Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/330

 2 2 Presidential Address.

record of a tale of this kind concerns Sargon of Akkad who lived about 2800 B.C. According to the myth, Sargon, when newly born, was laid by his mother in a boat of reeds of which the " doors " were stopped with bitumen. This was then placed in a stream which led it to Akki, the irrigator, who drew the boy from the vessel and brought him up as his own son. Rank gives many examples of myths with points of similarity to those of Sargon and Moses, and, in spite of the absence of any reference to water in several of them, he regards this cycle of myths as providing evidence which confirms the psycho-analytic view derived from the study of dreams that going into or coming out of water symbolises birth.

Let us assume for a moment that Rank's evidence shows the unanimity we should expect if water is a universal symbol of birth or rebirth, and consider whether the uni- versal occurrence of this symbol in the stories he quotes points to its being a universal property of the human mind.

In the first place the whole of Rank's examples are drawn from peoples sufficiently advanced to have had written literatures and from civihsations of Asia and Europe which no one now doubts had definite relations to one another. The persons of whose birth-stories he treats are Sargon ; Moses ; Kama ; CEdipus ; Paris ; Telephos ; Perseus ; Gilgamish ; Cyrus ; Kaikhosrav and Feridun, the Persian heroes ; Romulus ; Amphion and Zethos ; Hercules ; Siegfried and Lohengrin ; while the life of Christ is drawn into the series, apparently on the ground that the manger was a substitute for the more usual vessel laid in water.

All the literatures from which these examples are drawn are certainly connected with one another historically. In so far as the symbolisation of birth by water occurs in them it can be amply explained as part of a common social heritage. At the least the probabihty of the presence of a common tradition is so great that Rank's series of parallels