Segnius Irritant: or Eight Primitive Folk-lore Stories/Supplementary Essay
Supplementary Essay.
This table is an attempt to classify the characters of these eight stories. It will be seen that nearly all the characters are the same in the eight stories, and that they can easily be referred to the natural events they allegorize. Just as in biology the simple forms precede the more differentiated chronologically, so, in a general way, the story which most closely allegorizes the death of the year and the renewal of spring will be the most ancient. Those stories in which some of the characters have become rudimentary, or have disappeared, in which new characters have been added or the original ones differentiated into two, three, or more, will be the more modern ones. That this principle is a sound one is borne out by the fact that the two stories most differentiated are those to which a moral is tacked on, viz., Right yet remains Right and Reason and Happiness. In George and his Goat a moral idea also glimmers: George declares that the king ought to keep his promise, for saying which the wicked counsellor declares his life to be forfeit. In this story the characters have greatly changed in form. Jezibaba has become a goat, not an inappropriate change. The sun has become the mayor looking out of the window. Four new characters, a landlord and his three daughters, Manka, Doodle and Kate (perhaps corresponding to the baker and his three daughters in Rè Corvo), have been added, not to mention a unicorn and two beasts. In Reason and Happiness, Charon and the sun have both disappeared. The father of the heroine has differentiated into a perfectly inert king, a cruel counsellor and the executioner, that is, inert winter-the icy wind and the frost which nips the nose off two of the heroes in a story called “Are you Angry?”; not to mention the farmer’s wife who cuts the mice’s tails off in the catch of “Three Blind Mice.” Jezibaba has differentiated into Reason and Good-Luck, and the Fates dwindled into a carver and tailor (mentioned incidentally), and have to be eked out by the hero himself, who forms a third. In Right remains Right, the Fates and the sun have both disappeared. Jezibaba plays a very subsidiary part as the old woman who points out the sight-restoring well; and Charon has developed into three damned spirits, the souls of three executed murderers.
Let us now pass in review the eight allegorical figures and examine them more closely.
1. Dead winter, in all eight stories, is represented by a king who is either inert or harsh and stubborn, with the exception of one, the Sun-horse, where he has been replaced by the witch mother-in-law.
| Dead Winter. | Frost bound Living Nature. | Living Nature in waning Autumn. | Aggressive Life of Nature in re-opening Spring. | Gross, age-clotted, frozen Matter tempting to the knowledge of good and evil. | The Fates. | Charon. | The Sun. | |
| Father Know-All. | King—Father of the heroine. | His daughter. | The woodman—father of the hero. | Hero, son of the woodman. | Old man leaning on a staff; dead one being buried. | The three fates—godmothers of the hero. | Ferryman over the black sea. | As child, adult and old man. |
| Long, Broad, and Sharp-Eyes. | Lord of the Castle of Steel—father of the heroine. | His daughter, dressed in white. Her white spectre is one of twelve seen by the prince in the tower. | The old king—father of the hero. | The prince, son of the old king, and hero. | The old woman who brings the serpent. | Long, Broad, and Sharp-Eyes. | Outskirts of a dense wood. | |
| Golden Locks. | King—father of Golden Locks. | Golden Locks, one of twelve maidens; the only one with golden hair. | A king, Jirichek’s master. | Jirichek, the king’s servant, and hero. | The old woman who brings the serpent. | The ants, the ravens, and a fish. A fly is added. | Outskirts of a black forest. | In part Golden Locks. |
| Reason and Fortune. | A king—father of the heroine, his cruel counsellor, and the executioner. | His daughter, dumb from her twelfth year. | A peasant cottage proprietor. | Vanek, his son, the hero. | Reason and Good Luck. | A carver, tailor and the hero. | Outskirts of a pine forest, with wolves. | |
| George and His Goat. | A king—father of the heroine. | His daughter, who cannot laugh. | A shepherd. | George, his son, the hero. | The goat. | Long, Broad, and Sharp-Eyes. | The mayor looking out of the window. | |
| The Three Citrons. | Lord of the Castle of Steel—father of the heroine. | The third of the maidens who appear at the cleaving of the citrons. | An old king—father of the hero. | His son, the hero. | Jezibaba, who incites the prince to go for the three citrons, and appears to him before the castles of lead, silver and gold. | The three giants of the castles of lead, silver and gold, respectively. | Three days before point of meeting with the twelve ravens. | The giant of the castle of gold |
| The Sun-horse. | Mother-in-law of the three kings. | A horse with a sun on its forehead. | The king of the sunless kingdom. | A seer, the hero. | In part the mother in-law and the three queens, and the old man at the bridge. | In part the servants and the old man leaning on a staff. | Cottage of the seer. | |
| Right yet Remains Right. | Father of the sick heroine (a princess). | An invalid princess. | A gamekeeper. | His son, the hero. Also a gamekeeper. | An old woman who points out the well. | Gallows and the three damned spirits. |
2. Frost-bound living Nature, in all but the Sun-horse story, is represented as the daughter of the king in (1). In two of the stories she is one of twelve maidens, and in Long, Broad, and Sharp-Eyes she is dressed in white. She is therefore, in part, the last winter month enveloped in snow. Where not one of twelve, she is generally represented as under a spell. In the Sun-horse story alone is she represented by a Sun-horse, which is stolen by the mother-in-law and her three daughters and rescued from them by the seer. We are expressly told that when the sun had disappeared the king had this horse led through his kingdom from end to end, and that light streamed from it in all directions and saved the people from perishing. When the horse was lost everything was in darkness; it was only when the king had reached the adjoining kingdom in his search for the Sun-horse, that he saw the real sun just glimmering, as if through a mist. This, as has been shown in the notes to the Sun-horse, seems to be an allegory of the sun dimly seen through the fogs of November, and points to some region in the Arctic circle with abundant lakes or rivers as the source of the legend. The legend would then be the tradition of a year or period, when, owing to floods or some other reason, the fog was so thick that the sun was completely veiled. Note particularly the substitution of a horse for a young lady. This would lead one to expect to find traces of some primitive legend in which the heroine was herself on horseback.
