Mannhardt takes the old Egyptian tale of ‘The Two Brothers,’ Bitiou and Anepou. This fable, as old, in actual written literature, as Moses, is a complex of half the Märchen plots and incidents in the world. It opens with the formula of Potiphar’s Wife. The falsely accused brother flies, and secretes his life, or separable soul, in a flower of the mystic Vale of Acacias. This affair of the separable soul may be studied in Mr. Hartland’s Perseus, and it animates, as we shall see, Mr. Frazer’s theory of the Origin of Totemism. A golden lock of the wicked wife’s hair is then borne by the Nile to the king’s palace in Egypt. He will insist on marrying the lady of the lock. Here we are in the Cinderella formula, en plein, which may be studied, in African and Santhal shapes, in Miss Coxe’s valuable Cinderella. [{60}] Pharaoh’s wise men decide that the owner of the lock of hair is (like Egyptian royalty at large) a daughter of the Sun-god (p. 239). Here is the Sun, in all his glory; but here we are dealing with a literary version of the Märchen, accommodated to royal tastes and Egyptian ideas of royalty by a royal scribe, the courtly Perrault of the Egyptian Roi-Soleil. Who can say what he introduced?—while we can say that the Sun-god is absent in South African and Santhal and other variants. The Sun may have slipped out here, may have been slipped in there; the faintest glimmer of the historical sense prevents us from dogmatising.
Wedded to Pharaoh, the wicked wife, pursuing her vengeance on Bitiou, cuts down his life-tree. Anepou, his brother, however, recovers his concealed heart (life), and puts it in water. Bitiou revives. He changes himself into the sacred Bull, Apis—a feature in the story which is practically possible in Egypt alone. The Bull tells the king his story, but the wicked wife has the Bull slain, as by Cambyses in Herodotus. Two of his blood-drops become two persea trees. One of them confesses the fact to the wicked wife. She has them cut down; a chip flies into her mouth, she becomes a mother by the chip, the boy (Bitiou) again becomes king, and slays his mother, the wicked wife.
In the tree, any tree, acacia or persea, Mannhardt wishes to recognise the Sun-tree of the Lett songs. The red blossoms of the persea tree are a symbol of the Sun-tree: of Horus. He compares features, not always very closely analogous, in European Märchen. For example, a girl hides in a tree, like Charles II. at Boscobel. That is not really analogous with Bitiou’s separable life in the acacia! ‘Anepou’ is like ‘Anapu,’ Anubis. The Bull is the Sun, is Osiris—dead in winter. Mr. Frazer, Mannhardt’s disciple, protests à grands cris against these identifications when made by others than Mannhardt, who says, ‘The Märchen is an old obscure solar myth’ (p. 242). To others the story of Bitiou seems an Egyptian literary complex, based on a popular set of tales illustrating furens quid femina possit, and illustrating the world-wide theory of the separable life, dragging in formulas from other Märchen, and giving to all a thoroughly classical Egyptian colouring. [{61a}] Solar myths, we think, have not necessarily anything to make in the matter.
The Golden Fleece
Mannhardt reasons in much the same way about the Golden Fleece. This is a peculiarly Greek feature, interwoven with the world-wide Märchen of the Lad, the Giant’s helpful daughter, her aid in accomplishing feats otherwise impossible, and the pursuit of the pair by the father. I have studied the story—as it occurs in Samoa, among Red Indian tribes, and elsewhere—in ‘A Far-travelled Tale.’ [{61b}] In our late Greek versions the Quest of the Fleece of Gold occurs, but in no other variants known to me. There is a lamb (a boy changed into a lamb) in Romaic. His fleece is of no interest to anybody. Out of his body grows a tree with a golden apple. Sun-yarns occur in popular songs. Mannhardt (pp. 282, 283) abounds in solar explanations of the Fleece of Gold, hanging on the oak-tree in the dark Ææan forest. Idyia, wife of the Colchian king, ‘is clearly the Dawn.’ Aia is the isle of the Sun. Helle=Surya, a Sanskrit Sun-goddess; the golden ram off whose back she falls, while her brother keeps his seat, is the Sun. Her brother, Phrixus, may be the Daylight. The oak-tree in Colchis is the Sun-tree of the Lettish songs. Perseus is a hero of Light, born in the Dark Tower (Night) from the shower of gold (Sun-rays).
‘We can but say “it may be so,”’ but who could explain all the complex Perseus-saga as a statement about elemental phenomena? Or how can the Far-travelled Tale of the Lad and the Giant’s Daughter be interpreted to the same effect, above all in the countless examples where no Fleece of Gold occurs? The Greek tale of Jason is made up of several Märchen, as is the Odyssey, by epic poets. These Märchen have no necessary connection with each other; they are tagged on to each other, and localised in Greece and on the Euxine. [{62a}] A poetic popular view of the Sun may have lent the peculiar, and elsewhere absent, incident of the quest of the Fleece of Gold on the shores of the Black Sea. The old epic poets may have borrowed from popular songs like the Lettish chants (p. 328). A similar dubious adhesion may be given by us in the case of Castor and Polydeuces (Morning and Evening Stars?), and Helen (Dawn), [{62b}] and the Hesperides (p. 234). The germs of the myths may be popular poetical views of elemental phenomena. But to insist on elemental allegories through all the legends of the Dioskouroi, and of the Trojan war, would be to strain a hypothesis beyond the breaking-point. Much, very much, is epic invention, unverkennbar das werk der Dichter (p. 328).
Mannhardt’s Approach to Mr. Max Müller
In this essay on Lettish Sun-songs (1875) Mannhardt comes nearest to Mr. Max Müller. He cites passages from him with approval (cf. pp. 314, 322). His explanations, by aid of Sun-songs, of certain features in Greek mythology are plausible, and may be correct. But we turn to Mannhardt’s explicit later statement of his own position in 1877, and to his posthumous essays, published in 1884; and, on the whole, we find, in my opinion, much more difference from than agreement with the Oxford Professor, whose Dawn-Daphne and other equations Mannhardt dismisses, and to whose general results (in mythology) he assigns a value so restricted. It is a popular delusion that the anthropological mythologists deny the existence of solar myths, or of nature-myths in general. These are extremely common. What we demur to is the explanation of divine and heroic myths at large as solar or elemental, when the original sense has been lost by the ancient narrators, and when the elemental explanation rests on conjectural and conflicting etymologies and interpretations of old proper names—Athene, Hera, Artemis, and the rest. Nevertheless, while Mannhardt, in his works on Tree-cult, and on Field and Wood Cult, and on the ‘Corn Demon,’ has wandered far from ‘his old colours’—while in his posthumous essays he is even more of a deserter, his essay on Lettish Sun-myths shows an undeniable tendency to return to Mr. Max Müller’s camp. This was what made his friends so anxious. It is probably wisest to form our opinion of his final attitude on his preface to his last book published in his life-time. In that the old colours are not exactly his chosen banner; nor can the flag of the philological school be inscribed tandem triumphans.
In brief, Mannhardt’s return to his old colours (1875-76) seems to have been made in a mood from which he again later passed away. But either modern school of mythology may cite him as an ally in one or other of his phases of opinion.