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

peoples this thought takes another turn, and, as in the speech of the Karankawas, an extinct Indian tribe of Texas, “the biggest, or thickest finger is called ‘father, mother, or old’” (456. 68). The Creek Indians of the Southeastern United States term the “thumb” ingi itchki, “the hand its mother,” and a like meaning attaches to the Chickasaw ilbak-ishke, Hichiti ilb-iki, while the Muskogees call the “thumb,” the “mother of fingers.” It is worthy of note, that, in the Bakaïri language of Brazil, the thumb is called “father,” and the little finger, “child,” or “little one” (536. 406). In Samoa the “thumb” is named lima-matua, “forefather of the hand,” and the “first finger” lima-tama, “child of the hand.” In the Tshi language of Western Africa a finger is known as ensah-tsia-abbah, “little child of the hand,” and in some other tongues of savage or barbaric peoples “fingers” are simply “children of the hand.”

Professor Culin in his notes of “Palmistry in China and Japan,” says: “The thumb, called in Japanese, oya-ubi, ‘parent-finger,’ is for parents. The little finger, called in Japanese, ko-ubi, ‘child-finger,’ is for children; the index-finger is for uncle, aunt, and elder brother and elder sister. The third finger is for younger brother and younger sister” (423a). A short little finger indicates childlessness, and lines on the palm of the hand, below the little finger, children. There are very many nursery-games and rhymes of various sorts based upon the hand and fingers, and in not a few of these the thumb and fingers play the rôle of mother and children. Froebel seized upon this thought to teach the child the idea of the family. His verses are well-known:—

 

“Das ist die Groszmama, Das ist der Groszpapa, Das ist der Vater, Das ist die Mutter, Das ist’s kleine Kindchen ja; Seht die ganze Familie da. Das ist die Mutter lieb und gut, Das ist der Vater mit frohem Muth; Das ist der Bruder lang und grosz; Das ist die Schwester mit Puppchen im Schoosz; Und dies ist das Kindchen, noch klein und zart, Und dies die Familie von guter Art.”

 

Referring to Froebel’s games, Elizabeth Harrison remarks:—

“In order that this activity, generally first noticed in the use of the hands, might be trained into right and ennobling habits, rather than be allowed to degenerate into wrong and often degrading ones, Froebel arranged his charming set of finger-games for the mother to teach her babe while he is yet in her arms; thus establishing the right activity before the wrong one can assert itself. In such little songs as the following:—

 

‘This is the mother, good and dear; This the father, with hearty cheer; This is the brother, stout and tall; This is the sister, who plays with her doll; And this is the baby, the pet of all. Behold the good family, great and small,’

 

the child is led to personify his fingers and to regard them as a small but united family over which he has control.” (257 a. 14).

Miss Wiltse, who devotes a chapter of her little volume to “Finger-songs related to Family Life and the Imaginative Faculty,” says:—

“The dawning consciousness of the child so turned to the family relations is surely better than the old nursery method of playing ‘This little pig went to market’” (384. 45).

And from the father and mother the step to God is easy.

Dr. Brewer informs us that in the Greek and Roman Church the Trinity is symbolized by the thumb and first two fingers: “The thumb, being strong, represents the Father; the long, or second finger, Jesus Christ; and the first finger, the Holy Ghost, which proceedeth from the Father and the Son” (_Dict. of Phrase and Fable_, P. 299).

 

Mother-God.

The “Motherhood of God” is an expression that still sounds somewhat strangely to our ears. We have come to speak readily enough of the “Fatherhood of God” and the “Brotherhood of Man,” but only a still small voice has whispered of the “Motherhood of God” and the “Sisterhood of Woman.” Yet there have been in the world, as, indeed, there are now, multitudes to whom the idea of Heaven without a mother is as blank as that of the home without her who makes it. If over the human babe bends the human mother who is its divinity,—

 

“The infant lies in blessed ease Upon his mother’s breast; No storm, no dark, the baby sees Invade his heaven of rest. He nothing knows of change or death— Her face his holy skies; The air he breathes, his mother’s breath— His stars, his mother’s eyes,”—

 

so over the infant-race must bend the All-Mother, das Ewigweibliche. Perhaps the greatest service that the Roman Catholic Church has rendered to mankind is the prominence given in its cult of the Virgin Mary to the mother-side of Deity. In the race’s final concept of God, the embodiment of all that is pure and holy, there must surely be some overshadowing of a mother’s tender love. With the “Father-Heart” of the Almighty must be linked the “Mother-Soul.” To some extent, at least, we may expect a harking back to the standpoint of the Buddhist Kalmuck, whose child is taught to pray: “O God, who art my father and my mother.”

