to hint in the speech of symbol the realities of spiritual, or the striking beautiful facts which only such tongue can paint or describe. Brynhild on the Glistening Heath lies sleeping, encircled by walls of flame, enfolded within the dragon's coils, and waits the prince who has the resistless sword Gram, and is able to leap the walls, slay the monster, wake and release her. So sweet Briar Rose in the tale, plunged in her long sleep, can be awakened only by the magic touch of her lover's hand. In the Hindu story of little Surya Bai, the maiden is high up in the eagle's nest, fast asleep. The evil demon or Rakshasa, striving his utmost to gain access to * John Smith, 1618-1652. See Tulloch's BaUonal Theology In England, -in Seventeenth Century, Vol. 2, p. 169. 220 SYMBOLISM. her, in vain, leaves one of his finger nails fast in the crack of the door; she rises in the morning to look out on the world below, opens the door, receives a wound from the sharp claw, and falls dead. This eagle's nest, the eyrie of the clouds ; this Rakshasa's claw, the thorn of darkness or night ; — the same story is told in so many other forms in all the mythologies. The spring to which Siegfried stooped to drink, giving the fatal opportunity which Hagen availed of to wound him in the back, the pyre on which Her- akles and Quetzalcohuatl are burned at the end of their career, the Diktaian cave in which the infant Zeus must be born, the Lake and the Cave in our nursery tale, — the Lady descending into the Lake and rising from the Cave, — &c., all are luminous when seen as they are written, in symbol. In the final strife upon the plains of Ilion, in which Achilleus mingled and was to lose his life, all nature was roused, the very heavens were moved and took part, Zeus bids all the gods choose each his side. He alone, the poet tells us, will look down serenely on the struggle, as it rages beneath him. The sky itself^ abode of the pure ether, far above the grosser and ever agitated air breathed by mortals, cannot be con- ceived as taking part in this contest. Clouds, light- nings, wind and vapors may. They cannot look unmoved on this stupendous death-confiict, the great- est, most momentous now enacted on the face of the THE DIVINE NECTAR. 221 earth ; each will do utmost for his favorite. But the sky is beyond, is above it all. God is patient. Sky has furnished to all peoples and in all ages, their highest symbol. The story of the Grail is a tale for us, for we also are seekers ; as truly as were the knights of the Round Table, we are out on the endless quest. The gener- ations of mankind have always been in pursuit, and as we find illustrated in this tale, they have slowly and often poorly, sought to elevate, to refine, to hal- low, to rise from sensuous to spiritual, to transform into spiritual. The problem remains unsolved still. We believe in the charm of the talisman, that once attained, would give us all our wish. It is that magic glass — — " Bound whose wondrous rim The enrapturing secrets of creation swim," We seek but do not find, seek but rarely ever see. Yet the experience of Sir Galahad is shared to greater or less extent by us all : — ' ' Sometimes on lonely mountain meres, 1 find a magic bark ; I leap on board ; no helmsman steers ; I float till all is dark. A gentle sound, an awful light ! Three angles bear the Holy Grail : With folded feet, in stoles of white, On sleeping wings they sail." The Fountain of Youth couches a deep meaning for us. In the Hindu mythology we read of the Soma 222 SYMBOLISM. draught, drink of the gods, which gives strength and confers immortality. It is the divine nectar, Indu, sap which flows from Indra, stream which is purity itself, and source of all health and power. To mortals it is strength in weakness, medicine that cures all malady, and gives restoration of youth in old age. This which primarily was probably the moisture of the heavens, the life-giving rain, pure water of the skies has been transfigured into the nectar of immortality. It has been in the dream of subsequent ages. Ponce de Leon sought it long and anxiously, searched amid the rocks and limpid springs of the Bahamas, and the luscious groves of his new-discovered Florida, but found it not. Prester John in earlier time ('thirteenth century^, tells of it. It was, he says, in his own dominions — though no mortal has ever been able to find where the kingdom of this false claimant was. "At the foot of Mount Olympus," he writes to Manuel of Constantinople, and other west- ern potentates, " bubbles up a spring which changes its flavor hourly night and day, and the spring is scarcely three days' journey from Paradise, out of which Adam was driven. If any man drinks thrice of this spring, he will from that day feel no infirmity, and he will, as long as he lives, appear of the age of thirty." Sir John Mandeville, travelling in southern Asia a century after, identifies the mountain ; it is Polombo, near a city of the same name, viz., Colombo in THE WELLE OF YOUTHE. 223 Ceylon ; and he found the well. " And at the foot of that mount," he tells us, "is a fayr welle and a gret, that hath odour and savour of all spices ; and at every hour of the day he chaungeth his odour and his savour dyversely. And who so drinketh 3 times fasting of the watre of that welle, he is hool of all manner of sykenesse, that he hathe. And they that dwellen there and drynken of that welle, thei never han sykenesse, and thei semen alle weeys yonge. I have dronken there of 3 or 4 sithes Aimes^ ; and zit, methinkethe I fare the better. Some men clepen it the Welle of Youthe : for thei that often drynken thereat semen alle weys yongly and lyven withouten sykeness. And men seyn that that welle cometh out of Paradys; and therefore it is so vertuous." Notwithstanding that Sir John speaks so positively and assuringly, I have not heard that any one since has been able to find it. It hovers in the imagination, and inspires forever our hopes. Immortality, the unfading youth, we seek as our portion and boon, and far would we go any of us to find draught of that miraculous water. Pilgrims and searchers we all are, all too oft bafHed and mocked by the distant mirage. If less fortunate than Sir John, do we not sometimes sip of the sacred element, drinking a drop or two of that all-quickening and renovating Soma- juice? Draught that imparts all kinds of reinvigor- 2 24 SYMBOLISM. ation alike to body and to mind, and " preserves from harm for another period." I have seen at least a few, I believe, who knew what it was to approach and quaff from that eternal fountain. They drew day by day of those waters that impart health and the bloom of youth to soul and also to flesh. It lay in the thought of the old myth-maker, and that conception of the Well shadowed his dream. The mystic sampo was made up of the feather of a swan, of a tuft of wool, of a grain of corn, and of chips from a spindle, and it became so large that it had to be carried by a hundred-horned ox. 'Tis a clear symbol to the Finnish mind of that wealth, that quern of abundance which in other lands is typed under the cup, the horn, the grail. Well might Wainamoinen or any other minstrel descend the depths of Pohjola to recover it, happy if his harp might lay the dragons to sleep and permit him to bring it away. But he also, the relation significantly adds, lost the priceless treasure in a desperate con- flict forced upon him with the nether powers, ere he had fully reached the land of light. Hard to gain and almost equally hard to keep the inner possession* Who has not found it wrested away at times, even when he seemed to have secure hold upon it ? From the blood of Qvasir, wisest of all beings, the Norseman said, the dwarfs mingling it with honey, made a costly mead, whose taste upon the lips im- COMPANIONS THAT THE HERMIT HAD LOST. 225 parted the wisdom of the sage and the eloquence of the bard. The fount of inspiration is in that cup ; from age to age souls quaff and are strong. It is the sacramental wine whose supply never exhausts, whose virtues never fail. Millions may drink and feel the quickening power; it flows undiminished for as many millions more. Even where the obscurities of speech seem impen- etrable, we are piqued and have a measure of delight, we gain something and enjoy, though we may be baffled in attempt at clear interpretation. " I long ago," says Thoreau, " lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travelers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind the cloud, and seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves." There is some enigma in this symbolism, which as he gives no key, leaves us puzzled and unsatisfied. The 'tur- tle dove ' perhaps may be the loved one he seeks, but has never yet been able to recover. Possibly she did " disappear behind the cloud." The Oriental mind is rich in all this wealth of pic- ture far beyond anything we find in the West, albeit we meet it everywhere. 2Z6 SYMBOLISM. And the more we read and ponder here, the more we are astonished at the marvelous fertility of the human mind, the extent of its resources in devising so much from so little material. Its ingenuity is exhaustless ; it interests us by its numberless inven- tions, where these seem to have no ground in reality, but only to come from the exuberance of pure fancy. Referring to music, Dr. Newman well says, " There are seven notes in the scale ; make them thirteen, yet how slender an outfit for so vast an enterprise." As all articulations of speech, the myriads and myriads of words come from a few primal roots, a handful of monosyllables, phonetic types ; as all numerals, the names, come from the first three, throughout the domain certainly of Aryan, Shemitic and Egyptian tongues; all tools from the hammer and celt; all agricultural implements, spade, hoe, plough, &c., from the digging stick; all stringed instruments from the archer's bow ; — so, from a few story roots, or archetypal myths, telling for most part one story, never ending, and never wearying, all the wealth of mythology, of legend and household tale, has been born. We seem to be standing before a kaleidoscope, whose every new turn brings a new combination and a new view. Sun, moon, stars, dawn, earth, great nature everywhere, and especially humanity, greet under so many and such varied phases. There is no THE FERTILITY OF THE HUMAN MIND. 227 more engaging study than the tracing of these mythic words and phrases, learning so far as we may in the many dark or obscure cases, what the meaning was of the early namer, as he attempted to intimate or describe. And often indeed shall we perceive that the reality sought was felt transcendent, and the ut- most language could do was seen to be but shadow and type. This also has its deep fascination for the mind. XI. SYMBOLISM, CONTINUED. Notwithstanding that reference has already been made freely to the value and effective use of symbol- ism, I am tempted here to dwell upon it somewhat farther. It is so great a theme, we cannot ponder it too long and deeply, hardly indeed speak of it too much. In it is involved whatever belongs to the in- struction and improvement of man. We naturall)- delight in personification. The child with its toys, hobby-horse, doll, or mimic go-cart, finds unceasing exhilaration and joy. And to the end we love to play with these counters of sport and make-believe. We teach and incite by such methods, talk with the children upon what the wind says, the brook, what the birds say, as they chant their rounde- lays of gladsome song. And we easily go out to what the ten thousand tongues of nature speak, what •the faces beam to express, throughout the universe of glowing life. We are not caught in an illusion, but instructed in truth, not entangled in mythology, but liberated and winged, borne on to heights that otherwise it were beyond our power to gain, ' In (him was life, and the life was the light of men.' (228) THE BEAUTIFUL ANANGKE. 