Star Lore.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 786, 25 March 1887, Page 8

Star Lore.

Gentleman’s Magazine. It must often have struck the most cursory observer of a celestial globe or atlas with wonder that the objects thereon depicted should ever have been imagined to possess the least correspondence with the heavenly bodies. Why are wolves, lions, scorpions, lyres, and the rest seen in arrangements of stars that have not the least resemblance to the things after which they are named ? Did astronomers resort to those figures for the more convenient mapping out of the heavens, or did they accept traditional names handed down from a time when all the forms of life figured in the heavens were really thought to be embodied in the stars ’ The latter alternative seems the more probable of the two, since the beliefs of existing savages prove beyond doubt the possibility of the state of mind supposed. The Taunese islanders, for instance, have the heavens portioned out into constellations, with definite traditions to account for the canoes and ducks and children that they see there. Egede tells us that the Esquimaux thought that some of the stars had been men, and others different sorts of animals or fish. In the South Pacific Islands dying men will announce their intention of becoming a Jstar, and even mention the particular part of the heavens where they are to be looked for. The Bushman regards the more conspicuous stars as men, lions, tortoises, and so forth, while he sees in the Milky Way some wood ashes thrown up by a girl into the sky, that the people might see their way home by night. To the Australians, two large stars in the fore legs of Centaurus were two brothers who speared Tchingal to death, the east stars of Crux being the points of the spears that pierced his body. And t‘e Indians of America, who told of the fisherman who once trespassed in heaven in quest of perpetual sunshine, and was shot by an arrow from one of the celestials, could point to the actual Fisher Stars, where the arrow could be seen in the fisherman’s tail. We who are accustomed to think of the Milky Way os a vast multitude of unknown worlds, and of the tun eimply as the sun—a conception against the impiety of which even Seneca protested— ean hardly enter i•'to the feelings of the Esquimaux, to whom the Milky Way represented in all realiy the vast concourse of the dead, or of the Andamanese, to whom the sun was litera'ly a woman and the mother of the stars. But a goodly numbsr of legends in sctual European folklore prevent the necessity of relying solely on the evidence of savage >deas in proof of the reality of this method of regarding or explaining the heavenly bodie°. Everything in existence was apparently once regarded as human, or thought of under human attributes, as illustrated in the story of Balder to the Edda. To protect Bilder from danger, his mother, the goddeßS Freja, exacted an oath that they would spare his life from water, fire, earth, plants, animals, bird?, worms, and even from pestilence, only excepting from the oath one small bush, the mistletoe, not because it was not as human as the rest, but because it was too young to understand the solemnity of an oath. And when Balder met his heath from the mistle--109, not only men lamented him, but beasts and plants, and oven stones. The genders of words is a further confirmation of this theory, especially in the case of the sun and moonIn Latin and the Romance languages the sun

