"Father of all! in every age,
In every clime adored,
By saint, by savage, and by sage,
Jehovah, Jove, or Lord,"
having started from the same thought as the Hebrews in the infancy of their race. An Eastern legend of the child Abraham has crystallized the idea. It is said that one morning, while with his mother in the cave in which they were hiding from Nimrod, he asked his mother, "Who is my God?" and she replied, "It is I." "And who is thy God?" he inquired farther. "Thy father" (547.69). Hence also we derive the declaration of Du Vair, "Nous devons tenir nos pères comme des dieux en terre," and the statement of another French writer, of whom Westermarck says: "Bodin wrote, in the later part of the sixteenth century, that, though the monarch commands his subjects, the master his disciples, the captain his soldiers, there is none to whom nature has given any command except the father, 'who is the true image of the great sovereign God, universal father of all things'" (166. 238).
Father-Sky.
"Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridal of the earth and sky,"
sang the poet Herbert, unconsciously renewing an ancient myth. As many cosmologies tell, Day and Dawn were born of the embraces of Earth and Sky. Ushas, Eos, Aurora, is the daughter of heaven, and one story of the birth is contained in the Maori myth of Papa and Rangi. Ushas, Max Muller tells us, "has two parents, heaven and earth, whose lap she fills with light" (510. 431). From Rangi, "Father-Sky," and Papa, "Mother-Earth," say the Maoris of New Zealand, sprang all living things; and, in like manner, the Chinese consider the Sky or Heaven,—Yang, the masculine, procreative, active element,—to be the "father of all things," while the Earth,—Yu, the feminine, conceiving, passive element,—is the "mother of all things." From the union of these two everything in existence has arisen, and consequently resembles the one or the other (529. 107).
Among the primitive Aryans, the Sky, or Heaven God, was called "Father," as shown by the Sanskrit Dyaus Pitâr, Greek Zeus Patær, Latin Jupiter, all of which names signify "sky father." Dyaus is also called janitâr, "producer, father," and Zeus, the "eternal father of men," the "father of gods and men, the ruler and preserver of the world." In the Vedic hymns are invocations of Dyaus (Sky), as "our Father," and of Prithivi (Earth), as "our Mother" (388. 210).
Dyaus symbolizes the "bright sky"; from the same primitive Indo-European root come the Latin words dies (day), deus or divus (god); the dark sombre vault of heaven is Varuna, the Greek [Greek: Ouranós], Latin Uranus.
Other instances of the bridal of earth and sky,—of "mother earth," and "father sky,"—are found among the tribes of the Baltic, the Lapps, the Finns (who have Ukko, "Father Heaven," Akka, "Mother Earth"), and other more barbaric peoples.
In Ashanti, the new deity, which the introduction of Christianity has added to the native pantheon, is called Nana Nyankupon, "Grandfather-sky" (438. 24).
The shaman of the Buryats of Alarsk prays to "Father Heaven"; in the
Altai Mountains the prayer is to