229. The Greeks personified the retributive Justice, Nemesis, which pursues and overtakes every wrong doer, meting out to him with exactness the fruit of his doings; personified Necessity, the great power that presides over all, the beautiful Anangke, as they did the Dawn as Erinys that brings all deeds to light. Perhaps in the first two instances there was no illu- sion, the transparency was kept; certainly to us there is none. We still speak of Jealousy as the green- eyed monster; we paint Time as a reaper with his sickle or scythe wherewith he cuts down all, and no one is deceived in that language. What graphic force, what vividness of presentation in -^schylos, in his impersonations of Justice, Insolence, Ate, and the Eumenides ! The pictures of these avengers and scourges, the Furies, with their symbolic torches, their dreadful eyes piercing all, their fiery breath,, snaky hair, and tongues lapping blood, could never be forgotten. " The imagination of jEschylos," says Mr. Symonds, "added new deities to the Athenian Pantheon. The same creative faculty enabled him to- inform elemental substances, fire, water, air, with personal vitality." We read Wordsworth or Milton ; the personifica- tions do not mislead, they please and enrich us. Or the Hindu poet Jayadeva : — "0 thou God that liest Bapt on Kumla's breast. Happiest, holiest, highest! 230 SYMBOLISM. Planets are thy jewels, Stars thy forehead gems, Set like sapphires gleaming On kingliest ot anadems. Even the great gold smi-god Blazing through the sky, Serves thee but for crest-stone." Carlyle said the stars were the street-lamps of the City of God. " Want is a growing giant, whom the coat of Have was never large enough to cover," says a well-known American writer, whose words are all glistening symbols. All this is thoroughly trans- parent to us ; we feel that description could hardly be fitter or finer. And yet in some stages of the human mind it might carry mythology. Some day a like transparency will shine through all the representations given in the old mythologies, so far at least as they are not product of the gross- ness of savagery; and the mind will be introduced to a new temple of beauty and wonder, where it shall behold and worship with ever increasing delight. Worship without taint or remotest touch of any idolatry. For the language and the thought will be seen symbolic, poetic, the essay of the spirit to reach through type, similitude, personifica- tion, the heights inaccessible of truth and pure being. The gods will be seen in nature, the wood-nymphs, the celestial muses, the brilliant goddess of the dawn. The Greek epigram said: — ' Cease your work, ye maids who labored at the mills, sleep, and let the PICTURESQUE IN SPEECH FROM MYTHIC SOURCES. 23 I birds sing to the returning dawn. Demeter has bid- den the water-nymphs to do your task ; obedient to her call, they throw themselves on the wheel and turn the axle and the heavy mill.' The Greek mythology will speak with new force to the thought, the imagination, as the key that unlocks it is found and applied, and it is discovered that here is a sublimely royal endeavor on the part of man's soul to speak the name ineffable, to clothe the invisible in form, to penetrate and tell the wrapt and inscrutable secret. " And when our poor labor- ing masses," says Prof. Anderson, " get their taste cultivated for poetry, art and mythological lore, — when they have learned to appreciate our common inheritance, they will find that our Gothic history, folk-lore, and mythology together form —•■A link That binds us to the skies, A bridge of rain-bows, thrown across The gul£ of tears and sighs." " To this day our best writers and speakers illustrate and enforce their thought from these sources, particu- larly the Greek. It is spontaneous. Nothing can be more natural, we might say necessary, than to refer to the Labyrinth and the thread of Ariadne, the bed of Procrustes, Pandora's box, the perils of Odysseus with his voyagers, the Scylla and Charyb- dis, ever present to wreck, the one or the other of them, the bark, the song of the Sirens, the draught 232 SYMBOLISM. of Kirke, the lyre of Apollo, &c, — to present brightly and vividly the idea to hand. Indeed there seems nothing so good in speech anywhere as the symbolic figures and personalizations which the mythic con- ception affords. An illustration, a word from such source tells more than ail description otherwise from the entire store of language. It makes language picturesque and living. How could we get along without such words as ogre, spectre, exorcise, the good daimonion, or genius, &c,? A story from the realm of pure mythic fancy will tell and convince, where an argument would utterly fail. In the future there will be use not less but more of these resources, as their wider range is found. Not only Greek, but Teutonic, Hindu, Tartar, and Red Indian, will help. Our teaching throughout in childhood, and to life's farthest end, is by object-lessons. We are all chilrl- ren, all in tht Kinder-garten school, Wc climb by the stair-case of similitude and example, ascend to heaven by the ladder set on earth. Metaphor is the mirror wherein we see what were otherwise beyond possi- bility of vision. And it will doubtless be always true with humanity, that the deepest lessons will be impressed, the most vivid and helpful images fixed in the mind by this celestial dialect. All the great teachers have used it freely ; it is the method with them. Jesus and Buddha abound in it, or the cognate method of parable ; Lao Tsze, Zoroaster, Pythagoras. THE EXPOSITORS IN SCIENCE. 233 And see what the masters do in our own day. With what force a sentence of Huxley strikes home not simply from the compactness and native per- spicuity, but from its telling metaphor or illustra- tion as well. " Kant's baggage train is bigger than his army, and the student who attacks him, is too often led to suspect he has won a position, when he has only captured a mob of useless camp-followers." " The colt that is left at grass too long, makes but a sorry draft horse : " — spoken with reference to shap- ing the lad to labor early. "The web and woof of matter and force, interweaving by slow degrees, with- out a broken thread, the veil which lies between us and the Infinite." Still more do we find this in Tyndall. He has a richer imagination, more spontaneous, free-flowing, than his friend. It has raised him to the first rank in the scientific world as an expositor, lifted him so that he stands perhaps without a peer to-day among his class. " ' Nature lays her beams in music,' and it is the function of science to purify our organs so as to enable us to hear the strain." Speaking of the de- votion of Faraday to his wife, he says : — " Never was there a manlier, steadier, and purer love. Like a burning diamond, it continued to shed for six and forty years, its white and smokeless glow." Referring to the transformations constantly going forward throughout nature, the perpetual metamorphosis yet fundamental 234 SYMBOLISM. Stability and fixity, the Proteus always changing form, yet ever one and the same, he says ; — " The flux of power is eternally the same. It rolls in music through the ages, and all terrestrial energy, — the manifestations of life as well as the display of phenomena, — are but modulations of its rhythm." Max Miiller has much of the same element. It constitutes, with his clear perceptions, profound learning and affluent illustration, the charm that clothes as with a shining robe all of his Essays and Lectures. " We may tap language wherever we like, the sap that runs from its roots is always conceptual." Robert Browning, contemplating the deep, dread abode of the Dire Ones, the abyss of the Erebos, speaks of it as "this hollow hewn out of night's heart." Kant's characterization of ethics as " the astronomy of the mind," is apt and striking from its felicitous symbolism. Tyndall's declaration, ground- ed in his clear demonstration, that ' we live in the sky, not under it,' easily tells us much more than the fact of our relation to the literal sky ; tells the transcen- dent fact brought home with a fresh force from this impressive figure. Carlyle and Emerson are con- spicuous examples, each in his way, of this wealth. Carlyle's conceptions are Titanic, his figures gigan- tesque, but they are spontaneous and powerful. The powers of the heavens are shaken, the earth- quake chasms gape, the stars dance and reel in the MASTERS IN THE REALM OF IDEAL. 235 Storms, but we are irresistibly set to learn geology, and in the letters of fire he traces on the circle of the universe, we read arid must the laws of the cosmos. "" It is mainly to his splendid imagination," says Mr. James, "that he owes his position in literature. Both the moral and the physical world were full of pictures for him, and it would seem to be by his great pictorial energy that he will live." Emerson stands almost alone, has few equals in all the ages, and so far as I can see, no superior. " But what fragments these colored sentences were," says Dr. Holmes, " and what pictures they often placed before us, as if we too saw them ! " Carlyle is in some senses stronger, more massive, striking, commanding ; Emerson is loftier, serener, clearer, and in the long run, of higher effect. Both are masters in the realm of the ideal. The delight, the instruction is unending, and man never outgrows the appetences and loves of his childhood in this particular. Nay, as the race ma- tures, the more will it affect and enjoy this poetic insight and object-teaching. The love is primal and final, belongs to childhood and belongs much more to the ripening of age. It is in the very nature of humanity, and the constitution of the human soul would be undone, obliterated, in the extinction of this element. Religion, art, poetry, belong not to the minority of man, to be left behind as a child's dream or toy, 236 SYMBOLISM. as the mind opens to the ' scientific stage ; ' they are the heritage of his majority, to be the bright consum- mate flower and perfection of his final growth. The spirit is to draw more and quaff deeper perpetually from this fountain. The teachers that are to come will exceed those of the past in the gift of this vision and speech. They will bathe all life, the world, in a new and hitherto unknown beauty, will illume and gild every remotest nook or most common-place aspect of our existence with the radiance of the eternal light. The deaf shall hear, blind shall see, stupid shall wake ; all shall stand on the mount of transfiguration and behold with anointed vision. The great poets, prophets, bards, are yet to be. Hardly a note, speaking comparatively, has thus far been sung of this strain; least of all has been ren- dered the air in any tongue of speech or art. Science will furnish hint and illustration. The kingdom of knowledge is rich beyond degree, con- stantly extending, and will be drawn from with great freedom to furnish and exalt the mind. The gifted expositors in this realm will be among the high priests, the hierophants, in the temple of the future. For nature is perpetual teacher and inspirer ; the parallelisms of seen and unseen, the illustrations from matter to spirit, are unending. The symbolism of art, — a wide volume compara- tively unknown to most, — especially the religious TYPE OF THE MOUNTING FLAME. 237 symbolism, grotesque, wild, or at least rude, coarse, as much of it seems, will be found all to have a meaning, and to have served its use in earlier ages. To a degree it will doubtless still be employed for suggestion and quickening. There was a grand hint in the Egyptian temples, structures for worship exceeding in massiveness, and sombre impressive grandeur, anything elsewhere erected by the hand of man ; they symbolized in their vast proportions and softly fading views, secured by the arrangement of their columns, the immensity and eternity they were built to celebrate. There is kindred meaning in India and Birmah, both in the temple and in the images, as we come to read to the real sense. And there are elements in the Roman Catholic worships, the stupendous cathedrals that church has erected, and the forms it observes, that have their spring in the same source, and will in part certainly be util- ized permanently for the soul. The lofty spire, relic probably and survival from the kindled flame of the fire-worshiper, is a pregnant symbol, typifying the aspiration and ascent of the spirit, like the mounting flame, to its home in the skies. Let it speak to the imagination rightly, it incites and inspires; to the sense primarily and mainly, it blights and destroys. It seems we have here what resembles certain of the chemical substances we know ; taken in one measure it is exhilaration and quickening, in another, it is death. 