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THE CHILD AND CHILDHOOD IN FOLK-THOUGHT
STUDIES OF THE ACTIVITIES AND INFLUENCES OF THE CHILD AMONG PRIMITIVE PEOPLES, THEIR ANALOGUES AND SURVIVALS IN THE CIVILIZATION OF TO-DAY
THE CHILD AND CHILDHOOD IN FOLK-THOUGHT (THE CHILD IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE)
BY ALEXANDER FRANCIS CHAMBERLAIN M.A., PH.D.
TO
HIS FATHER AND HIS MOTHER
THEIR SON
Dedicates this Book
"Vom Vater hab' ich die Statur, Des Lebens ernstes Fuhren; Vom Mutterchen die Frohnatur Und Lust zu fabulieren."—Goethe.
PREFATORY NOTE.
The present volume is an elaboration and amplification of lectures on "The Child in Folk-Thought," delivered by the writer at the summer school held at Clark University in 1894. In connection with the interesting topic of "Child-Study" which now engages so much the attention of teachers and parents, an attempt is here made to indicate some of the chief child-activities among primitive peoples and to point out in some respects their survivals in the social institutions and culture-movements of to-day. The point of view to be kept in mind is the child and what he has done, or is said to have done, in all ages and among all races of men.
For all statements and citations references are given, and the writer has made every effort to place himself in the position of those whose opinion he records,—receiving and reporting without distortion or alteration.
He begs to return to his colleagues in the University, especially to its distinguished president, the genius of the movement for "Child-Study" in America, and to the members of the summer school of 1894, whose kind appreciation of his efforts has mainly led to the publication of this work, his sincerest gratitude for the sympathy and encouragement which they have so often exhibited and expressed with regard to the present and allied subjects of study and investigation in the field of Anthropology, pedagogical and psychological.
A. F. CHAMBERLAIN
CLARK UNIVERSITY, WORCESTER, Mass., April, 1895.
CONTENTS.
I. CHILD-STUDY
II. THE CHILD'S TRIBUTE TO THE MOTHER
III. THE CHILD'S TRIBUTE TO THE MOTHER (Continued)
IV. THE CHILD'S TRIBUTE TO THE FATHER
V. THE NAME CHILD
VI. THE CHILD IN THE PRIMITIVE LABORATORY
VII. THE BRIGHT SIDE OF CHILD-LIFE: PARENTAL AFFECTION
VIII. CHILDHOOD THE GOLDEN AGE
IX. CHILDREN'S FOOD
X. CHILDREN'S SOULS
XI. CHILDREN'S FLOWERS, PLANTS, AND TREES
XII. CHILDREN'S ANIMALS, BIRDS, ETC.
XIII. CHILD-LIFE AND EDUCATION IN GENERAL
XIV. THE CHILD AS MEMBER AND BUILDER OF SOCIETY
XV. THE CHILD AS LINGUIST
XVI. THE CHILD AS ACTOR AND INVENTOR
XVII. THE CHILD AS POET AND MUSICIAN
XVIII. THE CHILD AS TEACHER AND WISEACRE
XIX. THE CHILD AS JUDGE
XX. THE CHILD AS ORACLE-KEEPER AND ORACLE-INTERPRETER
XXI. THE CHILD AS WEATHER-MAKER
XXII. THE CHILD AS HEALER AND PHYSICIAN
XXIII. THE CHILD AS SHAMAN AND PRIEST
XXIV. THE CHILD AS HERO, ADVENTURER, ETC.
XXV. THE CHILD AS FETICH AND DIVINITY
XXVI. THE CHILD AS GOD: THE CHRIST-CHILD
XXVII. PROVERBS, SAYINGS, ETC., ABOUT PARENTS, FATHER AND MOTHER
XXVIII. PROVERBS, SAYINGS, ETC., ABOUT THE CHILD, MANKIND, GENIUS
XXIX. PROVERBS, SAYINGS, ETC., ABOUT MOTHER AND CHILD
XXX. PROVERBS, SAYINGS, ETC., ABOUT FATHER AND CHILD
XXXI. PROVERBS, SAYINGS, ETC., ABOUT CHILDHOOD, YOUTH, AND AGE
XXXII. PROVERBS, SAYINGS, ETC., ABOUT THE CHILD AND CHILDHOOD
INDEX TO PROVERBS
XXXIII. CONCLUSION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
SUBJECT-INDEX TO SECTION A OF BIBLIOGRAPHY
SUBJECT-INDEX TO SECTION B OF BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX I.—AUTHORITIES
INDEX II.—PLACES, PEOPLES, TRIBES, LANGUAGES
INDEX III.—SUBJECTS
CHAPTER I.
CHILD-STUDY.
Oneness with Nature is the glory of Childhood; oneness with Childhood is the glory of the Teacher.—G. Stanley Hall.
Homes ont l'estre comme metaulx, Vie et augment des vegetaulx, Instinct et sens comme les bruts, Esprit comme anges en attributs. [Man has as attributes: Being like metals, Life and growth like plants, Instinct and sense like animals, Mind like angels.]—Jehan de Meung.
The Child is Father of the Man.—Wordsworth.
And he [Jesus] called to him a little child, and set him in the midst of them.—Matthew xviii. 2.
It was an Oriental poet who sang:—
"On parent knees, a naked, new-born child, Weeping thou sat'st, while all around thee smiled; So live, that, sinking in thy last, long sleep, Calm thou mayst smile, while all around thee weep,"
and not so very long ago even the anthropologist seemed satisfied with the approximation of childhood and old age,—one glance at the babe in the cradle, one look at the graybeard on his deathbed, gave all the knowledge desired or sought for. Man, big, burly, healthy, omniscient, was the subject of all investigation. But now a change has come over the face of things. As did that great teacher of old, so, in our day, has one of the ministers of science "called to him a little child and set him in the midst of them,"—greatest in the kingdom of anthropology is assuredly that little child, as we were told centuries ago, by the prophet of Galilee, that he is greatest in the kingdom of heaven. The child, together with woman, who, in so many respects in which the essential human characteristics are concerned, so much resembles him, is now beyond doubt the most prominent figure in individual, as well as in racial, anthropology. Dr. D. G. Brinton, in an appreciative notice of the recent volume on Man and Woman, by Havelock Ellis, in which the secondary sexual differences between the male and the female portions of the human race are so well set forth and discussed, remarks: "The child, the infant in fact, alone possesses in their fulness 'the chief distinctive characters of humanity. The highest human types, as represented in men of genius, present a striking approximation to the child-type. In man, from about the third year onward, further growth is to some extent growth in degeneration and senility.' Hence the true tendency of the progressive evolution of the race is to become child-like, to become feminine." (Psych. Rev. I. 533.)
As Dr. Brinton notes, in this sense women are leading evolution—Goethe was right: Das Ewig-weibliche zieht uns hinan. But here belongs also the child-human, and he was right in very truth who said: "A little child shall lead them." What new meaning flashes into the words of the Christ, who, after declaring that "the kingdom of God cometh not with observation: neither shall they say, Lo, here! or, There! for lo, the kingdom of God is within you," in rebuke of the Pharisees, in rebuke of his own disciples, "called to him a little child and set him in the midst of them, and said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye turn, and become as little children, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven." Even physically, the key to the kingdom of heaven lies in childhood's keeping.
Vast indeed is now the province of him who studies the child. In Somatology,—the science of the physical characteristics and constitution of the body and its members,—he seeks not alone to observe the state and condition of the skeleton and its integuments during life, but also to ascertain their nature and character in the period of prenatal existence, as well as when causes natural, or unnatural, disease, the exhaustion of old age, violence, or the like, have induced the dissolution of death.
In Linguistics and Philology, he endeavours to discover the essence and import of those manifold, inarticulate, or unintelligible sounds, which, with the long flight of time, develop into the splendidly rounded periods of a Webster or a Gladstone, or swell nobly in the rhythmic beauties of a Swinburne or a Tennyson.
In Art and Technology, he would fain fathom the depths of those rude scribblings and quaint efforts at delineation, whence, in the course of ages, have been evolved the wonders of the alphabet and the marvellous creations of a Rubens and an Angelo.
In Psychology, he seeks to trace, in childish prattlings and lore of the nursery, the far-off beginnings of mythology, philosophy, religion. Beside the stories told to children in explanation of the birth of a sister or a brother, and the children's own imaginings concerning the little new-comer, he may place the speculations of sages and theologians of all races and of all ages concerning birth, death, immortality, and the future life, which, growing with the centuries, have ripened into the rich and wholesome dogmas of the church.
