Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 5 1887.djvu/173

Rh with it. "Formerly when there was no land, God was on the top of a golden pillar in the middle of the sea. When he saw His image in it, he said, 'Rise up whoever thou art.' Well, it rose up, and it was the Devil. God then asked, 'how could land be produced?' The Devil said, 'Sure enough it will be produced if one went three times to fetch earth from the bottom of the sea.' Well, he was ordered to go, and the Devil went, but the third time he put some of the earth by stealth into his mouth. From the earth, God rubbed forth the land, between his hands. The earth in the Devil's mouth increased in bulk, and with it the pains in his jaws. Then he came to complain to God that 'he had stolen, and so was in pain.' Well, God took the earth from the Devil's jaws, and threw it at Pohjola, as stones and rocks." The Mordvin account, which is much longer and more circumstantial, begins: "When there was nothing in the world but water, Cham-Pas (the supreme Mordvin god) was drifting about on a stone upon the open sea reflecting how to create the world." The incidents that follow are the same as in the Finnish version, though the word for Devil (F. piru) is rendered by Shaitan, one of the words that betray its Mahometan Tatar origin, or at any rate a modification of an original Mordvin legend from that quarter. There is, however, one incident in which the two accounts differ. In the one, land is produced by rubbing between the hands, and in the other, sand is thrown here and there upon the sea and it grew into dry land. The former is a common Finnish formula when anything is being created or produced.

For instance, in the 20th runo of the Kalevala, Osmotar rubs a splinter of wood between her hands and produced a white squirrel, she does the same with a chip and produces a golden-breasted martin, and from a husk of grass by the same operation she brings forth a bee. The connection of the two ideas, "rubbing between the hands" and "the creation or production of something," goes back perhaps to the time when fire was produced by turning the fire-stick rapidly between the hands. Some may see a confirmation of this in a squirrel and a golden-breasted martin being the animals produced, as the former is often associated with fire legends. Another common phrase in Finnish songs and charms under similar circumstances is composed of words meaning to "cradle, rock, swing to and fro," precisely the