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

(385. 6).

Curiously enough, as if to emphasize the relativity of folk-explanations, a Mussulman legend states that it is “the touch of Satan” that renders the child “susceptible of sin from its birth,” and that is the reason why “all children cry aloud when they are born” (547.

249).

Henderson tells us that in the north and south of England “nurses think it lucky for the child to cry at its baptism; they say that otherwise the baby shows that it is too good to live.” But there are those also who believe that “this cry betokens the pangs of the new birth,” while others hold that it is “the voice of the Evil Spirit as he is driven out by the baptismal water” (469. 16).

Among the untaught peasantry of Sicily, the sweet story goes that “Mary sends an angel from Heaven one day every week to play with the souls of the unbaptized children [in hell]; and when he goes away, he takes with him, in a golden chalice, all the tears which the little innocents have shed all through the week, and pours them into the sea, where they become pearls” (449. 326).

Here again we have a borrowing from an older myth. An Eastern legend has it that when Eden was lost, Eve, the mother of all men, wept bitterly, and “her tears, which flowed into the ocean, were changed into costly pearls, while those which fell on the earth brought forth all beautiful flowers” (547. 34). In the classic myth, the pearl is said to have been born of the tears of Venus, just as a Greek legend makes ælektron come from the tears of the sisters of Phaëthon, the daughters of the sun, and Teutonic story turns the tears of the goddess Freyja into drops of gold (462. III. 1218).

In the Kalevala we read how, after the wonderful harping of Wäinämöinen, the great Finnish hero, which enchanted beasts, birds, and even fishes, was over, the musician shed tears of gratitude, and these, trickling down his body and through his many garments, were transmuted into pearls of the sea.

Shakespeare, in King Henry V., makes Exeter say to the King,—

“But all my mother came into mine eyes, And gave me up to tears,”—

and the tears of the mother-god figures in the folk-lore of many lands. The vervain, or verbena, was known as the “Tears of Isis,” as well as the “Tears of Juno,”—a name given also to an East Indian grass (_Coix lacryma_). The lily of the valley, in various parts of Europe, is called “The Virgin’s Tears,” “Tears of Our Lady,” “Tears of St. Mary.” Zmigrodzki notes the following belief as current in Germany: “If the mother weeps too much, her dead child comes to her at night, naked and trembling, with its little shirt in its hand, and says: ‘Ah, dearest mother, do not weep! See! I have no rest in the grave; I cannot put on my little shirt, it is all wet with your tears.’” In Cracow, the common saying is, “God forbid that the tears of the mother should fall upon the corpse of her child.” In Brittany the folk-belief is that “the dead child has to carry water up a hill in a little bucket, and the tears of the mother increase its weight” (174. 141).

The Greeks fabled Eos, the dawn-goddess, to have been so disconsolate at the death of Memnon, her son, that she wept for him every morning, and her tears are the dewdrops found upon the earth. In the mythology of the Samoans of the Pacific, the Heaven-god, father of all things, and the Earth-goddess, mother of all things, once held each other in firm embrace, but were separated in the long ago. Heaven, however, retains his love for earth, and, mourning for her through the long nights, he drops many tears upon her bosom,—these, men call dewdrops. The natives of Tahiti have a like explanation for the thick-falling rain-drops that dimple the surface of the ocean, heralding an approaching storm,—they are tears of the heaven-god. The saying is:—

“Thickly falls the small rain on the face of the sea, They are not drops of rain, but they are tears of Oro.” (Tylor, Early Hist. of Mankind, p. 334.)

An Indian tribe of California believe that “the rain is the falling tears of Indians sick in heaven,” and they say that it was “the tears of all mankind, weeping for the loss of a good young Indian,” that caused the deluge, in which all were drowned save a single couple (440. 488).

Oriental legend relates, that, in his utter loneliness after the expulsion from Paradise, “Adam shed such an abundance of tears that all beasts and birds satisfied their thirst therewith; but some of them sunk into the earth, and, as they still contained some of the juices of his food in Paradise, produced the most fragrant trees and spices.” We are further told that “the tears flowed at last in such torrents from Adam’s eyes, that those of his right started the Euphrates, while those of his left set the Tigris in motion” (547. 34).

These are some of the answers of the folk to the question of Shakespeare:—

“What’s the matter, That this distempered messenger of wet, The many-coloured Iris, rounds thine eye?”

And many more are there that run along the lines of Scott’s epigrammatic summation:—

“A child will weep a bramble’s smart, A maid to see her sparrow part, A stripling for a woman’s heart: But woe betide a country, when She sees the tears of bearded men.”

Cradles.

According to Mr. Powers: “The conspicuous painstaking which the Modok squaw expends upon her baby-basket is an index of her maternal love. And indeed the Modok are strongly attached to their offspring,—a fact abundantly attested by many sad and mournful spectacles witnessed in the closing scenes of the war of 1873. On the other hand, a California squaw often carelessly sets her baby in a deep, conical basket, the same in which she carries her household effects, leaving him loose and liable to fall out. If she makes a baby-basket, it is totally devoid of ornament; and one tribe, the Miwok, contemptuously call it ‘the dog’s nest.’ It is among Indians like these that we hear of infanticide” (519. 257).