Ethnology, with its broad sweep over ages and races of men, its searchings into the origins of nations and of civilizations, illumined by the light of Evolution, suggests that in the growth of the child from helpless infancy to adolescence, and through the strong and trying development of manhood to the idiosyncrasies of disease and senescence, we have an epitome in miniature of the life of the race; that in primitive tribes, and in those members of our civilized communities, whose growth upward and onward has been retarded by inherited tendencies which it has been out of their power to overcome, or by a milieu and environment, the control and subjugation of which required faculties and abilities they did not possess, we see, as it were, ethnic children; that in the nursery, the asylum, the jail, the mountain fastnesses of earth, or the desert plains, peopled by races whose ways are not our ways, whose criteria of culture are far below ours, we have a panorama of what has transpired since, alone and face to face with a new existence, the first human beings partook of the fruit of the tree of knowledge and became conscious of the great gulf, which, after millenniums of struggle and fierce competition, had opened between the new, intelligent, speaking anthropoids and their fellows who straggled so far behind.
Wordsworth has said: "The child is father of the man," and a German writer has expanded the same thought:—
"Die Kindheit von heute Ist die Menschheit von morgen, Die Kindheit von heute Ist die Menschheit von gestern." ["The childhood of to-day Is the manhood of to-morrow, The childhood of to-day Is the manhood of yesterday."]
In brief, the child is father of the man and brother of the race.
In all ages, and with every people, the arcana of life and death, the mysteries of birth, childhood, puberty, adolescence, maidenhood, womanhood, manhood, motherhood, fatherhood, have called forth the profoundest thought and speculation. From the contemplation of these strange phenomena sprang the esoteric doctrines of Egypt and the East, with their horrible accompaniments of vice and depravity; the same thoughts, low and terrible, hovered before the devotees of Moloch and Cybele, when Carthage sent her innocent boys to the furnace, a sacrifice to the king of gods, and Asia Minor offered up the virginity of her fairest daughters to the first-comer at the altars of the earth-mother. Purified and ennobled by long centuries of development and unfolding, the blossoming of such conceptions is seen in the great sacrifice which the Son of Man made for the children of men, and in the cardinal doctrine of the religion which he founded,—"Ye must be born again,"—the regeneration, which alone gave entrance into Paradise.
The Golden Age of the past of which, through the long lapse of years, dreamers have dreamt and poets sung, and the Golden City, glimpses of whose glorious portal have flashed through the prayers and meditations of the rapt enthusiast, seem but one in their foundation, as the Eden of the world's beginning and the heaven that shall open to men's eyes, when time shall be no more, are but closely allied phases, nay, but one and the same phase, rather, of the world-old thought,—the ethnic might have been, the ought to be of all the ages. The imagined, retrospect childhood of the past is twin-born with the ideal, prospective childhood of the world to come. Here the savage and the philosopher, the child and the genius, meet; the wisdom of the first and of the last century of human existence is at one. Childhood is the mirror in which these reflections are cast,—the childhood of the race is depicted with the same colours as the childhood of the individual. We can read a larger thought into the words of Hartley Coleridge:—
"Oh what a wilderness were this sad world, If man were always man, and never child."
Besides the anthropometric and psycho-physical investigations of the child carried on in the scientific laboratory with exact instruments and unexceptionable methods, there is another field of "Child-Study" well worthy our attention for the light it can shed upon some of the dark places in the wide expanse of pedagogical science and the art of education.
Its laboratory of research has been the whole wide world, the experimenters and recorders the primitive peoples of all races and all centuries,—fathers and mothers whom the wonderland of parenthood encompassed and entranced; the subjects, the children of all the generations of mankind.
The consideration of "The Child in Folk-Thought,"—what tribe upon tribe, age after age, has thought about, ascribed to, dreamt of, learned from, taught to, the child, the parent-lore of the human race, in its development through savagery and barbarism to civilization and culture,—can bring to the harvest of pedagogy many a golden sheaf.
The works of Dr. Ploss, Das kleine Kind, Das Kind, and Das Weib, encyclopadic in character as the two last are, covering a vast field of research relating to the anatomy, physiology, hygiene, dietetics, and ceremonial treatment of child and mother, of girl and boy, all over the world, and forming a huge mine of information concerning child-birth, motherhood, sex-phenomena, and the like, have still left some aspects of the anthropology of childhood practically untouched. In English, the child has, as yet, found no chronicler and historian such as Ploss. The object of the present writer is to treat of the child from a point of view hitherto entirely neglected, to exhibit what the world owes to childhood and the motherhood and the fatherhood which it occasions, to indicate the position of the child in the march of civilization among the various races of men, and to estimate the influence which the child-idea and its accompaniments have had upon sociology, mythology, religion, language; for the touch of the child is upon them all, and the debt of humanity to the little children has not yet been told. They have figured in the world's history and its folk-lore as magi and "medicine-men," as priests and oracle-keepers, as physicians and healers, as teachers and judges, as saints, heroes, discoverers, and inventors, as musicians and poets, actors and labourers in many fields of human activity, have been compared to the foolish and to the most wise, have been looked upon as fetiches and as gods, as the fit sacrifice to offended Heaven, and as the saviours and regenerators of mankind. The history of the child in human society and of the human ideas and institutions which have sprung from its consideration can have here only a beginning. This book is written in full sympathy with the thought expressed in the words of the Latin poet Juvenal: Maxima debetur pueris reverentia, and in the declaration of Jean Paul: "I love God and every little child."
CHAPTER II.
THE CHILD'S TRIBUTE TO THE MOTHER.
A good mother is worth a hundred schoolmasters.—English Proverb.
The first poet, the first priest, was the first mother. The first empire was a woman and her children.—O. T. Mason.
When society, under the guidance of the "fathers of the church," went almost to destruction in the dark ages, it was the "mothers of the people" who saved it and set it going on the new right path. —Zmigrodski (adapted).
The story of civilization is the story of the mother. —Zmigrodski.
One mother is more venerable than a thousand fathers. —Laws of Manu.
If the world were put into one scale, and my mother into the other, the world would kick the beam.—Lord Langdale.
Names of the Mother.
In A Song of Life,—a book in which the topic of sex is treated with such delicate skill,—occurs this sentence: "The motherhood of mammalian life is the most sacred thing in physical existence" (120. 92), and Professor Drummond closes his Lowell Institute Lectures on the Evolution of Man in the following words: "It is a fact to which too little significance has been given, that the whole work of organic nature culminates in the making of Mothers—that the animal series end with a group which even the naturalist has been forced to call the Mammalia. When the savage mother awoke to her first tenderness, a new creative hand was at work in the world" (36. 240). Said Henry Ward Beecher: "When God thought of Mother, he must have laughed with satisfaction, and framed it quickly,—so rich, so deep, so divine, so full of soul, power, and beauty, was the conception," and it was unto babes and sucklings that this wisdom was first revealed. From their lips first fell the sound which parents of later ages consecrated and preserved to all time. With motherhood came into the world song, religion, the thought of immortality itself; and the mother and the child, in the course of the ages, invented and preserved most of the arts and the graces of human life and human culture. In language, especially, the mother and the child have exercised a vast influence. In the names for "mother," the various races have recognized the debt they owe to her who is the "fashioner" of the child, its "nourisher" and its "nurse." An examination of the etymologies of the words for "mother" in all known languages is obviously impossible, for the last speakers and interpreters of many of the unwritten tongues of the earth are long since dead and gone. How primitive man—the first man of the race—called his mother, we can but surmise. Still, a number of interesting facts are known, and some of these follow.
The word mother is one of the oldest in the language; one of the very few words found among all the great branches of the widely scattered Aryan race, bearing witness, in ages far remote, before the Celt, the Teuton, the Hellene, the Latin, the Slav, and the Indo-Iranian were known, to the existence of the family, with the mother occupying a high and honourable place, if not indeed the highest place of all. What the etymological meaning was, of the primitive Aryan word from which our mother is descended, is uncertain. It seems, however, to be a noun derived, with the agent-suffix -t-r, from the root ma, "to measure." Skeat thinks the word meant originally "manager, regulator [of the household]," rejecting, as unsupported by sufficient evidence, a suggested interpretation as the "producer." Kluge, the German lexicographer, hesitates between the "apportioner, measurer," and the "former [of the embryo in the womb]." In the language of the Klamath Indians of Oregon, p'gishap, "mother," really signifies the "maker."