238 SYMBOLISM. In fact there is not anywhere in the wide world a. mode of expression chosen by the mind to intimate- or shadow sense of its relation to the highest, that has not a meaning and vitality for us all. Even in the Japanese temple of Tensio Dai Sin, described by Kempfer a traveller in the eighteenth century^ thronged then with many worshipers, the pieces of white paper, placed round on the walls, emblematic of purity, and the polished metal mirror, sole thing to be seen in the midst, hint of the all-seeing eye, — have their quaint and simple symbolism. There remains much to do justice to the thought even of savages. There is a higher side than the idolatry sheer, the mythology of the rude and bar- baric races. Genuine perceptions there have always been, fitting representations too of the true and spiritual. When we enter in spirit of true catho- licity, simple love of the fact, that alone, we shall find them more than we think. The altar fame, the naphtha fire, told a momentous truth in nature and in history. We have not yet grown beyond its force or the image that shadows it ; we shall never. 'The groves were God's first temples.' This sen- tence so often quoted as to have become almost one of the common-places, is shown to be statement of historic fact, so far at least as some of our race are concerned. Grimm has demonstrated by his re- searches that with the old Teutons the words for THE SACRED GROVE. 239 temple signified properly a wood. Our forefathers worshiped in the depths of the forest, as finding there the fittest shrine, the nearest home to them, of the felt presence of the Deity. It was the recogni- tion of this patent, overshadowing fact shining, speak- ing in the solitudes of the forest, that gave ground originally to the tree and grove worship that holds so prominent a place in the history of religions, appearing in fact all over the globe. His remem- brance of the forest, with its sacred retirements, presence and communings, man does not outgrow, as we see evinced in the Gothic architecture, carry- ing still in its leading features noted in the cathedrals and churches, obvious suggestion of the tall over- arching trees of the sacred grove. The Hindus felt that, do still perhaps, more than any other people. " Do not the grand forest trees," says one of their old poets, " under which the hermits have plunged into deeps of meditation in the open air, seem to have been themselves transported by their own serene tranquillity into the divine life in God .' " We have grown away from worship of the tree, but the perception, the thought that laid its foundation, and first informed it, the mind shall never leave behind. The tree is still alive and instinct with Deity, the solitudes vocal forever to the inner ear. With what a beautiful simplicity as of the world's childhood, our forefathers spoke of God's coming 240 SYMBOLISM. down to earth, when sufiFering from sorrow or any ill, to be lifted and cheered by the song of the bard ! And for perception of the method of spiritual communication of man with the highest, — I know not where we find it more genuine in its degree than with Red Indians, as shown in this tale told among the Mandans. Their great ancestor, the first man, had promised to render them aid in time of need, but had departed and disappeared in the West. Trouble came, they were beset by foes, and they would fain get from the divine ancestral man the help they now sore needed. But how to communi- cate with him ? Ore thought to send a bird, but no bird was equal to so long a flight. One would reach him by a look, but sight was limited, the hills walled him in. A third said thought must be the medium, he could send this to the first man. So he wrapped himself in his buffalo robe, and he fell down and said : "I think — I have thought — I come back." He threw off the robe, he was bathed in sweat. This savage philosopher, not only like Des Cartes, knew himself in thought, he knew the highest also, he saw the Divine Man, in thought. The story tells that he had reached the great helper, and that helper came down and interposed. All that belongs to the world of scenic representa- tion, of plastic and pictorial art, the drama, as well as the word-painting of story-teller and poet, comes MISSION OF ART FOR RELIGION. 241 here into play. It belongs vitally to the education and uplifting of the human race. Shall we have dramatic representation, paintings, statuary, &c., freely exhibited in the places of religious assembly, all that art, that a high realism can do for quickening, generously made use of in the temples.' All being kept saturated in the religious element, and held of lofty tone, I cannot see why not. Protestantism has become, in fact was from the beginning, Quakerish, jealous of art, in its abhor- rence of the idolatries of Rome. Its churches are bare, prosaic, drear, or if indulging in objective representations at all, they bear the taint of my- thology; they approach the paganisms of the mother church their protest sought to renounce. Whatever may be grotesque, uncanny or ensnaring being re- jected, let all that belongs to this great missionary to man's mind, be invoked for purposes of noblest culture. The best, most elevated and inspiring pic- tures and statuary of the world, might well greet the worshiper as he enters his church. Representations there should be on the walls or in the niches, of the great prophets of humanity, the bards and inspirers in all the ages. And the practical duties could be taught impressively and perpetually through con- crete expression. Keeping the range wide and con- stantly progressive, there need be no amaurosis or idolatry. 242 SYMBOLISM. Symbolism, yes, not less but more, infinitely more in the coming time ; all the resources of the world will be drawn upon ; the sacred art of Egyptian^ Babylonian, Hindu, most of all Greek, the types of every race, whereby they have sought to articulate thought of spiritual and everlasting, will be used largely and helpfully. Maternity, the divineness and love of motherhood, will be represented not alone in our familiar type of the Madonna, but in others illustrating the beautiful maternal relation as well, Greek, Roman, Norse, and in examples not less impressive in our modern time.. The Egyptians had the idea, so the Chinese, as well as the classic and other ancient peoples ; they em- bodied it each in their several way, and with a beauty in each case all their own. The like affection and tenderness exhibited on that lower but similar plane, may be instanced from the animal world. Why not the figures from some of these, the stork or pelican for example, reverenced for suchjcare of the aged, and perfect devotion to off- spring, and furnising an old symbol ? We may have from the animals as many significant hints in figure,, as the ancient Hindus with their subtle powers of spiritual perception, found. And in exalting the brute so as to teach us the great lessons, we not less but more honor and exalt the human. The devotions of friendship, relation of teacher and taught, Pythagoras and his band, all instructors THE PSALM OF LIFE. 24 J and lovers and learners, — these among the highest,, divinest of all things we know; the loves of youth, of man and maiden, the fidelities, joys and mutual communings of the conjugal relation ; all the sacra- ments and powerful quickening of the social life in its many types ; the heroic sufferings and sacrifices of the confessors and martyrs; the toil and achieve- ments of inventors, scholars, artists, and artisans in every kind and degree ; — these must be celebrated,, told, published, impressed in the pregnant language of figure and picture. Religion in its worship is to be the psalm of life, paean to the benignities, the worths, and the virtues, of human and all mundane existence. Some of these scenes, the great moments- in the history of man, showing the soul victorious over all, divinely strong and free, will be among the most wholesome and powerful incitements and tonics- for humanity. And shall not the lily, the lotos, the cactus, the cedar, the palm, more than all the grand old Yggdra- sil, stand to speak their several truth to the eye and the imagination? For that unthought, unseen, un- known, even to highest, purest conception, reality nearest, inmost, yet remotest forever, perhaps no hint for expression can be more significant and suggestive than the simple inscription in the- Greek temple at Delphi, Ei, Thou art. ' He that has no mark, his mark are we,' says a Mohammedan apothegm. Him that alone is, must the mind con- 244 SYMBOLISM. template without image or any representation, of whom the sunlight, the ray of reason itself, while the beam, is but shadow. The Roman Catholic church has lessons to teach us ; it is not here simply for warning, for admonition and deterrent, but also in a degree for an ensample. For the use that church has made of the objective, its address to the sense of the aesthetic, and to that side of our nature which deals in form and determin- ation, — always present and powerful in us all, — has suggestions of priceless worth for the prophets of truth. Some day the method will be employed but with entire safety, shunning religiously and with infallible sureness that rock of fatal idolatry upon which all barks hitherto have gone to wreck. No more imperative question is pressing for the best minds to-day, than the devising of fitting gar- ments for the worship of the soul, seeking and find- ing the appropriate vestures wherein to clothe the truths of light, glasses that shall rightly temper, while not refract or distort or obscure one line of the glistening, piercing rays. Imperative, yet diffi- cult and subtle to the last degree; the embarrass- ment we all know, the necessity is sovereign and absolute. A fearful peril there has always been, leading often and ever indeed, to the deadly abyss. But "the more formidable mischief will make the more useful slave." THE LOST STATUE. 245,. The Greek literature gives us an epigram which hints the office that statuary may do for the mind. Poseidippus interrogated a lost statue, and these are the answers rendered : — " The sculptor's country 7 Sicyon. His name ? Lyslppus. You 1 Time that can all things tame. Why thus a-tiptoe ? I have halted never. Why ankle-winged ? I fly like wind forever. But in your hand that razor ? 'Tis a pledge That I am keener than the keenest edge. Why falls your hair in front ? For him to bind Who meets me. True ; but then you're bald behind? Yes, because when with winged feet I've passed, 'Tis vain upon my back your hand to cast. Why did the sculptor carve you 7 For your sake Here in the porch I stand ; my lesson take." * A Statue to preach such sermon might fittingly be used anywhere. And so we find here, if this be the original, the parent rock whence was chipped the apt apothegm of Lord Bacon, that " Occasion turneth a bald nod- dle, after she hath presented her front locks, and no hold taken." And furthermore we have a chip of the chip in our saw that enjoins, " Take time by the fore-lock." From Arda Viraf, a Persian writer of the thirteenth century, — though I believe it is found much earlier, in the Zend Avesta — we find this : — " In a region of bleak cold wandered a soul which had departed from the earth ; and there stood before * Symonds' Qreek Poets, Ist Series, 408. -246 SYMBOLISM. him a hideous woman, profligate and deformed. ^ Who art thou,' he cried ; ' Who art thou, than whom no demon could be more foul or horrible .' ' To him she answered, ' I am thy own actions.' And there met him ('the departed one in the groves of Paradise J, a beautiful maiden, whose form and face were charming to heart and soul. To her he said, ' Who art thou, in comparison with whom none so fair was ever seen by me in the land of the living .' ' The maiden replied, ' O Youth, I am thy actions.' " It tells the story of the sure and natural retribu- tions on conduct, more aptly and forcibly perhaps •than any other form of statement could. " Our acts our angels are, or good or ill. Out fatal shadows that walk by us still." Our great satisfaction in animal fables comes from the same source. They clothe the most significant truths in the form of a sprightly, telling story. The investing of the animal with personality, and giving reason and speech, imparts picturesqueness and a fresher interest. Hence they have been the delight of all ages and all races. Through the apologue, amid the arbitrary and absolute depotisms of the East, as a Hindu phrase expresses it, ' The tongue of wisdom may speak in the ear of authority.' The wonderful prison of Merlin is described in "" Morte d' Arthur ; " — an enchanted tower, " no such strong tower in the world," says Merlin, " as this MERLIN S PRISON. 