The subject of children’s cradles, baby-baskets, baby-boards, and the methods of manipulating and carrying the infant in connection therewith, have been treated of in great detail by Ploss (325), Pokrovski, and Mason (306), the second of whom has written especially of the cradles in use among the various peoples of European and Asiatic Eussia, with a general view of those employed by other races, the last with particular reference to the American aborigines. The work is illustrated, as is also that of Ploss, with many engravings. Professor Mason thus briefly sums up the various purposes which the different species of cradle subserve (306. 161-162):—

“(1) It is a mere nest for the helpless infant.

“(2) It is a bed so constructed and manipulated as to enable the child to sleep either in a vertical or a horizontal position.

“(3) It is a vehicle in which the child is to be transported, chiefly on the mother’s back by means of a strap over the forehead, but frequently dangling like a bundle at the saddle-bow. This function, of course, always modifies the structure of the cradle, and, indeed, may have determined its very existence among nomadic tribes.

“(4) It is indeed a cradle, to be hung upon the limbs to rock, answering literally to the nursery-rhyme:—

‘Rock-a-bye baby upon the tree-top, When the wind blows the cradle will rock, When the bough bends, the cradle will fall, Down will come baby, and cradle, and all.’

“(5) It is also a playhouse and baby-jumper. On many—nearly all—specimens may be seen dangling objects to evoke the senses, foot-rests by means of which the little one may exercise its legs, besides other conveniences anticipatory of the child’s needs.

“(6) The last set of functions to which the frame is devoted are those relating to what we may call the graduation of infancy, when the papoose crawls out of its chrysalis little by little, and then abandons it altogether. The child is next seen standing partly on the mother’s cincture and partly hanging to her neck, or resting like a pig in a poke within the folds of her blanket.”

Professor Mason sees in the cradle-board or frame “the child of geography and of meteorology,” and in its use “a beautiful illustration of Bastian’s theory of ‘great areas.’” In the frozen North, for example, “the Eskimo mother carries her infant in the hood of her parka whenever it is necessary to take it abroad. If she used a board or a frame, the child would perish with the cold.”

The varieties of cradles are almost endless. We have the “hood” (sometimes the “boot”) of the Eskimo; the birch-bark cradle (or hammock) of several of the northern tribes (as in Alaska, or Cape Breton); the “moss-bag” of the eastern Tinné, the use of which has now extended to the employés of the Hudson’s Bay Company; the “trough-cradle” of the Bilqula; the Chinook cradle, with its apparatus for head-flattening; the trowel-shaped cradle of the Oregon coast; the wicker-cradle of the Hupas; the Klamath cradle of wicker and rushes; the Pomo cradle of willow rods and wicker-work, with rounded portion for the child to sit in; the Mohave cradle, with ladder-frame, having a bed of shredded bark for the child to lie upon; the Yaqui cradle of canes, with soft bosses for pillows; the Nez Percé cradle-board with buckskin sides, and the Sahaptian, Ute, and Kootenay cradles which resemble it; the Moki cradle-frame of coarse wicker, with an awning; the Navajo cradle, with wooden hood and awning of dressed buckskin; the rude Comanche cradle, made of a single stiff piece of black-bear skin; the Blackfoot cradle of lattice-work and leather; the shoe-shaped Sioux cradle, richly adorned with coloured bead-work; the Iroquois cradle (now somewhat modernized), with “the back carved in flowers and birds, and painted blue, red, green, and yellow.” Among the Araucanians of Chili we meet with a cradle which “seems to be nothing more than a short ladder, with cross-bars,” to which the child is lashed. In the tropical regions and in South America we find the habit of “carrying the children in the shawl or sash, and bedding them in the hammock.” Often, as in various parts of Africa, the woman herself forms the cradle, the child clinging astride her neck or hips, with no bands or attachments whatever. Of woman as carrier much may be read in the entertaining and instructive volume of Professor Mason (113). The primitive cradle, bed, and carrier, was the mother.

Father and Child.

With many of the more primitive races, the idea so tritely expressed in our familiar saying, “He is a chip of the old block,”—_patris est filius_, “he is the son of his father,”—and so beautifully wrought out by Shakespeare,—

“Behold, my lords, Although the print be little, the whole matter And copy of the father: eye, nose, lip, The trick of his frown, his forehead; nay, the valley, The pretty dimples of his chin and cheek; his smiles, The very mould and frame of hand, nail, finger,”

has a strong hold, making itself felt in a thousand ways and fashions. The many rites and ceremonies, ablutions, fastings, abstentions from certain foods and drinks, which the husband has to undergo and submit to among certain more or less uncivilized peoples, shortly before, or after, or upon, the occasion of the birth of a child, or while his wife is pregnant, arise, in part at least, from a firm belief in the influence of parent upon child