The Karankawas of Texas called "mother," kaninma, the "suckler," from kanin, "the female breast." In Latin mamma, seems to signify "teat, breast," as well as "mother," but Skeat doubts whether there are not two distinct words here. In Finnish and some other primitive languages a similar resemblance or identity exists between the words for "breast" and "mother." In Lithuanian, mote—cognate with our mother—signifies "wife," and in the language of the Caddo Indians of Louisiana and Texas sassin means both "wife" and "mother." The familiar "mother" of the New England farmer of the "Old Homestead" type, presents, perhaps, a relic of the same thought. The word dame, in older English, from being a title of respect for women—there is a close analogy in the history of sire—came to signify "mother." Chaucer translates the French of the Romaunt of the Rose, "Enfant qui craint ni pere ni mere Ne pent que bien ne le comperre," by "For who that dredeth sire ne dame Shall it abie in bodie or name," and Shakespeare makes poor Caliban declare: "I never saw a woman, But only Sycorax, my dam." Nowadays, the word dam is applied only to the female parent of animals, horses especially. The word, which is one with the honourable appellation dame, goes back to the Latin domina, "mistress, lady," the feminine of dominus, "lord, master." In not a few languages, the words for "father" and "mother" are derived from the same root, or one from the other, by simple phonetic change. Thus, in the Sandeh language of Central Africa, "mother" is n-amu, "father," b-amu; in the Cholona of South America, pa is "father," pa-n, "mother"; in the PEntlate of British Columbia, "father" is maa, "mother," taa, while in the Songish man is "father" and tan "mother" (404. 143).
Certain tongues have different words for "mother," according as it is a male or a female who speaks. Thus in the Okanak.en, a Salish dialect of British Columbia, a man or a boy says for "mother," sk'oi, a woman or a girl, tom; in Kalispelm the corresponding terms for "my mother" are isk'oi and intoop. This distinction, however, seems not to be so common as in the case of "father."
In a number of languages the words for "mother" are different when the latter is addressed and when she is spoken of or referred to. Thus in the Kwakiutl, Nootka, and Catloltq, three British Columbia tongues, the two words for "mother" are respectively at, abouk; at, abEmp; nikH, tan. It is to be noted, apparently, that the word used in address is very often simpler, more primitive, than the other. Even in English we find something similar in the use of ma (or mama) and mother.
In the Gothic alone, of all the great Teutonic dialects,—the language into which Bishop Wulfila translated the Scriptures in the fourth century,—the cognate equivalent of our English mother does not appear. The Gothic term is aithiei, evidently related to atta, "father," and belonging to the great series of nursery words, of which our own ma, mama, are typical examples. These are either relics of the first articulations of the child and the race, transmitted by hereditary adaptation from generation to generation, or are the coinages of mother and nurse in imitation of the cries of infancy.
These simple words are legion in number and are found over the whole inhabited earth,—in the wigwam of the Redskin, in the tent of the nomad Bedouin, in the homes of cultured Europeans and Americans. Dr. Buschmann studied these "nature-sounds," as he called them, and found that they are chiefly variations and combinations of the syllables ab, ap, am, an, ad, at, ba, pa, ma, na, da, ta, etc., and that in one language, not absolutely unrelated to another, the same sound will be used to denote the "mother" that in the second signifies "father," thus evidencing the applicability of these words, in the earliest stages of their existence, to either, or to both, of the parents of the child (166. 85). Pott, while remarking a wonderful resemblance in the names for parents all over the world, seeks to establish the rather doubtful thesis that there is a decided difference in the nature of the words for "father" and those for "mother," the former being "man-like, stronger," the latter "woman-like, mild" (517. 57).
Some languages apparently do not possess a single specialized word for "mother." The Hawaiian, for example, calls "mother and the sisters of the mother" makua wahine, "female parent," that being the nearest equivalent of our "mother," while in Tonga, as indeed with us to-day, sometimes the same term is applied to a real mother and to an adopted one (100. 389). In Japan, the paternal aunt and the maternal aunt are called "little mother." Similar terms and appellations are found in other primitive tongues. A somewhat extended discussion of names for "mother," and the questions connected with the subject, will be found in Westermarck (166. 85). Here also will be found notices of the names among various peoples for the nearest relatives of the mother and father. Incidentally it is worth noting that Westermarck controverts Professor Vambery's opinion that the Turko-Tartar words for "mother," ana, ene, originally meant "nurse" or "woman" (from the root an, en), holding that exactly the reverse is the fact, "the terms for mother being the primitive words." He is also inclined to think that the Aryan roots pa, "to protect, to nourish," and ma, "to fashion," came from pa, "father," and ma, "mother," and not vice versa. Mr. Bridges, the missionary who has studied so well the Yahgans of Tierra del Fuego, states that "the names imu and dabi—father and mother—have no meaning apart from their application, neither have any of their other very definite and ample list of terms for relatives, except the terms macu [cf. magu, "parturition"] and macipa [cf. cipa, "female"], son and daughter." This statement is, however, too sweeping perhaps (166. 88).
According to Colonel Mallery, the Ute Indians indicate "mother" by placing the index finger in the mouth (497a. 479). Clark describes the common Indian sign as follows: "Bring partially curved and compressed right hand, and strike with two or three gentle taps right or left breast, and make sign for female; though in conversation the latter is seldom necessary. Deaf mutes make sign for female, and cross hands as in their sign for baby, and move them to front and upwards" (420. 262). Somewhat similar is the sign for "father": "Bring the compressed right hand, back nearly outwards, in front of right or left breast, tips of fingers few inches from it; move the hand, mostly by wrist action, and gently tap the breast with tips of fingers two or three times, then make sign for male. Some Indians tap right breast for 'father,' and left for 'mother.' Deaf-mutes make sign for male, and then holding hands fixed as in their sign for baby, but a little higher, move the hands to front and upwards" (420. 167).
Interesting is the following statement of Mr. Codrington, the well-known missionary to the Melanesians:—
"In Mota the word used for 'mother' is the same that is used for the division [tribe?] veve, with a plural sign ra veve. And it is not that a man's kindred are so called after his mother, but that his mother is called his kindred, as if she were the representative of the division to which he belongs; as if he were not the child of a particular woman, but of the whole kindred for whom she brought him into the world." Moreover, at Mota, in like fashion, "the word for 'consort,' 'husband,' or 'wife,' is in a plural form ra soai, the word used for members of a body, or the component parts of a canoe" (25. 307-8).
Mother-Right.
Since the appearance of Bachofen's famous book on the matriarchate, "mother-right," that system of society in which the mother is paramount in the family and the line of inheritance passes through her, has received much attention from students of sociology and primitive history.
Post thus defines the system of mother-right:—
"The matriarchate is a system of relationship according to which the child is related only to his mother and to the persons connected with him through the female line, while he is looked upon as not related to his father and the persons connected with him through the male line. According to this system, therefore, the narrowest family circle consists not, as with us to-day, of father, mother, and child, but of mother, mother's brother, and sister's child, whilst the father is completely wanting, and the mother's brother takes the father's place with the sister's children. The real father is not the father of his own children, but of his nephews and nieces, whilst the brother of his wife is looked upon as father to his children. The brothers and sisters of the mother form with her a social group, to which belong also the children of the sisters, the children of the daughters of the sisters, etc., but not the children of the brothers, the children of the sisters' sons, etc. With every husband the relationship ceases" (127. I. 13-14).
The system of mother-right prevails widely over the whole globe; in some places, however, only in fragmentary condition. It is found amongst nearly all the native tribes of America; the peoples of Malaysia, Melanesia, Australia, Micronesia, and Polynesia, the Dravidian tribes of India; in Africa it is found in the eastern Sahara, the Soudan, the east and west coast, and in the centre of the continent, but not to the exclusion, altogether, of father-right, while in the north the intrusion of Europeans and the followers of Islam has tended to suppress it. Traces of its former existence are discovered among certain of the ancient tribes of Asia Minor, the old Egyptians, Arabs, Greeks, Romans, Teutons, the Aryans of India, the Chinese, Japanese, etc.
Mother-right has been recognized by many sociologists as a system of family relationship, perhaps the most widespread, perhaps the most primitive of all. Dr. Brinton says:—
"The foundation of the gentile system, as of any other family life, is ... the mutual affection between kindred. In the primitive period this is especially between children of the same mother, not so much because of the doubt of paternity, as because physiologically and obviously, it is the mother in whom is formed, and from whom alone proceeds, the living being" (412. 47).