247 wherein I am confined ; and it is neither of wood, nor of iron, nor of stone, but of air, without anything else ; and made by enchantment so strong, that it can never be demolished while the world lasts, neither can I go out, nor can any one come in, save she who hath enclosed me here, and who keeps me company when it pleaseth her ; she cometh when she listeth, for her will is here." Arthur could not reach him, he could not reach Arthur henceforth any more ; Sir Gawain, though he could hear him and hold some converse, could not find, could not see him ; he is held in most impalpable, yet most stern and irresistible prison. — How more happily could the captures and incarcerations, the enforced exile and expatriation of the soul we all sometimes know, be described .i" Ere we be aware, we are locked in the enchanted castle, enclosed in a ' bush of hawthorn,' and no power on earth can take us out. Nay, in a sense, we are all there, from life's beginning to its end. Goethe's marvellous Tale, das Mdrchen der aller Marchen, and Bunyan's Allegory, both are vivid and powerful pictures. They mirror so much of life, they must both also be immortal, for they will speak to man's nature — ' As long as the heart bath wishes. As long as life hath woes.' Pilgrim and wanderers we all are, exposed, beset, beleaguered, and full often overcome, making the toilsome perilous journey across the fields of Time, 248 SYMBOLISM. mired in full many a slough of Despond, and caught not seldom in drear castle of the Giant Despair, as we attempt to urge our way from the city of the plains to the New Jerusalem beyond mountain and dividing river. In dealing with childhood, we must use picture and the concrete ; in dealing with the adult years, we still have to hold much to that same method. And the resources of history for this supply are practically infinite. There are stories or mythic representations that, I think, must have been transparent at the beginning to the most stolid understanding, felt to have force by the figurative or moral meaning they couched. The concrete and picturesque form was of the frame- work by which the mind was helped. If by any they came to be taken in the letter, and believed in so, the case would but furnish an instance of reversion,^ analogous to that of cultivated land by neglect laps- ing to wilderness, or individual men or tribes measurably civilized, going back to wildness and barbarism. When the Norsemen spoke of Night and Day as horsemen, driving each his steed, and the dew we see in the morning, as the shining foam dropped from the bit of Hrimfaxi's* bridle when his journey is done, and the glistening rays that pencil the sky and * Hrimf axl, Klmy-mane. THE SOUL S PERILOUS JOURNEY. 249 glorify the earth as the beaming light of Skinfaxi's ('Shining hair'sj mane, no one that heard could have failed to perceive that this was poetic speech. So too, the characteristics of the Toltec god, Quetzal- cohuatl, must have been felt to belong only to the sun. The Greeks said of Apollon that he throws himself into the sea as a dolphin, and comes out of it after a time as a star. This must have been very plain to all. So in the ideas of future life expressed among many races, thex conception of trial and retribution must have informed and given the essential coloring to manifold stories. The Algonquin hunter who left his body behind and visited the land of souls, found that the wicked souls perish in the storm, as they attempt to cross the lake that spreads this side the beautiful and happy island. The Greenlander believes that the journey to the land of Torngarsuk is difficult; the souls have to slide five days or more down a precipice all gained with the blood of those who have gone before, and the ride especially in the winter, is exceedingly peril- ous. Some come to nothing, utterly perish in mak- ing that terrible descent. In the Choctaw belief, a rapid fearful stream has to be encountered by the soul making its long jour- ney towards the west ; over that stream, reaching from hill to hill, lies a long slippery pine log, the 250 SYMBOLISM. bark all peeled off. The good walk the log safely, though stones are sent flying at them by six people who are on the other side. The wicked trying to dodge the stones, slip off the log, and perish in the boiling gulf below. Corresponding; to this is the idea among the Moslems of the Bridge Es-Sirat, finer than a hair, and sharper than the edge of a sword, — the Bridge Chinavat of the Parsis,— -which all souls must pass, but from which the wicked, attacked and harried by demons, inevitably fall into the abyss. These are all good as mirror. It was probably in the character of figure or type that they were first invented and told. And the same again in substance we find in the " Brig o' Dread, na brader than a thread," sung in the old Lyke-Wake Dirge in the North Country, England, an ancient funeral chant. The old savage or barbaric legend is modified, but the poor tired soul has to pass over the Bridge of Dread, through the piercing furze and Purgatory Fire, all the same. It is armed however with the " hell-shoon " of the old Norsemen, the shoes now coming through the charity the soul has shown in life. " Tills a* nlglite, this a nlglite. Every night and alle ; Fire and fleetf and candle-light. And Christe receive thy saule," • A, one. t Fleet, water. THE BRIG O DREAD. 2$ I First it comes to Whinne-moor, where if in life it has given either hosen or shoon, it now may put them on, and so be protected against the Whinnes. But if not, the Whinnes " shall prick it to the bare beean " f'bone^. Then the Brig o' Dread the soul must cross, and next beyond thattt meets Purgatory- Fire. •' If ever thou gave either milke or drink, Every night and alle ; The fire shall never make thee shrinke, And Christe receive thy saule. But if milke nor drink thou never gave neean,* Every night and alle ; The Are shall bum thee to the bare beean. And Christ receive thy saule." Walter Scott states the belief in Yorkshire. " They are of beliefe that once in their lives it is good to give a pair of new shoes to a poor man, for as much as after this life they are to pass barefoote through a great launde full of thorns and furzen, except by the meryte of the almes aforesaid the}' have redeemed the forfeyte; for at the edge of the launde an oulde man shall meet them with the same shoes that were given by the partie when he was lyving, and after he hath shodde them, dismisseth them to go through thick and thin without scratch or scalle."f In German folk-lore it is taught that he who gave bread in his life time, shall find it after death ready for him to cast into the hell-hound's jaws. * Neean, none. t Border Minetrelsy, cited by Grimm, Mythologie, 795. 252 SYMBOLISM. It is plain to see that the moral element is present in these mythic representations; perhaps it was superior and presiding. They served in the past their use, and they have now great interest and value as showing a page in the history of man's mind. % The Hindu representations of the retributions to the souls are significant, as they declare the natural and exact justice that must come for deeds done in life. The stealer of food shall be dyspeptic ; the horse-thief shall go lame; the scandal-monger shall have foul breath; the thief who stole perfumes, shall become a musk-rat. Sac. Some tribes in Brazil be- lieve that the souls of the brave will become beauti- ful birds, while cowards will be changed into reptiles. The pictures in Dante's Inferno, intensely realistic, vivid and fearful as they are, have ground in truth, — bating the fact that they are in part the expression of his own prejudice and personal exasperation, — and may have a present value for impressing, but such things are to be used with caution. We may better pass quickly along. J\ron ragio7iiam di lor., via guar da e passa ! 'In indigestion food is poison,' says a Hindu maxim ; in disuse of the discerning reason, failure to penetrate through the outer and seen, read down to the inner verities, and rest in them alone, is death. Words are powers, they carry not seldom fearful nightmare and blight. Pictures will become real death; or life. 253 things, alive, bearing as in the gross belief of the savage, a fell potency, a witchery and incantation. Symbolism in its abuse has degraded, stultified, debauched the mind of man; symbolism in its just use, purged, clarified, exalted, penetrated and aglow with transcendent and invisible, is to be the liberator and inspirer of the mind, on and on without end. For since by man came death, says the New Testa- ment, by man also came the resurrection of the dead. XII. EXCELSIOR. " Thus with infinite desire Deathless beauty doth inspire Human souls : one goal attMned , Higher summits must be gained." —Persian. We have outgrown and surmounted much, but we are not yet fully free. Max Miiller tells us we have not to this hour escaped the meshes of mythology^ even with reference to some of our most common words, and those not connected in any direct way with religious ideas. He adduces instances in point, which must bring surprise even to the observant and thoughtful. We penetrate some of this figurative speech, it is transparent to us. We speak of high, low, of ascend- ing, of descending, using the words in recognized spiritual sense; we are never ensnared by them. We employ old terms that go back to rudest mythopoeic ages, as 'rainbow,' 'thunderbolt,' &c., but we have outgrown all trammel of these. The words mean to us no more what they once did. So with 'en- thusiasm,' clear as the mark is carried here of riiy- thology; we no longer signify or believe, as we so (254) PARENTAGE FROM THE SUN. 255 speak, in a divine aflBatus and possession by deity. The case is the same with 'epilepsy,' 'ecstasy,' 'lunacy,' &c. The growth of the mind has wholly borne the thought out of the mythological stage. We see through the impersonation in our word Nature; we characterize her as a mother, the all- producing and all-nourishing mother, — indeed the word Nature literally means the one always about to bring forth, — but we are never for a moment caught in this phraseology. We have left that toil a good way behind. We can speak of the sun as father, and be as little deceived. Literally, the philologists tell us, the term signifies the begetter. In strictest sense he is the parent, procreator, of all life there is on the planet; he is our father. " Every tree, planet and flower, grows and flour- ishes by the grace and bounty of the sun. Thunder and lightning are his transmuted strength. Every fire that burns, and every flame that glows, dispenses light and heat which originally belonged to the sun. He rears the whole vegetable world, and through it the animal; the lilies of the field are his workman- ship, the verdure of the meadows, and the cattle upon a thousand hills. He forms the muscle, he urges tlie blood, he builds the brain. His fleetness is in the lion's foot, he springs in the panther, he soars in the eagle. The sun digs the ore from our mines, he rivets the plates, he boils the water, he draws the train. He 256 EXCELSIOR. not only grows the cotton, he spins the fibre, and weaves the web. There is not a hammer raised, a wheel turned, or a shuttle thrown, that is not raised, turned and thrown by the sun."