FullReads

We can perceive by shreds and patches such as these the all but loss of an early and grand mythology which has undergone the usual transmutation into romantic and nursery legends. By great exertion we might recover it, but the old Indians who retain its fragments are passing away rapidly, and no subject attracts so little interest among our literati. A few hundred dollars expended annually in each State would result in the collection of all that is extant of this folk-lore; and a hundred years hence some few will, perhaps, regret that it was not done.

It may be observed that in the Edda the rainbow is the heavenly road over which the gods pass. The rainbow is not the Milky Way, but it may be observed that in this tale the two are curiously compared, or almost identified. But according to Charles Francis Keary (Mythology of the Eddas, London, 1882), “there is small hint in the Edda of the use of the rainbow as a path for souls, save where Helgi says to his wife,–

“”Tis time for me to ride the ruddy road,
And on my horse to tread the path of flight,'”

which is more applicable to the Milky Way than the rainbow. “We owe,” he says, “to the learned Adalbert Kohn some researches which have traced the path of the Milky Way as a bridge of souls from its first appearance in Eastern creeds to its later appearance in mediaeval German tradition.” (Zeitschrift f. v. Sp.l.c.) In the Vedas the Milky Way is called the Gods’ Path. The American Indians firmly believe that the Spirits’ Road is one of their very earliest traditions, and I believe with them that they had it long before Columbus discovered this country.

Since the foregoing remarks were written, Mrs. W. Wallace Brown has obtained the following fragment, which was given as a song, and declared to be very ancient:–

“Then was woman, long, long ago:
She came out of a hole.
In it dead people were buried.
She made her house in a tree;
She was dressed in leaves,
All long ago.
When she walked among the dry leaves
Her feet were so covered
The feet were invisible.
She walked through the woods,
Singing all the time,
‘I want company; I’m lonesome!’
A wild man heard her:
From afar over the lakes and mountains
He came to her.
She saw him; she was afraid;
She tried to flee away,
For he was covered with the rainbow;
Color and light were his garments.
She ran, and he pursued rapidly;
He chased her to the foot of a mountain.
He spoke in a strange language,
She could not understand him at first.
He would make her tell where she dwelt.
They married, they had two children.
One of them was a boy,
He was blind from his birth,
But he frightened his mother by his sight.
He could tell her what was coming,
What was coming from afar
What was near he could not see.
He could see the bear and the moose
Far away beyond the mountains,
He could see through everything.”

The old Indian woman ended this story by saying abruptly, “Don’t know any more. Guess they all eat up by mooin” (the bear). She said that it was only a fragment. “If you could have heard her repeat this,” adds Mrs. Brown, “in pieces, stopping to explain what the characters said, and describing how they looked, and anon singing it again, you would have got the inner sense of a wonderfully weird tale. The woman’s feet covering and the man’s dress like a rainbow, yet not one, which made their bodies invisible, seemed to exercise her imagination strangely; and these were to her the most important part of the story.” The fragment is part of a very old myth; I regret to say a very obscure one.]