Myth, Ritual And Religion Volume II Part 30

(4) Next morning the brothers parley across the stream. The younger first mutilates himself (_Atys_) then says he is going to the vale of the acacia, according to M. Maspero probably a name for the other world.

Meanwhile the younger brother will put his _heart_ in a high acacia tree. If the tree is cut down, the elder brother must search for the _heart_, and place it in a jar of water, when the younger brother will revive. Here we have the idea which recurs in the Samoyed marchen where the men lay aside their hearts, in which are their separable lives. As Mr.

Ralston says,* "This heart-breaking episode occurs in the tales of many lands". In the Russian the story is Koschchei the deathless, whose "death" (or life) lies in an egg, in a duck, on a log, in the ice.** As Mr. Ralston well remarks, a very singular parallel to the revival of the Egyptian brothers heart in water is the Hottentot tale of a girl eaten by a lion. Her heart is extracted from the lion, is placed in a calabash of milk, and the girl comes to life again.***

(5) The younger brother gives the elder a sign magical, whereby he shall know how it fares with the heart. When a cup of beer suddenly grows turbid, then evil has befallen the heart. This is merely one of the old _sympathetic signs_ of story--the opal that darkens; the comb of Lemminkainen in the _Kalewala_ that drops blood when its owner is in danger; the stick that the hero erects as he leaves home, and which will fall when he is imperilled. In Australia the natives practise this magic with a stick, round which they bind the hair of the distant person about whose condition they want to be informed.**** This incident, turning on the belief in _sympathies_, might perhaps be regarded as "universally human" and capable of being invented anywhere.

* Russian Folk-Tales, 109.

** In Norse, Asbjornsen and Moe, 36; Dasent, 9. Gaelic, Campbell, i. 4, p. 81. Indian, "Punchkin," Old Deccan Days, pp. 13-16. Samoyed, Castren, Ethnol. Varies liber die Altaischen Volker., p. 174.

*** Bleek, Reynard the Fox of South Africa, p. 57.

**** Dawson, Australian Aborigines, p. 36, 1881. The stick used is the "throwing stick" wherewith the spear is hurled,(6) The elder brother goes home and kills his wife.

The G.o.ds pity the younger Bitiou in the Valley of Acacias, and make him a wife.

M. Cosquin has found in France the trait of the blood that boils in the gla.s.s when the person concerned is in danger.

(7) The three Hathors come to her creation, and prophesy for her a violent death. For this incident compare Perrault's _The Sleeping Beauty_ and Maury's work on _Les Fees_. The spiritual midwives and prophetesses at the hour of birth are familiar in _marchen_ as Fairies, and Fates, and Maerae.

(8) The river carries a tress of the hair of Bitiou's wife to the feet of Pharaoh's washermen; the scent perfumes all the king's linen. Pharaoh falls in love with the woman from whose locks this tress has come. For this incident compare _Cinderella_. In Santal and Indian _marchen_ a tress of hair takes the place of the gla.s.s-slipper, and the amorous prince or princess will only marry the person from whose head the lock has come. Here M. Cosquin himself gives Siamese, Mongol, Bengali (Lai Behar Day, p. 86), and other examples of the lock of hair doing duty for the slipper with which the lover is smitten, and by which he recognises his true love.

(9) The wife of Bitiou reveals the secret of his heart. The people of Pharaoh cut down the acacia tree.

(10) His brother reads in the turbid beer the death of Bitiou. He discovers the heart and life in a berry of the acacia.

It is superfluous to give modern parallels to the various transformations of the life of Bitiou. He becomes an Apis bull, and his faithless wife desires his death, and wishes to eat his liver, but his life goes on in other forms. This is merely the familiar situation of the a.s.s in _Peau d'Ane_ (the a.s.s who clearly, before Perrault's time, had been human).

_Demandez lui la peau de ce rare animal!_

In most traditional versions of _Cinderella_ will be found examples of the beast, once human, slain by an enemy, yet potent after death. This beast takes the part given by Perrault to the fairy G.o.dmother. The idea is also familiar in Grimm's _Machandelboom_ (47), and was found by Casalis among the Bechuanas.

(11) The wicked wife obtains the bull Apis's death by virtue of a _hasty oath_ of Pharaoh's (_Jephtha, Herodias_).

(12) The blood of the bull grows into two persea trees.

Here M. Cosquin himself supplies parallels of blood turning into trees from Hesse (Wolf, p. 394) and from Russian. We may add the ancient Lydian myth. When the G.o.ds slew Agdistis, a drop of his blood became an almond tree, the fruit of which made women pregnant.*

* Pausanias, vii. 17.

(13) The persea tree is also cut down by the wicked wife of Bitiou. A chip from its boughs is swallowed by the wicked wife, who conceives, like Margata in the _Kalewala_, and bears a son.

The story of Agdistis, just quoted, is in point, but the topic is of enormous range, and the curious may consult _Le Fils de Vierge_ by M. H.