3. Living Nature in waning autumn. This character is more or less subsidiary and faintly defined. In two stories he is a woodman, the woods above all showing plainly the year’s decay. In Reason and Happiness he is a peasant, perhaps an allusion to the Libusa and Premysl tradition. In one he is a shepherd; in two he is a superannuated old king; and in two the master of the hero. But in these two last (the Sun-horse and Golden Locks), he merges more or less into the king, who represents winter-particularly in Golden Locks; a perfectly natural transformation to a people without almanacs, considering how variable the degree of cold is in autumn and winter respectively, during different autumn and winter seasons.
4. Aggressive life of Nature in returning re-opening spring. The hero. He is always the son or dependent of the last. In Father Know-All, the most primitive of the legends in form, he is called Plavachek (just as the Piave is the chief river in the Slav province of Venezia), the swimmer, a clear allusion to the river floods in autumn, and perhaps also after the breaking up of the ice in early spring. In two of the stories his name is Jiricek (? a diminutive of year), which name, corresponding in Czech to George, may be an allusion to the Libusa legend (cf., γεονργος), and at the same time connect the legends in which it occurs with St. George and the Dragon.
5. Gross matter, congealed by the cold, and the cold itself, represented as extreme old age, tempting the hero to the knowledge of good and evil. The primitive idea seems to have been that of an old woman or old man leaning on a staff—a figure dear to Slavonic literature. In the Slovenian legend, one of the most complete and elaborate of any Slavonic fairy stories, Jezibaba, the fire-hag of the tundra and steppes, plays the part. Now this hag (agni, gipsy, yag, fire), was imagined as driving in a car drawn by two horses over the steppes at a wild speed, stirring with an immense pestle an immense mortar, from which sparks flew in all directions. She bears, therefore, a certain resemblance to the heroine on horse-back (inferred as existing somewhere from the Sun-horse), and may perhaps be considered as a sort of burlesque of her. In Golden Locks she bears a considerable resemblance to Eve. She appears at the palace (as Jezibaba does in the Three Citrons), and offers the king a serpent, which, when eaten, was to make him understand the language of birds and animals. For the interpretation of the symbols of the serpent and the apple, I refer the reader to Michael Angelo and Gubernatis. George, the servant, contrary to express orders, himself takes a bite before serving up the serpent, and in this way also acquires the gift of understanding what the birds and beasts say.
This character, as I have said, represents the clotting cold, and more or less merges, on the one hand, into the Fates, on the other into the king or Black Prince-representing the black sunless winter of the Arctic circle. Thus the mother-in-law of the Sun-horse legend in part resembles the Black Prince of the Long, Broad, and Sharp-Eyes legend, while her three daughters, the snow, have much in common with the Fates dressed in white, with tapers in their hands. It is easy to see why in Arctic regions the idea of cold and fate should be associated. Fate is, above all things, associated with death, and death with cold-particularly where the cold is intense enough to kill directly. To dwellers in Arctic regions the ever-present idea is, and always must have been, that cold is the cause of death, or vice versa, and this explains why in old Slavonic the words for cold, congelation, and death are all closely linked together, because at some very early period of their history the Slav stock certainly inhabited a region within the Polar circle. Here is a list of some of these words: mor, pestilence; Morana, the Goddess of pestilence and death; mord, murder (cf., the Italian merda, the compact excrement); more, a morass or stagnant piece of water, afterwards the sea; morek, marrow; morena, madder; morous, a morose, concentrated, reserved person; mrak, a cloud; mramor, marble; mraz, frost; mrcha, carrion; mriti, to die; mrtev, dead, and other derivatives; mrzeti, to vex or render morose; mrznouti, to freeze; mrzout, a grumbler; mrzuty, tiresome, morose; smrk, a turpentine pine and snot; smrkati, (cf. Danish mörke, Yorkshire mirk, and Mercury Psychopompon, the mirk-god) to become mirk, i.e., the day curdling into night; smrsknouti, to wrinkle; smrstiti, the same; and smrst, an elephant’s trunk; smrt, death; umriti, to die; and numerous derivatives from both these words. Death therefore being evidently so closely linked with cold, wrinkling and congelation, and fate with death (cf. the Moravian story of Godmother Death), no wonder if Jezibaba now and then plays the part. And if there were any doubt about this it would be set at rest by the story of the Three Citrons.
