Feb. 9, 1883.] 



• KNOWL-EDGE • 



83 



and materials sell lluor spar in powder, and broken glass is 

 an article most families are acquainted with. In the 

 absence of a pestle and mortar, it may be wrapped in a 

 few folds of brown paper and struck with a hammer to 

 reduce it to powder. , ,, 



THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF MYTH. 



111. 

 By Edwakd Clodd. 



THE names given to the sun in mythologj- are as 

 manifold as his aspects and influences, and as 

 the moods of the untutored minds that endowed him 

 with the complex and contrary qualities which make up 

 the nature of man. Him, we say, not it, thus preserving 

 in our common speech a relic, not only of the universal 

 personification of things, but of their division into sex. 



The origin of gender is most obscure, but its invest- 

 ment of both animate and inanimate things with sexual 

 qualities shows it to be a product of the mythopa'ic 

 stage of man's progress, and demands some reference in 

 these papers. The languages of savages are in a constant 

 state of flux, even the most abiding terms, as numerals 

 and personal pronouns, being replaced by others in a 

 few years. And the changes undergone by civilised 

 speech have so rubbed away and obscured its primi- 

 tive forms that, look where he may, the poverty of the 

 old materials embarrasses the inquirer. If the similar 

 endings to such undoubtedly early words as father, mother, 

 brother, sister, in our own and other related languages, 

 notably Sanskrit, afibrd any clue, it goes rather to show 

 that gender was a later feature than one might think. But 

 there is no uniformity in the matter. It seems pretty clear 

 that in the early forms of our Indo-European speech there 

 were two genders only, masculine and feminine. The 

 assignment of certain things conceived of as sexless to 

 neither gender, Keutfins rjewris, is of later origin. Some of 

 the languages derived from Latin, and, to name one of a 

 difi'erent family, the Hebrew, have no neuter gender, whilst 

 others, as the ancient Turkish and Finnish, have no gram- 

 matical gender. In our own, under the organic changes 

 incident to its absorption of Norman and other foreign 

 elements, gender has practically disappeared (although 

 ships and nations are still spoken of as feminine), the pro- 

 nouns he, site, it, being its representative. Such a gain is 

 apparent when we take up the study of the ancestral 

 Anglo-Saxon, with its masculine, feminine, and neuter 

 nouns, or of our allied German with its perplexities of sex, 

 as, e.<j , its masculine spoon, its feminine fork, and its 

 neuter knife. Turning for a moment to such slight aid as 

 barbaric speech gives, we find in the languages of the hill 

 tribes of South India a curious distinction made : rational 

 beings, as gods and men, being grouped in a " high-caste or 

 major gender," and living animals and lifeless things in a 

 "castcless or minor gender." The languages of some 

 North American and South African tribes make a distinc- 

 tion into animate and inanimate gender ; but, as non-living 

 things, the sun, the thunder, the lightning, are regarded as 

 persons, they are classed in the animate gender. 



Further research into the radicals of so relatively fixed 

 a language as Chinese, and into more mobile languages 

 related to it, may, perhaps, enlighten the present igno- 

 rance; but one thing is certain, that language was " once the 

 scene of an immense personification," and has thereby added 

 vitality to myth. Analogies and conceptions apparent to 

 barbaric man, and in no way occurring to us, caused him 



to attribute sexual qualities not only to dead as to living 

 things, but to their several parts, as well as, in the course 

 of time, to intellectual and abstract terms. Speaking 

 broadly, things in which were manifest size and qualities, 

 as strength, independence, governing or controlling power, 

 usually attaching to the male, were classed as masculine ; 

 whilst those in which the gentler and more subordinate 

 features were apparent were classed as feminine. Of 

 course, marked exceptions to this will at once occur 

 to us, as, e.g., in certain savage and civilised languages, 

 where the sun is feminine and the moon is mas- 

 culine, but in the main the division holds good. 

 The big is male, and the small is female. The Dyaks 

 of Borneo call a heavy downpour of rain a he rain ; 

 and, if so strength-imparting a thing as bread is to be 

 classed as either masculine or feminine, we must agree 

 with the negro who, in answer to his master's question, 

 " Sambo, where 's the bread 3 " replied, " De bread, massa f 

 him lib in de pantry." The mediieval Persians are said to 

 have distinguished between male and female even in such 

 things as food and cloth, air and water, and prescribed 

 their proper use accordingly ; while, as Dr. Tylor, from 

 whom the above is quoted, adds, " even we, with our 

 blunted mythologic sense, cannot give an individual name 

 to a lifeless object, such as a boat or a weapon, without in 

 the very act imagining for it something of a personal 

 nature." 



But we must not stay longer in these attractive byways 

 of philology, however warranted the digression may be, 

 and must return to the many-titled sun. 



Whilst in the more elaborate mythologies of classic 

 peoples we find him addressed in exalted terms which are 

 still the metaphors of poetry, we are nearer the rough 

 material out of which all myth is shaped when among 

 races who speak of sun, moon, and stars as father, mother, 

 and cliildren, and who mean exactly what they say. We 

 may find simUar relationships in the solar and lunar 

 deities of Egyptian and classic myth, but profound moral 

 elements have entered into these and dissolved the mate- 

 rial. We are face to face with the awful and abiding 

 questions personified in Osiris and Isis, in Qidipus and 

 Jocaste, where for us the sunlight pales and the storm 

 clouds are dispersed before the dazzling mysteries of human 

 life and destiny. 



No such matters confront us when in Indian myth we 

 read that the moon is the sun's sister, an aged, pale-faced 

 woman, who in kindness led to her brother two of the 

 tribe who had sprung through a chasm in the sky to tin' 

 pleasant moonlit land. Neither do they in Australian 

 myth, which shows that the dwellers on Olympus had no 

 monopoly of conjugal faithlessness. For in it the moon's 

 motions are explained as the chase of a jealous husband, 

 one of the bright stars, who found the inconstant in the 

 act of eloping with the moon. Among the bushmen, the 

 moon has incurred the sun's anger and is hacked smaller 

 and smaller by him, till, begging for mercy, a respite is 

 given. But as soon as he grows larger the sun hacks him 

 again. In Slavonic myth the sun cleaves him through, for 

 loving the morning star. The Indians of the far west say 

 that, when the moon is full, evil spirits begin nibbling at it, 

 and eat a portion every night till it is all gone ; then a 

 g^eat spirit makes a new moon, and, weary with his toil, 

 falls asleep, when the bad spirits renew their attack. 

 Another not uncommon group of myths is that which 

 speaks of sun and moon as borne across the heavens on the 

 backs of ancestors, as in Greek myth Atlas supports the 

 world. 



But a still larger and more widespread body of myth 

 has its source in the patches on the moon's face. In the 



