Page:Primitive Culture Vol 1.djvu/375

Rh the mythology of the Stars a course of thought, changed indeed in application, yet never broken in its evident connexion from first to last. The savage sees individual stars as animate beings, or combines star-groups into living celestial creatures, or limbs of them, or objects connected with them; while at the other extremity of the scale of civilization, the modern astronomer keeps up just such ancient fancies, turning them to account in useful survival, as a means of mapping out the celestial globe. The savage names and stories of stars and constellations may seem at first but childish and purposeless fancies; but it always happens in the study of the lower races, that the more means we have of understanding their thoughts, the more sense and reason do we find in them. The aborigines of Australia say that Yurree and Wanjel, who are the stars we call Castor and Pollux, pursue Purra the Kangaroo (our Capella), and kill him at the the beginning of the great heat and the mirage is the smoke of the fire they roast him by. They say also that Marpean-Kurrk and Neilloan (Arcturus and Lyra) were the discoverers of the ant-pupas and the eggs of the loan-bird, and taught the aborigines to find them for food. Translated into the language of fact, these simple myths record the summer place of the stars in question, and the seasons of ant-pupas and loan-eggs, which seasons are marked by the stars who are called their discoverers. Not less transparent is the meaning in the beautiful Algonquin myth of the Summer-maker. In old days eternal winter reigned upon the earth, till a sprightly little animal called the Fisher, helped by other beasts his friends, broke an opening through the sky into the lovely heaven-land beyond, let the warm winds pour forth and the summer descend to earth, and opened the cages of the prisoned birds: but when the dwellers in heaven saw their birds let loose and their warm gales descending, they started in pursuit, and shooting their arrows at the Fisher, hit him at last in his one vulnerable spot at the tip of his tail; thus