Page:Segnius Irritant or Eight Primitive Folk-lore Stories.pdf/89

 Sun-horse. Now the Bethlehem legend has been formed by the substitution of the three kings in the Sun-horse for the Three Fates of Father Know-All; probably, therefore, there was some intermediate legend between the fates in Father Know-All and the Magi of Bethlehem, some legend in which three ice-kings stood by the bedside of some Arctic Plavachek. And speaking generally, it is sufficiently clear that the Bethlehem Magi legend was taken from the Sun-horse and Father Know-All, and not Father Know-All and the Sun-horse from the Bethlehem legend. Even the further development of the Bethlehem legend corresponds not vaguely to its earlier counterpart. Just as the hero of the primitive myth leaves home to, wander through darkness and bring back the light, so Jesus, the putative child of the Jewish Tvashtar, runs away from home, and disputing with the doctors of divinity, proves himself to be more enlightened than any of them; and not long after this, after a forty days’ fast, which is perhaps a faint reminiscence of the forty-two days’ Arctic winter night, occurs the struggle for the light in its usual triple form, but vulgarized into a trial of moral strength between a devil and a saint, perhaps having been modified by ancient Buddhist legends. Such is the stuff religions and religious thought are formed of.

In saying this, I do not mean that the story of the New Testament is a mere annual myth or allegory; just as in the legend of the Lake of Carlovits, there may very well be a core of real fact round which the legends have crystallized. Moreover, in the case of a religious mystic, the question is a more complicated one, and it becomes difficult to draw the line where fact ends and fiction begins. These allegories and mysteries must have been widely diffused in the time of Christ himself, and it is more than likely that a person who proposed to himself the task of solving all human difficulties and pointing out the narrow gate which leadeth unto life, had turned his receptive mind to the study of popular beliefs, and had somehow or other got to know of the great mystery of Arctic regions, the death and burial of the sun, together with and in consequence of the temporary death of vegetable and animal life, and their resurrection together with the sun in spring. And with his total absence of scientific training and his idealizing tendencies, the knowledge of this cosmical mystery would almost certainly lead him to the same conclusion to which it had led our rudely cultivated Finnish ancestors themselves, that, namely, the gradual collapse of the golden apple of the sun into the apple-garth of the under-world, was only part of the great ebb of vital energy which took place every autumn and winter. And believing this great tide of vitality to be gathered up and to reach its maximum in the human organism, no wonder if he came to believe that in some mysterious way it was possible for an individual, by accumulating within himself the forces of the soma of vitality by means of signal chastity and singleness of life, and then acting in his own life the great mystery of the sun’s death, burial, and resurrection, by sacrificing himself voluntarily as human beings had from the