Primitive culture, vol. 1 (of 2)

So Maui stripped off his clothes, and the skin on his hips, tattooed by the chisel of Uetonga, looked mottled and beautiful, like a mackerel’s, as he crept in. The birds kept silence, but when he was in up to his waist, the little tiwakawaka could hold its laughter in no longer, and burst out loud with its merry note; then Maui’s ancestress awoke, closed on him and caught him tight, and he was killed. Thus died Maui, and thus death came into the world, for Hine-nui-te-po is the goddess both of night and death, and had Maui entered into her body and passed safely through her, men would have died no more. The New Zealanders hold that the Sun descends at night into his cavern, bathes in the Wai Ora Tane, the Water of Life, and returns at dawn from the under-world; hence we may interpret the thought that if Man could likewise descend into Hades and return, his race would be immortal.[438] Further evidence that Hine-nui-te-po is the deity of Night or Hades, appears in another New Zealand myth. Tane, descending to the shades below in pursuit of his wife, comes to the Night (Po) of Hine-a-te-po, Daughter-of-Night, who says to him, ‘I have spoken thus to her “Return from this place, as I, Hine-a-te-po, am here. I am the barrier between night and day.”’[439] It is seldom that solar characteristics are more distinctly marked in the several details of a myth than they are here.

In the list of myths of engulfing monsters, there are others which seem to display, with a clearness almost approaching this, an origin suggested by the familiar spectacle of Day and Night, or Light and Darkness. The simple story of the Day may well be told in the Karen tale of Ta Ywa, who was born a tiny child, and went to the Sun to make him grow; the Sun tried in vain to destroy him by rain and heat, and then blew him up large till his head touched the sky; then he went forth and travelled from his home far over the earth; and among the adventures which befell him was this—a snake swallowed him, but they ripped the creature up, and Ta Ywa came back to life,[440] like the Sun from the ripped up serpent-demon in the Buddhist eclipse-myth. In North American Indian mythology, a principal personage is Manabozho, an Algonquin hero or deity whose solar character is well brought into view in an Ottawa myth which tells us that Manabozho (whom it calls Na-na-bou-jou) is the elder brother of Ning-gah-be-ar-nong Manito, the Spirit of the West, god of the country of the dead in the region of the setting sun. Manabozho’s solar nature is again revealed in the story of his driving the West, his father, across mountain and lake to the brink of the world, though he cannot kill him.

This sun-hero Manabozho, when he angled for the King of Fishes, was swallowed, canoe and all; then he smote the monster’s heart with his war-club till he would fain have cast him up into the lake again, but the hero set his canoe fast across the fish’s throat inside, and finished slaying him; when the dead monster drifted ashore, the gulls pecked an opening for Manabozho to come out. This is a story familiar to English readers from its introduction into the poem of Hiawatha. In another version, the tale is told of the Little Monedo of the Ojibwas, who also corresponds with the New Zealand Maui in being the Sun-Catcher; among his various prodigies, he is swallowed by the great fish, and cut out again by his sister.[441] South Africa is a region where there prevail myths which seem to tell the story of the world imprisoned in the monster Night, and delivered by the dawning Sun. The Basutos have their myth of the hero Litaolane; he came to man’s stature and wisdom at his birth; all mankind save his mother and he had been devoured by a monster; he attacked the creature and was swallowed whole, but cutting his way out he set free all the inhabitants of the world. The Zulus tell stories as pointedly suggestive. A mother follows her children into the maw of the great elephant, and finds forests and rivers and highlands, and dogs and cattle, and people who had built their villages there; a description which is simply that of the Zulu Hades.

When the Princess Untombinde was carried off by the Isikqukqumadevu, the ‘bloated, squatting, bearded monster,’ the King gathered his army and attacked it, but it swallowed up men, and dogs, and cattle, all but one warrior; he slew the monster, and there came out cattle, and horses, and men, and last of all the princess herself. The stories of these monsters being cut open imitate, in graphic savage fashion, the cries of the imprisoned creatures as they came back from darkness into daylight. ‘There came out first a fowl, it said, “Kukuluku! I see the world!” For, for a long time it had been without seeing it. After the fowl there came out a man, he said “Hau! I at length see the world!”’ and so on with the rest.[442]