* We are his offspring; our very thought, conscious- ness itself, owns the sun for its parentage. We have outgrown the gods, have pushed intelli- gence into .the darkness of ignorance, until the universe which to Greek, Hindu, Teuton, to all rude or semi-civilized races in fact, seemed peopled with deities, with strange and capricious and very fleshly personalities, is to us luminous with law. We can use the names Apollon, Herakles, Zeus or Jupiter, Mars, &c., but they carry no snare; they are very innocent personification. So far, good. We have gotten out of the polythe- ism of the old ages, we are no longer in ecstasy or terror in the imagined presence of the multitudinous gods and goddesses of the Pantheon. We have escaped the toil oi person here; where Greek saw the various personalities, we, gifted with a larger freer vision, see powers and forces. But have we reached the highest, or proximately the final growth in this regard .' Is ours the ultimate conception.? We have thrown off the many, or rather have resolved the many into one. Illumed * Tyndall, Htat as a Mode of Motion. INDIVIDUALIZED DEITY. 257 with light, borne on in retreat from one redoubt and fortification after another that it had thrown up for protection and succor, the spirit of man has retired to one central fastness as the stronghold that is finally impregnable, — the ultimate and supreme person. We still personify, but melt all the individu- alities into one individual, sublimate polytheism into monotheism. Whatever else we have parted with, we have not left that conception behind. There is one central and absolute person, we say, though all the personalities that peopled Olympos, or Asgard, or Alborj, were dreams. The mind clings here as to rock that can never be pulverized, fact that cannot be dissolved away. And as is almost inevitably the case, we cast this personality in a quite determinate form, we conceive God as a monarch, a potentate, much after the style of the Orient, dwelling in a place, and holding rule amid the splendors of regal state. He is clothed with the attributes of individual will, and the quali- ties in large degree that mark one like ourselves. The projected shadow, the survival, is it not, of the ■old mythology.' Does that conception in its begin- ning, its very essence, bear something of the mythic taint.' Is not the thought in future to make this step also ■on, growing beyond the anthropomorphism in refer- ence to Deity.' Leaving behind the concept of per- 258 EXCELSIOR. sonality, f'as it already has in regard to Nature and* the nature-gods of myth^, as it contemplates the supreme Reality? Here too recognizing the meta- phors and personifications of speech, and the realism of thought, but never to be caught thereby ? The pointers we already have, look that way. Max Miiller speaking of the old Vedic deity Atman — breath or spirit, then the divine self, — says that the idea remained "like a pure crystal too transparent for poetry." " In my conception of person," says Fichte, "there are limits; how can I clothe Thee with it, without these?" 'In substance like light, in nature like truth,' said Pythagoras. God, the Infinite, — shall we not conceive of that supreme and ineffable as presence rather than person, as the One that transcends all, all form and determina- tion, all categories even of thought? That One ethereal, unknown, invisible, whose city is immensity, whose shape the universe, whose open palace door the dawn, whose breath is the breeze, whose eye- beam the sheen of the star, whose revelation is reason, whose incarnation is man. And as we must have for our beholding the 'angel of his presence,' as the Hebrews described, what Zoroaster called the Am- schaspands, some mode or type of the divine existence,, something to temper the light to our vision, — shall we not find in Truth, Excellence, Beauty, the highest,, grandest symbol? Here is shrine for our purest THE GREAT PRESENCE 259. worship, here a temple which idolator's foot-step" cannot enter. Here is point of union of Eternity with Time, a realm for science, a sphere for growth and enlargement on and on without end., Milton says of himself, as he is writing to a friend,, that he is enamored of moral perfection. Can there be an object worthier of adoration and the heart's deepest love ? Doubtless there will still be employment of the words God, Divine Being, Deity, or their equivalents. Language must seek to express, and the tongue can but stammer. We shall use them because we must, since the limits of pictorial and personal speech we have never been able to pass, use, because they have, rightly read and kept sternly subordinate, their truth and striking significance. We shall remember that we too are children ; we also are attempting to set our ladder against the sky. These words will be thoroughly penetrated with light, made so transpar- ent they will carry no obstructing veil, and cast no shadow. As completely as Nature has become deanthropomorphised in our common speech, so fully shall the term God, and other words of like im- port, be freed from bearing or awakening in any degree the personal concept. And what a presence it is, as we come into that realm of ethereal Truth and Beauty ! Society here 26o EXCELSIOR. in every solitude, solace in every sorrow, cheer amid all darkness and discouragement. Strength' out of very weakness, and victory from defeat. Nowhere such alchemy, which transmutes the basest earths to gold, and converts poison to nourishment. This is that reality which underlies and transcends all, ideal which soars and broods, beckoning ever on and beyond. This is the Nirvana of which the rapt souls in the East have thought, dreamed, and towards which they have onward striven. When man comes to his estate and looks thus into the perfect law of liberty, he shall dwell and rejoice in this com- munion, every day the inner beholding, and life a psalm. Humanity the divine incarnation, in the human soul a ray, a fadeless ray from the heights of the skies. The human is ej-e-beam of God. " In thy face," said the dying Bunsen, looking up into the countenance of his wife, " In thy face have I beheld the Eternal." This communication none that has seen, felt, can ever forget. The social, the dear ones we know, the per- sons we behold, are the medium thus of the impart- ing and fellowship with the infinite soul. A nearer access in any objective relation we cannot conceive, and may never hope to obtain. How Heaven descends into man, how man rises toward and culminates in deity; or in the large, how the angels of God ascend and descend on this ladder THE BEAUTIFUL MYSTERY. 261 of Time; how unseen incarnates and expresses itself in seen, how seen types, approximates, and but faintly shadows, the unseen ; how there is union and also separation, blending and yet distinction, — this we may well call by an old term, 'the mystery of redemption,' into whose depths, fathomless secrets,, the angels are ever desiring to look. Finite is mirror and symbol of infinite, its pulse-beat; infinite is reality and illimitable goal of finite. I have some- times thought the ages of eternity would not be too long for the soul to study, to explore this beautiful mystery, the divine in the human. We penetrate, we read, more and more in ever increasing degree see and possess it ; yet we penetrate and possess it not.. To pierce and solve it, would be to fathom, to answer the riddle of being. Yes, the mind of man is to grow and leave the limita- tions and hamper of all its past behind. The religion of reason will exorcise the beasts and the ghouls of sense. With inauguration of this exalted ethereal conception of God, will go inevitably all belief in personal Devil, — coming down from Iranian sources and made in the faith of the Christian world so dom- inant and powerful, painting that imaginary figure as well nigh omniscient, — and in the pessimistic in whatever form, in fetich of miraculous Bible and ex- piatory blood, in dreams and nightmares of spiritual world with ubiquitous personalities, airy winged messengers and demons that now haunt and harry 262 EXCELSIOR. the mind. These attest the survivals of mythology not yet left behind. The pure Truth, the Everlasting Wisdom and Excellence, will be the sufficient re- source, the bosom of succor, the arm to sustain, that the soul ever in love may lean upon. How different will life be, will death be, when the whole being rests in trust on this presence, the ineffable One who is Light, Beneficence and Power, no longer anxiety or any sorrow or fear, no desire of interposition, -since it feels that for it all is bound up in the desti- nies of the unfading realities. There will be peace. " Teach me your mood, O patient stars! Who climb each night the ancient sky, Leaving on space no shade, no sears, No trace of age, no lear to die." With this will come marked change in the form and aim of worship, there will be far less of invoca- tion and appellation as to a person, there will be celebration of the thought's ideal. The sacraments will be different, the office of book, of discourse, will be different. All things will be centered upon the world of substance, cultivation of the nature and character. The period of dream, of terror, of phan- tasy will be passed, period of vision, of liberation in knowledge, will have come. The prayer will fade, rather it will sublimate into psalm ; invocation be- come thanksgiving and song. Preaching will be teaching and incitement through the reason and the -rational sentiment, not the administration of a pre- FROM ANTHROPOMORPHIC TO IDEAL. 263 ■scribed and imposed faith, but the inculcation of Truths, the Truths of Life; not imparting a revelation, but awakening the inner being, opening the door to new faculties, and lifting to a larger and higher free- dom. The stone which the builders have rejected will become the head of the corner. A reverence for veracity, for integrity, holding the fealty supreme, regarding the laws themselves as practically very deity, appreciation deeper, keener, for the incarnate presence in nature and in man, awaking of the sensibilities so the spirit shall be all alive and aglow to the fact of the harmonies and beauties, — will be the religion, the prayer and the altar incense of the future. It has been a signal advance from Odin to God,* from the wind to personal invisible spirit ; a great step once from coarse fetichism to the Jehovism of the Old Testament; it will be a greater from the anthropomorphic to the ideal ; more momentous in its eflFect both upon thought and the forms of worship. And as the present looks back upon the old idolatries with wonder that their devotees should have been so stupid and blind, set in such narrow mould, and un- able to see over or get out, so shall a future age look back to ours with amazement that in the midst of * Both {according to Mr. John Fiske the same word; Guodon original {orm ol Odln, becoming in course of time our word Ood. 264 EXCELSIOR. our advanced and measurably ripened civilization^ such expansion and growth in intellectual freedom and material and economic power, we could still be such pagans in our religion. With the higher emancipation there shall be also the larger recognition and appropriation of man's past. Reading through all, the mind shall read in all, depths of meaning never seen before. Prof. Youmans has well said, speaking of the sun, that it is more, far more to us of to-day than it was to the men even of fifty years ago, since now science is learning to explore and pierce it, reads its elements, and un- folds the story of its birth, its age, its action, and its destiny. The spectroscope has penetrated the heavens, unveiled the mystery of the stars, and shown in beautiful and memorable illustration, the oneness of the worlds and laws above, with those below. Light