As Odin’s single eye seems certainly to be the sun in heaven, one may guess what is the lost eye in the well—perhaps the sun’s own reflection in any pool, or more likely that of the moon, which in popular myth is told of as found in the well.[[462]] Possibly, too, some such solar fancy may explain part of the myth of Perseus. There are three Scandinavian Norns, whose names are Urdhr, Verdhandi, and Skuld—Was, and Is, and Shall-be—and these three maidens are the ‘Weird sisters’ who fix the lifetime of all men. So the Fates, the Parkai, daughters of the inevitable Anágkē, divide among them the periods of time: Lachesis sings the past, Klôthô the present, Atropos the future. Now is it allowable to consider these fatal sisters as of common nature with two other mythic sister-triads—the Graiai and their kinsfolk the Gorgons?[[463]] If it be so, it is easy to understand why of the three Gorgons one alone was mortal, whose life her two immortal sisters could not save, for the deathless past and future cannot save the ever-dying present. Nor would the riddle be hard to read, what is the one eye that the Graiai had between them, and passed from one to another?—the eye of day—the sun, that the past gives up to the present, and the present to the future.
Compared with the splendid Lord of Day, the pale Lady of Night takes, in myth as in nature, a lower and lesser place. Among the wide legendary group which associates together Sun and Moon, two striking examples are to be seen in the traditions by which half-civilized races of South America traced their rise from the condition of the savage tribes around them. These legends have been appealed to even by modern writers as gratefully remembered records of real human benefactors, who carried long ago to America the culture of the Old World. But happily for historic truth, mythic tradition tells its tales without expurgating the episodes which betray its real character to more critical observation. The Muyscas of the high plains of Bogota were once, they said, savages without agriculture, religion, or law; but there came to them from the East an old and bearded man, Bochica, the child of the Sun, and he taught them to till the fields, to clothe themselves, to worship the gods, to become a nation. But Bochica had a wicked, beautiful wife, Huythaca, who loved to spite and spoil her husband’s work; and she it was who made the river swell till the land was covered by a flood, and but a few of mankind escaped to the mountain-tops. Then Bochica was wroth, and he drove the wicked Huythaca from the earth, and made her the Moon, for there had been no moon before; and he cleft the rocks and made the mighty cataract of Tequendama, to let the deluge flow away. Then, when the land was dry, he gave to the remnant of mankind the year and its periodic sacrifices, and the worship of the Sun. Now the people who told this myth had not forgotten, what indeed we might guess without their help, that Bochica was himself Zuhé, the Sun, and Huythaca the Sun’s wife, the Moon.[[464]]
Like to this in meaning, though different in fancy, is the civilization-myth of the Incas. Men, said this Quichua legend, were savages dwelling in caves like wild beasts devouring wild roots and fruit and human flesh, covering themselves with leaves and bark or skins of animals. But our father the Sun took pity on them, and sent two of his children, Manco Ccapac and his sister-wife, Mama Occllo these rose from the lake of Titicaca, and gave to the uncultured hordes law and government, marriage and moral order, tillage and art and science. Thus was founded the great Peruvian empire, where in after ages each Inca and his sister-wife, continuing the mighty race of Manco Ccapac and Mama Occllo, represented in rule and religion not only the first earthly royal ancestors, but the heavenly father and mother of whom we can see these to be personifications, namely, the Sun himself, and his sister-wife the Moon.[[465]] Thus the nations of Bogota and Peru, remembering their days of former savagery, and the association of their culture with their national religion, embodied their traditions in myths of an often-recurring type, ascribing to the gods themselves, in human shape, the establishment of their own worship.