De Charencey. Compare also Surya Bay in _Old Deccan Days_ (6). The final resurrection of Surya Bay is exactly like that in the Hottentot tale already quoted. Surya is drowned by a jealous rival, becomes a golden flower, is burned, becomes a mango; one of the fruits falls into a calabash of milk, and out of the calabash, like the Hottentot girl, comes Surya!

(14) The son of the persea tree was Bitiou, born of his own faithless wife; and when he grew up he had her put to death.

Even a hasty examination of these incidents from old Egypt proves that before India was heard of in history the people of the Pharaohs possessed a large store of incidents perfectly familiar in modern marchen. Now, if one single Egyptian tale yields this rich supply, it is an obvious presumption that the collection of an Egyptian Grimm might, and probably would, have furnished us with the majority of the situations common in popular tales. M. Cosquin himself remarks that these ideas cannot be invented more than once (I. lxvii.). The other Egyptian contes, as that of _Le Prince Predestine_ (twentieth dynasty), and the noted _Master Thief_ of Herodotus (ii. 121), are merely familiar marchen of the common type, and have numerous well-known a.n.a.logues.

From all these facts M. Cosquin draws no certain conclusions. He asks: Did Egypt borrow these tales from India, or India from Egypt? _And were there Aryans in India in the time of Rameses II.?_

These questions are beyond conjecture. We know nothing of Egyptian relations with prehistoric India. We know not how many aeons the tale of _The Two Brothers_ may have existed in Egypt before Ennana, the head librarian, wrote it out for Pharaoh's treasurer, Qagabou.

What we do know is, that if we find a large share of the whole stock of incident of popular tale fully developed in one single story long before India was historic, it is perfectly vain to argue that all stories were imported from historic India. It is impossible to maintain that the single centre whence the stories spread was not the India of fable, but the India of history, when we discover such abundance of story material in Egypt before, as far as is known, India had even become the India of fable.

The topic is altogether too obscure for satisfactory argument. Certainly the _marchen_ were at home in Egypt before we have even reason to believe that Egypt and India were conscious of each other's existence.

The antiquity of _marchen_ by the Nile-side touches geological time, if we agree with M. Maspero that Bitiou is a form of Osiris, that is, that the Osiris myth may have been developed out of the Bitiou _marchen_.*

* Maspero, op. cit., p. 17, note 1.

The Osiris myth is as old as the Egypt we know, and the story of Bitiou may be either the _detritus_ or the germ of the myth. This gives it a dateless antiquity; and with this _marchen_ the kindred and allied _marchen_ establish a claim to enormous age. But it is quite impossible to say when these tales were first invented. We cannot argue that the cradle of a story is the place where it first received literary form.

We know not whence the Egyptians came to Nile-side; we know not whether they brought the story with them, or found it among some nameless earlier people, fugitives from Kor, perhaps, or anywhere else. We know not whether the remote ancestors of modern peoples, African, or European, or Asiatic, who now possess forms of the tale, borrowed it from a people more ancient than Egypt, or from Egypt herself. These questions are at present insoluble. We only know for certain that, when we find anywhere any one of the numerous incidents of the story of _The Two Brothers_, we can be certain that their original home was _not_ historic India. There is also the presumption that, if we knew more of the tales of ancient Egypt, we could as definitely refuse to regard historic India as the cradle of many other _marchen_.

Thus, in opposition to the hypothesis of borrowing from India, we reach some distinct and a.s.sured, though negative, truths.

1. So far as the ideas in _The Two Brothers_ are representative of _marchen_ (and these ideas are inextricably interwoven with some of the most typical legends), _historic_ India is certainly and demonstrably _not_ the cradle of popular tales. These are found far earlier already in the written literature of Egypt.

2. As far as these ideas are representative of _marchen_, there is absolutely no evidence to show that _marchen_ sprang from India, whether historical or prehistoric; nor is any connection proved between ancient Egypt and prehistoric India.

3. As far as _marchen_ are represented by the ideas in _The Two Brothers_ and the _Predestined Prince_, there is absolutely no evidence to show in what region or where they were originally invented.

The Bellerophon story rests on a _donnee_ in _The Two Brothers_; the _Flight_ rests on another; _Cinderella_ reposes on a third; the giant with no heart in his body depends on a fourth; the _Milk-White Dove_ on the same; and these incidents occur in Hottentot, Bechuana, Samoyed, Samoan, as well as in Greek, Scotch, German, Gaelia Now, as all these incidents existed in Egyptian _marchen_ fourteen hundred years before Christ, they _may_ have been dispersed without Indian intervention. One of the white raiders from the Northern Sea may have been made captive, like the pseud-Odysseus, in Egypt; may have heard the tales; may have been ransomed, and carried the story to Greece or Libya, whence a Greek got it. Southwards it may have pa.s.sed up the Nile to the Great Lakes, and down the Congo and Zambesi, and southward ever with the hordes of T'Chaka's ancestors. All these processes are possible and even probable, but absolutely nothing is known for certain on the subject. It is only as manifest as facts can be that all this might have occurred if the Indian peninsula _did not exist._ Another objection to the hypothesis of distribution from historic India is the existence of sagas or epic legends corresponding to marchen in pre-Homeric Greece. The story of Jason, for example, is in its essential features, perhaps, the most widely diffused of all.* The story of the return of the husband, and of his difficult recognition by his wife, the central idea of the _Odyssey_, is of wide distribution, and the _Odyssey_ (as Fenelon makes the ghost of Achilles tell Homer in Hades) is _un amas de contes de vieilles_. The Cyclops, the Siren, Scylla, and the rest,** these tales did not reach Greece from historic India at least, and we have no reason for supposing that India before the dawn of history was their source.

