Ragnarok : the Age of Fire and GravelDonnelly, Ignatius
Science
Ragnarok : the Age of Fire and Gravel
Donnelly, Ignatius
Atlantis (Legendary place); Comets; Drift
The child of the Great Spirit exposes herself too much, is caught by
the wind and blown down the mountain-side, where she is found,
shivering on the snow, by a family of grizzly bears. These grizzly
bears evidently possessed some humane as well as human traits: "They
walked then on their hind-legs like men, and talked, and carried
clubs, using the fore-limbs as men use their arms." They represent in
their bear-skins the rude, fur-clad race that were developed during
the intense cold of the Glacial Age.
The child of the Great Spirit, the superior race, intermarries with
one of the grizzly bears, and _from this union came the race of men_,
to wit, the Indians.
"But the Great Spirit punished the grizzly bears by depriving them of
the power of speech, and of standing erect--in short, by making true
bears of them. But no Indian will, to this day, kill a grizzly bear,
recognizing as he does the tie of blood."
Again, we are told:
"The inhabitants of central Europe and the Teutonic races who came
late to England place their mythical heroes under ground in caves, in
vaults beneath enchanted castles, or _in mounds_ which rise up and
open, and show their buried inhabitants alive and busy about the
avocations of earthly men. . . . In Morayshire the buried race are
_supposed to be under the sandhills_, as they are in some parts of
Brittany."[1]
Associated with these legends we find many that refer to the time of
great cold, and snow, and ice. I give one or two specimens:
In the story of the Iroquois, (see p. 173, _ante_,) we are told that
the White One, [the Light One, the Sun,] after he had destroyed the
monster who covered the earth with
[1. "Frost and Fire," vol. ii, p. 190.]
{p. 205}
blood and stones, then destroyed the gigantic frog. The frog, a
cold-blooded, moist reptile, was always the emblem of water and cold;
it represented the great ice-fields that squatted, frog-like, on the
face of the earth. It had "swallowed all the waters," says the
Iroquois legend; that is, "the waters were congealed in it; and when
it was killed great and destructive torrents broke forth and
devastated the land, and Manibozho, the White One, the beneficent
Sun, guided these waters into smooth streams and lakes." The Aztecs
adored the goddess of water under the figure of a great green frog
carved from a single emerald.[1]
In the Omaha we have the fable of "How the Rabbit killed the Winter,"
told in the Indian manner. The Rabbit was probably a reminiscence of
the Great Hare, Manabozho; and he, probably, as we shall see, a
recollection of a great race, whose totem was the Hare.
I condense the Indian story:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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