The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought by Alexander F. Chamberlain (read full novel txt) 📖

nurse, Who sang to him, night and day, The rhymes of the universe.

“And whenever the way seemed long, Or his heart began to fail, She—would sing a more wonderful song, Or tell a more marvellous tale.”

 

Through the long centuries Nature has been the mother, nurse, and teacher of man.

 

Other Mother-Goddesses.

Among other “mother-goddesses” of ancient Italy we find Maia Mater, Flora Mater, both deities of growth and reproduction; Lua Mater, “the loosing mother,” a goddess of death; Acca Larentia, the mother of the Lares (_Acca_ perhaps = Atta, a child-word for mother, as Lippert suggests); Mater matuta, “mother of the dawn,” a goddess of childbirth, worshipped especially by married women, and to whom there was erected a temple at Cære.

The mother-goddesses of Germany are quite numerous. Among those minor ones cited by Grimm and Simrock, are: Haulemutter, Mutter Holle, the Klagemütter or Klagemuhmen, Pudelmutter (a name applied to the goddess Berchta), Etelmutter, Kornmutter, Roggenmutter, Mutterkorn, and the interesting Buschgroszmutter, “bush grandmother,” as the “Queen of the Wood-Folk” is called. Here the mother-feeling has been so strong as to grant to even the devil a mother and a grandmother, who figure in many proverbs and folk-locutions. When the question is asked a Mecklenburger, concerning a social gathering: “Who was there?” he may answer: “The devil and his mother (_möm_)”; when a whirlwind occurs, the saying is: “The Devil is dancing with his grandmother.”

In China the position of woman is very low, and, as Mr. Douglas points out: “It is only when a woman becomes a mother that she receives the respect which is by right due to her, and then the inferiority of her sex disappears before the requirements of filial love, which is the crown and glory of China” (434. 125).

In Chinese cosmogony and mythology motherhood finds recognition. Besides the great Earth-Mother, we meet with Se-wang-moo, the “Western Royal Mother,” a goddess of fairy-land, and the “Mother of Lightning,” thunder being considered the “father and teacher of all living beings.” Lieh-tze, a philosopher of the fifth century B.C., taught: “My body is not my own; I am merely an inhabitant of it for the time being, and shall resign it when I return to the ‘Abyss Mother’” (434. 222, 225,

277).

 

In the Flowery Kingdom there is also a sect “who worship the goddess Pity, in the form of a woman holding a child in her arms.”

Among the deities and semi-deities of the Andaman Islanders are chän·a·ê·lewadi, the “mother of the race,”—Mother E·lewadi; chän·a·erep, chän·a·châ·riâ, chän·a·te·liu, chän·a·li·mi, chän·a·jär·a·ngûd, all inventors and discoverers of foods and the arts. In the religious system of the Andaman Islanders, Pû·luga-, the Supreme Being, by whom were created “the world and all objects, animate and inanimate, excepting only the powers of evil,” and of whom it is said, “though his appearance is like fire, yet he is (nowadays) invisible,” is “believed to live in a large stone house in the sky with a wife whom he created for himself; she is green in appearance, and has two names, chän·a·àu·lola (Mother Freshwater Shrimp) and chän·a·pâ·lak-—(Mother Eel); by her he has a large family, all except the eldest being girls; these last, known as mô·ro-win— (sky-spirits or angels), are said to be black in appearance, and, with their mother, amuse themselves from time to time by throwing fish and prawns into the streams and sea for the use of the inhabitants of the world” (498. 90). With these people also the first woman was chän·a·ê·lewadi (Mother E-lewadi), the ancestress of the present race of natives. She was drowned, while canoeing, and “became a small crab of a description still named after her ê·lewadi” (498. 96):

Quite frequently we find that primitive peoples have ascribed the origin of the arts or of the good things of life to women whom they have canonized as saints or apotheosized into deities.

We may close our consideration of motherhood and what it has given the world with the apt words of Zmigrodzki:—

“The history of the civilization (Kulturgeschichte) of our race, is, so to speak, the history of the mother-influence. Our ideas of morality, justice, order, all these are simply mother-ideas. The mother began our culture in that epoch in which, like the man, she was autodidactic. In the epoch of the Church Fathers, the highly educated mother saved our civilization and gave it a new turn, and only the highly educated mother will save us out of the moral corruption of our age. Taken individually also, we can mark the ennobling, elevating influence which educated mothers have exercised over our great men. Let us strive as much as possible to have highly accomplished mothers, wives, friends, and then the wounds which we receive in the struggle for life will not bleed as they do now” (174. 367).

The history of civilization is the story of the mother, a story that stales not with repetition. Richter, in his Levana, makes eloquent appeal:—

“Never, never has one forgotten his pure, right-educating mother! On the blue mountains of our dim childhood, towards which we ever turn and look, stand the mothers who marked out for us from thence our life; the most blessed age must be forgotten ere we can forget the warmest heart. You wish, O woman, to be ardently loved, and forever, even till death. Be, then, the mothers of your children.”

Tennyson in The Foresters uses these beautiful words: “Every man for the sake of the great blessed Mother in heaven, and for the love of his own little mother on earth, should handle all womankind gently, and hold them in all honour.” Herein lies the whole philosophy of life. The ancient Germans were right, who, as Tacitus tells us, saw in woman sanctum aliquid et providum, as indeed the Modern German Weib (cognate with our wife) also declares, the original signification of the word being “the animated, the inspirited.”