* Custom and Myth, "A Far-Travelled Tale ".

** Gerland, Alt Griechische Marchen in der Odyssee.

The reasons for which India has been regarded as a great centre and fountain-head of popular stories are, on the other hand, excellent, if the theory is sufficiently limited. The cause is _vera causa_. Marchen certainly did set out from mediaeval India, and reached mediaeval Europe and Asia in abundance. Not to speak of oral communications in the great movements, missions and migrations, Tartar, crusading, Gypsy, commercial and Buddhistic--in all of which there must have been "swopping of stories"--it is certain that Western literature was actually invaded by the _contes_ which had won away into the literature of India.* These are facts beyond doubt, but these facts must not be made the basis of too wide an inference. Though so many stories have demonstrably been borrowed from India in the historical period, it is no less certain that many existed in Europe before their introduction. Again, as has been ably argued by a writer in the _Athenaeum_ (April 23, 1887), the literary versions of the tales probably had but a limited influence on the popular narrators, the village gossips and grandmothers. Thus no collection of published tales has ever been more popular than that of Charles Perrault, which for many years has been published not only in cheap books, but in cheaper broadsheets.

* Cosquin, op. cit., i. xv., xxiv.; Max Muller, "The Migrations of Fables," Selected Essays, vol. ii., Appendix; Benfey, Pantschatantra; Comparetti, Introduction to Book of Sindibad, English translation of the Folk-Lore Society.

Yet M. Sebillot and other French collectors gather from the lips of peasants versions of _Cinderella_, for example, quite unaffected by Perrault's version, and rich in archaic features, such as the presence of a miracle-working beast instead of a fairy G.o.dmother. That detail is found in Kaffir, and Santhal, and Finnish, as well as in Celtic, and Portuguese, and Scottish variants, and has been preserved in popular French traditions, despite the influence of Perrault. In the same way, M. Carnoy finds only the faintest traces of the influence of a collection so popular as the _Arabian Nights_. The peasantry regard tales which they read in books as quite apart from their inherited store of legend.*

* Sebillot's popular Cendrillon is Le Taureau Bleu in Contes de la Haute Bretagne. See also M. Carnoy's Contes Francais, 1885, p. 9.

If printed literature has still so little power over popular tradition, the ma.n.u.script literature of the Middle Ages must have had much less, though sometimes _contes_ from India were used as parables by preachers.

Thus we must beware of over-estimating the effect of importation from India, even where it distinctly existed. Even the versions that were brought in the Middle Ages by oral tradition must have encountered versions long settled in Europe--versions which may have been current before any scribe of Egypt perpetuated a legend on papyrus.

Once more, the Indian theory has to account for the presence of tales in Africa and America among populations which are not known to have had any contact with India at all. Where such examples are urged, it is usual to say that the stories either do not really resemble our _marchen_, or are quite recent importations by Europeans, Dutch, French, English and others.* Here we are on ground where proof is difficult, if not impossible. a.s.suredly French influence declares itself in certain narratives collected from the native tribes of North America. On the other hand, when the _marchen_ is interwoven with the national traditions and poetry of a remote people, and with the myths by which they account to themselves for the natural features of their own country, the hypothesis of recent borrowing from Europeans appears insufficient. A striking example is the song of Siati (a form of the Jason myth) among the people of Samoa.** Even more remarkable is the presence of a crowd of familiar _marchen_ in the national traditions of the Huarochiri, a pre-Inca civilised race of Southern Peru. These were published, or at least collected and written down, by Francisco de Avila, a Spanish priest, about 1608. He remarks that "these traditions are deeply rooted in the hearts of the people of this province".***

These traditions refer to certain prehistoric works of engineering or accidents of soil, whereby the country was drained. The Huarochiri explained them by a series of _marchen_ about Huthiacuri, Pariaca (culture-heroes), and about friendly animals which aided them in the familiar way. In the same manner exactly the people of the Marais of Poitou have to account for the drainage of the country, a work of the twelfth century.

* Cosquin, op. cit, 1, xix.

** Turner's Samoa, p. 102.

*** Rites of the Incas. Hakluyt Society. The third doc.u.ment in the book. The _marchen_ have been examined by me in _The Marriage of Cupid and Psyche_, p. lxxii.

They attribute the old works to the local hero, Gargantua, who "drank up all the water".* No one supposes that this legend is borrowed from Rabelais, and it seems even more improbable that the Huarochiri hastily borrowed _marchen_ from the Spaniards, and converted them before 1600 into national myths.