The well-known modern interpretation of the myth of Perseus and Andromeda, or of Herakles and Hesione, as a description of the Sun slaying the Darkness, has its connexion with this group of legends. It is related in a remarkable version of this story, that when the Trojan King Laomedon had bound his daughter Hesione to the rock, a sacrifice to Poseidon’s destroying sea-monster, Herakles delivered the maiden, springing full-armed into the fish’s gaping throat, and coming forth hairless after three days’ hacking within. This singular story, probably in part of Semitic origin, combines the ordinary myth of Hesione or Andromeda with the story of Jonah’s fish, for which indeed the Greek sculpture of Andromeda’s monster served as the model in early Christian art, while Joppa was the place where vestiges of Andromeda’s chains on a rock in front of the town were exhibited in Pliny’s time, and whence the bones of a whale were carried to Rome as relics of Andromeda’s monster. To recognize the place which the nature-myth of the Man swallowed by the Monster occupies in mythology, among remote and savage races and onward among the higher nations, affects the argument on a point of Biblical criticism. It strengthens the position of the critics who, seeing that the Book of Jonah consists of two wonder-episodes adapted to enforce two great religious lessons, no longer suppose intention of literal narrative in what they may fairly consider as the most elaborate parable of the Old Testament.

The conception of Hades as a monster swallowing men in death, was actually familiar to Christian thought. Thus, to take instances from different periods, the account of the Descent into Hades in the Apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus makes Hades speak in his proper personality, complaining that his belly is in pain, when the Saviour is to descend and set free the saints imprisoned in it from the beginning of the world; and in mediæval representations of this deliverance, the so-called ‘Harrowing of Hell,’ Christ is depicted standing before a huge fish-like monster’s open jaws, whence Adam and Eve are coming forth first of mankind.[444] With even more distinctness of mythical meaning, the man-devouring monster is introduced in the Scandinavian Eireks-Saga. Eirek, journeying toward Paradise, comes to a stone bridge guarded by a dragon, and entering into its maw, finds that he has arrived in the world of bliss.[445] But in another wonder-tale, belonging to that legendary growth which formed round early Christian history, no such distinguishable remnant of nature-myth survives. St. Margaret, daughter of a priest of Antioch, had been cast into a dungeon, and there Satan came upon her in the form of a dragon and swallowed her alive:

Stories belonging to the same group are not unknown to European folk-lore. One is the story of Little Red Ridinghood, mutilated in the English nursery version, but known more perfectly by old wives in Germany, who can tell that the lovely little maid in her shining red satin cloak was swallowed with her grandmother by the Wolf, but they both came out safe and sound when the hunter cut open the sleeping beast. Any one who can fancy with prince Hal, ‘the blessed sun himself a fair hot wench in flame-coloured taffeta,’ and can then imagine her swallowed up by Sköll, the Sun-devouring Wolf of Scandinavian mythology, may be inclined to class the tale of Little Red Ridinghood as a myth of sunset and sunrise. There is indeed another story in Grimm’s Märchen, partly the same as this one, which we can hardly doubt to have a quaint touch of sun-myth in it. It is called the Wolf and Seven Kids, and tells of the Wolf swallowing the kids all but the youngest of the seven, who was hidden in the clock-case. As in Little Red Ridinghood, they cut open the Wolf and fill him with stones. This tale, which took its present shape since the invention of clocks, looks as though the tale-teller was thinking, not of real kids and wolf, but of days of the week swallowed by night, or how should he have hit upon such a fancy as that the wolf could not get at the youngest of the seven kids, because it was hidden (like to-day) in the clock case?[447]

It may be worth while to raise the question apropos of this nursery tale, does the peasant folk-lore of modern Europe really still display episodes of nature-myth, not as mere broken-down and senseless fragments, but in full shape and significance? In answer it will be enough to quote the story of Vasilissa the Beautiful, brought forward by Mr. W. Ralston in one of his lectures on Russian Folk-lore. Vasilissa’s stepmother and two sisters, plotting against her life, send her to get a light at the house of Bába Yagá, the witch, and her journey contains the following history of the Day, told in truest mythic fashion. Vasilissa goes and wanders, wanders in the forest. She goes, and she shudders. Suddenly before her bounds a rider, he himself white, and clad in white, the horse under him white, and the trappings white. And day began to dawn. She goes farther, when a second rider bounds forth, himself red, clad in red, and on a red horse. The sun began to rise. She goes on all day, and towards evening arrives at the witch’s house. Suddenly there comes again a rider, himself black, clad all in black, and on a black horse; he bounded to the gates of the Bába Yagá and disappeared as if he had sunk through the earth. Night fell. After this, when Vasilissa asks the witch, who was the white rider, she answers, ‘That is my clear Day;’ who was the red rider, ‘That is my red Sun;’ who was the black rider, ‘That is my black Night; they are all my trusty friends.’

