Another form of assistance by birds is found among the Zulus. The birth of Unthlatu was on this wise. Two pigeons came to his mother, who was a chief’s wife. One said: “Vukutu;” the other asked: “Why do you say ‘Vukutu,’ since she has no children?” They bargain with her for a feed of castor-oil berries in exchange for the promise of a child. When they had eaten the berries they scarified her in two places on the loins, saying: “You will now have a child.” She accordingly gave birth to a beautiful boy, whom she hid in a boa’s skin to save him from the envy of her fellow-wives; for they had only given birth to brutes. In a variant the pigeons direct the woman to take a horn and cup herself, draw out a clot of blood, place it in a pot, lute it down and only uncover it in the ninth month. She acts accordingly; and on opening the pot a child is found within, to the astonishment of herself and her husband. Here, too, she has to hide the boy from the envy of the other women.[98.1]
A favourite märchen in Italy and Sicily is one which approaches far more nearly to the Danae type of the Perseus group. As told in Sicily, a king unblessed with issue summons a wizard, to inquire of him whether his queen will have a babe, or not. The wizard replies that she will have a daughter, who in her fourteenth year will be impregnated by the sun. The child is accordingly born, and shut up with her nurse in a tower where the sun cannot penetrate. One day the little maiden finds a pointed bone in her food; and with its aid she scratches the wall of the tower until she scrapes a hole in it. Through this hole the sun shines on her and fulfils the prediction. A daughter is born in due course and exposed, but found by a king’s son, who ultimately falls in love with her, and weds her after learning of what ancestry she comes.[99.1] The opening of this tale admits of many variations having nothing to do with the Supernatural Birth. Thus, in a Greek story from Epirus, a woman prays to the sun for a daughter, promising him that he may take her away when she is twelve years old. When she obtains the child, however, she seeks to evade the fulfilment of her promise, and hides the girl in the house, stopping up all windows, chinks and holes whereby the sun can reach her. But she forgets to stop up the keyhole; and the sun sends a ray that way into the house to seize and bring him the maiden.[99.2] A Florentine story represents the astrologer as predicting that the lass will be carried away by the wind; and all precautions against her destiny are vain.[100.1] In another Sicilian tradition the soothsayer is wisely vaguer, his denunciations only extending to a dreadful fate at the age of eleven. A bird comes in through the hole the maiden has bored in the wall of her tower, and becomes a man. He is, in fact, an enchanted prince; and the misfortune she undergoes is the loss of her beauty in disenchanting him—a woe of light account in fairyland, where the virtuous are ever rewarded.[100.2] A tale from the Azores relates that a king to whom a daughter had been born consulted his book of astrology; and in obedience to the directions he there found he confined her at the age of twelve in a tower having only one aperture, by which food was conveyed to her, and commanded that no bones be left in the meat supplied. By accident his command was disobeyed; a duke dressed, like MacKineely in the Irish tale, in female attire gains an opportunity of talking with her through the aperture. Who could resist such a temptation? The bone she had found in her food she utilises to enlarge the opening, so as to get out and flee with him.[100.3] A similar illustration of the impossibility of cheating fate occurs in an old Hebrew manuscript. King Solomon, we learn from this veracious authority, had a beautiful daughter whose horoscope disclosed that she was to marry a poor Israelite of low birth. He therefore built a very high tower with no entrance, and there he imprisoned her with a stock of victuals. For some time his precautions appeared successful; but after a while a poor youth, exhausted from long travel, took shelter for the night in the carcase of an ox. When he had fallen asleep a large bird obligingly carried carcase and youth up to the roof of the tower. There to his great surprise he found himself the next morning; and, like the prince borne by the Enchanted Horse in the Arabian Nights, he lost no time in making the princess’ acquaintance. They speedily fell in love with one another; but, with scruples that King Solomon perhaps would hardly have appreciated, he wrote a marriage contract in his own blood, calling upon God and the angels Michael and Gabriel to witness it.[101.1] In a modern Transylvanian Gipsy version the foreign “common” man is carried up by a magical wooden bird, with which he has been gifted by Saint Nicholas in return for hospitality when the saint appeared to him in beggar’s guise. Though a favourite with the saint, his conscience does not seem to have been quite so tender as that of the poor Israelite.[101.2] These tales carry us back to that of Gilgamos, as it is recounted by Ælian.