 

CHAPTER IV.

 

THE CHILD’S TRIBUTE TO THE FATHER.

If the paternal cottage still shuts us in, its roof still screens us; and with a father, we have as yet a prophet, priest, and king, and an obedience that makes us free.—_Carlyle_.

To you your father should be as a god.—_Shakespeare_.

Our Father, who art in Heaven.—_Jesus_.

 

Father of all! in every age, In every clime adored, By saint, by savage, and by sage, Jehovah, Jove, or Lord.—Pope.

 

Names of the Father.

Father, like mother, is a very old word, and goes back, with the cognate terms in Italic, Hellenic, Teutonic, Celtic, Slavonic, and Indo-Aryan speech, to the primitive Indo-European language, and, like mother, it is of uncertain etymology.

An English preacher of the twelfth century sought to derive the word from the Anglo-Saxon fédan, “to feed,” making the “father” to be the “feeder” or “nourisher,” and some more modern attempts at explanation are hardly better. This etymology, however incorrect, as it certainly is, in English, does find analogies in the tongues of primitive peoples. In the language of the Klamath Indians, of Oregon, the word for “father” is t’shishap (in the Modoc dialect, p’tishap), meaning “feeder, nourisher,” from a radical tshi, which signifies “to give somebody liquid food (as milk, water).” Whether there is any real connection between our word pap,—with its cognates in other languages,—which signifies “food for infants,” as well as “teat, breast,” and the child-word papa, “father,” is doubtful, and the same may be said of the attempt to find a relation between teat, tit, etc., and the widespread child-words for “father,” tat, dad. Wedgewood (Introd. to Dictionary), however, maintained that: “Words formed of the simplest articulations, ma and pa, are used to designate the objects in which the infant takes the earliest interest,—the mother, the father, the mother’s breast, the act of taking or sucking food.” Tylor also points out how, in the language of children of to-day, we may find a key to the origin of a mass of words for “father, mother, grandmother, aunt, child, breast, toy, doll,” etc. From the limited supply of material at the disposal of the early speakers of a language, we can readily understand how the same sound had to serve for the connotation of different ideas; this is why “mama means in one tongue mother, in another father, in a third, uncle; dada in one language father, in a second nurse, in another breast; tata in one language father, in another son,” etc. The primitive Indo-European p-tr, Skeat takes to be formed, with the agent-suffix tr, from the radical pâ, “to protect, to guard,”—the father having been originally looked upon as the “protector,” or “guarder.” Max Müller, who offers the same derivation, remarks: “The father, as begetter, was called in Sanskrit ganitár, as protector and supporter of his posterity, however, pitár. For this reason, in the Veda both names together are used in order to give the complete idea of ‘father.’ In like manner, mâtar, ‘mother,’ is joined with ganit, ‘genetrix,’ and this shows that the word mâtar must have soon lost its etymological signification and come to be a term, of respect and caress. With the oldest Indo-Europeans, mâtar meant ‘maker,’ from mâ, ‘to form.’”

Kluge, however, seems to reject the interpretation “protector, defender,” and to see in the word a derivative from the “nature-sound” pa. So also Westermarck (166. 86-94). In Gothic, presumably the oldest of the Teutonic dialects, the most common word for “father” is atta, still seen in the name of the far-famed leader of the Huns, Attila, i.e. “little father,” and in the ätti of modern Swiss dialects. To the same root attach themselves Sanskrit atta, “mother, elder sister”; Ossetic ädda, “little father (Väterchen)”; Greek årra, Latin atta, “father”; Old Slavonic otí-ci, “little father”; Old Irish aite, “foster-father.” Atta belongs to the category of “nature-words” or “nursery-words” of which our dad (_daddy_) is also a member.

Another member is the widespread papa, pa. Our word papa, Skeat thinks, is borrowed, through the French, from Latin papa, found as a Roman cognomen. This goes back in all probability to ancient Greek, for, in the Odyssey (vi. 57), Nausicaa addresses her father as [Greek: pappa phile], “dear papa.” The Papa of German is also borrowed from French, and, according to Kluge, did not secure a firm, place in the language until comparatively late in the eighteenth century.

In some of the Semitic languages the word for “father” signifies “maker,” and the same thing occurs elsewhere among primitive people

(166. 91).

 

As with “mother,” so with “father”; in many languages a man (or a boy) does not employ the same term as a woman (or a girl). In the Haida, Okanak’en, and Kootenay, all Indian languages of British Columbia, the words used by males and by females are, respectively: kun, qat; lEe’u, mistm; tito, so.

In many languages the word for “father,” as is also the case with “mother,” is different when the parent is addressed from that used when he is spoken of or referred to. In the Tsimshian, Kwakiutl, Nootka, Ntlakyapamuq, four Indian languages of British Columbia, the words for “father” when addressed, are respectively a’bo, ats, no’we, pap, and for “father” in other cases, nEgua’at, au’mp, nuwe’k’so, ska’tsa. Here, again, it will be noticed that the words used in address seem shorter and more primitive in character.

In the Chinantee language of Mexico, nuh signifies at the same time “father” and “man.” In Gothic aba means both “father” and