Somewhat similar beliefs prevailed in ancient Mexico and among the
Eskimo.
Even so with the father. Zoroaster said in the book of the law: "I name the married before the unmarried, him who has a household before him who has none, the father of a family before him who is childless" (125. I. 108). Dr. Winternitz observes of the Jews: "To possess children was always the greatest good-fortune that could befall a Jew. It was deemed the duty of every man to beget a son; the Rabbis, indeed, considered a childless man as dead. To the Cabbalists of the Middle Ages, the man who left no posterity behind him seemed one who had not fulfilled his mission in this world, and they believed that he had to return once more to earth and complete it" (385. 5).
Ploss (125. I. 108) and Lallemand (286. 21) speak in like terms of this children-loving people. The Talmud ranks among the dead "the poor, the leprous, the blind, and those who have no children," and the wives of the patriarchs of old cheerfully adopted as their own the children born to their husband by slave or concubine. To be the father of a large family, the king of a numerous people, was the ideal of the true Israelite. So, also, was it in India and China.
Ploss and Haberlandt have a good deal to say of the ridicule lavished upon old maids and bachelors among the various peoples and races, and Rink has recorded not a few tales on this head from the various tribes of the Eskimo—in these stories, which are of a more or less trifling and outré character, bachelors are unmercifully derided (525. 465).
With the Chippeways, also, the bachelor is a butt for wit and sarcasm. A tale of the Mississagas of Skugog represents a bachelor as "having gone off to a certain spot and built a lot of little 'camps.' He built fires, etc., and passed his time trying to make people believe he was not alone. He used to laugh and talk, and pretend that he had people living there." Even the culture-heroes Gluskap and Näniboju are derided in some of the tales for not being married (166. 376).
According to Barbosa (67. 161), a writer of the early part of the sixteenth century, the Nairs, a Dravidian people of the Malabar coast (523. 159), believed that "a maiden who refused to marry and remained a virgin would be shut out of Paradise." The Fijians excluded from Paradise all bachelors; they were smashed to pieces by the god Nangganangga (166. 137).
In the early chronicles and mythic lore of many peoples there are tales of childless couples, who, in their quaint fashion, praying to the gods, have been blest with the desired offspring. There is, however, no story more pathetic, or more touching, than the Russian folk-tale cited by Ralston, in which we read concerning an old childless couple (520. 176): "At last the husband went into the forest, felled wood, and made a cradle. Into this his wife laid one of the logs he had cut, and began swinging it, crooning the while a tune beginning:—
'Swing, blockie dear, swing.'
After a little time, behold! the block already had legs. The old woman rejoiced greatly, and began swinging anew, and went on swinging until the block became a babe."
The rude prayers and uncouth aspirations of barbarous and savage peoples, these crude ideas of the uncivilized races of men, when sounded in their deepest depths, are the folk-expression of the sacredness of the complete family, the forerunners of the poet's prayer:—