Happily I am not called upon to stand sponsor here for every irregular birth in a fairy tale. Cases of birth direct from fruit, diminutive births, impregnation in the ordinary way but by a supernatural being, and other instances, therefore need not detain us. But we ought not altogether to overlook the widespread story of The Lucky Fool. In the Pentameron Basile has given us what may be regarded as the typical form. Pervonto is a ninny who, going to cut wood in the forest, finds three youths asleep and perspiring in the hot sunshine. Taking pity on them, he sets up a shade of oak-leaves over their heads; and on their awaking they endow him with the power of obtaining anything by a wish. When the hero has made up a bundle of wood he sets himself astride of it and wishes it to carry him home. On the way he passes on his strange palfrey the king’s palace; and the princess Vastolla, beholding him from the window, bursts out into loud laughter. Pervonto retorts by wishing her to become pregnant by him. The wish takes effect. Her children are twin boys; and at a banquet given by the king, to which all his male subjects are summoned, they identify their father. The king, enraged, encloses them with his daughter and Pervonto in a cask, and flings the cask into the sea. Again Pervonto’s magical wish becomes useful; for by its means he saves them all from peril, changes himself into a fair youth, and at last is reconciled to the king and recognised as Vastolla’s husband. Whence Basile, or the lady into whose mouth he puts the tale, draws the very relevant moral: Man proposes, God disposes.[102.1]
CHAPTER V.
THE SUPERNATURAL BIRTH IN SAGAS.
Hitherto, dealing exclusively with märchen, or tales told for simple amusement, we have found the incident of the Supernatural Birth, outside the cycle of the Perseus myth, widely scattered in Europe, in Asia as far east as Annam, southward among the Zulu kraals of Africa and northward among the snows of Greenland. Nor does it occur in modern folklore only. It formed one of the chain of events in a tale of wonder carefully guarded for us through the long silence of three thousand years by an Egyptian mummy, to whose arms it had been intrusted at his burial, a precious fragment of the literature he had known and loved in life, and therefore deemed a gift appropriate to his service in his everlasting home. But the story of Perseus was, at all events in early ages, believed as an actual occurrence by the simple folk of Greece and wherever Greek influence extended the hero’s cult. Has the possibility of a Supernatural Birth of this kind been credited elsewhere and under other conditions of culture? In a land dominated by Christian thought the question seems superfluous. The mystery taught by the creeds of the Church, however, is believed to be something apart from all the other beliefs of the world, something altogether above them, alike in its evidence and its consequences. Christians in thus thinking overlook the fact that to the believer in any religion its evidences are undeniable and its claims are supreme. The fact is that the incident in question is part and parcel of many other religions than the Christian, and is also gravely accepted among what we may call the secular and quasi-historical traditions of tribes in various parts of the Old and New World. Beyond this, as we shall see in another chapter, pregnancy is held actually producible by means analogous to those described in the legends, means outside the ordinary operations of nature. Into the bearing of these facts on the dogma of the Supernatural Birth of Jesus Christ, or on the historical evidence on which that dogma rests, it is not my purpose to inquire. This is a question of apologetics, not of folklore.
Many stories of Supernatural Birth belong to the cosmogonic legends of savage and barbarous tribes. These we may for the most part pass over. What may have happened to the monsters that in the dawn of things were the first to loom upon the horizon is hardly relevant. They may have had reasons of their own for their extraordinary conduct. Our business is with beings conceived in distinctly human terms and something like human proportions. The distinction may be hard to define, seeing that savage tribes hold savage opinions as to the power of men and brutes (or of some men, at least, and some brutes) to change their forms at will. In the same way märchen have no clear dividing line in the savage mind from sagas (or stories believed in as recording actual events) nor religious narratives from secular histories. It is one of the characteristics of savagery that these things are not as yet differentiated. Intellectual evolution is going on; but until a much higher grade of civilisation be reached we cannot be sure that the divergence is complete. If, therefore, some of the stories I am going to refer to seem scarcely within the limits I have laid down, these difficulties in the way of definition must be borne in mind.
We began our review of märchen containing the incident of the Supernatural Birth by examples of the results of eating a magical fish or fruit. The fish is a means of impregnation comparatively little known in sagas. A legend of the Tupis of Brazil, however, bearing resemblances to stories of the type of Beauty and the Beast, represents the hero, a supernatural being, as fertilising a young virgin by means of a mysterious fish.[105.1] A curious piece of gossip is recorded by John Aubrey concerning Archbishop Abbot’s mother, who is said to have dreamed that if she ate a jack the son then in her womb would be a great man. Accordingly, “she arose early the next morning and went with her pail to the river-side (which runneth by the house, now an ale-house, the sign of the Three Mariners) to take up some water, and in the water in the pail she found a good jack, which she dressed, and ate it all, or very near.” Her son in due time was born, and grew up to be Archbishop of Canterbury.[105.2] If not exactly a great man, he was an able and honest one and a patriot, who suffered, by no means alone, from the superstition, or the malignity, of his successor, the “martyr” Laud.