The old woman who persuades the young prince to go in search of the citrons is the first winter frost after the fogs of November; she who makes the young prince laugh in the Love of the Three Oranges (Venetian) by tumbling into the oil-well. But she is also Destiny, for, arrived at the Hill of Glass, the prince exclaims: Porucena Bohu! uz ak buďe tak buďe! che sarà, sarà (Honoured be God! what will be will be). And in a special sense is the cold of the first winter frost at the beginning of the hero’s adventures, a reapparition of the Fates, who appeared just a year before at the same date round his cradle when he was born; because just as fate leads human life irresistibly to the grave, so did the first winter frost infallibly prelude the grave’s Arctic prototype, the long winter night, in which the darkness was not all an evil; for to our sensual Ugrian ancestors it was a period of unbridled licence and sensuality—the earthly Soma juice, the elixir of life, the physical, material, bodily delight, corresponding on earth to the moonlight in heaven, which together rendered that darkness anything but unendurable. Thus the people that walked in darkness saw a great light; thus to the annual winter death of Polar regions, enshrining in its sunless gloom the silver casket of an utterly abandoned sensuality, we owe the beautiful but alas! unproven superstition, that the light of love still gilds the tomb, just as it silvered the long Arctic winter night to our lusty Hungarian ancestors. We can now, step by step, shew that the Norns and the basket in Il çestelo di fiori (Venetian) are, incredible as it may seem, one and the same person. For Jezibaba, the old woman at the beginning of the Three Citrons, is a re-embodiment of the Three Fates in the prelude to Father Know-All. This old woman is the same as the one at the beginning of the Venetian variant of the story (L’amore delle tre narance), who makes the prince laugh by falling into the oil-well. The old woman who falls into the oil-well is the same as George’s goat in the Czech story, who makes the princess laugh; and a mistaken derivation of the word koza, combined with the Venetian lagoons, has turned the goat into a basket. The transformation has even gone a step further in an absurd Venetian variant called A Holiday Dinner. A woman leaves the dinner cooking. The cat and dog eat it. Then, afraid of a whipping, the cat jumps into a spider’s web (note, the basket of flowers has become an autumn spinner’s web—the spider of St. Martin’s summers), but her tail hangs down. The dog jumps at the tail and sticks to it. The wife, returning from mass, and then her husband share the same fate, and are also hung up. Their crony Tony finds them so, pulls off the cat's tail, and the dog swallows the cat, the wife the dog, the husband the wife-and the hearers are great fools if they swallow Tony and my tale. But, for all that, I would, in conclusion, heartily recommend this demonstrated series of transformations to Professor Sayce and Canon Taylor, who find it hard to believe that the Vedic Parkun’ya and the Slav Perkuna, the Vedic Pandu and the Homeric Pandarus, the Vedic Harites and the Greek Charites, the Vedic Gandharvas and the Greek Centaurs, etc., etc., are really one and the same thing.
We now see why the old woman in the Three Citrons is not invited to the wedding. She was the herald of the black Arctic winter night, symbol of death, and thus the temptress to its dark and sensual delights; but not for this was she banned from the festivities, but because the cold has no place in the marriage of the spring. All she could do to revenge herself for the slight was, like the Christian superstition of which she and the rest of the Arctic legends are the more genial origin, to condense a black cloud, and with it for awhile to obscure the sun.
We now see also why the three Frost Kings of the Sun-horse story, substituted in the Bethlehem legend as three Magi for the three white-robed winter Fates of Father Know-All, bear caskets of precious jewels: they are the jewels of ice and snow which the three Frost Kings scattered in their Arctic kingdoms, transformed to gems and blended with spices and scents as the legend was carried into warmer southern climates.
6. The Fates appear in the first story as the godmothers of the hero, reduced to one in the famous Moravian legend of Godmother Death. They perfectly correspond to the three Norns seated under the tree, Igdrasil, of the Scandinavian legend. In two stories they take the form of dependents, and change sex, viz., as Long, Broad, and Sharp-Eyes. In Golden Locks they become ants, ravens, and a fish and a fly. In the Three Citrons (in part), three giants. In another Slavonic fairy story they become identified with the four brothers themselves, and this change is beginning to manifest itself in Reason and Happiness. In the Scandinavian Norns we have the past, the present, and the future. It is not wonderful, therefore, to find them in the Three Citrons blended with three periods. Nor need we be surprised if they tend to merge in the hero or heroes of these folk-lore tales. It is only in our actions that the fates which rule our lives manifest themselves.
7. Charon only occurs in Father Know-All. He corresponds to the three damned spirits and his boat to the gallows in Right remains Right, and perhaps to the first flock of ravens in the Three Citrons, and his boat to the cottage of the seer in the Sun-horse. He represents the passage of the sun into the underworld of the Arctic winter night. The bridges, and perhaps the dumplings, represent the sunsets of the brief winter days on the return of the sun of the Polar winter night. In Long, Broad, and Sharp-Eyes, the drawbridge which is represented as moving pari passu with the setting sun. It is drawn up and disappears just as the disc of the sun disappears below the horizon. The simile, in fact, is an extremely happy one. When halved by the horizon, the disc of the sun does in fact form a one-arched bridge; the instant it has sunk, the hero and his companions are plunged in the kingdom of night. They remain there three days. Again, in three lengthening days at the beginning of the Arctic spring (if it can be called so), the course of the sun will form three arches of a bridge, each arch a little wider and higher than the one before, just as they are drawn in the illustration of the second half of the Sun-horse.
As I have already said, in Right remains Right Charon has become three accursed spirits; after their appearance, the hero visits the two cities of Ramuli and Sarahawsky, in the kingdom of darkness. That Charon and the Three Spirits represent one and the same element is shown by the fate of the king and the stranger man (tcuzy muz) in Father Know-All and Right remains Right respectively. The sun has dropt out of the latter story, and with it the final three days’ struggle between the light and the darkness. The dumplings in the Three Citrons, and the bridge in the Sun-horse, are closely incorporated with the final struggle between the light and the dark, the heat and the cold. Comparing Father Know-All, The Three Citrons, the Sun-horse, and Right remains Right, the four stories in which the time previous to the final struggle is sharply divided, we find:
In (1) the hero passes through two ruined cities.
In (8) named Sarahawsky and Ramuli.
In (5) the seer in search of the Sun-horse passes through seven kingdoms.
In (3) the hero visits two castles, first one of lead and then one of silver.
