Folklore; Manners and customs; Mythology; Religion
Many separate races seem to recognise the figure of a hare, where we see
'the Man in the Moon.' In a Buddhist legend, an exemplary and altruistic
hare was translated to the moon. 'To the common people in India the
spots on the moon look like a hare, and Chandras, the god of the moon,
carries a hare: hence the moon is called sasin or sasanka, hare-mark. The
Mongolians also see in these shadows the figure of a hare.' {132b} Among
the Eskimo, the moon is a girl, who always flees from her cruel brother,
the sun, because he disfigured her face. Elsewhere the sun is the girl,
beloved by her own brother, the moon; she blackens her face to avert his
affection. On the Rio Branco, and among the Tomunda, the moon is a girl
who loved her brother and visited him in the dark. He detected her
wicked passion by drawing his blackened hand over her face. The marks
betrayed her, and, as the spots on the moon, remain to this day. {133}
Among the New Zealanders and North American Indians the sun is a great
beast, whom the hunters trapped and thrashed with cudgels. His blood is
used in some New Zealand incantations; and, according to an Egyptian
myth, was kneaded into clay at the making of man. But there is no end to
similar sun-myths, in all of which the sun is regarded as a man, or even
as a beast.
To return to the stars--
The Red Indians, as Schoolcraft says, 'hold many of the planets to be
transformed adventurers.' The Iowas 'believed stars to be a sort of
living creatures.' One of them came down and talked to a hunter, and
showed him where to find game. The Gallinomeros of Central California,
according to Mr. Bancroft, believe that the sun and moon were made and
lighted up by the Hawk and the Coyote, who one day flew into each other's
faces in the dark, and were determined to prevent such accidents in the
future. But the very oddest example of the survival of the notion that
the stars are men or women is found in the 'Pax' of Aristophanes. Trygaeus
in that comedy has just made an expedition to heaven. A slave meets him,
and asks him, 'Is not the story true, then, that we become stars when we
die?' The answer is 'Certainly;' and Trygaeus points out the star into
which Ios of Chios has just been metamorphosed. Aristophanes is making
fun of some popular Greek superstition. But that very superstition meets
us in New Zealand. 'Heroes,' says Mr. Taylor, 'were thought to become
stars of greater or less brightness, according to the number of their
victims slain in fight.' The Aryan race is seldom far behind, when there
are ludicrous notions to be credited or savage tales to be told. We have
seen that Aristophanes, in Greece, knew the Eskimo doctrine that stars
are souls of the dead. The Persians had the same belief, {134a} 'all the
unnumbered stars were reckoned ghosts of men.' {134b} The German
folklore clings to the same belief, 'Stars are souls; when a child dies
God makes a new star.' Kaegi quotes {134c} the same idea from the Veda,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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