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

of all things.” From the union of these two everything in existence has arisen, and consequently resembles the one or the other (529. 107).

Among the primitive Aryans, the Sky, or Heaven God, was called “Father,” as shown by the Sanskrit Dyaus Pitâr, Greek Zeus Patær, Latin Jupiter, all of which names signify “sky father.” Dyaus is also called janitâr, “producer, father,” and Zeus, the “eternal father of men,” the “father of gods and men, the ruler and preserver of the world.” In the Vedic hymns are invocations of Dyaus (Sky), as “our Father,” and of Prithivi (Earth), as “our Mother” (388. 210).

Dyaus symbolizes the “bright sky”; from the same primitive Indo-European root come the Latin words dies (day), deus or divus (god); the dark sombre vault of heaven is Varuna, the Greek [Greek: Ouranós], Latin Uranus.

Other instances of the bridal of earth and sky,—of “mother earth,” and “father sky,”—are found among the tribes of the Baltic, the Lapps, the Finns (who have Ukko, “Father Heaven,” Akka, “Mother Earth”), and other more barbaric peoples.

In Ashanti, the new deity, which the introduction of Christianity has added to the native pantheon, is called Nana Nyankupon, “Grandfather-sky” (438. 24).

The shaman of the Buryats of Alarsk prays to “Father Heaven”; in the Altai Mountains the prayer is to

 

“Father Yulgen, thrice exalted, Whom the edge of the moon’s axe shuns, Who uses the hoof of the horse. Thou, Yulgen, hast created all men, Who are stirring round about us, Thou, Yulgen, hast endowed us with all cattle; Let us not fall into sorrow! Grant that we may resist the evil one!” (504. 70, 77).

 

We too have recollections of that “Father-Sky,” whom our far-off ancestors adored, the bright, glad, cheerful sky, the “ancestor of all.” Max Müller has summed up the facts of our inheritance in brief terms:—

“Remember that this Dyaush Pitar is the same as the Greek [Greek: Zeus Patær], and the Latin Jupiter, and you will see how this one word shows us the easy, the natural, the almost inevitable transition from the conception of the active sky as a purely physical fact, to the Father-Sky with all his mythological accidents, and lastly to that Father in heaven whom Æschylus meant when he burst out in his majestic prayer to Zeus, whosoever he is” (510. 410).

Unnumbered centuries have passed, but the “witchery of the soft blue sky” has still firm hold upon the race, and we are, as of old, children of “our Father, who art in Heaven.”

 

Father-Sea.

Montesinos tells us that Viracocha, “sea-foam,” the Peruvian god of the sea, was regarded as the source of all life and the origin of all things,—world-tiller, world-animator, he was called (509. 316). Xenophanes of Kolophon, a Greek philosopher of the sixth century B.C., taught that “the mighty sea is the father of clouds and winds and rivers.” In Greek mythology Oceanus is said to be the father of the principal rivers of earth. Neptune, the god of the sea,—“Father Neptune,” he is sometimes called,—had his analogue in a deity whom the Libyans looked upon as “the first and greatest of the gods.” To Neptune, as the “Father of Streams,” the Romans erected a temple in the Campus Martius and held games and feasts in his honour. The sea was also spoken of as pater aequoreus.

 

Father-River.

The name “Father of Waters” is assigned, incorrectly perhaps, to certain American Indian languages, as an appellation of the Mississippi. From Macaulay’s “Lay of Horatius,” we all know

 

“O Tiber, Father Tiber, To whom the Romans pray,”

 

and “Father Thames” is a favourite epithet of the great English river.

 

Father-Frost.

In our English nursery-lore the frost is personified as a mischievous boy, “Jack Frost,” to whose pranks its vagaries are due. In old Norse mythology we read of the terrible “Frost Giants,” offspring of Ymir, born of the ice of Niflheim, which the warmth exhaled from the sun-lit land of Muspelheim caused to drop off into the great Ginnunga-gap, the void that once was where earth is now. In his “Frost Spirit” Whittier has preserved something of the ancient grimness.

We speak commonly of the “Frost-King,” whose fetters bind the earth in winter.

In Russia the frost is called “Father Frost,” and is personified as a white old man, or “a mighty smith who forges strong chains with which to bind the earth and the waters,” and on Christmas Eve “the oldest man in each family takes a spoonful of kissel (a sort of pudding), and then, having put his head through the window, cries: ‘Frost, Frost, come and eat kissel! Frost, Frost, do not kill our oats! Drive our flax and hemp deep into the ground’” (520.223-230).

Quite different is the idea contained in Grimm’s tale of “Old Mother Frost,”—the old woman, the shaking of whose bed in the making causes the feathers to fly, and “then it snows on earth.”

 

Father Fire.