This last form of the legend gives a clue to its general solution. As we know, in primitive ages time was reckoned, not by lunar months, but by dark and light moons, of fourteen days each. In the castles of lead and silver, therefore, and the journeyings to reach them, and stay in them, it is impossible not to recognise periods of dark moons and light moons. If there were any doubt about the matter, it would be set at rest by the Sun-horse legend. The seven kingdoms, if taken as weeks, exactly tally with the time in the Three Citrons (see the diagrams). It is worth noting that the Three Citrons and the Sun-horse are both Slovenian, and have travelled south, while the Magyars are related to the Turanian races of the extreme north. I suppose, though my astronomical imagination is too poorly cultivated to feel quite sure of it, that in a latitude where the sun disappeared for a time permanently below the horizon, the dark moon period would be less marked than with us, the waxing moon appearing for the same length of time each diurnal revolution in the constant darkness. This would quite agree with the details of the legend where it is stated that the giant of the castle of lead was considerably shorter than he of the castle of silver, and this gentleman than the lord of the golden castle. That is to say, there was first a brief dark moon, then a long light one, followed by the re-appearance of the sun with increasing and then waning splendour for the remainder of the year. In the Siebenbürgen form of the story, in place of a castle of lead is a copper well, with copper-coloured water, and a copper palace, which may be a reminiscence of the Aurora borealis; in the Venetian variant the lead and copper have given place to the wind.
Let us now attempt roughly to compare a few of the principal incidents and properties of the eight stories. First, let us take the properties of the Three Fates in the different stories. These figures are absent from Vedic legends. Their most primitive form (ideally if not chronologically), is that of the three Norns, past, present, and future, allegorized in Greek myth as the Parcæ plying that most ancient of all spinning-jennies, the spindle, and twisting the line with it from the distaff. In Father Know-All we observe them to be dressed in white and to carry tapers. In Grandmother Death, as has been observed, they have dwindled to one who leads the hero into a cavern, where tapers representing the lives of human beings are burning. This cavern with the tapers is the night firmament studded with stars. [1]The idea that the life of every human being is bound up with a star in heaven is a thoroughly and profoundly Slavic one, although it also occurs among the Maoris of New Zealand in the legend of Hikatoro. In the hands of Tycho Brahe, of Prague, and indeed much earlier, this idea was developed into the pseudo-science of astrology which occupied so large a field in the Middle Ages. Those who have walked over a plain or table-land thickly covered with snow on a starry winter’s night, know how intensely the mind is besieged by the idea of fate and fatality. This is the feeling or idea which has dressed the fates in white, with tapers in their hands. Interwoven in these stories to the inmost core is the presence of snow and ice. Carried to a warmer climate they may have melted into Indra myths and the like no Indra myth could ever have frozen into the Norns of Father Know-All.
In the Three Citrons the fates have become three periods presided over by three giants—at least in part. These periods are not exactly Past, Present, and Future, but they resemble them. There is first a sun-and-moonless period—chaos. The castle of lead. A sunless period—the castle of silver. A middle period, and so corresponding to the present; and a sunny period, the return of spring, the golden age we hope for but which never comes. In Long, Broad, and Sharp-Eyes a great change occurs. The vagueness in which fate was enveloped in the Three Citrons, where it was partly represented by the giants and partly by Jezibaba, has disappeared; again it has become three persons who are active helpmates of the hero and strongly individualized.
There are three stories in which these figures occur. In Long, Broad, and Sharp-Eyes we have—
(1) Long, the man who can go 100 miles at a stride;
(2) Broad, who can puff himself up like a puff-ball and drink seas dry;
(3) Sharp-Eyes, who can split rocks open with a beam from his eyes.
In George and his Goat—
(1) The man who goes so fast, that he has to tie one foot to his shoulder;
(2) The man with his finger in a wine-pouch, who squirts 100 miles;
(3) The man so sharp-sighted that he has to wear a beam across his eyes.
In Reason and Happiness—
(1) The carver;
(2) The tailor;
(3) The hero.
In Golden Locks we have—
(1) The ants who collect the pearls of the bracelet;
(2) The fish that recovers the princess’s gold ring from the bottom of the sea;
(3) The ravens that bring dead and living water (i.e., hail and rain, or ice and flowing water);
(4) The fly that indicates which of the twelve maidens is Golden Locks.
Now, Broad in the first story, and the fish in Golden Locks, have both the same task, viz., to recover the heroine’s golden ring from the bottom of the black sea. The recovery of the golden ring is the return of the sun after the sunless Arctic winter, and this return occurs towards the end of January or the beginning of February, under the constellation of the Pisces. The fish, then, is the constellation of the Pisces, and Broad can be no less. In George and his Goat the man with his finger in the mouth of the bottle is certainly Aquarius, and Sharp-Eyes is always Sagittarius. It follows, therefore, that in Long, Broad, and Sharp-Eyes, Long is Aquarius, and in George and his Goat, Pisces. The idea, perhaps, is the gigantic stride the Arctic winter makes from darkness to light with the re-appearance of the sun.
