Having said this, she departed, and Gega knew now that Nunzia was a white witch or a fairy. So, becoming rich, she was a lady, and ever after took good care of her loom and distrusted flattering friends.
This legend exists as a fairy-tale in many forms, and may be found in many countries; perhaps its beginning was in that of the princess who could spin straw into gold. To have some object which produces food or money ad libitum when called on, to be cheated out of it, and finally be revenged on the cheater, is known to all.
Virgil is in one of these tales naïvely called a saint, and in this he is seriously addressed as a god, by which we, of course, understand a classical heathen deity, or any spirit powerful enough to answer prayer with personal favours. But Virgil as the maker of a magic loom which yields gold and silk, and as a god at the same time, indicates a very possible derivation from a very grand ancient myth. The reader is probably familiar with the address of the Time Spirit in Goethe’s “Faust”:
“In Being’s flood, in action’s storm,
I work and weave, above, beneath—
Work and weave in endless motion
Birth and Death—an infinite ocean,
A-seizing and giving
The fire of the Living.
’Tis thus at the roaring loom of Time I ply,
And weave for God the garment thou see’st Him by.”
Thomas Carlyle informs us, in “Sartor Resartus,” that of the thousands who have spouted this really very intelligible formula of pantheism, none have understood it—implying thereby that to him it was no mystery. But Carlyle apparently did not know, else he would surely have told the reader, that the idea was derived from the Sanskrit myth that Maya (delusion or appearance), “the feminine half of the divine primitive creator (Urwesen), was represented as weaving the palpable universe from herself, for which reason she was typified as a spider.” [178] Hence Maia of the Greeks; and it is a curious coincidence that Maia in the Neapolitan legends is the mother of Virgil, all of which is confused, and may be accidental, but there may also be in it the remains of some curious and very ancient tradition. The spider was, however, certainly the emblem of domestic, stay-at-home, steady industry, as Friedrich illustrates, therefore of prosperity, hence it is believed to bring luck to those on whom it crawls, as set forth in the novel of “The Red Spider.” And it is evident that the moral of this tale of Virgil’s loom is to the effect that the heroine gained her good fortune by hard work at home, and came to grief by gadding abroad and playing the belle.
That Maia, or Illusion or Glamour, should, according to our tradition, be the mother of the greatest thaumaturgist, wonder-worker, poet, and sorcerer of yore is curious. That the original Maya of India should be the living loom from which the universe is spun, and that in another tale the same magician, her son, is a god who makes a magic loom which spins gold, silver, and silk, may be all mere chance coincidence, but, if so, it is strange enough to rank as a miracle per se.
The name Gega, with g the second soft, is very nearly Gaia, the Goddess of the Earth, who was one with Maia, as a type of the Universe.
As I regard this as a tradition of some importance, I would state that it owes nothing whatever to any inquiry, hint, or suggestion from me; that it was gathered from witch authority by Maddalena, near Prato; and, finally, that it is very faithfully translated, with the exception of the passages indicated by brackets, which were inserted by me to make the text clearer—a very necessary thing in most of these tales, where much is often palpably omitted. I have seldom had a story so badly written as this was; it appears to have been taken down without correction from some illiterate old woman, who hardly understood what she was narrating.
It is to be observed that in a number of these tales the proper names are strangely antique and significant. They are not such as are in use among the people, they would not even be known to most who are tolerably well read. I have only found several after special search in mythologies, etc.; and yet they are, I sincerely believe, in all cases appropriate to the tradition as in this case.