The ‘inconstant moon’ figures in a group of characteristic stories. Australian legend says that Mityan, the Moon, was a native cat, who fell in love with some one else’s wife, and was driven away to wander ever since.[[466]] The Khasias of the Himalaya say that the Moon falls monthly in love with his mother-in-law, who throws ashes in his face, whence his spots.[[467]] Slavonic legend, following the same track, says that the Moon, King of Night and husband of the Sun, faithlessly loved the Morning Star, wherefore he was cloven through in punishment, as we see him in the sky.[[468]] By a different train of thought, the Moon’s periodic death and revival has suggested a painful contrast to the destiny of man, in one of the most often-repeated and characteristic myths of South Africa, which is thus told among the Namaqua. The Moon once sent the Hare to Men to give this message, ‘Like as I die and rise to life again, so you also shall die and rise to life again,’ but the Hare went to the Men and said, ‘Like as I die and do not rise again, so you shall also die and not rise to life again.’ Then the Hare returned and told the Moon what he had done, and the Moon struck at him with a hatchet and slit his lip, as it has remained ever since, and some say the Hare fled and is still fleeing, but others say he clawed at the Moon’s face and left the scars that are still to be seen on it, and they also say that the reason why the Namaqua object to eating the hare (a prejudice which in fact they share with very different races) is because he brought to men this evil message.[[469]] It is remarkable that a story so closely resembling this, that it is difficult not to suppose both to be versions from a common original, is told in the distant Fiji Islands. There was a dispute between two gods as to how man should die: ‘Ra Vula (the Moon) contended that man should be like himself—disappear awhile and then live again. Ra Kalavo (the Rat) would not listen to this kind proposal, but said, “Let man die as a rat dies.” And he prevailed.’ The dates of the versions seem to show that the presence of these myths among the Hottentots and Fijians, at the two opposite sides of the globe, is at any rate not due to transmission in modern times.[[470]]
There is a very elaborate savage nature-myth of the generation of the Stars, which may unquestionably serve as a clue connecting the history of two distant tribes. The rude Mintira of the Malayan Peninsula express in plain terms the belief in a solid firmament, usual in the lower grades of civilization; they say the sky is a great pot held over the earth by a cord, and if this cord broke, everything on earth would be crushed. The Moon is a woman, and the Sun also: the Stars are the Moon’s children, and the Sun had in old times as many. Fearing, however, that mankind could not bear so much brightness and heat, they agreed each to devour her children; but the Moon, instead of eating up her stars, hid them from the Sun’s sight, who believing them all devoured, ate up her own; no sooner had she done it, than the Moon brought her family out of their hiding-place. When the Sun saw them, filled with rage she chased the Moon to kill her; the chase has lasted ever since, and sometimes the Sun even comes near enough to bite the Moon, and that is an eclipse; the Sun, as men may still see, devours his Stars at dawn, and the Moon hides hers all day while the Sun is near, and only brings them out at night when her pursuer is far away. Now among a tribe of North East India, the Ho of Chota-Nagpore, the myth reappears, obviously from the same source, but with a varied ending; the Sun cleft the Moon in twain for her deceit, and thus cloven and growing whole again she remains, and her daughters with her which are the Stars.[[471]]
From savagery up to civilization, there may be traced in the mythology of the Stars a course of thought, changed indeed in application, yet never broken in its evident connexion from first to last. The savage sees individual stars as animate beings, or combines star-groups into living celestial creatures, or limbs of them, or objects connected with them; while at the other extremity of the scale of civilization, the modern astronomer keeps up just such ancient fancies, turning them to account in useful survival, as a means of mapping out the celestial globe. The savage names and stories of stars and constellations may seem at first but childish and purposeless fancies; but it always happens in the study of the lower races, that the more means we have of understanding their thoughts, the more sense and reason do we find in them. The aborigines of Australia say that Yurree and Wanjel, who are the stars we call Castor and Pollux, pursue Purra the Kangaroo (our Capella), and kill him at the the beginning of the great heat and the mirage is the smoke of the fire they roast him by. They say also that Marpean-Kurrk and Neilloan (Arcturus and Lyra) were the discoverers of the ant-pupas and the eggs of the loan-bird, and taught the aborigines to find them for food. Translated into the language of fact, these simple myths record the summer place of the stars in question, and the seasons of ant-pupas and loan-eggs, which seasons are marked by the stars who are called their discoverers.