Page:Segnius Irritant or Eight Primitive Folk-lore Stories.pdf/111

 gelid and sparkling splendour, we have the following myth enshrined. “Liebe Maria” gives an orphan her handkerchief to dry her tears. Having dried them, the orphan throws it into a bed of nettles. Boys passing the nettles see something shining there; ask what it is, and are told that it is Liebe Maria’s handkerchief sparkling with the orphan’s tears. I ask where shall I wash it? Mary replies: In the golden brook. I ask where shall I keep it? Mary replies: In a golden casket hung round with nine little locks, having nine little keys. Now these stinging-nettles correspond to the stinging-ants of Golden Locks, and these to Sagittarius. The handkerchief lying in the nettles sparkling with the orphan’s tears is, therefore, the winter sky bereft of the sun, but sparkling with stars, when the sun has entered the November constellation of Sagittarius to remain there and in Aquarius until February. The golden casket would, therefore, seem to mean the year of nine months (the nine keys and locks), illuminated by the sun. The strong contrast between the two periods in the myth, between the starlit winter yearlet of three and the sunlit golden year of nine months, shows that it must have been manufactured in high latitudes as surely as the Serbian legend of the boy who looked under the bark of a spruce-tree and saw a sun-bright, amber-clear nymph shining there, was the produce of a spruce trementina forest of a much lower latitude.

Wonderful to dwellers within the northern circle must have been the following coincidences, particularly where the sun remained eclipsed just a month. (1) The three sharply-defined winter months, just ninety days in all, and the nine sunny months, giving the numbers three and nine. (2) The nine months’ gestation of the human fetus in the womb, perhaps, originally in some way, really due to the arrest of nature’s life during the three glacial winter months, and our man-ape ancestry having a fixed rutting period (perhaps in March), like the other animals. And (3), the 3x9=27 days of the lunar month. It is worth remembering that nine is the number sacred to Buddha, and that the Turanians of the north resemble that personage in the respect they show for human life. Indeed, the rareness of murder and the roundness of the skull of the Lapp and Samoyede Nomads, besides their skill in magic, seem to indicate that physically they are the highest type of human beings yet in process of being evolved. But they are so small, it may be objected. Size, however, is no criterion of excellence. But we are Christians, and just the right size, it may be retorted angrily. Of course, to this argument there is no answer. All disbelievers can do is humbly to bow the head in presence of a revelation.

In conclusion, I quote a Lithuanian versified form of the legend in which the northern nine again occurs, and which is so obviously an Arctic annual myth as to require no comments: