Page:Segnius Irritant or Eight Primitive Folk-lore Stories.pdf/110

 exchange for the golden horse, and the golden horse for the golden apple; the fox transforms itself at each step into a golden maiden, a golden horse, and a golden pippin; thus the possessors of these treasures are cheated as well as the stealer of the vine-stock, which yields twenty-four buckets of wine. All these precious articles are thus recovered and brought home by the hero, and the father, whose right eye laughs and left eye weeps, being presented with the vinestock, weeps no more. In the normal form of the story it is always a tree or leguminous plant the hero climbs; in the Hungaro-Slovenian variant the dumplings have been developed through a misunderstanding. HaluskiHalušky [sic] in Slovenian means dumplings; and in Bohemian and perhaps other Slavonic languages haluze means a branch. The legend has therefore drifted into Hungary from the north, and the branches turned to dumplings in the process. We have no right to assume that the Slovenian Three Citrons was derived from the Siebenbürgen legend; both may be variants of some legend more primitive still; all we have a right to affirm is that the legend travelled south, and that the mistake about haluze created the dumplings. Still we may safely assert that, besides being Arctic in many other respects, the Slovenian legend is closely connected with a story in which three periods of nine days each is a strongly marked feature. Now in the Vedic legends (except in the late cosmogonical one of Purusha, the universal male being nine months hatching in the primitive egg), the number nine does not occur, but it is of common occurrence in the northern forms of the legends. Thus, for example, in the Siberian version of the legend of the fall, the fatal tree has nine branches, and there are nine Adams and nine Eves. The fruit of five of the branches pointing east might be eaten, the fruit of the four other branches pointing west were forbidden. Under the tree were a dog and a serpent. Erlik, the tempter, persuaded one of the Eves to eat the forbidden fruit. This caused the shaggy hides of the men and women (for, like the Japanese Ainos, they were covered with hair) to fall off, and their expulsion from Paradise. How can we here fail to identify the four westward-facing branches with the bean-stalk—that is, dark- and light-moon periods of the Arctic winter night, the profoundly phallic character of which can be traced with certainty in the vulgarisms of the common people, both of Durham and Liguria to this very day. May it not be that to the pious orgies of those genial winter nights of the primitive circumpolar civilization we owe it that our simian hides thinned off and human forms emerged, worthy to be the subjects of the chisel of Pheidias and Praxiteles? To this day the Northern Mongols are almost hairless. Vice is a great depilatory, profligacy a great humanizer. Juvenal, in his diatribes against Roman vice, was well aware of this, and begs heaven, in his satires, to restore the golden ages of the world when the women were nearly as hairy as the men, and both as bears.

Finally, in a lovely Lithuanian folk-lied, in which every syllable declares itself the genuine offspring of a northern winter in all its