Professor O. T. Mason, in the course of his interesting address on "Woman's Share in Primitive Culture," remarks (112. 10):—
"Such sociologists as Morgan and McLennan affirm that the primitive society had no family organization at all. They hypothecate a condition in which utter promiscuity prevailed. I see no necessity for this. There is some organization among insects. Birds mate and rear a little family. Many animals set up a kind of patriarchal horde. On the other hand, they err greatly who look among savages for such permanent home life as we enjoy. Marriages are in groups, children are the sons and daughters of these groups; divorces are common. The fathers of the children are not known, and if they were, they would have no authority on that account. The mother never changes her name, the children are named after her, or, at least, are not named after the father. The system of gentes prevails, each gens consisting of a hypothetical female ancestress, and all her descendants through females. These primitive men and women, having no other resort, hit upon this device to hold a band of kin together. Here was the first social tie on earth; the beginning of the state. The first empire was a woman and her children, regardless of paternity. This was the beginning of all the social bonds which unite us. Among our own Indians mother-right was nearly universal. Upon the death of a chief whose office was hereditary, he was succeeded, not by his son, but by the son of a sister, or an aunt, or a niece; all his property that was not buried with him fell to the same parties, could not descend to his children, since a child and the father belonged to different gentes." McLennan has discussed at some length the subject of kinship in ancient Greece (115. 193-246), and maintains that "the system of double kinship, which prevailed in the time of Homer, was preceded by a system of kinship through females only," referring to the cases of Lycaon, Tlepolemus, Helen, Arnaeus, Glaucus, and Sarpedon, besides the evidence in the Orestes of Euripides, and the Eumenides of Aeschylus. In the last, "the jury are equally divided on the plea [that Orestes was not of kin to his mother, Clytemnestra, whom he had killed, —"Do you call me related by blood to my mother?"], and Orestes gains his cause by the casting vote of Athene." According to tradition, "in Greece, before the time of Cecrops, children always bore the name of their mothers," in marked contrast to tha state of affairs in Sparta, where, according to Philo, "the marriage tie was so loose that men lent their wives to one another, and cared little by whom children were begotten, provided they turned out strong and healthy."
We have preserved for us, by Plutarch and others, some of the opinions of Greek philosophers on the relation of the father and the mother to the child. Plato is represented as calling "mind the conception, idea, model, and father; and matter the mother, nurse, or seat and region capable of births." Chrysippus is said to have stated: "The foetus is nourished in the womb like a plant; but, being born, is refrigerated and hardened by the air, and its spirit being changed it becomes an animal," a view which, as McLennan points out, "constitutes the mother the mere nurse of her child, just as a field is of the seed sown in it."
The view of Apollo, which, in the council of the gods, influenced Athene to decide for Orestes, is this:—
"The bearer of the so-called offspring is not the mother of it, but only the nurse of the newly conceived foetus. It is the male who is the author of its being; while she, as a stranger, for a stranger, preserves the young plant for those for whom the god has not blighted it in the bud. And I will show you a proof of this assertion; one may become a father without a mother. There stands by a witness of this in the daughter of Olympian Zeus, who was not even nursed [much less engendered or begotten] in the darkness of the womb" (115. 211). "This is akin to the wild discussion in the misogynistic Middle Ages about the possibility of lucina sine concubitu. The most recent and most scholarly discussion of all questions involved in "mother-right" will be found people in the world; for it stands on record that the five companies (five hundred men) recruited from the Iroquois of New York and Canada during our civil war stood first on the list among all the recruits of our army for height, vigour, and corporeal symmetry" (412. 82). And it was this people too who produced Hiawatha, a philosophic legislator and reformer, worthy to rank with Solon and Lycurgus, and the founder of a great league whose object was to put an end to war, and unite all the nations in one bond of brotherhood and peace.
Among the Choctaw-Muskogee tribes, women-chiefs were also known; the Yuchis, Chetimachas, had "Queens"; occasionally we find female rulers elsewhere in America, as among the Winnebagos, the Nah-ane, etc. Scattered examples of gynocracy are to be found in other parts of the world, and in their later development some of the Aryan races have been rather partial to women as monarchs, and striking instances of a like predilection are to be met with among the Semitic tribes,—Boadicea, Dido, Semiramis, Deborah are well-known cases in point, to say nothing of the Christian era and its more enlightened treatment of woman.
The fate of women among those peoples and in those ages where extreme exaltation of the male has been the rule, is sketched by Letourneau in his chapter on The Condition of Women (100. 173-185); the contrast between the Australians, to whom "woman is a domestic animal, useful for the purposes of genesic pleasure, for reproduction, and, in case of famine, for food," the Chinese, who can say "a newly-married woman ought to be merely as a shadow and as an echo in the house," the primitive Hindus, who forbade the wife to call her husband by name, but made her term him "master, lord," or even "god," and even some of our modern races in the eye of whose law women are still minors, and the Iroquois, is remarkable. Such great differences in the position and rights of women, existing through centuries, over wide areas of the globe, have made the study of comparative pedagogy a most important branch of human sociology. The mother as teacher has not been, and is not now, the same the world over.
As men holding supreme power have been termed "father," women have in like manner been called "mother." The title of the queen-mother in Ashanti is nana, "Grandmother" (438. 259), and to some of the Indian tribes of Canada Queen Victoria is the "Great White Mother," the "Great Mother across the Sea." In Ashanti the "rich, prosperous, and powerful" are termed oman enna, "mothers of the tribe," and are expected to make suitably large offerings to the dead, else there will be no child born in the neglectful family for a certain period (438. 228).
With the Romans, mater and its derivative matrona, came to be applied as titles of honour; and beside the rites of the parentalia we find those of the matronalia (492. 454).
In the ancient Hebrew chronicles we find mention of Deborah, that "mother in Israel."
With us, off whose tongues "the fathers," "forefathers," "ancestors" (hardly including ancestresses) and the like rolled so glibly, the "Pilgrim Fathers" were glorified long before the "Pilgrim Mothers," and hardly yet has the mother of the "father of his country" received the just remembrance and recognition belonging to her who bore so noble and so illustrious a son. By and by, however, it is to be hoped, we shall be free from the reproach cast upon us by Colonel Higginson, and wake up to the full consciousness that the great men of our land have had mothers, and proceed to re-write our biographical dictionaries and encyclopadias of life-history.
In Latin mater, as does mother with us, possessed a wide extent of meaning, "mother, parent, producer, nurse, preparer, cause, origin, source," etc. Mater omnium artium necessitas, "Necessity is the mother of invention," and similar phrases were in common use, as they are also in the languages of to-day. Connected with mater is materia, "matter,"—mother-stuff, perhaps,—and from it is derived matrimonium, which testifies concerning primitive Roman sociology, in which the mother-idea must have been prominent, something we cannot say of our word marriage, derived ultimately from the Latin mas, "a male."
Westermarck notes the Nicaraguans, Dyaks, Minahassers, Andaman Islanders, Padam, Munda Kols, Santals, Moors of the Western Soudan, Tuaregs, Teda, among the more or less primitive peoples with whom woman is held in considerable respect, and sometimes, as among the Munda Kols, bears the proud title "mistress of the house" (166. 500, 501). As Havelock Ellis remarks, women have shown themselves the equals of men as rulers, and most beneficial results have flowed from their exercise of the great political wisdom, and adaptation to statecraft which seems to belong especially to the female sex. The household has been a training-school for women in the more extended spheres of human administrative society.
Alma Mater.
The college graduate fondly calls the institution from which he has obtained his degree Alma Mater, "nourishing, fostering, cherishing mother," and he is her alumnus (foster-child, nourished one). For long years the family of the benign and gracious mother, whose wisdom was lavished upon her children, consisted of sons alone, but now, with the advent of "sweeter manners, purer laws," daughters have come to her also, and the alumnae, "the sweet girl-graduates in their golden hair," share in the best gifts their parent can bestow. To Earth also, the term Alma Mater has been applied, and the great nourishing mother of all was indeed the first teacher of man, the first university of the race.
Alma, alumnus, alumna, are all derived from alo, "I nourish, support." From the radical al, following various trains of thought, have come: alesco, "I grow up"; coalesco, "I grow together"; adolesco, "I grow up,"—whence adolescent, etc.; obsolesco, "I wear out"; alimentum, "food"; alimonium, "support"; altor, altrix, "nourisher"; altus, "high, deep" (literally, "grown"); elementum, "first principle," etc. Connected With adolesco is adultus, whence our adult, with the radical of which the English word old (eld) is cognate. From the root al, "to grow, to make to grow, to nourish," spring also the Latin words proles, "offspring," suboles, "offspring, sprout," indoles, "inborn or native quality."
"Mother's Son."
The familiar expression "every mother's son of us" finds kin in the Modern High German Muttersohn, Mutterkind, which, with the even more significant Muttermensch (human being), takes us back to the days of "mother-right." Rather different, however, is the idea called up by the corresponding Middle Low German modersone, which means "bastard, illegitimate child."