Now, considering that the story of Little Red Ridinghood belongs to the same class of folk-lore tales as this story of Vasilissa the Beautiful, we need not be afraid to seek in the one for traces of the same archaic type of nature-myth which the other not only keeps up, but keeps up with the fullest consciousness of meaning.

The development of nature-myth into heroic legend seems to have taken place among the barbaric tribes of the South Sea Islands and North America much as it took place among the ancestors of the classic nations of the Old World. We are not to expect accurate consistency or proper sequence of episodes in the heroic cycles, but to judge from the characteristics of the episodes themselves as to the ideas which suggested them. As regards the less cultured races, a glance at two legendary cycles, one from Polynesia and the other from North America, will serve to give an idea of the varieties of treatment of phases of sun-myth. The New Zealand myth of Maui, mixed as it may be with other fancies, is in its most striking features the story of Day and Night. The story of the Sun’s birth from the ocean is thus told. There were five brothers, all called Maui, and it was the youngest Maui who had been thrown into the sea by Taranga his mother, and rescued by his ancestor Tama-nui-ki-te-Rangi, Great-Man-in-Heaven, who took him to his house, and hung him in the roof. Then is given in fanciful personality the tale of the vanishing of Night at dawn. One night, when Taranga came home, she found little Maui with his brothers, and when she knew her last-born, the child of her old age, she took him to sleep with her, as she had been used to take the other Mauis his brothers, before they were grown up. But the little Maui grew vexed and suspicious, when he found that every morning his mother rose at dawn and disappeared from the house in a moment, not to return till nightfall.

So one night he crept out and stopped every crevice in the wooden window and the doorway, that the day might not shine into the house; then broke the faint light of early dawn, and then the sun rose and mounted into the heavens, but Taranga slept on, for she knew not it was broad day outside. At last she sprang up, pulled out the stopping of the chinks, and fled in dismay. Then Maui saw her plunge into a hole in the ground and disappear, and thus he found the deep cavern by which his mother went down below the earth as each night departed. After this, follows the episode of Maui’s visit to his ancestress Muri-ranga-whenua, at that western Land’s End where Maori souls descend into the subterranean region of the dead. She sniffs as he comes towards her, and distends herself to devour him, but when she has sniffed round from south by east to north, she smells his coming by the western breeze, and so knows that he is a descendant of hers. He asks for her wondrous jawbone, she gives it to him, and it is his weapon in his next exploit when he catches the sun, Tama-nui-te-Ra, Great-Man-Sun, in the noose, and wounds him and makes him go slowly. With a fishhook pointed with the miraculous jawbone, and smeared with his own blood for bait, Maui next performs his most famous feat of fishing up New Zealand, still called Te-Ika-a-Maui, the fish of Maui. To understand this, we must compare the various versions of the story in these and other Pacific Islands, which show that it is a general myth of the rising of dry land from beneath the ocean.

It is said elsewhere that it was Maui’s grandfather, Rangi-Whenua, Heaven-Earth, who gave the jawbone. More distinctly, it is also said that Maui had two sons, whom he slew when young to take their jawbones; now these two sons must be the Morning and Evening, for Maui made the morning and evening stars from an eye of each; and it was with the jawbone of the eldest that he drew up the land from the deep. It is related that when Maui pulled up his fish, he found it was land, on which were houses, and stages on which to put food, and dogs barking, and fires burning, and people working. It appears, moreover, that the submarine region out of which the land was lifted was the under-world of Night, for Maui’s hook had caught the gable of the house of Hine-nui-te-po, Great-Daughter-of-Night, and when the land came up her house was on it, and she was standing near. Another Maori legend tells how Maui takes fire in his hands, it burns him, and he springs with it into the sea: ‘When he sank in the waters, the sun for the first time set, and darkness covered the earth. When he found that all was night, he immediately pursued the sun, and brought him back in the morning.’ When Maui carried or flung the fire into the sea, he set a volcano burning. It is told, again, that when Maui had put out all fires on earth, his mother sent him to get new fire from her ancestress Mahuika.