[ is masculine and the moon feminine, and in* ' Egypt and Peru be sun and moon were related os brother and sister, or as husbmd and wife. But in German, Arabic, Mexican,, Slavonic, and Lithuanian the genders are reversed, an 1 in our own language Shakespearespeaks of the moon as ‘ she.’ But in all languages the fundamental thought is the actual human persjnalitj of the two greatligh s, still the dominint thought among all,, or nearly all, tLe lower races. And the thought s ! ill lingers with us, as in Bavaria, whero they still speak of ’ Herr Mond ’ andi ‘ Frau Sonne,' and whence the following' sp cimen of natural philosophy h derived. Moon and son, they say, were man and wife, but the moon proved but a cold lover, and- ! was so addicted to sleep that one day hii wife laid him a wager, by virtue of which the right of shining hv day was to belong in future lowhichever of ihem should awake first in the' morning. The moon laughe >, and accepted the wager, but found when ha rose next day that the 6un had been already for two hours—giving d^h r . unto the world ; a condition and indeed a consequence of their wager being that unless they woke at the same time they should shine at different times. The result of the wager was a permanent separation, much tc the affliction of the triumphant Eun,‘ who, sttll loving her husband, was, and always i?,„. trying to repa-r the matrimonial breach. Eclipses are really due to meelijgs with a view t ) reconciliation ; but as the pair alwaysbegin with mutual reproaches, the time comes for them to part before they have ceas-d to quarrel, and so the sun goes away blood-red with anger, and the red clouds often seen at sunset, are the tears of blood she Given the idea of the sun and moon as a rnarr.e i couple, the belief of the old Prussians that the stars were their children (identical with the Andamanese, belief) was an obvious---inference. Novels and romances were clearly written in the heavens, and affjrJed a ready clue to certain natural phenomena. Thus,, according to one story, ;ha moon once deserted his wife and elope i with the betrothed of the morning star, for which the god of thundercut him in two with a knife, as may be distinctly percei.-ed in hie shape at certain times.. According to another story the sun’s jealousy was aroused when the moon took up from the earth a girl who span by moonlight. To be even with him she took up the girl’s lover, whom she espied asleep in a wood. The girl and her lover, however, continued faithful toone another in spite of the immense distance between them. The coldness of the soinning girl towards himself caused the moon so lively a distress that he often weeps, and the tears he sheds are what we call shooting s'are. Or you may regard the shooting stars as the dust which falls from tho head of a g anress as she combs her hair with I he moon’s crescent*. Nothing is left unexplained in this philosophy. The phases of the moon presuppose an old giant, too feeble to walk, who mounts the moou as lie rises, but who rides him so heavily that the moo ’s sides are so much pressed in that it takes him some lime to recover his normal size. As to the stars there once were none, till the giants of old, throwing balls at the sun, pierced hole* in the sky,,, and so let the light of that orb sh : no through those lioles which we call stars. The Danes take the moon for a cheese, formed of the - milk that has run together out of the MilkyWay. In Cyirus they call that luminary Verms barbata, because she once prayed to--the Virgin for help against an impor unate lover, and received to protect her, a beard like man’s. In the Pyrenees they frighten black clouds by showing them their own facein a mirror, and thus avert the devastation of hail-storms. Nothing more absurd than-, those ideas can be found among savages, albeit much that is of a precisely similar cast.. In what a mental state must the old Jews have lived, who believed that the sun, moon, and stars danced b fore Adam in Paradise, and at the end of the world they would do soagain in the presence of the just 1 Or whafcr shall bo thought of Slavonic mythology, which, regards the 6tars as living in habitual intercourse wi)b men and their affairs, and which, tells of a beautiful maiden who, because she boasted of her beauty ai exceeding that of the sun’s, was burned coal black by that revengful luminary ? Everything shows that do ideas of primitive philosophy are too extravagant to survive into the days of exact science and observation. We may still study themind of the savage in civilised Europe, where tho rude guesses at truth, which constitute the greatest part of mythology, are created or preserved very much as they ever were before the primitive Aryans left their common home. And if we wonder.. Low people ever could have seen tho remotest resemblance between, say, the sun and a man, we mnst remember that with cur own children the smallest point of similarity between things amply suffices for an inference of complete identity. If the sun and moon suggested the idea of an eye or face, the imagination would readily supply the other invisible parts And who can measure the depths of absurdity into which we may get—if the sun, for instance, besides being a man or a woman, may as easily be thought of as a oow or a wolf, or in fact any thing else ? There is, therefora, no essential improbability in assuming that, as the Rod Indians, Auslraians, Bushmen, and Esquimaux interpreted the starlit heavens in the terms of earth, and saw men and anituuls where we see suns and worlds, so did our Aryan an r estors al?o, and that m that way originated those names and figures of the constellxtions which are so great a perplexity to ourselves. "Why, for instance, did the Greeks give the name of bear to that set of seven stars which we still call tho Great B--ar j. or why should the Hindus have seen in them seven rishi, or wise men ? The solar my thologists say that it was in consequence of thodevelopment of a verbal root which meant toshine. Says Sir George Cox : ‘ From a root which meant to shine, the Seven Sbinersreceived their name ; possibly or prjbably tothe same root belongs the name of theG lden Bear. . . . and thus, when the epithet had by some tribes been confined totho bear, the Seven Shiners were transformed first into seven bears, then into one with. Arktouros (Aroturus) for their bearward. In India, too, the name of riksha was forgotten, but instead of referring the word t<» bears they oonfounded it with rishi, aud the seven stars became the abode of seven poets or sages, who enter the ark with Menu (MinoeJ, aud reappearns the Seven Wise Men of Hellas, and I the Seven Champions of Christendom.’ The

emanation i? highly ingenious; but it is at least aa likely an explanation, and n far simpler one, ("hat, ju-t as the horse god Thor was onoe thought- of as a bear, and actually so ca'hd, or as the Irokeo god Agankitchee became eamet’mes a wolf, eornetinoea a brar, eo tbe early Q-reebs reverenced a man as a bear or a bear as a god, and, when he died, gave him his place amon? the stars; or, again, that the Hindus oil the same by seven' wise men, or, seeing seven bright stars, Bidiply interpreted them as eoveu sages. 'J be Arcadian tale of Callisto, the mother of Areas, being changed into a bear by the jsalousy of Here, and imprisoned in the constellation of ihe bear, would, from its perfect accordance -with the way in which such names are applied to the stars by most of the ruder races of mankind, be a far more likely origin for the Greek or modern English name than the root meaning to shine, which would have no more application to the a ars of the Great Bear than “to any others of the host of heaven.