Lore of Motherhood
A synonym of Muttermensch is Mutterseele, for soul and man once meant pretty much, the same. The curious expression mutterseelenallein, "quite alone; alone by one's self," is given a peculiar interpretation by Lippert, who sees in it a relic of the burial of the dead (soul) beneath the hearth, threshold, or floor of the house; "wessen Mutter im Hause ruht, der kann daheim immer nur mit seiner Mutterseele selbander allein sein." Or, perhaps, it goes back to the time when, as with the Seminoles of Florida, the babe was held over the mouth of the mother, whose death resulted from its birth, in order that her departing spirit might enter the new being.
In German, the "mother-feeling" makes its influence felt in the nomenclature of the lower brute creation. As contrasted with our English female donkey (she-donkey), mare, ewe, ewe-lamb, sow, doe-hare (female hare), queen-bee, etc., we find Mutteresel, "mother-donkey "; Mutterpferd, "mother-horse"; Mutterschaf, "mother-sheep"; Mutterlamm, "mother lamb"; Mutterschwein, "mother swine"; Mutterhase, "mother-hare"; Mutterbiene, "mother-bee."
Nor is this feeling absent from the names of plants and things inanimate. We have Mutterbirke, "birch"; Mutterblume, "seed-flower"; Mutternelke, "carnation"; Mutternagelein (our "mother-clove"); Mutterholz. In English we have "mother of thyme," etc. In Japan a triple arrangement in the display of the flower-vase—a floral trinity—is termed chichi, "father"; haha, "mother"; ten, "heaven" (189. 74).
In the nursery-lore of all peoples, as we can see from the fairy-tales and child-stories in our own and other languages, this attribution of motherhood to all things animate and inanimate is common, as it is in the folk-lore and mythology of the adult members of primitive races now existing.
Mother Poet.
The arts of poetry, music, dancing, according to classic mythology, were presided over by nine goddesses, or Muses, daughters of Mnemosyne, goddess of memory, "Muse-mother," as Mrs. Browning terms her. The history of woman as a poet has yet to be written, but to her in the early ages poetry owed much of its development and its beauty. Mr. Vance has remarked that "among many of the lowest races the only love-dances in vogue are those performed by the women" (545a. 4069). And Letourneau considers that "there are good grounds for supposing that women may have especially participated in the creation of the lyric of the erotic kind." Professor Mason, in the course of his remarks upon woman's labour in the world in all ages, says (112. 12):—
"The idea of a maker, or creator-of-all-things found no congenial soil in the minds of savage men, who manufactured nothing. But, as the first potters, weavers, house-builders were women, the idea of a divine creator as a moulder, designer, and architect originated with her, or was suggested by her. The three Fates, Clotho, who spins the thread of life; Lachesis, who fixes its prolongation; and Atropos, who cuts this thread with remorseless shears, are necessarily derived from woman's work. 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."
And we have, besides the goddesses of all mythologies, personifying woman's devotion, beauty, love. What shall we say of that art, highest of all human accomplishments, in the exercise of which men have become almost as gods? The old Greeks called the singer [Greek: poiaetaes], "maker," and perhaps from woman the first poets learned how to worship in noble fashion that great maker of all, whose poem is the universe. Religion and poetry have ever gone hand in hand; Plato was right when he said: "I am persuaded, somehow, that good poets are the inspired interpreters of the gods." Of song, as of religion, it may perhaps be said: Dux foemina facti.
To the mother beside the cradle where lies her tender offspring, song is as natural as speech itself to man. Lullabies are found in every land; everywhere the joyous mother-heart bursts forth into song. The German proverb is significant: "Wer ein saugendes Kind hat, der hat eine singende Frau," and Fischer, a quaint poet of the sixteenth century, has beautifully expressed a like idea:—
"Wo Honig ist, da sammlen sieb die Fliegen, Wo Kinder sind, da singt man um die Wiegen."
Ploss, in whose book is to be found a choice collection of lullabies from all over the globe, remarks: "The folk-poetry of all peoples is rich in songs whose texts and melodies the tender mother herself imagined and composed" (326. II. 128).
The Countess Martinengo-Cesaresco devotes an interesting chapter of her Essays in the Study of Folk-Song to the subject of lullabies. But not cradle-songs alone have sprung from woman's genius. The world over, dirges and funeral-laments have received their poetical form from the mother. As name-giver, too, in many lands, the mother exercised this side of her imaginative faculty. The mother and the child, from whom language received its chief inspiration, were also the callers forth of its choicest and most creative form.
Mother-Wit.
"An ounce o' mother-wit is worth a pound o' clergy," says the Scotch proverb, and the "mother-wit," Muttergeist and Mutterwitz, that instructive common-sense, that saving light that make the genius and even the fool, in the midst of his folly, wise, appear in folk-lore and folk-speech everywhere. What the statistics of genius seem to show that great men owe to their mothers, no less than fools, is summed up by the folk-mind in the word mother-wit. Jean Paul says: "Die Mutter geben uns von Geiste Warme und die Vater Licht," and Goethe, in a familiar passage in his Autobiography, declares:—
"Vom Vater hab'ich die Statur, Des Lebens ernstes Fuhren; Vom Mutterchen die Frobnatur, Und Lust zu fabulieren."
Shakespeare makes Petruchio tell the shrewish Katherine that his "goodly speech" is "extempore from my mother-wit," and Emerson calls "mother-wit," the "cure for false theology." Quite appropriately Spenser, in the Faerie Queene, speaks of "all that Nature by her mother-wit could frame in earth." It is worth noting that when the ancient Greeks came to name the soul, they personified it in Psyche, a beautiful female, and that the word for "soul" is feminine in many European languages.
Among the Teton Indians, according to the Rev. J. Owen Dorsey, the following peculiar custom exists: "Prior to the naming of the infant is the ceremony of the transfer of character; should the infant be a boy, a brave and good-tempered man, chosen beforehand, takes the infant in his arms and breathes into his mouth, thereby communicating his own disposition to the infant, who will grow up to be a brave and good-natured man. It is thought that such an infant will not cry as much as infants that have not been thus favoured. Should the infant be a girl, it is put into the arms of a good woman, who breathes into its mouth" (433. 482).
Here we have father-wit as well as mother-wit.
Mother-Tongue.
Where women have no voice whatever in public affairs, and are subordinated to the uttermost in social and family matters, little that is honourable and noble is named for them. In East Central Africa, a Yao woman, asked if the child she is carrying is a boy or a girl, frequently replies: "My child is of the sex that does not speak" (518. XLIII. 249), and with other peoples in higher stages of culture, the "silent woman" lingers yet. Taceat mulier in ecclesia still rings in our ears to-day, as it has rung for untold centuries. Though the poet has said:—
"There is a sight all hearts beguiling— A youthful mother to her infant smiling, Who, with spread arms and dancing feet, And cooing voice, returns its answer sweet,"
and mothers alone have understood the first babblings of humanity, they have waited long to be remembered in the worthiest name of the language they have taught their offspring.
The term mother-tongue, although Middle English had "birthe-tonge," in the sense of native speech, is not old in our language; the Century Dictionary gives no examples of its early use. Even immortal Shakespeare does not know it, for, in King Richard II., he makes Mowbray say:—
"The language I have learned these forty years (My native English) now must I forego."
The German version of the passage has, however, mein mutterliches Englisch.
Cowper, in the Task, does use "mother-tongue," in the connection following:—
"Praise enough To fill the ambition of a private man, That Chatham's language was his mother-tongue."
Mother-tongue has now become part and parcel of our common speech; a good word, and a noble one.
In Modern High German, the corresponding Mutterzunge, found in Sebastian Franck (sixteenth century) has gradually given way to Muttersprache, a word whose history is full of interest. In Germany, as in Europe generally, the esteem in which Latin was held in the Middle Ages and the centuries immediately following them, forbade almost entirely the birth or extension of praiseworthy and endearing names for the speech of the common people of the country. So long as men spoke of "hiding the beauties of Latin in homely German words," and a Bacon could think of writing his chief work in Latin, in order that he might be remembered after his death, it were vain to expect aught else.
Hence, it does not surprise us to learn that the word Muttersprache is not many centuries old in German. Dr. Lubben, who has studied its history, says it is not to be found in Old High German or Middle High German (or Middle Low German), and does not appear even in Luther's works, though, judging from a certain passage in his Table Talk, it was perhaps known to him. It was only in the seventeenth century that the word became quite common. Weigand states that it was already in the Dictionarium latino-germanicum (Zurich, 1556), and in Maaler's Die Teutsch Spraach (Zurich, 1561), in which latter work (S. 262 a) we meet with the expressions vernacula lingua, patrius sermo, landspraach, muoterliche spraach, and muoterspraach (S. 295 c). Opitz (1624) uses the word, and it is found in Schottel's Teutsche Haupt-Sprache (Braunschweig, 1663). Apparently the earliest known citation is the Low German modersprake, found in the introduction of Dietrich Engelhus' (of Einbeck) Deutsche Chronik (1424).