and heat, the crystallizing molecules, create the familiar world of every day anew for us, since expos- itors like Tyndall have told us the tale of their mar- velous secrets and their informing intelligence. So of mythology ; as we are able to decipher, to enter into the frame and outlook of the people that wrought the rnyths, to see all that and beyond also, — it speaks with a far deeper emphasis and more pregnant meaning to us than to any before. " Even man's errors," says Max Miiller, " we learn to under- stand, even his dreams we begin to interpret." We READING THROUGH ALL. 265 shall look with a freshened interest, with more en- gaged, perceiving and admiring eyes, upon the famil- iar sights of the every day that we had ceased to note and remember. They become furbished with new brightness, and speak with a deeper suggestion, as we put ourselves in place 'of the early beholders, and recall how they were viewed in a poet's eye. We shall see the Golden Fleece in the burnished gleams upon the folds of cloud that hang upon the sea of sky in the hour of expiring day; the dying struggle of the toilng hero as he wrestles with the poisoned garment that burns and tears his flesh ; see the palace and gardens of Alkinoos; the Daidalean Labyrinth, or again the sparkling valley of diamonds haunted by the roc ; pale lo and Argos with his thousand eyes ; see the rosy-fingered maiden that beams and glows in the dawning East, or Gerda, beautiful beyond compare, standing in her father's door that she had just opened, pouring auroral light o'er all the sky, and smiting Freyr with frenzy of love ; see the Bridge of Light thrown up by the parted lovers, looking and longing to be united and one, that arches and gilds the nocturnal sky. Nothing shall be too fanciful or whimsical, arbitrary or grotesque in these old conceits, to interest and attract; nothing too rude, sensuous-seeming or even gross, to instruct and enrich. All the experience and the thought of man, his vision and his dreams. 266 EXCELSIOR. his wisdom and his infirmities of folly, shall be sac- ramental to the perceiving and improving mind. Every shred of this history shall be precious, divine. We all are like, all held much in the same tether ; all visited with a common aspiration, and enlarged in the thought of one sublime, measureless possibility. It may be fitting before we end, to instance two myths, — both from races in whom little in the direc- tion of the poetic and truly spiritual might be ex- pected, races dwelling, we might suppose surely and almost inevitably on the lower plane, amid the besetments and preoccupations of the mere sense. The Esthonians, living on marshes and amid sand plains, in most inhospitable climate, in smoky, sooty huts, which they share with the beasts, and that know not window^s or chimneys, are not the people you would suppose to be rich in imagination, or in any of the finer perceptions. But tiiey have a tale that tells that the thought of the poet blooms here also, amid the protracted night and devouring cold of Arctic clime. Indeed the Kalevala, — wonderful pro- duct of the imagination, — apprises us that man may be thinker, poet, bard, even under these hardest con- ditions. Wanna Issi — Old Father — had two servants, Koit and Ammarik, and he gave them a torch, which it was the office of Koit to light every morning, and of Ammarik to extinguish in the evening. Faithful THE WINTER-STREET OF LIGHT. 267 they had long been in this service, and Wanna Issi at length said to them they might be man and wife. They replied No, but asked that they might be per- mitted to remain forever bride and bridegroom, — affianced, lovers still. "Wanna Issi assented, and henceforth Koit handed the torch every evening to Ammarik, and Ammarik took and extinguished it. "Only during four weeks in summer they remain together at midnight. Koit hands the dying torch to Ammarik, but Ammarik does not let it die, but lights it again with her breath. Then their hands are stretched out and their lips meet, and the blush of Ammarik colors the midnight sky."* Here we have those evenings in midsummer under that latitude, when the gloaming seems to kiss the dawn. No race has ever conceived and told the fact more finely. Somewhat similar, at least cognate to this, is an old conception that has come down in the form of a legend, and been rendered in verse by a Swedish poet of our time, Torpelius, The names of the two lovers, drawn manifestly from the Old Testament, show plainly that at the time it assumed the form in which we have it, there must have been some con- tact with Christian influence. But the thought is old, and well illustrates one of the early mythic con- ceptions. The bridge they threw up, arching the *Max MflUer In Art. on Mythologv, Chips V, 87. 268 EXCELSIOR. farthest skies, it need hardly be said, was the Milky- Way. " Her name Salami was, his Zulamytli ; And botli so loved, each other loved. TIius runs the tender myth : That once on earth they lived, and loving there, Were wrenched apart by night, and sorrow and despair ; And when death came at last, with white wings given. Condemned to live apart, each reached a separate heaven. «**»■« Yet loving still upon the azure height Across unnumbered ways of splendor, gleaming bright With worlds on worlds that spread and glowed and burned. Each unto each, with love that knew no limit, longing turned. Zulamyth half consumed, until he willed Out of his strength, one night, a bridge of light to build Across the waste— and lo! from her far sun A bridge of light from orb to orb Salami had begun. A thousand years they built, still on, with faith Immeasurable, quenchless,— thus the legend saith, — Until the winter-street of light— a bridge Above heaven's highest vault swung clear, remotest ridge from ridge. Fear seized the cherubim ; to God they spake : — ' See what amongst Thy works. Almighty, these can make! God smiled, and smiling, lit the spheres with joy— ' What in my world love builds,' He said, ' shall I, shall love destroy? ' The bridge stood finished, and the lovers flew Into each other's arms ; when lo ! shot up and grew Brightest in the heavens serene, a star that shone As the heart shines serene, after a thousand troubles gone. ' ' * Our second tale is from the Maoris of New Zea- land, a story of the origin of man and of the daily life of things on this earth, in which we have all of the child's simplicity, and the thought, the imagina- tion of more than childhood. It is called ' The * Translation by Mr. E. Keary, Evening Hours, Vol. 3. THE CHILDREN OF HEAVEN AND EARTH. 269 Legend of the Children of Heaven and Earth,' and was taken down by Sir George Grey about thirty years ago. Lengthy as it is, it will all repay perusal. "Men' had but one pair, of primitive ancestors; they sprang from the vast heaven that exists above us, and from the earth which lies beneath us. Ac- cording to the traditions of our race, Rangi and Papa, or Heaven and Earth, were the source from which, in the beginning, all things originated. Darkness then rested upon the heaven and upon the earth, and they still both clave together, for they had not yet been rent apart; and the children they had begotten were ever thinking amongst them- selves what might be the difference between dark- ness and light; they knew that beings had multi- plied and increased, and yet light had never broken upon them, but it ever continued dark. Hence those sayings are found in our ancient religious ser- vices : "There was darkness from the first division of time unto the tenth, to the hundredth, to the thousandth," — that is for a vast space of time ; and these divisions of time were considered as beings, and were each termed a Po. "At last the beings who had been begotten by Heaven and the Earth, worn out by the continued darkness, consulted amongst themselves, saying. Let us now determine what we should do with Rangi and Papa, whether it would be better to slay them, 270 EXCELSIOR. or to rend them apart. Then spoke Tu-ma-tauenga, the fiercest of the children of Heaven and Earth, " It is well, let us slay them." "Then spake Tane-marhuta, the father of forests and of all things that inhabit them, or that are con- structed from trees, — " Nay, not so. 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 nourishing mother." The brothers all con- sented to this proposal, with the exception of Taw- hiri-ma-tea, the father of winds and storms, and he fearing that his kingdom was about to be over- thrown, grieved greatly at the thought of his parents' being torn apart. Five of the brothers willingly con- sented to the separation of their parents, but one of them would not agree to it." The brothers all tried, in vain, — the god and father of the cultivated food of man, god and father of fish and reptiles, &c.; — every one failed. — " Then at last, slowly uprises Tane-mahuta, the god and father of forests, of birds, and of insects, and he struggles with his parents; in vain he strives to rend them apart 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 THE LIBERATION. 2? I with cries and groans of wo they shriek aloud, " Wherefore slay you thus your parents ? Why com- mit you so dreadful a crime as to slay us, as to rend your parents apart? " But Tane-mahuta pauses not, he regards not their shrieks and cries; far, far beneath him he presses down the earth, far, far above him he thrusts up the sky. "Hence these sayings of olden time ; — "It was the fierce thrusting of Tane, which tore the heaven from the earth so that they were rent apart, and darkness was made manifest, and so was the light." " No sooner was heaven rent from the earth, than the multitude of human beings were discovered whom they had begotten, and who had hitherto lain concealed between the bodies of Rangi and Papa."* The legend next describes how Tawhiri-ma-tea, god and father of winds and storms, arose and fol- lowed his father to the realms above, hurrying to the sheltered hollows of the boundless skies, to hide and cling and nestle there. Fierce desire came to him to wage war against his brethren who had done such unhandsome deed to their parents. " 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 *In one version it is priven thus:— "Tliey became visible, wlio had hitherto been concealed between the lioUows of their parent's breasts.'' —Lang, Custom and Myth, citing Taylor and Bastian. 272 EXCELSIOR. upon his foe." Tane-mahuta and his giant forests were taken unawares, unsuspecting, when the raging hurricane burst upon them, the. mighty trees were snapped in twain, prostrated, trunks and branches left torn upon the ground for insect and grub to prey on. The sea was swept and tossed with wild surg- ings and mountain waves till Tangaroa, god of the ocean and father of all that dwell therein, became affrighted and fled. His children, the parents offish on the one hand and of reptiles on the other, fled, the one into the depths of the sea, the other into the recesses of the shore^ amid the forests and the scrubs. The storm-god attacked his brothers, the gods and progenitors of the tilled food and the wild, but Papa, the Earth, caught them up and hid them, and he searched and swept to find them, in vain. He fell upon the last of his brothers, the father oi fierce men, but him he could not even move. Man stood erect, unshaken upon the bosom of his mother earth. "At last the hearts of the Heaven and the Storm became tranquil, and their passion was assuaged." But now Tu-ma-tauenga, farther of fierce men, became stirred to attack. He was minded to avenge himself upon his brethren who had left him unaided to stand against the god of storms. He twisted nooses of the leaves of the whanake tree, and the birds and beasts, children of the forest-god fell before him ; netted nets of the flax plant and dragged ashore the THE UNDYING LOVK AND DEVOTION. 