The Tongans, in their version of the myth, relate how the youngest Maui discovers the cavern that leads to Bulotu, the west-land of the dead, and how his father, another Maui, sends him to the yet older Maui who sits by his great fire; the two wrestle, and Maui brings away fire for men, leaving the old earthquake-god lying crippled below. The legendary group thus dramatizes the birth of the sun from the ocean and the departure of the night, the extinction of the light at sunset and its return at dawn, and the descent of the sun to the western Hades, the under-world of night and death, which is incidentally identified with the region of subterranean fire and earthquake. Here, indeed, the characteristics of true nature-myth are not indistinctly marked, and Maui’s death by his ancestress the Night fitly ends his solar career.[448]

It is a sunset-story, very differently conceived, that begins the beautiful North American Indian myth of the Red Swan. The story belongs to the Algonquin race. The hunter Ojibwa had just killed a bear and begun to skin him, when suddenly something red tinged all the air around. Reaching the shore of a lake, the Indian saw it was a beautiful red swan, whose plumage glittered in the sun. In vain the hunter shot his shafts, for the bird floated unharmed and unheeding, but at last he remembered three magic arrows at home, which had been his father’s. The first and second arrow flew near and nearer, the third struck the swan, and flapping its wings, it flew off slowly towards the sinking of the sun. With full sense of the poetic solar meaning of this episode Longfellow has adapted it as a sunset picture, in one of his Indian poems:

The story goes on to tell how the hunter speeds westward in pursuit of the Red Swan. At lodges where he rests, they tell him she has often passed there, but those who followed her have never returned. She is the daughter of an old magician who has lost his scalp, which Ojibwa succeeds in recovering for him and puts back on his head, and the old man rises from the earth, no longer aged and decrepit, but splendid in youthful glory. Ojibwa departs, and the magician calls forth the beautiful maiden, now not his daughter but his sister, and gives her to his victorious friend. It was in after days, when Ojibwa had gone home with his bride, that he travelled forth, and coming to an opening in the earth, descended and came to the abode of departed spirits; there he could behold the bright western region of the good, and the dark cloud of wickedness. But the spirits told him that his brethren at home were quarrelling for the possession of his wife, and at last, after long wandering, this Red Indian Odysseus returned to his mourning constant Penelope, laid the magic arrows to his bow, and stretched the wicked suitors dead at his feet.[449] Thus savage legends from Polynesia and America, possibly indeed shaped under European influence, agree with the theory[450] that Odysseus visiting the Elysian fields, or Orpheus descending to the land of Hades to bring back the ‘wide-shining’ Eurydikê, are but the Sun himself descending to, and ascending from, the world below.

Where Night and Hades take personal shape in myth, we may expect to find conceptions like that simply shown in a Sanskrit word for evening, ‘rajanîmukha,’ i.e., ‘mouth of night.’ Thus the Scandinavians told of Hel the death-goddess, with mouth gaping like the mouth of Fenrir her brother, the moon-devouring wolf; and an old German poem describes Hell’s abyss yawning from heaven to earth:

The sculptures on cathedrals still display for the terror of the wicked the awful jaws of Death, the mouth of Hell wide yawning to swallow its victims. Again, where barbaric cosmology accepts the doctrine of a firmament arching above the earth, and of an under world whither the sun descends when he sets and man when he dies, here the conception of gates or portals, whether really or metaphorically meant, has its place. Such is the great gate which the Gold Coast negro describes the Heaven as opening in the morning for the Sun; such were the ancient Greek’s gates of Hades, and the ancient Jew’s gates of Sheol. There are three mythic descriptions connected with these ideas found among the Karens, the Algonquins, and the Aztecs, which are deserving of special notice. The Karens of Burma, a race among whom ideas are in great measure borrowed from the more cultured Buddhists they have been in contact with, have precedence here for the distinctness of their statement. They say that in the west there are two massive strata of rocks which are continually opening and shutting, and between these strata the sun descends at sunset, but how the upper stratum is supported, no one can describe. The idea comes well into view in the description of a Bghai festival, where sacrificed fowls are thus addressed,—‘The seven heavens, thou ascendest to the top; the seven earths, thou descendest to the bottom. Thou arrivest at Khu-the; thou goest unto Tha-ma [i.e., Yama, the Judge of the Dead in Hades.] Thou goest through the crevices of rocks, thou goest through the crevices of precipices.