Turning to the story of Golden Locks, we shall soon identify the ants and the ravens. In Long, Broad, and Sharp-Eyes, when the last task has been completed, the heroine freed from the spell, the frozen warriors recalled to life, and the third hoop has snapped off the body of the Black Prince, he flies out of the window as a raven. That is, the long winter night, when the thaw comes, flies off as a thunder-cloud. In the Three Citrons the hero is given his father’s sword. Every time in his journey that he throws himself down to rest, the sword clanks and disturbs the ravens above, who fly into the air. The prince, following them, arrives at the different castles of lead, silver and gold. Now the stick and sword represent the lightning in these myths; here again, therefore, the ravens represent the cloud-wrack drifting eastward. In Golden Locks, therefore, the ravens bearing frozen and fluid water are the thunder-clouds showering hail or rain, and correspond to Aquarius, hence of necessity the quick-eyed ants to Sagittarius. According to a Vedic legend, Indra as an ant passed into a cavern where was a great serpent. He bit this serpent and, distracting its attention for a moment, caused it to allow the waters to escape and usher in the spring. In this form, therefore, Indra, the ants and Sagittarius identify and may be compared to Hermes Psychopompos, the usherer of the souls to the under-world, just as Sagittarius ushers the sun into his Arctic winter tomb. Lastly, the fly which recognizes which of the twelve maidens is Golden Locks is a symbol of the return of life in spring. In George (? little year) and his Goat we have another sign of the Zodiac—Capricornus, the December sign. The mayor looks out of 93 the window and says: “Oh fie! Martha, Kate and Doodle!” comes down to detach them from the goat as the bull is passing, and he and the bull both stick too. This seems to indicate the passing of the sun into the constellation of the bull. There is, however, some confusion here. The goat is certainly Capricornus; but, as we have seen (and the explanation has been given), there is a tendency for the characters to walk out of their frames, so to say, and assume different parts. Analogies might easily be imagined between Capricornus, the first winter, and Aries, the first spring constellation; between the first constellation of the year, and the first one of the little year, i.e., the three winter months.
The carver, tailor, and hero of the story Reason and Happiness are explained by a Moravian legend called The Four Brothers. In this story four sons of a gamekeeper, like the Panduidi, go into a wood, there divide and seek their fortunes. At the end of a year they return home, each having learnt a trade. One is a botcher, the second a thief, the third a gamekeeper, and the fourth a star-gazer. The star-gazer wins the princess, and each brother is given a kingdom. In spring the father lives with the botcher, in summer with the thief, in autumn with the gamekeeper, and in winter with the star-gazer. The hero, therefore, corresponds to the winter; the carver is autumn; and the tailor who clothes the world with flowers is the spring. In the Vedic legend Tvashtar (the Vedic Vulcan) compare Slav tvoritel—the former or creator is associated with the autumn, he creates all forms of beings. In other words, the seeds which contain all the forms of vegetable life set and fall, the fish spawn, the cattle rut.
We have now identified all the characters in these eight stories who correspond, and have found, in their most abstract form, the fates or grandmothers to represent vague ideas of time, past, present and future; then the recurrent periods of dark moons, light moons and day, particularly associated with the long Arctic winter night; then the four seasons; and lastly the twelve signs of the Zodiac, presiding over the twelve months, and supposed in the dark ages of the world to influence the destinies of human beings. The stories, therefore, with the least differentiated Norns will, as a rule, be the most ancient.
The table on next page shows the relation of the fates and their substitutes to one another in the stories.
This analysis of the fate-element brings out in very clear relief one or two facts with respect to the Slavonic myths, which seem to me of considerable importance. In the first place, all the stories are annual myths. In the next place, all are more or less impregnated, so to say, with the elements of frost and cold. And, lastly, in all the stories the hero is not the sun, but the revivifying forces of nature acting upon the surface of our globe, and which bring dead nature
| Future. | Present. | Past. | Indefinite Time. | ||||||||||
| Skulde. | Varende. | Vorth. | Scandinavian. | ||||||||||
| Atropos. | Clotho. | Lachesis. | Greek. | ||||||||||
| The Three | Fates of God- | mothers. | Czech (Father Know-All) | ||||||||||
| Sun and Moon-Period. | Moon-Period. | Moonless Period. | Arctic Moon-Periods | ||||||||||
| Castle of Gold (Giant size of a high tower) 48 ft. | Castle of Silver (Giant size of a fir) 27ft. | Castle of Lead. Giant 15 ft. | The Three Citrons. Hungaro-Slovenian. | ||||||||||
| Winter. | Autumn. | Summer. | Spring. | Annual Period with the four seasons. | |||||||||
| Hvezdar, the stargazer. | Myslivec, the gamekeeper. | Pobera, the thief. | Latar, the botcher. |
The Four Brothers. Moravian. | |||||||||
| The Hero. | The carver. | ......... | The tailor. | Reason and Happiness. Czech. | |||||||||
| Pisces. | Aquarius. | Capricornus. | Sagittarius. | Scorpio. | Libra. | Virgo. | Leo. | Cancer. | Gemini. | Taurus. | Aries. | Annual Period, with Twelve Signs of Zodiac. | |
| Feb. | Jan. | Dec. | Nov. | Oct. | Sept. | Aug. | July | June | May | Apr. | Mar. | Months. | |
| Broad. | Long. | Sharp-Eyes. | Long, Broad, and Sharp-Eyes. Czech. | ||||||||||
| The Fish. | The Raven. | The Ants. | Golden Locks. Czech. | ||||||||||
| The man with his finger in a flask. |
The man with his foot tied to his shoulder. |
The Goat. | The The man with a beam across his eyes. |
The Bull. | The Goat (?) | George and His Goat. Czech. | |||||||
Now, suppose a philosophizing reflective stage of thought reached, as in fact was reached in the north of India some five or six centuries before the birth of Christ, the condition of their mythology would naturally turn thoughtful people’s minds to the curious analogy between the cyclus of the day and that of the year, the evolution of the day and the year, and that of human life: all three beginning with a little fluid or viscid slime, and finishing in darkness, rigidity, and death. And the verification of this fact (more particularly in minds to which the true conditions and relations of the organic and inorganic world world were still a mystery) would lead to a very natural and simple inference. If, it would be said, the day is an epitome of the year, the year will be an epitome of the Kalpa, or œon. Partial floods and deluges and the regular floods of spring would, in fact, be data from which to infer that the Kalpa of which the year was an epitome also began with flood and deluge. And if one Kalpa, then the whole series of Kalpas, so that at last the generalization of Thales would be reached, and in fact was reached that the world began as water. But in those early days of a robust vitality, still unbroken by crowding and the insanitary conditions of city life, and when inorganic nature was so totally inexplicable, organic vitalism was considered to be, in a way not understood, the source of the inorganic activities and superior to them; it was the spring that brought the sun, not the sun that brought the spring, exactly reversing the modern scientific conception. The third parallel series, the organic vital cyclus from generation to the grave, would therefore come in with irresistible force to clinch the previous induction and give it the stamp of certainty. Finally, since all life begins with an egg, the two primitive elements of the ontology would be, and were considered to be, water and an egg (whence our baptism and Easter eggs)—an egg floating on the water, although sometimes, as was indeed logical where organic vitality was supposed to be at the root of the inorganic, the egg itself was held to be the origin of the condition of deluge which succeeded it (cf.: the Serbian chicken legends).
Now, this induction, of 2,500 years before the present day, was considerably in advance of the latest modern thought and discovery which has recognized in the development of the embryo an epitome of the whole development through geologic time of organic beings. What was necessarily wanting to it was verification by observation and the collection of facts; nevertheless, these ancient philosophers in the legend of Purusha, who is developed from an egg, lives a thousand years, producing from the different parts of his body, light, air, fire, etc., and then dies, had in their general induction hit upon the development among the lower animals by alternate generation, and in their ontology are in substantial accord with the conclusions of modern science. Lastly, in those earlier times, not only may several missing links between men and apes have been still lingering upon earth (just as the Moas have only recently become extinct in New Zealand), or at any rate traditions of them have survived, but the creation of an inflexional language (perhaps consciously and deliberately evolved during its later stages as a stupendous memoria tecnica), and the absence or rarity of books and printing, with the pernicious habit of mind they create of transferring memory from brains to paper, contributed to the development of well-stored minds, with all their knowledge, so to say, in hand, and tended to ensure the soundness of their inductions. I have said we are behind these early philosophers in one respect, and so we are. We have never yet attempted to infer the evolution of the æon from that of the year, because the analogical nexus between the two has not been shewn to be necessary. Considering the success of this method of induction among the ancients for arriving at respectably accurate conclusions, it might even now be of use, at all events for the framing of hypotheses to be afterwards the subject of analytical study, observation, and the collation of facts. However this may be, one thing is certain, that ancient traditions, beliefs and theories are far from being the despicable trash they are supposed to be by missionaries in the East, and that geologists, by a careful collation of all the traditions and notices of the ape-hero Hanuman in the Hindoo classics, might greatly facilitate their search for the remnants quaternary, or perhaps yet more ancient, of the missing link. A comparative study of the name for apes in all the languages of the world might also lead to some valuable results. The roots of many Latin words as, e.g., that of tabes and macula dim (cf.: mak), are to be found in their most primitive form in old Slavonic. Now the name of the filthy oscans was originally opisci (see Juvenal), and isco, asco, etc., means “that nasty,” while op in Sclavonic means ape; it is not unlikely, therefore, that the word opisci meant originally “those nasty monkeys,” from the likeness of the ancient oscans to apes.
If the tenacity of the memory of the men of old be doubted, I would appeal to that of the modern North Russian moujik biliny (lit.: weeds) or ballad singers, or to Homer and Hesiod, who, from not being able to read or write, could remember 50,000 lines of poetry, as well as to Herodotus, who repeated from memory a great part of his history at the Olympic games.
To return to our immediate subject—the eight primitive Slav fairy stories. From their comparison, the just conclusion seems to be that they point to having been derived from Arctic annual myths, and not from Indian Vedic solar ones, themselves more probably a derivation from the same stock, the annual myth degrading to diurnal ones, when the climatic conditions that originated them were exchanged by migration (either of the story or the story-teller), for less rigorous winters and warm summers. This theory in no way touches or impugns what has been repeatedly demonstrated, that Eastern legends and fairy stories (like the Bethgellert legend) have constantly, and from remote times, found their way into Europe, become naturalized, and extended themselves to remote regions. The very welcome that they received proves that the soil was congenial to them. They stirred memories legends long since passed into oblivion, and were doubly welcome, both for their novelty, and because, though the hearers, perhaps, only half-realized it, they were old friends with new faces. When in some angle of a breakwater the rolling breakers are repelled, the crests colliding with the advancing billows increase the confusion and hurly-burly, and heighten its wild extravagance. This is what has happened with our myths and fairy stories. The huge majestic billows of the past are subsiding, but the reflux from the last of their spent forces, crossing the subsiding wave-roll of western pagan fancy, has prolonged the semblance of its activity and galvanized its decay into a last flicker of youthful vitality.
In all the eight stories from the Czech, Lusatian, and Ungaro-Slovenian of which I am writing, the frost and snow element is intrinsic, and in some of them stronger than the climate of Bohemia and Hungary would seem to warrant. This is particularly the case with the Three Citrons and the Sun-horse, both of which have many points in common with Eastern fairy stories. Every one knows the story of Jack and the Bean Stalk; it is the variant of a fairy myth which extends from Alaska in North America to Serbia in the Balkan Peninsula, and to Great Britain in the North of Europe. That is to say, it covers probably nearly the whole of the Northern hemisphere. In the Alaska (Dogger-Indian) legend, Chepewa, the divine being, plants a stick[2] which grows into a fir-tree. This was after the great flood. The stick rapidly grew into a fir which reached heaven. A squirrel ran up the tree, and Chepewa after it, and reached the stars and a broad table-land, where, laying a snare for the squirrel, he caught the sun. In the Siebenbürgen form of the legend a young shepherd comes to a tree, the branches of which form a kind of a ladder. After nine days’ climbing he arrives at a plateau on which is a palace, a forest, and a well, with copper-coloured water. He dips his hand in, which becomes copper-coloured also. He breaks off a branch, climbs other nine days, and reaches a similar plateau, palaces, and a silver well, dips in his hand, and it becomes silvered. He breaks off a branch, climbs other nine days, and arrives at a plateau with a castle and well of gold. He detaches a third branch, obtains admission to the castle, rides thrice round the hill of glass, and, touching the breast of the king’s daughter with the three branches, causes her to become his bride.
In the English variant the plant of a haricot-bean shows that the legend is a lunar one, the pea and haricot-bean being symbolical of the moon, perhaps from their crescent-shaped pods (cornetti in Italian), or because the scarlet-runner is a rapid-growing plant. In one of the Serbian legends the miraculous hair has disappeared, but the hero is conducted by a limping fox in return for kind treatment (the squirrel of the Dogger-Indian story), to a sort of starry underworld for the golden maiden, the golden maiden is only to be obtained in exchange for the golden horse, and the golden horse for the golden apple; the fox transforms itself at each step into a golden maiden, a golden horse, and a golden pippin; thus the possessors of these treasures are cheated as well as the stealer of the vine-stock, which yields twenty-four buckets of wine. All these precious articles are thus recovered and brought home by the hero, and the father, whose right eye laughs and left eye weeps, being presented with the vinestock, weeps no more. In the normal form of the story it is always a tree or leguminous plant the hero climbs; in the Hungaro-Slovenian variant the dumplings have been developed through a misunderstanding. Haluski in Slovenian means dumplings; and in Bohemian and perhaps other Slavonic languages haluze means a branch. The legend has therefore drifted into Hungary from the north, and the branches turned to dumplings in the process. We have no right to assume that the Slovenian Three Citrons was derived from the Siebenbürgen legend; both may be variants of some legend more primitive still; all we have a right to affirm is that the legend travelled south, and that the mistake about haluze created the dumplings. Still we may safely assert that, besides being Arctic in many other respects, the Slovenian legend is closely connected with a story in which three periods of nine days each is a strongly marked feature. Now in the Vedic legends (except in the late cosmogonical one of Purusha, the universal male being nine months hatching in the primitive egg), the number nine does not occur, but it is of common occurrence in the northern forms of the legends. Thus, for example, in the Siberian version of the legend of the fall, the fatal tree has nine branches, and there are nine Adams and nine Eves. The fruit of five of the branches pointing east might be eaten, the fruit of the four other branches pointing west were forbidden. Under the tree were a dog and a serpent. Erlik, the tempter, persuaded one of the Eves to eat the forbidden fruit. This caused the shaggy hides of the men and women (for, like the Japanese Ainos, they were covered with hair) to fall off, and their expulsion from Paradise. How can we here fail to identify the four westward-facing branches with the bean-stalk—that is, dark- and light-moon periods of the Arctic winter night, the profoundly phallic character of which can be traced with certainty in the vulgarisms of the common people, both of Durham and Liguria to this very day. May it not be that to the pious orgies of those genial winter nights of the primitive circumpolar civilization we owe it that our simian hides thinned off and human forms emerged, worthy to be the subjects of the chisel of Pheidias and Praxiteles? To this day the Northern Mongols are almost hairless. Vice is a great depilatory, profligacy a great humanizer. Juvenal, in his diatribes against Roman vice, was well aware of this, and begs heaven, in his satires, to restore the golden ages of the world when the women were nearly as hairy as the men, and both as bears.
Finally, in a lovely Lithuanian folk-lied, in which every syllable declares itself the genuine offspring of a northern winter in all its gelid and sparkling splendour, we have the following myth enshrined. “Liebe Maria” gives an orphan her handkerchief to dry her tears. Having dried them, the orphan throws it into a bed of nettles. Boys passing the nettles see something shining there; ask what it is, and are told that it is Liebe Maria’s handkerchief sparkling with the orphan’s tears. I ask where shall I wash it? Mary replies: In the golden brook. I ask where shall I keep it? Mary replies: In a golden casket hung round with nine little locks, having nine little keys. Now these stinging-nettles correspond to the stinging-ants of Golden Locks, and these to Sagittarius. The handkerchief lying in the nettles sparkling with the orphan’s tears is, therefore, the winter sky bereft of the sun, but sparkling with stars, when the sun has entered the November constellation of Sagittarius to remain there and in Aquarius until February. The golden casket would, therefore, seem to mean the year of nine months (the nine keys and locks), illuminated by the sun. The strong contrast between the two periods in the myth, between the starlit winter yearlet of three and the sunlit golden year of nine months, shows that it must have been manufactured in high latitudes as surely as the Serbian legend of the boy who looked under the bark of a spruce-tree and saw a sun-bright, amber-clear nymph shining there, was the produce of a spruce trementina forest of a much lower latitude.
