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

Among the ancient Greeks the Cretans were remarkable for saying not [Greek: patris] (fatherland), but [Greek: maetris] (mother-land), by which name also the Messenians called their native land. Some light upon the loss of “mother-words” in ancient Greece may be shed from the legend which tells that when the question came whether the new town was to be named after Athene or Poseidon, all the women voted for the former, carrying the day by a single vote, whereupon Poseidon, in anger, sent a flood, and the men, determining to punish their wives, deprived them of the power of voting, and decided that thereafter children were not to be named after their mothers (115. 235).

In Gothic, we meet with a curious term for “native land, home,” gabaurths (from gabairan “to bear”), which signifies also “birth.” As an exemplification of the idea in the Sophoclean phrase “all-nourishing earth,” we find that at an earlier stage in the history of our own English tongue erd (cognate with our earth) signified “native land,” a remembrance of that view of savage and uncivilized peoples in which earth, land are “native country,” for these are, in the true sense of the term, Landesleute, homines.

In the language of the Hervey Islands, in the South Pacific, “the place in which the placenta of an infant is buried is called the ipukarea, or native soil” (459. 26).

Our English language seems still to prefer “native city, native town, native village,” as well as “native land,” “mother-city” usually signifying an older town from which younger ones have come forth. In German, though Vaterstadt in analogy with Vaterland seems to be the favorite, Mutterstadt is not unknown.

Besides Mutterland and Mutterstadt, we find in German the following:—

Mutterboden, “mother-land.” Used by the poet Uhland. Muttergefilde, “the fields of mother-earth.” Used by Schlegel. Muttergrund, “the earth,” as productive of all things. Used by Goethe. Mutterhimmel, “the sky above one’s native land.” Used by the poet Herder. Mutterluft, “the air of one’s native land.” Mutterhaus, “the source, origin of anything.” Uhland even has:—

“Hier ist des Stromes Mutterhaus, Ich trink ihn frisch vom Stein heraus.”

More farreaching, diviner than “mother-land,” is “mother-earth.”

CHAPTER III.

THE CHILD’S TRIBUTE TO THE MOTHER (_Continued_).

To the child its mother should be as God.—_G. Stanley Hall_.

A mother is the holiest thing alive.—_Coleridge_.

God pardons like a mother, who kisses the offence into everlasting forgetfulness.—_Henry Ward Beecher_.

When the social world was written in terms of mother-right, the religious world was expressed in terms of mother-god.

There is nothing more charming than to see a mother with a child in her arms, and nothing more venerable than a mother among a number of her children.—_Goethe_.

Mother-Earth.

“Earth, Mother of all,” is a world-wide goddess. Professor O.T. Mason, says: “The earth is the mother of all mankind. Out of her came they. Her traits, attributes, characteristics, they have so thoroughly inherited and imbibed, that, from any doctrinal point of view regarding the origin of the species, the earth may be said to have been created for men, and men to have been created out of the earth. By her nurture and tuition they grow up and flourish, and, folded in her bosom, they sleep the sleep of death. The idea of the earth-mother is in every cosmogony. Nothing is more beautiful in the range of mythology than the conception of Demeter with Persephone, impersonating the maternal earth, rejoicing in the perpetual return of her daughter in spring, and mourning over her departure in winter to Hades” (389 (1894). 140).

Dr. D.G. Brinton writes in the same strain (409. 238): “Out of the earth rises life, to it it returns. She it is who guards all germs, nourishes all beings. The Aztecs painted her as a woman with countless breasts; the Peruvians called her ‘Mama Allpa,’ mother Earth; in the Algonkin tongue, the words for earth, mother, father, are from the same root. Homo, Adam, chamaigenes, what do all these words mean but earth-born, the son of the soil, repeated in the poetic language of Attica in anthropos, he who springs up like a flower?”

Mr. W. J. McGee, treating of “Earth the Home of Man,” says (502. 28):—

“In like manner, mankind, offspring of Mother Earth, cradled and nursed through helpless infancy by things earthly, has been brought well towards maturity; and, like the individual man, he is repaying the debt unconsciously assumed at the birth of his kind, by transforming the face of nature, by making all things better than they were before, by aiding the good and destroying the bad among animals and plants, and by protecting the aging earth from the ravages of time and failing strength, even as the child protects his fleshly mother. Such are the relations of earth and man.”

The Roman babe had no right to live until the father lifted him up from “mother-earth” upon which he lay; at the baptism of the ancient Mexican child, the mother spoke thus: “Thou Sun, Father of all that live, and thou Earth, our Mother, take ye this child and guard it as your son” (529. 97); and among the Gypsies of northern Hungary, at a baptism, the oldest woman present takes the child out, and, digging a circular trench around the little one, whom she has placed upon the earth, utters the following words: “Like this Earth, be thou strong and great, may thy heart be free from care, be merry as a bird” (392 (1891). 20). All of these practices have their analogues in other parts of the globe.

