Folklore; Manners and customs; Mythology; Religion
We have already given some Australian examples in the stories of the
Pleiades, and of Castor and Pollux. We may add the case of the Eagle. In
Greece the Eagle was the bird of Zeus, who carried off Ganymede to be the
cup-bearer of Olympus. Among the Australians this same constellation is
called Totyarguil; he was a man who, when bathing, was killed by a
fabulous animal, a kind of kelpie; as Orion, in Greece, was killed by the
Scorpion. Like Orion, he was placed among the stars. The Australians
have a constellation named Eagle, but he is our Sinus, or Dog-star.
The Indians of the Amazon are in one tale with the Australians and
Eskimo. 'Dr. Silva de Coutinho informs me,' says Professor Hartt, {131}
'that the Indians of the Amazonas not only give names to many of the
heavenly bodies, but also tell stories about them. The two stars that
form the shoulders of Orion are said to be an old man and a boy in a
canoe, chasing a peixe boi, by which name is designated a dark spot in
the sky near the above constellation.' The Indians also know
monkey-stars, crane-stars, and palm-tree stars.
The Bushmen, almost the lowest tribe of South Africa, have the same star-
lore and much the same myths as the Greeks, Australians, Egyptians, and
Eskimo. According to Dr. Bleek, 'stars, and even the sun and moon, were
once mortals on earth, or even animals or inorganic substances, which
happened to get translated to the skies. The sun was once a man, whose
arm-pit radiated a limited amount of light round his house. Some
children threw him into the sky, and there he shines.' The Homeric hymn
to Helios, in the same way, as Mr. Max Muller observes, 'looks on the sun
as a half-god, almost a hero, who had once lived on earth.' The pointers
of the Southern Cross were 'two men who were lions,' just as Callisto, in
Arcadia, was a woman who was a bear. It is not at all rare in those
queer philosophies, as in that of the Scandinavians, to find that the sun
or moon has been a man or woman. In Australian fable the moon was a man,
the sun a woman of indifferent character, who appears at dawn in a coat
of red kangaroo skins, the present of an admirer. In an old Mexican text
the moon was a man, across whose face a god threw a rabbit, thus making
the marks in the moon. {132a}
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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