Nowadays Muttersprache is found everywhere in the German book-language, but Dr. Lubben, in 1881, declared that he had never heard it from the mouth of the Low German folk, with whom the word was always lantsprake, gemene sprake. Hence, although the word has been immortalized by Klaus Groth, the Low German Burns, in the first poem of his Quickborn:—
"Min Modersprak, so slicht un recht, Du ole frame Red! Wenn blot en Mund 'min Vader' seggt, So klingt mi't as en Bed,"
and by Johann Meyer, in his Ditmarscher Gedichte:—
"Vaderhus un Modersprak! Lat mi't nom'n un lat mi't rop'n; Vaderhus, du belli Sted, Modersprak, da frame Red, Schonres klingt der Nix tohopen,"
it may be that modersprak is not entirely a word of Low German origin; beautiful though it is, this dialect, so closely akin to our own English, did not directly give it birth. Nor do the corresponding terms in the other Teutonic dialects,—Dutch moederspraak, moedertaal, Swedish modersmal, etc.,—seem more original. The Romance languages, however, offer a clue. In French, langue mere is a purely scientific term of recent origin, denoting the root-language of a number of dialects, or of a "family of speech," and does not appear as the equivalent of Muttersprache. The equivalents of the latter are: French, langue maternelle; Spanish, lengua materna; Italian, lingua materna, etc., all of which are modifications or imitations of a Low Latin lingua materna, or lingua maternalis. The Latin of the classic period seems not to have possessed this term, the locutions in use being sermo noster, patrius sermo, etc. The Greek had [Greek: ae egchorios glossa ae idia glossa,] etc. Direct translations are met with in the moderlike sprake of Daniel von Soest, of Westphalia (sixteenth century), and the muoterliche spraach of Maaler (1561). It is from an Italian- Latin source that Dr. Lubben supposes that the German prototypes of modersprak and Muttersprache arose. In the Bok der Byen, a semi-Low German translation (fifteenth century) of the Liber Apium of Thomas of Chantimpre, occurs the word modertale in the passage "Christus sede to er [the Samaritan woman] mit sachte stemme in erre modertale." A municipal book of Treuenbrietzen informs us that in the year 1361 it was resolved to write in the ydeoma maternale—what the equivalent of this was in the common speech is not stated—and in the Relatio of Hesso, we find the term materna lingua (105 a).
The various dialects have some variants of Muttersprache, and in Gottingen we meet with moimen spraken, where moime (cognate with Modern High German Muhme, "aunt"), signifies "mother," and is a child-word.
From the mother-tongue to the mother-land is but a step. As the speech she taught her babe bears the mother's name, so does also the land her toil won from the wilderness.
Mother-Land.
As we say in English most commonly "native city," so also we say "native land." Even Byron sings:—
"Adieu, adieu I my native shore Fades o'er the waters blue;
* * * * *
My native land—good night!"
and Fitz-Greene Halleck, in his patriotic poem "Marco Bozzaris," bids strike "For God, and your native land."
Scott's far-famed lines:—
"Breathes there a man with soul so dead, Who never to himself has said, This is my own, my native land!"
and Smith's national hymn, "My country,'tis of thee," know no mother-land.
In the great Century Dictionary, the only illustration cited of the use of the word mother-land is a very recent one, from the Century Magazine (vol. xxix. p. 507).
Shakespeare, however, comes very near it, when, in King John (V. ii.), he makes the Bastard speak of "your dear Mother-England," —but this is not quite "mother-land."
In German, though, through the sterner influences which surrounded the Empire in its birth and reorganization, Vaterland is now the word, Mutterland was used by Kant, Wieland, Goethe, Herder, Uhland, etc. Lippert suggests an ingenious explanation of the origin of the terms Mutterland, Vaterland, as well as for the predominance of the latter and younger word. If, in primitive times, man alone could hold property,—women even and children were his chattels,—yet the development of agriculture and horticulture at the hands of woman created, as it were, a new species of property, property in land, the result of woman's toil and labour; and this new property, in days when "mother-right" prevailed, came to be called Mutterland, as it was essentially "mothers' land." But when men began to go forth to war, and to conquer and acquire land that was not "mothers' land," a new species of landed property,—the "land of the conquering father,"—came into existence (and with it a new theory of succession, "father-right"), and from that time forward "Vaterland" has extended its signification, until it has attained the meaning which it possesses in the German speech of to-day (492. 33, 36).
The inhabitants of the British colonies scattered all over the world speak of Britain as the "mother country," "Mother England"; and R. H. Stoddard, the American poet, calls her "our Mother's Mother." The French of Canada term France over-sea "la mere patrie" (mother fatherland).
Even Livy, the Roman historian, wrote terra quam matrem appellamus,—"the land we call mother,"—and Virgil speaks of Apollo's native Delos as Delum maternum. But for all this, the proud Roman called his native land, not after his mother, but after his father, patria; so also in corresponding terms the Greek, [Greek: patris], etc. But the latter remembered his mother also, as the word metropolis, which we have inherited, shows. [Greek: Maetropolis] had the meanings: "mother-state" (whence daughter-colonies went forth); "a chief city, a capital, metropolis; one's mother-city, or mother-country." In English, metropolis has been associated with "mother-church," for a metropolis or a metropolitan city, was long one which was the seat of a bishopric.
Among the ancient Greeks the Cretans were remarkable for saying not [Greek: patris] (father-land), 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 far-reaching, 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 are described in the books of classical mythology. Many times they are termed "mother of the gods" and "mother of men"; Cybele is sometimes represented as a woman advanced in pregnancy or as a woman with many breasts; Rhea, or Cybele, as the hill-enthroned protectress of cities, was styled Mater turrita.
The ancient Teutons had their Hertha, or Erdemutter, the Nertha of Tacitus, and fragments of the primitive earth-worship linger yet among the folk of kindred stock. The Slavonic peoples had their "earth-mother" also.
The ancient Indian Aryans worshipped Prithivi-matar, "earth-mother," and Dyaus pitar, "sky-father," and in China, Yang, Sky, is regarded as the "father of all things," while Yu, Earth, is the "mother of all things."
Among the ancient Egyptians the "earth-mother," the "parent of all things born," was Isis, the wife of the great Osiris. The natal ceremonies of the Indians of the Sia Pueblo have been described at great length by Mrs. Stevenson (538. 132-143). Before the mother is delivered of her child the priest repeats in a low tone the following prayer:—
"Here is the child's sand-bed. May the child have good thoughts and know its mother-earth, the giver of food. May it have good thoughts and grow from childhood to manhood. May the child be beautiful and happy. Here is the child's bed; may the child be beautiful and happy. Ashes man, let me make good medicine for the child. We will receive the child into our arms, that it may be happy and contented. May it grow from childhood to manhood. May it know its mother Ct'set [the first created woman], the Ko'pishtaia, and its mother-earth. May the child have good thoughts and grow from childhood to manhood. May it be beautiful and happy" (538. 134).
On the fourth morning after the birth of the child, the doctress in attendance, "stooping until she almost sits on the ground, bares the child's head as she holds it toward the rising sun, and repeats a long prayer, and, addressing the child, she says: 'I bring you to see your Sun-father and Ko'pishtaia, that you may know them and they you'" (538. 141).
Mother-Mountain.
Though we are now accustomed, by reason of their grandeur and sublimity, to personify mountains as masculine, the old fable of Phadrus about the "mountain in labour, that brought forth a mouse,"—as Horace has it, Montes laborabant et parturitur ridiculus mus,—shows that another concept was not unknown to the ancients. The Armenians call Mount Ararat "Mother of the World" (500. 39), and the Spaniards speak of a chief range of mountains as Sierra Madre. In mining we meet with the "mother-lode," veta, madre, but, curiously enough, the main shaft is called in German Vaterschacht.
We know that the Lapps and some other primitive peoples "transferred to stones the domestic relations of father, mother, and child," or regarded them as children of Mother-Earth (529. 64); "eggs of the earth" they are called in the magic songs of the Finns. In Suffolk, England, "conglomerate is called 'mother of stones,' under the idea that pebbles are born of it"; in Germany Mutterstein. And in litholatry, in various parts of the globe, we have ideas which spring from like conceptions.
Mother-Night.
