“Well, what do you think? During the night, back came Mother Friday, and took the dust out of that woman’s eyes, so that she was able to get about again. It’s a great sin to dishonor Mother Friday, combing and spinning flax, forsooth!”[455]
Professor Max Müller, in his “Contributions to the Science of Mythology” (New York and Bombay, 1897), cites a tradition of the as yet little known mythology of the Mordvinians, a Finnish race inhabiting the middle Volga provinces of Russia. A woman who had been working all day long on a Friday, baking bread for some orphan children, was taken up in a dream to the sun, and when she was nearly exhausted, owing to the effects of the heat, and to the rapidly increasing size of a piece of dough which she had put into her mouth, she was accosted by Chkaï, the large-eyed Mordvine sun-god, who told her that she was being punished because she had baked bread for the orphans on a Friday. She was charged, moreover, to tell all the people so. “But who will be such a fool as to believe me?” asked the woman most disrespectfully. Thereupon Chkaï placed his mark in scarlet and blue upon her forehead,—an emblem which is thought to bring luck. And after that the Mordvine women were careful to bake no bread, nor to do any other work, on a Friday.
It was a very early custom in England to appoint Friday as the day for the execution of criminals, and until recently the same was true in this country, but through the persistent efforts of the “Thirteen Club,” of New York, whose object is the discouragement of certain popular superstitions, the sixth day of the week has been partially relieved of the odium of being “hangman’s day” in the United States.
A writer of an inventive turn of mind has suggested that Friday’s unpopularity is partly owing to its being late in the week and money runs short to the poor. Saturday being the close of the week, and pay-day as well, there is no time then to be superstitious.
Some modern writers have displayed a misguided zeal in the collection of statistical evidence that Friday has been a most auspicious day in American history, and have cited among other events the surrender of Burgoyne at Saratoga, and that of Cornwallis at Yorktown, as occurring on that day. But will such an argument appeal with success to English readers? If by general consent we should teach our children that Friday was the luckiest day of the week, evidence in favor of this theory would no doubt rapidly accumulate, and the new belief would soon be worth just as much as the old one.
SUPERSTITIOUS DEALINGS WITH ANIMALS
I. RATS AND MICE AS AVENGERS
When in ancient times fields were overrun and crops destroyed by swarms of pestiferous animals or insects, these creatures were regarded either as agents of the Devil, or as being themselves veritable demons. We learn, moreover, that rats and mice were formerly especial objects of superstition, and that their actions were carefully noted as auguries of good or evil.[456] A rabbinical myth says that the rat and the hog were created by Noah as scavengers of the Ark; but the rat becoming a nuisance, the patriarch evoked a cat from the lion’s nose.[457] In the “Horapollon,” the only ancient work now known which attempted to explain Egyptian hieroglyphics, the rat is represented as a symbol of destruction. But the Egyptians also regarded this animal as a type of good judgment, because, when afforded the choice of several pieces of bread, he always selects the best.[458]