In all ages and over the whole world peoples of culture less than ours have had their “mother-gods,” all the embodiments of motherhood, the joy of the Magnificat, the sacrosanct expression of the poet’s truth:—

 

“Close to the mysteries of God art thou, My brooding mother-heart,”

 

the recognition of that outlasting secret hope and love, of which the Gospel writer told in the simple words: “Now there stood by the cross of Jesus his mother,” and faith in which was strong in the Mesopotamians of old, who prayed to the goddess Istar, “May thy heart be appeased as the heart of a mother who has borne children.” The world is at its best when the last, holiest appeal is ad matrem. Professor O.T. Mason has eloquently stated the debt of the world’s religions to motherhood (112. 12):—“The mother-goddess of all peoples, culminating in the apotheosis of the Virgin Mary, is an idea either originated by women, or devised to satisfy their spiritual cravings. So we may go through the pantheons of all peoples, finding counterparts of Rhea, mother-earth, goddess of fertility; Hera, queen of harvests, feeder of mankind; Hestia, goddess of the hearth and home, of families and states, giving life and warmth; Aphrodite, the beautiful, patron of romantic love and personal charms; Hera, sovereign lady, divine caciquess, embodiment of queenly dignity; Pallas Athene, ideal image of that central inspiring force that we learn at our mother’s knee, and that shone in eternal splendour; Isis, the goddess of widowhood, sending forth her son Horus, to avenge the death of his father, Osiris; as moon-goddess, keeping alive the light until the sun rises again to bless the world.”

 

The All-Mother.

In Polynesian mythology we find, dwelling in the lowest depths of Avaiki (the interior of the universe), the “Great Mother,”—the originator of all things, Vari-ma-te-takere, “the very beginning,”—and her pet child, Tu-metua, “Stick by the parent,” her last offspring, inseparable from her. All of her children were born of pieces of flesh which she plucked off her own body; the first-born was the man-fish Vatea, “father of gods and men,” whose one eye is the sun, the other the moon; the fifth child was Raka, to whom his mother gave the winds in a basket, and “the children of Raka are the numerous winds and storms which distress mankind. To each child is allotted a hole at the edge of the horizon, through which he blows at pleasure.” In the songs the gods are termed “the children of Vatea,” and the ocean is sometimes called “the sea of Vatea.” Mr. Gill tells us that “the Great Mother approximates nearest to the dignity of creator”; and, curiously enough, the word Vari, “beginning,” signifies, on the island of Rarotonga, “mud,” showing that “these people imagined that once the world was a ‘chaos of mud,’ out of which some mighty unseen agent, whom they called Vari, evolved the present order of things” (458. 3,

21).

 

Another “All-Mother” is she of whom our own poets have sung, “Nature,” the source and sustainer of all.

 

Mother-Nature.

“So übt Natur die Mutterpflicht,” sang the poet Schiller, and “Mother Nature” is the key-word of those modern poets who, in their mystic philosophy, consciously or unconsciously, revive the old mythologies. With primitive peoples the being, growing power of the universe was easily conceived as feminine and as motherly. Nature is the “great parent,” the “gracious mother,” of us all. In “Mother Nature,” woman, the creator of the earliest arts of man, is recognized and personified, and in a wider sense even than the poet dreamt of: “One touch of Nature makes the whole world kin.”

Pindar declared that “gods and men are sons of the same mother,” and with many savage and barbaric tribes, gods, men, animals, and all other objects, animate and inanimate, are akin(388.210). As Professor Robertson Smith has said: “The same lack of any sharp distinction between the nature of different kinds of visible beings appears in the old myths in which all kinds of objects, animate and inanimate, organic and inorganic, appear as cognate with one another, with men, and with the gods” (535.85). Mr. Hartland, speaking of this stage of thought, says: “Sun and moon, the wind and the waters, perform all the functions of living beings; they speak, they eat, they marry and have children” (258.26). The same idea is brought out by Count D’Alviella: “The highest point of development that polytheism could reach, is found in the conception of a monarchy or divine family, embracing all terrestrial beings, and even the whole universe” (388.211). Mr. Frank Cushing attributes like beliefs in the kinship of all existences to the Zuni Indians (388.66), and Mr. im Thurn to the Indians of Guiana (388.99).

This feeling of kinship to all that is, is beautifully expressed in the words of the dying Greek Klepht: “Do not say that I am dead, but say that I am married in the sorrowful, strange countries, that I have taken the flat stone for a mother-in-law, the black earth for my wife, and the little pebbles for brothers-in-law.” (Lady Verney, Essays, II.

39.)

 

In the Trinity of Upper Egypt the second person was Mut, “Mother Nature.” the others being Armin, the chief god, and their son, Khuns.

Among the Slavs, according to Mone, Ziwa is a nature-goddess, and the Wends regard her as “many-breasted Mother Nature,” the producing and nourishing power of the earth. Her consort is Zibog, the god of life (125. II. 23).

Curiously reminiscent of the same train of ideas which has given to the moderson of Low German the signification of “bastard,” is our own equivalent term “natural son.”

Poets and orators have not failed to appeal to “Mother Nature” and to sing her panegyrics, but there is perhaps nothing more sweet and noble than the words of Elizabeth Cady Stanton: “Nature, like a loving mother, is ever trying to keep land and sea, mountain and valley, each in its place, to hush the angry winds and waves, balance the extremes of heat and cold, of rain and drought, that peace, harmony, and beauty may reign supreme,” and the verses of Longfellow:—

 

“And Nature, the old nurse, took The child upon her knee, Saying, ‘Here is a story-book Thy Father has—written for thee.

“‘Come wander with me,’ she said, ‘Into regions yet untrod; And read what is still unread, In the manuscripts of God.’

“And he wandered away and away With Nature, the dear old