Milton speaks of the "wide womb of uncreate night," and some of the ancient classical poets call Nox "the mother of all things, of gods as well as men." "The Night is Mother of the Day," says Whittier, and the myth he revives is an old and wide-spread one. "Out of Night is born day, as a child comes forth from the womb of his mother," said the Greek and Roman of old. As Bachofen (6. 16, 219) remarks: "Das Mutterthum verbindet sich mit der Idee der den Tag aus sich gebierenden Nacht, wie das Vaterrecht dem Reiche des Lichts, dem von der Sonne mit der Mutter Nacht gezeugten Tage." Darkness, Night, Earth, Motherhood, seem all akin in the dim light of primitive philosophy. Yet night is not always figured as a woman. James Ferguson, the Scotch poet, tells us how
"Auld Daddy Darkness creeps frae his hole, Black as a blackamoor, blin' as a mole,"
and holds dominion over earth till "Wee Davie Daylicht comes keekin' owre the hill" (230. 73).
An old Anglo-Saxon name for Christinas was modra-neht, "mother's night."
Mother-Dawn.
In Sanskrit mythology Ushas, "Dawn," is daughter of Heaven, and poetically she is represented as "a young wife awakening her children and giving them new strength for the toils of the new day."
Sometimes she is termed gavam ganitri, "the mother of the cows," which latter mythologists consider to be either "the clouds which pour water on the fields, or the bright mornings which, like cows, are supposed to step out one by one from the stable of the night" (510. 431).
In an ancient Hindu hymn to Ushas we read:—
"She shines upon us like a young wife, rousing every living being to go to his work. When the fire had to be kindled by men, she made the light by striking down darkness.
"She rose up, spreading far and wide, and moving everywhere. She grew in brightness, wearing her brilliant garment. The mother of the cows, the leader of the days, she shone gold-coloured, lovely to behold" (421. 29).
This daughter of the sky was the "lengthener of life, the love of all, the giver of food, riches, blessings." According to Dr. Brinton, the Quiche Indians of Guatemala speak of Xmucane and Xpiyacoc as being "the great ancestress and the great ancestor" of all things. The former is called r'atit zih, r'atit zak, "primal mother of the sun and light" (411. 119).
Mother-Days.
In Russia we meet with the days of the week as "mothers." Perhaps the most remarkable of these is "Mother Friday," a curious product of the mingling of Christian hagiology and Slavonic mythology, of St. Prascovia and the goddess Siwa. On the day sacred to her, "Mother Friday" wanders about the houses of the peasants, avenging herself on such as have been so rash as to sew, spin, weave, etc., on a Friday (520. 206).
In a Wallachian tale appear three supernatural females,—the holy mothers Friday, Wednesday, and Sunday,—who assist the hero in his quest of the heroine, and in another Wallachian story they help a wife to find her lost husband.
"Mother Sunday" is said "to rule the animal world, and can collect her subjects by playing on a magic flute. She is represented as exercising authority over both birds and beasts, and in a Slovak story she bestows on the hero a magic horse" (520. 211). In Bulgaria we even find mother-months, and Miss Garnett has given an account of the superstition of "Mother March" among the women of that country (61.I. 330). William Miller, the poet-laureate of the nursery, sings of Lady Summer:—
"Birdie, birdie, weet your whistle! Sing a sang to please the wean; Let it be o' Lady Summer Walking wi' her gallant train! Sing him how her gaucy mantle, Forest-green, trails ower the lea, Broider'd frae the dewy hem o't Wi' the field flowers to the knee!
"How her foot's wi' daisies buskit, Kirtle o' the primrose hue, And her e'e sae like my laddie's, Glancing, laughing, loving blue! How we meet on hill and valley, Children sweet as fairest flowers, Buds and blossoms o' affection, Rosy wi' the sunny hours" (230. 161).
Mother-Sun.
In certain languages, as in Modern German, the word for "sun" is feminine, and in mythology the orb of day often appears as a woman. The German peasant was wont to address the sun and the moon familiarly as "Frau Sonne" and "Herr Mond," and in a Russian folk-song a fair maiden sings (520. 184):—
"My mother is the beauteous Sun, And my father, the bright Moon; My brothers are the many Stars, And my sisters the white Dawns."
Jean Paul beautifully terms the sun "Sonne, du Mutterauge der Welt!" and Holty sings: "Geh aus deinem Gezelt, Mutter des Tags hervor, und vergulde die wache Welt"; in another passage the last writer thus apostrophizes the sun: "Heil dir, Mutter des Lichts!" These terms "mother-eye of the world," "mother of day," "mother of light," find analogues in other tongues. The Andaman Islanders have their chan-a bo-do, "mother-sun" (498. 96), and certain Indians of Brazil call the sun coaracy, "mother of the day or earth." In their sacred language the Dakota Indians speak of the sun as "grandmother" and the moon as "grandfather." The Chiquito Indians "used to call the sun their mother, and, at every eclipse of the sun, they would shoot their arrows so as to wound it; they would let loose their dogs, who, they thought, went instantly to devour the moon" (100. 289).
The Yuchi Indians called themselves "children of the sun." Dr. Gatschet tells us: "The Yuchis believe themselves to be the offspring of the sun, which they consider to be a female. According to one myth, a couple of human beings were born from her monthly efflux, and from, these the Yuchis afterward originated." Another myth of the same people says: "An unknown mysterious being once came down upon the earth and met people there who were the ancestors of the Yuchi Indians. To them this being (Hi'ki, or Ka'la hi'ki) taught many of the arts of life, and in matters of religion admonished them to call the sun their mother as a matter of worship" (389 (1893). 280).
Mother-Moon.
Shelley sings of
"That orbed maiden, with white fire laden, Whom mortals call the moon,"
and in other languages besides Latin the word for moon is feminine, and the lunar deity a female, often associated with childbirth. The moon-goddesses of the Orient—Diana (Juno), Astarte, Anahita, etc.—preside over the beginnings of human life. Not a few primitive peoples have thought of the moon as mother. The ancient Peruvians worshipped Mama-Quilla, "mother-moon," and the Hurons regarded Ataensic, the mother or grandmother of Jouskeha, the sun, as the "creatress of earth and man," as well as the goddess of death and of the souls of the departed (509. 363). The Tarahumari Indians of the Sierra of Chihuahua, Mexico, call the sun au-nau-ru-a-mi, "high father," and the moon, je-ru-a-mi, "high mother." The Tupi Indians of Brazil term the moon jacy, "our mother," and the same name occurs in the Omagua and other members of this linguistic stock. The Muzo Indians believe that the sun is their father and the moon their mother (529. 95).
Horace calls the moon siderum regina, and Apuleius, regina coeli, and Milton writes of
"mooned Ashtaroth, Heaven's queen and mother both."
Froebel's verses, "The Little Girl and the Stars," are stated to be based upon the exclamation of the child when seeing two large stars close together in the heavens, "Father-Mother-Star," and a further instance of like nature is cited where the child applied the word "mother" to the moon.
Mother-Fire.
An ancient Greek philosopher, Heraclitus of Ephesus, taught that the world was created from fire, the omnipotent and omniscient essence, and with many savage and barbaric peoples fire-worship has nourished or still flourishes. The Indie Aryans of old produced fire by the method of the twirling stick, and in their symbolism "the turning stick, Pramanta, was the father of the god of fire; the immovable stick was the mother of the adorable and luminous Agni [fire]"—a concept far-reaching in its mystic and mythological relations (100. 564).
According to Mr. Gushing the Zuni Indians term fire the "Grandmother of Men."
In their examination of the burial-places of the ancient Indian population of the Salado River Valley in Arizona, the Hemenway Exploring Expedition found that many children were buried near the kitchen hearths. Mr. Cushing offers the following explanation of this custom, which finds analogies in various parts of the world: "The matriarchal grandmother, or matron of the household deities, is the fire. It is considered the guardian, as it is also, being used for cooking, the principal 'source of life' of the family. The little children being considered unable to care for themselves, were placed, literally, under the protection of the family fire that their soul-life might be nourished, sustained, and increased" (501. 149). Boecler tells us that the Esthonian bride "consecrates her new home and hearth by an offering of money cast into the fire, or laid on the oven, for Tule-ema, [the] Fire Mother" (545. II. 285). In a Mongolian wedding-song there is an invocation of "Mother Ut, Queen of Fire," who is said to have come forth "when heaven and earth divided," and to have issued "from the footsteps of Mother-Earth." She is further said to have "a manly son, a beauteous daughter-in-law, bright daughters" (484. 38).
Mother-Water.
The poet Homer and the philosopher Thales of Miletus agreed in regarding water as the primal element, the original of all existences, and their theory has supporters among many primitive peoples. At the baptism festivals of their children, the ancient Mexicans recognized the goddess of the waters. At sunrise the midwife addressed the child, saying, among other things: "Be cleansed with thy mother, Chalchihuitlicue, the goddess of water." Then, placing her dripping finger upon the child's lips, she continued: "Take this, for on it thou must live, grow, become strong, and flourish. Through it we receive all our needs. Take it." And, again, "We are all in the hands of Chalchihuitlicue, our mother"; as she washed the child she uttered the formula: "Bad, whatever thou art, depart, vanish, for the child lives anew and is born again; it is once more cleansed, once more renewed through our mother Chalchihuitlicue." As she lifted the child up into the air, she prayed, "O Goddess, Mother of Water, fill this child with thy power and virtue" (326. I. 263).