[[472]] Not less transparent is the meaning in the beautiful Algonquin myth of the Summer-maker. In old days eternal winter reigned upon the earth, till a sprightly little animal called the Fisher, helped by other beasts his friends, broke an opening through the sky into the lovely heaven-land beyond, let the warm winds pour forth and the summer descend to earth, and opened the cages of the prisoned birds: but when the dwellers in heaven saw their birds let loose and their warm gales descending, they started in pursuit, and shooting their arrows at the Fisher, hit him at last in his one vulnerable spot at the tip of his tail; thus he died for the good of the inhabitants of earth, and became the constellation that bears his name, so that still at the proper season men see him lying as he fell toward the north on the plains of heaven, with the fatal arrow still sticking in his tail.[[473]] Compare these savage stories with Orion pursuing the Pleiad sisters who take refuge from him in the sea, and the maidens who wept themselves to death and became the starry cluster of the Hyades, whose rising and setting betokened rain: such mythic creatures might for simple significance have been invented by savages, even as the savage constellation-myths might have been made by ancient Greeks. When we consider that the Australians who can invent such myths, and invent them with such fulness of meaning, are savages who put two and one together to make their numeral for three, we may judge how deep in the history of culture those conceptions lie, of which the relics are still represented in our star-maps by Castor and Pollux, Arcturus and Sirius, Boötes and Orion, the Argo and the Charles’s Wain, the Toucan and the Southern Cross. Whether civilized or savage, whether ancient or new made after the ancient manner, such names are so like in character that any tribe of men might adopt them from any other, as American tribes are known to receive European names into their own skies, and as our constellation of the Royal Oak is said to have found its way, in new copies of the old Hindu treatises, into the company of the Seven Sages and the other ancient constellations of Brahmanic India.
Such fancies are so fanciful, that two peoples seldom fall on the same name for a constellation, while, even within the limits of the same race, terms may differ altogether. Thus the stars which we call Orion’s Belt are in New Zealand either the Elbow of Maui, or they form the stem of the Canoe of Tamarerete, whose anchor dropped from the prow is the Southern Cross.[[474]] The Great Bear is equally like a Wain, Orion’s Belt serves as well for Frigga’s or Mary’s Spindle, or Jacob’s Staff. Yet sometimes natural correspondences occur. The seven sister Pleiades seem to the Australians a group of girls playing to a corroboree; while the North American Indians call them the Dancers; and the Lapps the Company of Virgins.[[475]] Still more striking is the correspondence between savages and cultured nations in fancies of the bright starry band that lies like a road across the sky. The Basutos call it the ‘Way of the Gods;’ the Ojis say it is the ‘Way of Spirits,’ which souls go up to heaven by.[[476]] North American tribes know it as ‘the Path of the Master of Life,’ the ‘Path of Spirits,’ ‘the Road of Souls,’ where they travel to the land beyond the grave, and where their camp-fires may be seen blazing as brighter stars.[[477]] Such savage imaginations of the Milky Way fit with the Lithuanian myth of the ‘Road of the Birds,’ at whose end the souls of the good, fancied as flitting away at death like birds, dwell free and happy.[[478]] That souls dwell in the Galaxy was a thought familiar to the Pythagoreans, who gave it on their master’s word that the souls that crowd there descend, and appear to men as dreams,[[479]] and to the Manichæans whose fancy transferred pure souls to this ‘column of light,’ whence they could come down to earth and again return.[[480]] It is a fall from such ideas of the Galaxy to the Siamese ‘Road of the White Elephant,’ the Spaniards’ ‘Road of Santiago,’ or the Turkish ‘Pilgrims’ Road,’ and a still lower fall to the ‘Straw Road’ of the Syrian, the Persian, and the Turk, who thus compare it with their lanes littered with the morsels of straw that fall from the nets they carry it in.[[481]] But of all the fancies which have attached themselves to the celestial road, we at home have the quaintest. Passing along the short and crooked way from St. Paul’s to Cannon Street, one thinks to how small a remnant has shrunk the name of the great street of the Wætlingas, which in old days ran from Dover through London into Wales. But there is a Watling Street in heaven as well as on earth, once familiar to Englishmen, though now almost forgotten even in local dialect. Chaucer thus speaks of it in his ‘House of Fame:’ —
‘Lo there (quod he) cast up thine eye
Se yondir, lo, the Galaxie,
The whiche men clepe The Milky Way,