In another way, infanticide is connected with “mother-earth.” In the book of the “Wisdom of Solomon” (xiv. 23) we read: “They slew their children in sacrifices.” Infanticide—“murder most foul, as in the best it is, but this most foul, strange, and unnatural”—has been sheltered beneath the cloak of religion. The story is one of the darkest pages in the history of man. A priestly legend of the Khonds of India attributes to child-sacrifice a divine origin:—

“In the beginning was the Earth a formless mass of mud, and could not have borne the dwelling of man, or even his weight; in this liquid and ever-moving slime neither tree nor herb took root. Then God said: ‘Spill human blood before my face!’ And they sacrificed a child before Him. … Falling upon the soil, the bloody drops stiffened and consolidated it.”

But too well have the Khonds obeyed the command: “And by the virtues of the blood shed, the seeds began to sprout, the plants to grow, the animals to propagate. And God commanded that the Earth should be watered with blood every new season, to keep her firm and solid. And this has been done by every generation that has preceded us.”

More than once “the mother, with her boys and girls, and perhaps even a little child in her arms, were immolated together,”—for sometimes the wretched children, instead of being immediately sacrificed, were allowed to live until they had offspring whose sad fate was determined ere their birth. In the work of Reclus may be read the fearful tale of the cult of “Pennou, the terrible earth-deity, the bride of the great Sun-God” (523.

315).

In Tonga the paleness of the moon is explained by the following legend: Vatea (Day) and Tonga-iti (Night) each claimed the first-born of Papa (Earth) as his own child. After they had quarrelled a great deal, the infant was cut in two, and Vatea, the husband of Papa, “took the upper part as his share, and forthwith squeezed it into a ball and tossed it into the heavens, where it became the sun.” But Tonga-iti, in sullen humour, let his half remain on the ground for a day or two. Afterward, however, “seeing the brightness of Vatea’s half, he resolved to imitate his example by compressing his share into a ball, and tossing it into the dark sky during the absence of the sun in Avaiki, or netherworld.” It became the moon, which is so pale by reason of “the blood having all drained out and decomposition having commenced,” before Tonga-iti threw his half up into the sky (458. 45). With other primitive peoples, too, the gods were infanticidal, and many nations like those of Asia Minor, who offered up the virginity of their daughters upon the altars of their deities, hesitated not to slay upon their high places the first innocent pledges of motherhood.

The earth-goddess appears again when the child enters upon manhood, for at Brahman marriages in India, the bridegroom still says to the bride, “I am the sky, thou art the earth, come let us marry” (421. 29).

And last of all, when the ineluctable struggle of death is over, man returns to the “mother-earth”—dust to dust. One of the hymns of the Rig-Veda has these beautiful words, forming part of the funeral ceremonies of the old Hindus:—

“Approach thou now the lap of Earth, thy mother, The wide-extending Earth, the ever-kindly; A maiden soft as wool to him who comes with gifts, She shall protect thee from destruction’s bosom.

“Open thyself, O Earth, and press not heavily; Be easy of access and of approach to him, As mother with her robe her child, So do thou cover him, O Earth!” (421. 31).

The study of the mortuary rites and customs of the primitive peoples of all ages of the world’s history (548) reveals many instances of the belief that when men, “the common growth of mother-earth,” at last rest their heads upon her lap, they do not wholly die, for the immortality of Earth is theirs. Whether they live again,—as little children are often fabled to do,—when Earth laughs with flowers of spring, or become incarnate in other members of the animate or inanimate creation, whose kinship with man and with God is an article of the great folk-creed, or, in the beautiful words of the burial service of the Episcopal Church, sleep “earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in sure and certain hope of the resurrection,” all testifies that man is instinct with the life that throbs in the bosom of Earth, his Mother. As of old, the story ran that man grew into being from the dust, or sprang forth in god-like majesty, so, when death has come, he sinks to dust again, or triumphantly scales the lofty heights where dwell the immortal deities, and becomes “as one of them.”

With the idea of the earth-mother are connected the numerous myths of the origin of the first human beings from clay, mould, etc., their provenience from caves, holes in the ground, rocks and mountains, especially those in which the woman is said to have been created first (509. 110). Here belong also not a few ethnic names, for many primitive peoples have seen fit to call themselves “sons of the soil, terrae filii, Landesleute.”

Muller and Brinton have much to say of the American earth-goddesses, Toci, “our mother,” and goddess of childbirth among the ancient Mexicans (509. 494); the Peruvian Pachamama, “mother-earth,” the mother of men (509. 369); the “earth-mother” of the Caribs, who through earthquakes manifests her animation and cheerfulness to her children, the Indians, who forthwith imitate her in joyous dances (509. 221); the “mother-earth” of the Shawnees, of whom the Indian chief spoke, when he was bidden to regard General Harrison as “Father”: “No, the sun yonder is my father, and the earth my mother; upon her bosom will I repose,” etc. (509. 117).

Among the earth-goddesses of ancient Greece and Rome are Demeter, Ceres, Tellus, Rhea, Terra, Ops, Cybele, Bona Dea, Bona Mater, Magna Mater, Gaea, Ge, whose attributes and ceremonies