In their invocation for the restoration of the spirit to the body, the Nagualists,—a native American mystic sect,—of Mexico and Central America, make appeal to "Mother mine, whose robe is of precious gems," i.e. water, regarded as "the universal mother." The "robe of precious stones" refers to "the green or vegetable life" resembling the green of precious stones. Another of her names is the "Green Woman,"—a term drawn from "the greenness which follows moisture" (413. 52-54).
The idea of water as the source of all things appears also in the cosmology of the Indie Aryans. In one of the Vedic hymns it is stated that water existed before even the gods came into being, and the Rig-veda tells us that "the waters contained a germ from which everything else sprang forth." This is plainly a myth of the motherhood of the waters, for in the Brahmanas we are told that from the water arose an egg, from which came forth after a year Pragapati, the creator (510. 248). Variants of this myth of the cosmic egg are found in other quarters of the globe.
Mother-Ocean.
The Chinchas of Peru looked upon the sea as the chief deity and the mother of all things, and the Peruvians worshipped Mama-Cocha, "mother sea" (509. 368), from which had come forth everything, even animals, giants, and the Indians themselves. Associated with Mama-Cocha was the god Vira-Cocha, "sea-foam." In Peru water was revered everywhere,—rivers and canals, fountains and wells,—and many sacrifices were made to them, especially of certain sea-shells which were thought to be "daughters of the sea, the mother of all waters." The traditions of the Incas point to an origin from Lake Titicaca, and other tribes fabled their descent from fountains and streams (412. 204). Here belong, doubtless, some of the myths of the sea-born deities of classical mythology as well as those of the water-origin of the first of the human race, together with kindred conceits of other primitive peoples.
In the Bengalese tale of "The Boy with the Moon on his Forehead," recorded by Day, the hero pleads: "O mother Ocean, please make way for me, or else I die" (426. 250), and passes on in safety. The poet Swinburne calls the sea "fair, white mother," "green-girdled mother," "great, sweet mother, mother and lover of men, the sea."
Mother-River.
According to Russian legend "the Dnieper, Volga, and Dvina used once to be living people. The Dnieper was a boy, and the Volga and Dvina his sisters." The Russians call their great river "Mother Volga," and it is said that, in the seventeenth century, a chief of the Don Cossacks, inflamed with wine, sacrificed to the mighty stream a Persian princess, accompanying his action with these words: "O Mother Volga, thou great River! much hast thou given me of gold and of silver, and of all good things; thou hast nursed me and nourished me, and covered me with glory and honor. But I have in no way shown thee my gratitude. Here is somewhat for thee; take it!" (520. 217-220).
In the Mahabharata, the great Sanskrit epic, King Santanu is said to have walked by the side of the river one day, where "he met and fell in love with a beautiful girl, who told him that she was the river Ganges, and could only marry him on condition he never questioned her conduct. To this he, with a truly royal gallantry, agreed; and she bore him several children, all of whom she threw into the river as soon as they were born. At last she bore him a boy, Bhishma; and her husband begged her to spare his life, whereupon she instantly changed into the river Ganges and flowed away" (258. 317). Similar folk-tales are to be met with in other parts of the world, and the list of water-sprites and river-goddesses is almost endless. Greater than "Mother Volga," is "Mother Ganges," to whom countless sacrifices have been made. In the language of the Caddo Indians, the Mississippi is called bahat sassin, "mother of rivers."
Mother-Plant.
The ancient Peruvians had their "Mother Maize," Mama Cora, which they worshipped with a sort of harvest-home having, as Andrew Lang points out, something in common with the children's last sheaf, in the north-country (English and Scotch) "kernaby," as well as with the "Demeter of the threshing-floor," of whom Theocritus speaks (484. 18).
An interesting legend of the Indians of the Pueblos of Arizona and New Mexico is recorded by Muller (509. 60). Ages ago there dwelt on the green plains a beautiful woman, who refused all wooers, though they brought many precious gifts. It came to pass that the land was sore distressed by dearth and famine, and when the people appealed to the woman she gave them maize in plenty. One day, she lay asleep naked; a rain-drop falling upon her breast, she conceived and bore a son, from whom are descended the people who built the "Casas Grandes." Dr. Fewkes cites a like myth of the Hopi or Tusayan Indians in which appears ko-kyan-wuq-ti, "the spider woman," a character possessing certain attributes of the Earth-Mother. Speaking of certain ceremonies in which Ca-li-ko, the corn-goddess, figures, he calls attention to the fact that "in initiations an ear of corn is given to the novice as a symbolic representation of mother. The corn is the mother of all initiated persons of the tribe" (389 (1894). 48).
Mr. Lummis also speaks of "Mother Corn" among the Pueblos Indians: "A flawless ear of pure white corn (type of fertility and motherhood) is decked out with a downy mass of snow-white feathers, and hung with ornaments of silver, coral, and the precious turquoise" (302. 72).
Concerning the Pawnee Indians, Mr. Grinnell tells us that after the separation of the peoples, the boy (medicine-man) who was with the few who still remained at the place from which the others had departed, going their different ways, found in the sacred bundle—the Shekinah of the tribe—an ear of corn. To the people he said: "We are to live by this, this is our Mother." And from "Mother Corn" the Indians learned how to make bows and arrows. When these Indians separated into three bands (according to the legend), the boy broke off the nub of the ear and gave it to the Mandans, the big end he gave to the Pawnees, and the middle to the Rees. This is why, at the present time, the Pawnees have the best and largest corn, the Rees somewhat inferior, and the Mandans the shortest of all—since they planted the pieces originally given them (480 (1893). 125).
The old Mexicans had in Cinteotl a corn-goddess and deity of fertility in whose honour even human sacrifices were made. She was looked upon as "the producer," especially of children, and sometimes represented with a child in her arms (509. 491).
In India there is a regular cult of the holy basil (Ocymum sanetum), or Tulasi, as it is called, which appears to be a transformation of the goddess Lakshmi. It may be gathered for pious purposes only, and in so doing the following prayer is offered: "Mother Tulasi, be thou propitious. If I gather thee with care, be merciful unto me. O Tulasi, mother of the world, I beseech thee." This plant is worshipped as a deity,—the wife of Vishnu, whom the breaking of even a little twig grieves and torments,—and "the pious Hindus invoke the divine herb for the protection of every part of the body, for life and for death, and in every action of life; but above all, in its capacity of ensuring children to those who desire to have them." To him who thoughtlessly or wilfully pulls up the plant "no happiness, no health, no children." The Tulasi opens the gates of heaven; hence on the breast of the pious dead is placed a leaf of basil, and the Hindu "who has religiously planted and cultivated the Tulasi, obtains the privilege of ascending to the palace of Vishnu, surrounded by ten millions of parents" (448. 244).
In Denmark, there is a popular belief that in the elder (Sambucus) there lives a spirit or being known as the "elder-mother" (hylde-moer), or "elder-woman" (hilde-qvinde), and before elder-branches may be cut this petition is uttered: "Elder-mother, elder-mother, allow me to cut thy branches." In Lower Saxony the peasant repeats, on bended knees, with hands folded, three times the words: "Lady Elder, give me some of thy wood; then will I also give thee some of mine, when it grows in the forest" (448. 318-320). In Huntingdonshire, England, the belief in the "elder-mother" is found, and it is thought dangerous to pluck the flowers, while elder-wood, in a room, or used for a cradle, is apt to work evil for children. In some parts of England, it is believed that boys beaten with an elder stick will be retarded in their growth; in Sweden, women who are about to become mothers kiss the elder. In Germany, a somewhat similar personification of the juniper, "Frau Wachholder," exists. And here we come into touch with the dryads and forest-sprites of all ages, familiar to us in the myths of classic antiquity and the tales of the nursery (448. 396).
In a Bengalese tale, the hero, on coming to a forest, cries: "O mother kachiri, please make way for me, or else I die," and the wood opens to let him pass through (426. 250).
Perhaps the best and sweetest story of plant mythology under this head is Hans Christian Andersen's beautiful tale of "The Elder-Tree Mother,"—the Dryad whose name is Remembrance (393. 215).
Mother-Thumb.
Our word thumb signifies literally "thick or big finger," and the same idea occurs in other languages. With not a few primitive 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 Bakairi 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." |
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