273 fish ; he digged in the ground and brought up the sweet potato and all cultivated food, the fern root and all wild-growing food. He overcame every one of the brothers, all but the storm-god, who still ever attacks him in tempest and hurricane, seeking to destroy him both by sea and by land. It was in one of these attacks that the dry land was made to dis- appear beneath the waters. " The beings of ancient days who thus submerged the land were Terrible-rain, Long-continued-rain, Fierce hailstorms; and their progeny were Mist, Heavy-dew and Light-dew, and thus but little of the dry land was left standing above the sea. " From that time clear light increased upon the earth, and all the beings which were hidden between Rangi and Papa before they were separated, now multiplied upon the earth. The first beings begotten by Rangi and Papa were not like human beings; but Tu-ma-tauenga bore the likeness of a man, as did all his brothers. " Up to this time the vast Heaven has still ever remained separate 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 274 EXCELSIOR. his beloved, drops frequent tears upon her bosom, and men seeing these, term them dew-drops." * So we find here fountains of clear water, wells of life, opening for us in unexpected places. Humanity is rich and brings for us even in its lower planes, per- petual surprises. Who shall any longer speak of heathens, or people that dwell in the blackness of unbroken night, having no perceptions, no ideals? The scale is everywhere one of degree ; it is measure,, or more or less, that differences and divides barbar- ous from civilized, pagan from Christian. All have been touched from the fountain of Wisdom and Beauty, and all have articulated some syllable or more from the name ineffable. We find the oneness of Humanity, all the race like, everywhere essentially the same. The distinctions that have been drawn in the past, artificial, grounded in our ignorance and vain conceit of tribe or people, shall in this growing- light pass away. And by speaking to the common perceptions, all shall be reached. We see also clear hint here of the origin of the mythology that we find so ripened in the literatures of the higher and more cultivated races. Ancestors of Greek, Teuton, and Hindu, so conceived and spoke of the gods. These Maori tales are the germs • Grey's PolyneBian Mythologu, pp. 1-5, 14, 16. In the Greek mythology the dew is the tears of Eos weeping over the death of Memnon, and in the Teutonic, tlie trees in mourning over the stealing away of Iduna, weep- frozen tears . REVEALED THOUGH VEILED. 275, of such legends as spring and have grown into this world-covering tree. On this ladder of symbol, ascending rung after rung from lower to higher, we are to climb up to- God, ascending and transcending until we reach that central unity, that reality of all, for which thought has no conception and language no name. Here are we to commune, and find our being's portion, joy^ possession forever. Here are we liberated and come to our estate. Speech cannot describe or image it even, the soul knows it in some partial realization. All that highest prophets and bards have hitherto been able, was but to adumbrate in some faint degree to the already cognizant and perceiving spirit. At the best the vision is shadowed and dim, we never see our divinity unveiled. Only in some lofty type,, form transcending all forms we know, can we behold the invisible. We rise, we approximate, we reach nearer and nearer to the illimitable goal. And the clearer our perceptions and higher our attainment, seeing the unseen and eternal, the more shall we penetrate and appreciate the living symbol, world we live in, and the horn-book in which our lessons were taught. ' Terrestrial place is found by celestial observation.' The more we prize and lay hold upon the substance, the more shall we appreciate^ cherish, and in tender love and awe religiously cling- to the manifiestation in time. ' Hence,' says Hermes,, 276 EXCELSIOR. ^' was man called the Great Miracle.' The highest idealism can be but ever the truest realism. The elementary book we have learned in, the primer of the human race, can never be forgotten or dis- esteemed. Like a palimpsest, it reveals as studied new, deeper inscriptions and more. For the Alpine climbing that still awaits, the best help is to be found in the recorded history of man, his thought and most resolute endeavor after apprehension of the spiritual and real. This is sacramental bread and wine; it is the offered body and blood of a toiling, suffering humanity. Ideas shall become nobler, worthier, perceptions clearer, aims, purposes, as well as conceptions more exalted, language shall be purged and elevated, the grosser elements, terms that have proved most easily illusive and a snare, especially that have been satu- rated in the sense, shall be disused and pass away. The mind itself shall be enfranchised, so that as it deals with invisible, it shall be taken never in mesh of the seen. The mythology will all be left behind. Why should not the terms God, heaven, spiritual world , &c., become as pellucid, as free from the personal or any concrete implication, as now to us all are substance, truth ? More and more must speech become transpar- ent, no toil anywhere, and the soul shall dwell in undimmed, uninterrupted vision. There shall be iHO night there, no illusion, no refraction or veil SPEAKING TO THE THOUGHT. 277- before the eye of the spirit. There will be deliver- ence, perfect conquest, the fetter shall become the pinion, the clog transmute to wing, to bear on beyond the sense to the supreme, ethereal Beauty. We may perhaps say that finally all language will be safe, penetrated and illumed from the inner life; the passional seeming will carry no hint of passion, the intoxicated, erotic speech of Sufi saint will be read the ecstatic rapture of the freed, beholding, and exulting soul. A full absolute emancipation from all the intense realism and sensism, the bondage to determinate and seen, which we witness all through history, and which to this hour bears sway. Begin- ning has been made on this road, man's mind shall not pause or falter, until the final conquest be gained and the goal won. Yet there will be most careful discrimination and selection. All the symbolism employed in rite must have its spring sole in natural beauty. It must fit like the apt word for the thing, so inly and livingly related that it shall seem verily that, its spontaneous,, veritable type and pure incarnation. The forms will be in utmost simple, and luminously expressive; speaking to the thought and necessarily inspiring. Much that we now see prevailing, one might almost say all, must be cast aside, as foreign, unadapted, un- worthy, cumbrous, artificial and misleading. Will it not be possible to have every expression of man's -Z78 EXCELSIOR. sentiment so fitting, so exalted and clear, that to see with the eye shall be instantly to apprehend with the reason ? So charged and radiant with,the right meaning that the spirit shall be constrained, com- pelled in the witnessing of it, to repair to and repose alone in the central reality for love and worship? The world will show transfigured, and all life will be music, when the prophet, when the harper comes. The Hindus said of the seven Rishis, ' mortal but united with the immortals' that with their hymns they 'caused the dawn to arise and the sun to shine.' Pregnant and beautiful is the hint which the tales give us of the office of teacher and bard, interpreter and minstrel to the inner self of us all. "These strains," says the Gudrunlied, " he ('HorantJ sang, and they were wondrous. To none were they too long who heard the strains. The time that it would take to ride a thousand miles, passed whilst listening to him, as a moment. The wild beast of the forest and the timid deer hearkened, the little worms crept forth in the green meadows, fishes swam up to listen, each forgetting its nature so long as he chanted his song." A like power in the harper Volker in the Nibelungen Lay. He could fight as well as he could play, and the soft soothing tones of his harp lull to sleep the sorrows of the anxious men who are soon to die. Tales of Amphion with his lyre, Orpheus with his miraculous harp, Odin with his runes, Oberon with THE STORY OF THE RACE. 279 his horn, Gunadhya with his verses 'that he had written with his own blood,' Wainamoinen with his lays and with his kantele, — tell not a fulfilment only but more a prophecy, they speak their word of the songs and the oracles that shall be. Have we not all sometimes heard notes of the strain .■' And more, infinitely more and higher are in store. More and more the light beats and breaks in the throbbing East. The eye sees more clearly and deeply, the heart knows trulier, and with ever increasing delight and wonder and_love. This lesson we find in the study of these experi- ences and mythic conceptions through the entire range of history, — the spirit of man passing by slow, often imperceptible stages out of illusion to vision, out of bondage to freedom, out of mythology to knowledge, pure worship, and ever augmenting per- ception and power. The road is long, the goal yet far, far away. But the tale of mythology, the story of the race in its civilization and its growth, is one with the scripture told in all the Bibles of the world, — the journey of the soul from the city of the plains on to the azure heights, the city,— which yet is not a city, no determinate place at all, — the city of God. It begins Jisuckikos, it becomes pneumatikos ; it begins sensuous, animal, it rises in ever growing approxi- mation to spiritual. Sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It leaves one after another its dreams, its 28o EXCELSIOR. card-castles of fantasy behind, and ascends to realm of pure thought and being. It has to learn self-re- nunciation and great trust, to lay itself nakedly for repose and strength upon the bosom of the infinite rectitude and everlasting beneficience, — the supreme and impersonal Law. The creature of feeling, of impulse, of passion, man becomes lord of will, master of character. Planting in the moral ideal, worshiping sole the ethereal Truth and Excellence, the mind will be at once both religious and free. » Ages yet may pass, ere the full-orbed day shall rise, but soon or late the race is to unite Time with the eternal, to behold with clearest vision, to discern, worship and adore perfectly the everlasting amid and by the symbolism of the transient and the seen. Outer and inner, visible and invisible, finite and infinite, shall join and blend into one. All conflict, all unrest shall be taken away, perfect vision, perfect conquest, perfect peace be won. The beholding spirit will see Deity in manifestation, and aj mani- festation, and reading constantly through that, shall sink, rather sublimate all perpetually in the reality of God. Can we express it better than in the language of the old Hebrew, — the Jacob's ladder let down, and the angels of Elohim ascending and descending, uniting earth to skies, incarnating eternal in this THE THEOPHANIA. z8l world of time, and sublimating time in eternal ?■ Further, the incarnations of Heaven, his face seen, and presence r-ead, felt in human consciousness and personality, the eyes that beam, lips that speak, and hearts that love, this miraculous Theopha'hia, a com- panion soul, a friend, — will be for the quickened nature, the wonder, delight, and inextinguishable awe, through the ages unnumbered of the coming time. And the living symbols of infinite that speak to the thought, that high divine Beauty which ' can be loved without effeminacy,' will be the unending object of ever deepening worship, and longing and joy. Held as provisional and relative, felt as but a beam, mayhap only reflection and shadow of transcendent and unseen, it will still be adored as the greatest, worthiest, purest, that man's spirit can know in the present stage of its being. INDEX. Achllleus, 55, 73, 87, 160, 162, 220 jEschylos, 229 Algonquins, myths of the, 21, 25, 29, 48, 47, 55, 67, 96, 249 AlkinoOs, 265 Ammarik, 266, 267 Amphlon. 103, 191, 192, 278 Amrit, drink of Immortality, 184 Anderson, K. B , 231 Androgynous representations, 171 Andromeda, 57, 93, 183 Animation and Personiflcation, 15, Z28, 229, 257, 278 Antliropomorphism, 216, 257 Antigone, 201 Aphrodite, 63 Apollon, 51, 56, 58, 76, 83, 95, 106, 160, 162, 169, 203, 232, 256 Arda Viraf, 245, 246 Argos, 265 Arktos, 39 Art, symbolism of, 174, 175, 236, 237, 242, 243, 215 Artemis, 58 Arthur, 84, 85, 101, 106, 160, 162, 164, 184, 198, 199, 200, 247 Aryans, the early, 35, 71, 157, 207. 