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

be a quiet one; if they flicker, there will be strife and quarrels between them

(392 (1891). 161).

 

Writing of Manabozho, or Michabo, the great divinity of the Algonkian tribes of the Great Lakes, Dr. D. G. Brinton says: “Michabo, giver of life and light, creator and preserver, is no apotheosis of a prudent chieftain, still less the fabrication of an idle fancy, or a designing priestcraft, but, in origin, deeds, and name, the not unworthy personification of the purest conceptions they possessed concerning the Father of All” (409. 469).

To Agni, fire, light, “in whom are all the gods,” the ancient Hindu prayed: “Be unto us easy of access, as a father to his son” (388. 210), and later generations of men have seen in light the embodiment of God. As Max Müller says, “We ourselves also, though we may no longer use the name of Morning-Light for the Infinite, the Beyond, the Divine, still find no better expression than Light when we speak of the manifestations of God, whether in nature or in our mind” (510. 434).

In the Christian churches of to-day hymns of praise are sung to God as “Father of Light and Life,” and their neophytes are bidden, as of old, to “walk as Children of Light.”

 

Father-Sun.

At the naming of the newborn infant in ancient Mexico, the mother thus addressed the Sun and the Earth: “Thou Sun, Father of all that live, and thou Earth, our Mother, take ye this child, and guard it as your son.” A common affirmation with them was: “By the life of the Sun, and of our Lady, the Earth” (529. 97).

Many primitive tribes have the custom of holding the newborn child up to the sun.

Not a few races and peoples have called themselves “children of the sun.” The first of the Incas of Peru—a male and a female—were children of the Sun “our Father,” who, “seeing the pitiable condition of mankind, was moved to compassion, and sent to them, from Heaven, two of his children, a son and a daughter, to teach them how to do him honour, and pay him divine worship “; they were also instructed by the sun in all the needful arts of life, which they taught to men (529. 102). When the “children of the Sun” died, they were said to be “called to the home of the Sun, their Father” (100. 479).

The Comanche Indians, who worship the sun with dances and other rites, call him taab-apa, “Father Sun,” and the Sarcees speak of the sun as “Our Father,” and of the earth as “Our Mother” (412. 122, 72).

With the Piute Indians “the sun is the father and ruler of the heavens. He is the big chief. The moon is his wife, and the stars are their children. The sun eats his children whenever he can catch them. They fall before him, and are all the time afraid when he is passing through the heavens. When he (their father) appears in the morning, you see all the stars, his children, fly out of sight,—go away back into the blue of the above,—and they do not wake to be seen again until he, their father, is about going to his bed” (485. I. 130).

Dr. Eastman says of the Sioux Indians: “The sun was regarded as the father, and the earth as the mother, of all things that live and grow; but, as they had been married a long time and had become the parents of many generations, they were called the great-grandparents” (518 (1894).

89).

 

Widespread over the earth has been, and still is, the worship of the sun; some mythologists, indeed, would go too far and explain almost every feature of savage and barbarous religion as a sun-myth or as smacking of heliolatry.

Imagery and figurative language borrowed from the consideration of the aspect and functions of the great orb of day have found their way into and beautified the religious thought of every modern Christian community. The words of the poet Thomson:

 

“Prime cheerer light! Of all material beings first and best! Efflux divine! Nature’s resplendent robe! Without whose vesting beauty all were wrapt In unessential gloom; and thou, O Sun! Soul of surrounding worlds! in whom best seen Shines out thy Maker!”

 

find briefer expression in the simple speech of the dying Turner: “The sun is God.”

 

Father-Earth.

Though, in nearly every portion of the globe the apotheosis of earth is as a woman, we find in America some evidences of a cult of the terrestrial Father-God. Concerning the cave-worship of the Mexican aborigines, Dr. Brinton says (413. 38, 50): “The intimate meaning of this cave-cult was the worship of the Earth. The Cave-God, the Heart of the Hills, really typified the Earth, the Soil, from whose dark recesses flow the limpid streams and spring the tender shoots of the food-plants as well as the great trees. To the native Mexican the Earth was the provider of food and drink, the common Father of All; so that, to this day, when he would take a solemn oath, he stoops to the earth, touches it with his hand, and repeats the solemn formula: ‘Cuix amo nechitla in toteotzin? Does not our Great God see me?’”

 

Father-Wind.

Dr. Berendt, when travelling through the forests of Yucatan, heard his Maya Indian guide exclaim in awe-struck tones, as the roar of a tornado made itself heard in the distance: He catal nohoch yikal nohoch tat, “Here comes the mighty wind of the Great Father.” As Dr. Brinton points out, this belief has analogues all over the world, in the notion of the wind-bird, the master of breath, and the spirit, who is father of all the race, for we learn also that “the whistling of the wind is called, or attributed to, tat acmo, words which mean ‘Father Strong-Bird’” (411. 175).

The cartography of the Middle Ages and the epochs of the great maritime discoveries has made us familiar with the wind-children, offspring of the wind-father, from whose mouths came the breezes and the storms, and old Boreas, of whom the sailors sing, has traces of the fatherhood about him. More than one people has believed that God, the Father, is Spirit, breath, wind.

 

Other Father-Gods.