Wonderful to dwellers within the northern circle must have been the following coincidences, particularly where the sun remained eclipsed just a month. (1) The three sharply-defined winter months, just ninety days in all, and the nine sunny months, giving the numbers three and nine. (2) The nine months’ gestation of the human fetus in the womb, perhaps, originally in some way, really due to the arrest of nature’s life during the three glacial winter months, and our man-ape ancestry having a fixed rutting period (perhaps in March), like the other animals. And (3), the 3x9=27 days of the lunar month. It is worth remembering that nine is the number sacred to Buddha, and that the Turanians of the north resemble that personage in the respect they show for human life. Indeed, the rareness of murder and the roundness of the skull of the Lapp and Samoyede Nomads, besides their skill in magic, seem to indicate that physically they are the highest type of human beings yet in process of being evolved. But they are so small, it may be objected. Size, however, is no criterion of excellence. But we are Christians, and just the right size, it may be retorted angrily. Of course, to this argument there is no answer. All disbelievers can do is humbly to bow the head in presence of a revelation.
In conclusion, I quote a Lithuanian versified form of the legend in which the northern nine again occurs, and which is so obviously an Arctic annual myth as to require no comments:
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Bitterlich weint das Sonnchen |
Einfuhr die Sonne |
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To make the allegory still clearer, the following Swedish enigma is to the point: “Our mother,” it says, “has a counterpane no one can fold. Our father more gold than he can count. Our brother a golden apple that nobody can bite.” The answer tells us that the counterpane is the sky, the gold is the stars, and the golden pippin the sun.
Lastly, in all these eight stories, the hero is never the sun, but the living power of organic nature triumphant in spring, and with whose triumph the return of spring is somehow connected. Poets, and “that universal poet, the people,” are much more matter-of-act and stick much closer to it than philologists give them credit for doing. When a great number of myths are vaguely compared together, a certain indefiniteness results, and many points of resemblance are masked and thus overlooked; what is required is to group the immense mass of myths and legends, and first to compare minutely among themselves the members of the different groups. We are so accustomed to the scientific way of looking at nature, and to refer all activity to the sun as the prime source of it, that it is difficult for us to realize that the primitive savage’s point of view was a very different one. It was a mistake, of course, but with his limited observation and knowledge of facts it was a perfectly logical one. A child with strong rational and comparative instincts, that is to say, poetical ones, tossed about at sea in a boat, blames the trees for the wind, and exclaims: “Naughty trees.” He knows that a fan produces a current of air, and, observing that the trees wave their arms about when the wind is high, naturally concludes that the trees are the source of it. In the Roumanian versified legend, the infant Jesus being restless, the Virgin Mary gives him two apples to play with; one he throws into the air, and it becomes the sun, the other becomes the moon. In the Hottentot form of the legend, the first Hottentot man throws up his right shoe, and it becomes the sun; he throws up his left, and it becomes the moon. This is the frame of mind one must try to get into to understand these early Slav annual myths. The sun may be, indeed, an essential factor of the problem, but it is always the hero, the latent invincible power of organic life, which is the active agent in so re-adjusting the earthly and the celestial as to ensure the triumph of life over death. A vague over-ruling Destiny, to which, as in Greek mythology, even the sky-gods are destined ultimately to succumb, is more or less recognized. The fates and Father Know-All are somehow associated as overruling human destinies, but it is the hero who succeeds in carrying off the three golden hairs; it is the hero who removes the spell from the frozen waters of the life-giving well, causes the life-giving apple tree once more to bear fruit, kills the dragon, cures the sick princess, exorcises the black prince, and dethrones the autumn king and takes his place.
The analysis of these eight stories has, therefore, brought out into strong relief three important facts about them:
(1) They are all annual solar high latitude myths, and not low latitude solar myths of the dawn.
(2) They can all be traced to somewhere in the Arctic circle as their point of origin; the total disappearance of the sun in winter and an excessive degree of frost and cold being essential elements their composition.
(3) The hero is never the sun, but invariably the latent force of organic life, conceived as somehow instrumental in bringing back the sun, by conquering the forces of death and cold on the earth itself.
- ↑ In my selections of Victor Halek’s (the great Slav poet) evensongs, there is a translation of his versified version of the legend. As my translation of his admirable writings proved “caviar to the general,” and the reader is not likely to possess a copy, I reproduce here the translation, such as it is:
Two thoughts in God, as stars were set
In heaven’s divine communion,
And shone, of all the starry choir,
In closest union,Till one of them fell prone to earth
And left her mate to languish,
Till God excused her, too, the skies
Pitying her anguish.And many a night on earth they roved
In grief for their lost Aden,
Till once again they met as men,
As youth and maiden,And looking in each other’s eyes
They recognized straightway,
And lived, thrice blest, till God to rest
Called one away.Who, dying out of earth, recalled
Her love to heaven’s fair shore,
And God forbade it not, and now
They’re stars once more.Versifying this legend, the great constructive Slav poet wished to point out not merely the only possible, but the only thinkable, form of immortality since the new world of thought, created by Darwin and Darwinism. In the New Zealand legend, Hikatoro’s wife fell from heaven on to the earth. He followed in search of her, placed her in a boat, attached a rope to it, and they were hauled back into heaven and there transformed into two stars. The legend also occurs in China in the following form: “In the depths of the Milky Way dwells, according to Chinese tradition, a disconsolate star-goddess. One day, when she had been sent on a mission to the world, she committed the error of falling in love with a Chinese shepherd. When her mission was concluded she was recalled to heaven, and left her spouse a prey to profound despair. But when the hour of death sounded for him, the council of the gods had pity upon the erring goddess and carried the soul of the shepherd into the Milky Way, opposite to the spot where shone his beloved one’s. Once a year, on the seventh day of the seventh month, magpies descend into the Milky Way, and, by the help of their wings, the divided lovers can reunite.”
- ↑ In the Serbian variant it becomes a vine-stock, perhaps through influence of the Bible legend.