208, 209 Ash wood, virtues ascribed to, 136, 137, 149 Asklepios, 106 Athene, 56, 61, 123 Atlas, 180 Atman, the old Vedlc deity, 258 Australians, myth of the, 33 Baba Yaga, 97 Babes in the Wood, 103, 161 Bacon, Francis, 117, 202, 217, 245 Baldur, 55, 105, 132, 190, 191, 210 Bale-fires, jii, 132 Bancroft, H. H. 49 Banler, Abb€, 11 Bay of Souls, 134, 135 Beauty and the Beast, 37, 104 Belief in the near affinity of ani- mal creation with humanity, 106> Bif-rOst, the trembling-bridge, 18, 34 Blue Beard, 102, 103 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 91, 129 Boots, tale of, 98, 104 Brag, descendant from Bragi, 125 Brig 0' Dread, 260, 251 Brinton, D. G., 21, 22, 43, 44, 66 Brown, Kobert, 66, 156, 172, 174 Browning, Eobert, 234 Bryant, W. C, 70 BrynWld, 59, 73, 89, 95, 97, 105, 219 Bunsen, C. J. J ., 12, 260 Burial customs. 132, 133, 134 Burning in efBgy, 115 Burroughs, John, 179 Bushy Bride, 98,99 Byron, 70 Cap of invisibility, 163 Carlyle, Thomas, 127, 178, 230, 234, 235 Ceres, 60 Charlemagne, 90, 91, 113 Charms, 118, 119, 136. 148, 149 Choctaws, belief of, 249, 230 Chest, story of the, 8S Children of Heaven and Earth, 268-274 Christmas Tree, 141 Church, Bomau Catholic, points of value in, 237, 244 Cinderella, 97, 98, 104, 106- (383) 284 INDEX. Glodd, S., 24 Conception, the ultimate that may come, 257 Conway, M. D. 144 Cooper, W.E., 36,171 Cox,G. W., 19, B4, 62, 87, 104, 111, 165, 184, 213 Dakotas, mythological beliefs of, 31 Danae, 57, 105, 159, 161 Daphne, 51, 52, 68 Dawn, marriage of, 104 De Gubernatis, Angelo, 124 Demeter, 60 De Eougement, 186 Didactic Myths, 177-204 Digby, Sir Kenelm, 117 Dionysos, 160, 168 D'lsraeli, I., 217 Dog-Bib Indians, myth of the, 28 Drake, Sir Francis, 40 Draper, John W. 217. 218 Durandal, 85 Dyaus, 15, 213 Dyer, T. F. T. 116, 148 "Earth-cutting," 115 Earthquakes, 29, 26 Eclipses, 25 Elder wood, virtues ascribed to, 137 Elysion, 218 Emerson, E. W., 11, 42, 177, 180, 209, 230, 234, 235, 262 Enfranchisement of the mind, 276, 279, 280 Eos, 105 Erinyes, 181, 182, 229 Esquimaux, myths of the, 24, 33 Esthonians, myth of the, 266, 267 Enhemeros, 10, 11 Eurydlke, 51, 98, 105, 158 Exoallbur, 85, 87, 107, 162 Faraday, Michael, 196, 233 Fear, dominating the mind of a savage, 205, 206, 207 Feeding the departed, 143 Ferrying the souls of the dead, 135 Fertility o{ the human mind, 226, 227 '• Fetches," 141 Flchte, J, G., on nature of Deity, 258 Finns, myths of the, 32, 34, 45, 65 Fire, 22 Flske, John, 12, 17, 25, 74, 87, 101, 114, 263 Folk-lore, 108, 110-125, 128-149, 188 Forest, symbolism of, 161 Fortunatus' Hat, 107, 163 Fountain of Youth, 221, 222 Frederick Barbarossa, 90, 91, 118 Freya, 18, 51, 126 Freyr, 49, 50, 195, 265 Frodl's Quern, 32, 199 " Gabriel's Hounds," 81 Galton, Francis, 205, 206 Gerda, 49, 60, 265 Gilbert, Davis, 40 Glass Mountain, 59, 157 Glistening Heath, 59, 105, 219 God, origin of the word, 101,107,263 God, conception of in the future, 259, 260, 261, 276 Godlva, legend of, 89 Goethe, his Tale of Tales, 247 Golden Fleece, 62, 172, 188, S65 Goldziber, I., 12, 169, 172 Gould, 8. Baring, 67, 78, 99, ISO, 131, 134, 135, 153, 194, 197 Grail, the Holy, 197, 198, 221 Gray, T., 18 Greeks, characteristics of, 48, 183, 201, 208, 209 Greek mind, finest bloom in ancient world, 10, 48 Grey, Sir Gteorge, 269-274 Grimm, .Jacob, 16, 101, 108, 111, 125, 130, 137, 138. 139, 149, 160, 203, 238, 251 Grimm, the Brothers, 94 Grote, George, 10 Gudrunlled, 278 Gunadhya, 192, 193, 279 Hamlet, 74, 85, 86, 87 INDEX. 285 Hanoscb, Ignatius, 303, 204 Hazel wood, belieTed to have proteetive power, 137 Heimdall, 18, 170, 179 Hel, the deatb goddess, 67, iflO Helen, 58 ■" HeU-shoon," 183, 250 Helmet of Hades, 122. 163 Henderson, William. S2, 138, 187, 188 Hephaistos, 56 Herakleitos, n, 216 Herakles, 27, 30, 45. 53, 54, 71, 73, 75, 79, 85, 123, 160, 161, 162, 173, 181, 183, 199, 203, 220, 256 Heraldry, 170 Here, 26, 61, 62, 66, 123, 169 Hermes, 32, 57.58, 101, 102, 1(B, 106. 107, 166, 169 Hermes Trlsmegistos, 275. 276 Heme the Hunter, 100 Hero and Leander, 63 Herodotos, 16 Heroic Legends, 73-93 Hindus, myths of the. 54, 69, 61, 63, 74, 98, 252 Historic, intermingled with mythic, 75, 76 Eolda, 153, 159 Holmes, O. W., 235 Holy Coat of Treves, 107 Holyoake, 125 Homonymy, 38, 51 Horant, 278 Hottentots, myth of the. 27. 28 House of Glass, 156 Humanity, tlie divine incarna- tion, 260, 261. 276, 281 Huxley, T.H., 233 Images, superstitions in regard to, 114, 115 Impersonation in early speech, 42 Indian Summer, 21 lo, 61, 62, 265 Iphigeneia, 58, 200 Iroquois, myths of the, 31, 68 Isles of the Blessed, 213 Jack and 6111, 99, 100 Jack the Giant Killer, 95, 99, lot James, Henry, 235 Janus, the two faces of, 171, 172 Jayadeva, 189, 229, 230 Jew among the Thorns, 82, 105, 195 Jonah, story of, 98 Jones, William, 40 Kalevala, the Finnish epic, 174, 175, 187, 266 Kalypso, 80, 174, 18S, 202 Kamchadals, myths of the, 22. 23, 26 Kant, Immanuel, 234 Karens, myths among, 96 Keaty, C. F., 16,59,83 Keary, E., 268 Kelly, W. K., 14, 35, 36 Kepler, his view of the stars, 15 Kingsley, Charles, 206 Kirke, 202, 212, 232 Koit, 266, 267 Labyrinth, Daidalean, 62, 265 Lang, Andrew, 64, 65, 271 Launching place of souls, 134, 135, 136 Lear and Cordelia, 88 Left, believed of sinister omen, 124 Lohengrin, 91, 92, 93 Longfellow, H. W., 47 Loreley, 108 Lost Statue, 245 Lubbock, Sir John, 1S6. 205, 206 Lyke-Wake Dirge, 250, 251 Magic Ring, 164, 165 Magic Sword, 60, 162 Magical Sympathy, 117, 118 Man, myths of his origin, 30, 48, 49 Mandeville, Sir John, 222, 223 Maoris, (see New Zealandere). Master Thief, 101 Maul, 15,29,46,66 May, month of. imlucky, 128 Maypole, 106 Mediation and reconciliation. 280 Meleagros, 48, 75 Melusina, 37, 93, 122 286 INDEX. Merlin, prison of, 346, 247 Metaphor, source of mythology, 41-72 Metaphor, value of, 218, 238 Micbabo, 21,29,88,44 Milky Way, 26, 27, 123, 268 Mil too, John, 259 Moirai, 63, 184, 185 Moon-spots, myths accounting for, 24, 25 Moral lessons told in myth, 180-195, 197-204, 221-225, 249-252 Miiller, Otf ried, on mythic form of expression, IS Miiller. F . Max, 12, 13, 38, 39, 42, 52, 54, 66, 69, 74, 84, 89, 94, 97, 98, 161. 211, 234, 254, 258, 264, 267 Music, power of, 191-196, 278, 279 Mythic representations, that were transparent, 45, 48, 51, 53, 248, 249 Mythic representations, their value for impressing truth, 231,234 Mythology, some definitions of, 11-13 Mythology, its source, 13-19, 38-40, 274 Mythology, illusions of, 17-19 Mythology, grovirtli of, 19, 274, 275 Mythology, speaks with deeper emphasis, when, 230, 231, 264, 265 Mythology, Greek and Eoman. seems a labyrinth, 62, 65 Mythology, Greek, superior to most others, how, 71 Myths of Explanation, 20-40 Myths from Metaphor, 41-72 Names, superstitions in regard to, 11.3, 114 Nature, as viewed in the dlfEer- ent stages of men's culture. 205, 206, 208 Nature, now deanthropomor- phised in its sense, 255, 258, 239 ■Newman, J. H., 226 New Zealanders, myths of the, 15, 46, 66, 268-274 New Zealanders, superstitions among, 112, 134, 143, 144 Nibelungen Lay, 73, 124, 278 Night and Day, Horses of, 48, 24S Nightmare, ISO Nirvana. 260 Nlxy, 111 Nork, 167 Norns, 63, 184 Norsemen, myths of the, 18, 32, 35, 36, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 55, 56, 69, 67, 73, 75, 85, 99, 104. 190, 248 Notes and Queries, 131, 151 Numbers and Days, certain ones unlucky, 128 Nursery Tales, descended from mythic sources, 94-109 Odin, 18, 48, 49, 51, 82,. 87, 95, 100, 101, 107, 110. 161, 164, 186, 187, 190, 210, 263, 278 Odin, a psychopomp, 130, 131 Odin, degraded to an Ab-goit, or ex-god, 108 Odysseus, 80, 104, 173, 174,180, 202, 231 Ogre, 96, 108 Oidipous. 67, 64, 201 Omens, iinister, 128, 129, 141, 14J Opening the window for egress of the soul, 131 Ordeals, 119, 120 Orientation, 140 Orlgen. his view of the stars, 15 Origin of man, myths of, 30,31,48,49' Orion, 66 Orpheus. 51, 98. 105, 107, 191, 192, 202, 278 Ouranos, 65 Pan, Parere, Persephone, 37, 60, 105, Perseus, 60, 76, 93, 105, 107, Personality, ascription object. Personification, Pest maiden. Phantom Army, Pherekydes, Phoibos, 56, 63, 83, 84, 106, 51 63 138, 161, 167 33, 56. 57,. 161, 163, isa Of to every 13. 14 228, 229. 257 203, 204 100 172 89, 160, 162, 195 INDEX. 287 Phoibos Lykegenes, S9 Fiper of Hameln, 81, 82, 88, 110, 158 Polynesians, myth of, 29 Portia, 88 Presence, tbat is more than per- son, 258, 2S3 Procoplus, 135 Prometheus, 19, 48, 182 Protestantism, some of its limita- tions, 211 Proverbs, often chips of mythology, 110-126 Proverbial phrases, 112-115, 119-121,123-125 Powell, J. W., 23 Psyche and Eros, 87, 104 Pythagoras, on nature of Deity, 258 Ouetzalcohuatl, 29 44, 45, 54, 56, 75, 169, 220, 249 Kain, 23 Bainbow, 34 Balston, W. K. S., 83, 95, 184 Bamayana, the Hindu epic, 188 Bapunzel, 105 Bed Biding Hood, 95, 161 Bed Swan, 46, 47, 67 Keligion, permanence of, 235, 236 Bichter, J. P., 74 Bing, magic virtues of, 138, 164, 165 Bip Van Winkle, 91 Bobin Hood, 101 ■" Boland to to the Dark Tower came," 107 Borneo and Juliet, 88 Buskin, John, 11, 12, 35, 156, 169 Saeredness of the robin, 119 Saint George, 76, 77, 95 Saint Ursula, 77, 78, 79 Sampo, the mystic, 224 Sandals of Perseus, 168f San Greal, 164, 197, 198, 221 Science, the office it shall per- form, 236 Schoolcraft, H. K., « Scott, Walter, 251 Seven Sleepers, 112, 118 "Seven Whistlers," 81 Shadow and Signification, 156-176 Shadows, the blighting, of mythology, 71, 72 Shoshones, myth of the, 23, 34 Sibylline Books, 192, 193 Siegfried, 56, 187, 220 Signs of sinister omen, 128, 129, 180, 141, 142 Sigurd, 59, 73, 89 Simrock, 11 Sioux, myth of the, 22 Sirens, 202, 281 Skidbladnir, 195, 196 Sky, has furnished highest sym- bol, 220, 221 Slavons, myths of the, 60, 59 Slavons, superstitions among, 71, 111, 120, 143 Sleeping Beauty, 60, 97, 157 Sleep-thorn, 167 Smith, John, 219 Snow, 23, 123 Sokrates, 10 Sons of Kalew, 193 Sophocles, 201 Soul, described as a spark of heav- enly lire, by the Slavons. 48 Soul, symbolized by the mouse, 83, 158, 159 Soul, journeyings after death, 249-251 Soul, retributions to, 252 Sphinx, 203 Stauros, 165, 166 Sun, myths of the, 29, 30, 39, 44-51, 63-56 Sun, parentage from, 256, 356 Superstitions, iii 112, 114-122, 128-138, 140-149 Superstitions in sphere of religious belief, 149-153 Survivals, 128-153, 257, 261, 262 Swan-maidens, 122 Symbolic speech, value of, 177-179 Symbolic terms employed, 156-174, 183, 185, 186 Symbolism, its function, dangers, etc., 211-268, 275, 277, 280 288 INDEX. Symonds, J. A., 201,289,245 Valkyries, 36, 59 Vamana, 61 TaUsmanio Trees, etc., 136, 1S7 Vampires, 120 Tantalos, 182, 192 VasUissa, 97, 161 TannMuser, 79, 80 Veil, the symbolic. 172 Xara Bai 174 Vignoli, Tito, 116 Tarnkapp^, 122, 163 Volsung. 104 Tartars, myth of the. 67 Tell, William, 83, 84, 113 'Telling the Bees,' 121 Tenacity of life in old impres- sions, etc ., 127, 210, 211, 214, 215 Tennyson, Alfred, 199, 200, 221 Termagant, origin of the word, 125 Thomas of Ercildoune, 113 Thor, 52, 53, 119, 139, 166 Thoreau, H.D., 195,225 Thunder, 21 " Thunder-axes," 33 Toltecs, myths of the, 29, 30, 44, 45, 54, 66, 75, 104, 169 Tom Thumb, 95 Torpelius, 267, 268 Trees and Groves sacred, 125, 239 Trench, Kobert, 202, 216 Trojan Conflict, 89 Tyler, E. B., 11, 14, 25, 45, 61, 63, 64, 69, 148, 149, 177 Tyndall, John, 196, 233, 234, 255, 256, 264 Wainamoinen, 32, 90, 107, 174, 193, 194, 195, 224, 279 Wandering Jew, 101 Wanna Issi, 266 Weird Sisters, 184, 185, 200 Welle of Youthe, 222, 223 Wergeland, Henrick Arnold, 131 Wild Huntsman, 100 Wilklns, A. S., 208 Wilson, H. H., 98 Winter-Street of Light 267, 268 Witch-hazel, 136 Witches' Sabbath, 107 Wolf and Seven Kids, 96 Wooden Horse, 89 Worship, the future, 230, 262, 263, 275, 276, 278, 280, 281 Wuttke, Adolf, 62, 138 Yggdrasll, 19, 95, 172, 184, 185, 186, 243 Ymer, 35 Youmans, E. L., 264 Una and her Knight, 93 Urvasl, 93,98 Zeus, 53, 61, 220, 256 Ushas, 98, 105 Zeus Lykaios, 38 Undine, 93,122 Zoroaster, 258 Zulus, myths of the. 96