Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/356

346 being cut open to let the man out. Something very like this occurs in the myth of the Polynesian Sun-god Maui. He was born on the sea-shore, and his mother flung him into the foam of the surf; then the seaweed wrapped its long tangles round him, and the soft jelly-fish rolled themselves about him to protect him as he was drifted on shore again, and his great ancestor the Sky, Tama-nui-ki-te-Rangi, saw the flies and the birds collected in clusters and flocks, and ran and stripped the encircling jellyfish off, and behold there lay within a human being; so the old man took the child and carried it home. As the Polynesian Maui is among the clearest and completest personifications of the Sun, there is some force in Schirren's argument that this story means the Sun being set free by the Sky at dawn, from the Earth which covers him at night; for it must be remembered here that one of the most prominent ideas of the Polynesian Mythology is that the Earth is a huge fish, which Maui draws up with his line from the bottom of the sea, and that Maui's death, the sunset, is told in the story of his creeping into the mouth of his great ancestress, Hine-nui-te-po, whom you may see flashing, and, as it were, opening and shutting, where the horizon meets the sky; there Maui crept in, and perished. And not only would such an explanation of the tale of the Red Indian 'Tom Thumb' be a fitting one, in that he, like so many personifications of the Sun in other countries, is a slayer of Giants, but he will appear a few pages further on as the Sun-Catcher in a plain, open Solar myth. In any full discussion of the group of tales, it would be necessary to investigate their correspondence with the European stories of Tom Thumb, who was swallowed by the cow and came out unhurt, and of Little Red Riding-Hood, who was swallowed whole by the wolf, and came out alive when the hunter cut him open.

In the next myth, that of the Sun-Catcher, the Polynesian Sun-god Maui again makes his appearance. He began to think that it was too soon after the rising of the sun that it became night again, and that the sun again sank down below the