Fire has received worship and apotheosis in many parts of the globe. The Muskogee Indians of the southeastern United States “gave to fire the highest Indian title of honour, grandfather, and their priests were called ‘fire-makers’” (529. 68). The ancient Aztecs called the god of fire “the oldest of the gods, Huehueteotl, and also ‘our Father,’ Tota, as it was believed that from him all things were derived.” He was supposed “to govern the generative proclivities and the sexual relations,” and he was sometimes called Xiuhtecutli, “‘God of the Green Leaf,’ that is, of vegetable fecundity and productiveness.” He was worshipped as “the life-giver, the active generator of animate existence,”—the “primal element and the immediate source of life” (413). These old Americans were in accord with the philosopher, Heraclitus of Ephesus, who held that “fire is the element, and all things were produced in exchange for fire”; and Heraclitus, in the fragments in which he speaks of “God,” the “one wise,” that which “knows all things,” means “Fire.” In the rites of the Nagualists occurs a “baptism by fire,” which was “celebrated on the fourth day after the birth of the child, during which time it was deemed essential to keep the fire burning in the house, but not to permit any of it to be carried out, as that would bring bad luck to the child,” and, in the work of one of the Spanish priests, a protest is made: “Nor must the lying-in women and their assistants be permitted to speak of Fire as the father and mother of all things, and the author of nature; because it is a common saying with them that Fire is present at the birth and death of every creature.” It appears also that the Indians who followed this strange cult were wont to speak of “what the Fire said and how the Fire wept”

(413. 45-46).

 

Among various other peoples, fire is regarded as auspicious to children; its sacred character is widely recognized. In the Zend-Avesta, the Bible of the ancient Persians, whose religion survives in the cult of the Parsees, now chiefly resident in Bombay and its environs, we read of Ahura-Mazda, the “Wise Lord,” the “Father of the pure world,” the “best thing of all, the source of light for the world.” Purest and most sacred of all created things was fire, light (421. 32). In the Sar Dar, one of the Parsee sacred books, the people are bidden to “keep a continual fire in the house during a woman’s pregnancy, and, after the child is born, to burn a lamp [or, better, a fire] for three nights and days, so that the demons and fiends may not be able to do any damage and harm.” It is said that when Zoroaster, the founder of the ancient religion of Persia, was born, “a demon came at the head of a hundred and fifty other demons, every night for three nights, to slay him, but they were put to flight by seeing the fire, and were consequently unable to hurt him” (258. 96).

In ancient Rome, among the Lithuanians on the shores of the Baltic, in Ireland, in England, Denmark, Germany, “while a child remained unbaptized,” it was, or is, necessary “to burn a light in the chamber.” And in the island of Lewis, off the northwestern coast of Scotland, “fire used to be carried round women before they were churched, and children before they were christened, both night and morning; and this was held effectual to preserve both mother and infant from evil spirits, and (in the case of the infant) from being changed.”

In the Gypsy mountain villages of Upper Hungary, during the baptism of a child, the women kindle in the hut a little fire, over which the mother with the baptized infant must step, in order that milk may not fail her while the child is being suckled (392. II. 21).

In the East Indies, the mother with her newborn child is made to pass between two fires.

Somewhat similar customs are known to have existed in northern and western Europe; in Ireland and Scotland especially, where children were made to pass through or leap over the fire.

To Moloch (“King”), their god of fire, the Phoenicians used to sacrifice the first-born of their noblest families. A later development of this cult seems to have consisted in making the child pass between two fires, or over or through a fire. This “baptism of fire” or “purification by fire,” was in practice among the ancient Aztecs of Mexico. To the second water-baptism was added the fire-baptism, in which the child was drawn through the fire four times (509. 653).

Among the Tarahumari Indians of the Mexican Sierra Madre, the medicine-man “cures” the infant, “so that it may become strong and healthy, and live a long life.” The ceremony is thus described by Lumholtz: “A big fire of corn-cobs, or of the branches of the mountain-cedar, is made near the cross [outside the house], and the baby is carried over the smoke three times towards each cardinal-point, and also three times backward. The motion is first toward the east, then toward the west, then south, then north. The smoke of the corn-cobs assures him of success in agriculture. With a fire-brand the medicine-man makes three crosses on the child’s forehead, if it is a boy, and four, if a girl” (107. 298).

Among certain South American tribes the child and the mother are “smoked” with tobacco (326. II. 194).

With marriage, too, fire is associated. In Yucatan, at the betrothal, the priest held the little fingers of bridegroom and bride to the fire (509. 504), and in Germany, the maiden, on Christmas night, looks into the hearth-fire to discover there the features of her future husband (392. IV. 82). Rademacher (130a) has called attention to the great importance of the hearth and the fireplace in family life. In the Black Forest the stove is invoked in these terms: “Dear oven, I beseech thee, if thou hast a wife, I would have a man” (130 a. 60). Among the White Russians, before the wedding, the house of the bridegroom and that of the bride are “cleansed from evil spirits,” by burning a heap of straw in the middle of the living-room, and at the beginning of the ceremonies, after they have been elevated upon a cask, as “Prince” and “Princess,” the guests, with the wedding cake and two tapers in their hands, go round the cask three times, and with the tapers held crosswise burn them a little on the neck, the forehead, and the temples, so that the hair is singed away somewhat. At church the wax tapers are of importance: if they burn brightly and clearly, the young couple will have a happy, merry married life; if feeble, their life will