On the other hand, the eating of fruit is found in both hemispheres. In India it is told, as we might have expected, of the birth of Râjâ Rasâlû. Rânî Lonân, one of the two wives of Râjâ Sâlbâhan of Siâlkot, fell in love with her stepson Pûran, and, because he did not return her passion, traduced him to her husband, who cut off his hands and feet and threw him into a well. Pûran, however, like the hero of the Bulgarian ballad, survived this cruel treatment. After some years he was rescued by the Gurû Gorakhnâth, a Brahman of great sanctity, and became a celebrated fakir. Not knowing who he really was, the Rânî and her husband, desirous of offspring, came to him to pray for a son. He induced her to confess her crime; then, revealing himself, he gave her a grain of rice to eat, and told her she would bear a son who would be learned and brave and holy. That son was Râjâ Rasâlû, a monarch identified with the historical Sri Syâlapati Deva.[106.1] Gogá, a favourite Mahratta saint, is said to have been childless until his guardian deity bestowed upon him two barleycorns, one of which he gave to his wife and the other to his favourite mare. A son and the famous steed Javadia were the consequence.[106.2] The ancestry of the present, or Manchu, dynasty of China is traced to a heavenly maiden, who, having bathed one day in a certain pool, found on the skirt of her raiment a red fruit, placed there by a magpie. After eating it she found herself pregnant, and was delivered of a son of remarkable appearance, who spoke on the day of his birth. In obedience to a supernatural voice she called him Aisin-gioro, ‘the heaven-born to restore order to disturbed nations.’ Having grown up, he embarked in a boat and drifted down the river, until he reached a place where families of three surnames were in constant broils. There he landed, and was breaking off willow branches, when a warrior, coming to draw water, saw him. Amazed at the hero’s aspect, the warrior fetched his people, who came and inquired who he was. “I am the son of the heavenly maiden Fokolun,” replied the youth, “ordained by heaven to restore peace among you.” They took him and made him king; and he reigned there in Odoli city, in the desert of Omohi, east of the mountains of Ch’ang-pai-shan. A Japanese tradition, reported by Père Amyot, appears to be a variant of the same story. It relates that three heavenly maids, of whom Fokolun was one, descended to bathe. While they were praying Fokolun saw a tree half-covered with black cherries. She proceeded to eat of them, with the consequences we know. Being in this condition, she could not return with her sisters until she had brought forth her son and handed him over to a fisherman to be bred up.[107.1] Fokolun is identified by Amyot with a goddess whom he calls Pussa. It is quite possible that the present dynasty of China owes this legendary origin to a similar feeling to that which dictated so many of the mediæval miracle-stories in Europe. Fo-hi, the original founder of the Empire, was said to have sprung from a virgin named Ching-Mon, who ate a certain flower found on her garment after bathing. The striking resemblance to this tale of that of Fokolun is due to conscious forgery as little, and as much, as the achievements of Christian saints, equalling and surpassing the wonders recorded in the Bible.[108.1]
The magpie mentioned in the Chinese version of the legend just recorded is replaced by a crow in the analogous incident at the opening of the Volsungasaga. A childless king and queen, we are told, besought the gods for an heir. Frigg, the mother-goddess, heard their prayers and sent them, in the guise of a crow, the daughter of the giant Hrimnir, and with her an apple, of which when the queen had eaten, she soon perceived that her wish would come to pass.[108.2] In the fiftieth rune, that beautiful postscript to the Kalevala, Marjatta, the fair and gentle virgin, is addressed by the red bilberry and invited to pluck and eat. With the help of a staff she reaches down the mysterious fruit; but from the ground it climbs her shoe and then her knee, and so upward to her mouth, into which it slips and is swallowed. In this way she conceives. Her parents’ reproaches are met by the assertion that she is the paramour of none unless it be of fire, and that she will bear a hero who will rule the mighty, albeit Väinämöinen himself. In her extremity she applies to Ruotus for the vapour-bath which Finnish women are accustomed to take to facilitate delivery; but from him and his loathsome wife she gets nothing better than a contemptuous recommendation of a stable in the fir-forest. There, in a vapour-bath of the breath of horses, her child is born, and cradled in a manger. She cares for him as a mother; but after a while he suddenly disappears, and she goes seeking him everywhere. In her wandering she meets a star, and, sinking before it on her knees, she asks:
“ ‘O thou star, that God created!
Of my son dost thou know nothing,
Where my darling son abideth,
Where my golden apple tarries?’
And the star made haste to answer:
‘If I knew I would not say it;
He it is who hath created
Me to gleam thro’ cold and evil,
Me to sparkle in the darkness.’ ”