The ancient Romans applied the term Pater to many of their gods beside the great Jove. Vulcan was called Lemnus Pater, the “Lemnian Father”; Bacchus, Pater Lenæus; Janus, the “early god of business,” is termed by Horace, Matutinus Pater, “Early-morning Father”; Mars is Mars Pater, etc. The Guarayo Indians, of South America, prayed for rain and bountiful harvests to “Tamoï, the grandfather, the old god in heaven, who was their first ancestor and had taught them agriculture” (100. 288).

The Abipones, of Paraguay, called the Pleiades their “Grandfather” and “Creator.” When the constellation was invisible, they said: “Our Grandfather, Keebet, is ill” (509. 274, 284).

In his account of the folk-lore of Yucatan, Dr. Brinton tells us that the giant-beings known as Hbalamob, or balams, are sometimes “affectionately referred to as yum balam, or ‘Father Balam.’” The term yum is practically the equivalent of the Latin pater, and of the “father,” employed by many primitive peoples in addressing, or speaking of, their great male divinities (411.

176).

 

In his acute exposition of the philosophy of the Zuñi Indians, Mr. Gushing tells us (424. 11) that “all beings, whether deistic and supernatural, or animistic and mortal, are regarded as belonging to one system; and that they are likewise believed to be related by blood seems to be indicated by the fact that human beings are spoken of as the ‘children of men,’ while all other beings are referred to as ‘the Fathers,’ the ‘All-Fathers (Á-tä-tchu),’ and ‘Our Fathers.’” The “Priest’of the Bow,” when travelling alone through a dangerous country, offers up a prayer, which begins: “Si! This day, My Fathers, ye Animal Beings, although this country be filled with enemies, render me precious” (424. 41). The hunter, in the ceremonial of the “Deer Medicine,” prays: “Si! This day, My Father, thou Game Animal, even though thy trail one day and one night hast (been made) round about; however, grant unto me one step of my earth-mother. Wanting thy life-blood, wanting that flesh, hence I address to thee good fortune, address to thee treasure,” etc. When he has stricken down the animal, “before the ‘breath of life’ has left the fallen deer (if it be such), he places its fore feet back of its horns, and, grasping its mouth, holds it firmly, closely, while he applies his lips to its nostrils and breathes as much wind into them as possible, again inhaling from the lungs of the dying animal into his own. Then, letting go, he exclaims: ‘Ah! Thanks, my father, my child. Grant unto me the seeds of earth (‘daily bread’) and the gift of water. Grant unto me the light of thy favour, do” (424. 36).

Something of a like nature, perhaps, attaches to the bear-ceremonials among the Ainu and other primitive peoples of northeastern Asia, with whom that animal is held in great respect and reverence, approaching to deification.

Of Pó-shai-an-k’ia, “the God (Father) of the Medicine Societies, or sacred esoteric orders of the Zuñis,” Mr. Gushing tells us: “He is supposed to have appeared in human form, poorly clad, and therefore reviled by men; to have taught the ancestors of the Zuñi, Taos, Oraibi, and Coçonino Indians their agricultural and other arts; their systems of worship by means of plumed and painted prayer-sticks; to have organized their medicine societies, and then to have disappeared toward his home in Shi-pä-pu-li-ma (from shi-pa-a = mist, vapour; u-lin, surrounding; and i-mo-na = sitting-place of; ‘The mist-enveloped city’), and to have vanished beneath the world, whence he is said to have departed for the home of the Sun. He is still the conscious auditor of the prayers of his children, the invisible ruler of the spiritual Shi-pä-pu-li-ma, and of the lesser gods of the medicine orders, the principal ‘Finisher of the Paths of our Lives.’ He is, so far as any identity can be established, the ‘Montezuma’ of popular and usually erroneous Mexican tradition” (424. 16). Both on the lowest steps of civilization and on the highest, we meet with this passing over of the Father into the Son, this participation of God in the affairs and struggles of men.

 

CHAPTER V.

 

THE NAME CHILD.

 

Liebe Kinder haben viele Namen [Dear children have many names].—_German Proverb_.

Child or boy, my darling, which you will.—_Swinburne_.

Men ever had, and ever will have, leave To coin new words well-suited to the age. Words are like leaves, some wither every year, And every year a younger race succeeds.—_Roscommon_.

 

Child and its Synonyms.

Our word child—the good old English term; for both babe and infant are borrowed—simply means the “product of the womb” (compare Gothic kilthei, “womb”). The Lowland-Scotch dialect still preserves an old word for “child” in bairn, cognate with Anglo-Saxon bearn, Icelandic, Swedish, Danish, and Gothic barn (the Gothic had a diminutive barnilo, “baby”), Sanskrit bharna, which signifies “the borne one,” “that which is born,” from the primitive Indo-European root bhr, “to bear, to carry in the womb,” whence our “to bear” and the German “ge-_bären_.” Son, which finds its cognates in all the principal Aryan dialects, except Latin, and perhaps Celtic,—the Greek [Greek: yios] is for [Greek: syios], and is the same word,—a widespread term for “male child, or descendant,” originally meant, as the Old Irish suth, “birth, fruit,” and the Sanskrit sû, “to bear, to give birth to,” indicate, “the fruit of the womb, the begotten”—an expression which meets us time