Though we are now accustomed, by reason of their grandeur and sublimity, to personify mountains as masculine, the old fable of Phædrus 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).