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RELIGIOUS IDEAS
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Ugrian races, or to be borrowed from the same source. Among the Vogulians, the two first people descended from heaven in a cradle of silver wire. The idea that heaven is the birthplace of humanity is also found in the myths of other Finnish-Ugrian tribes in Asia and Europe.[1]
Similar ideas have also reached the Indians (perhaps through the Eskimos?) Thus the Hurons believe that the first human beings came from heaven.[2] The idea that the earth was originally flat and then split up also reminds us of the Finnish-Ugrian cosmogony, according to which the earth,
- ↑ See J. Krohn, Finska Litteratur-Historie, 1st Part, Kalevala (1891), p. 165. Moltke Moe has directed my attention to this similarity, and has lent me the MS. of an as yet unpublished essay on legends of this class. As a rule, the connection between earth and heaven is effected by a great tree, by which people climb up and down. The myth of such heaven-trees is to be found in almost every quarter of the world. We find it in Scandinavia (Ygdrasil) no less than in Polynesia, Celebes, Borneo, New Zealand, &c. Among the Vogulians, the son of the first two human beings (see above) transforms himself into a squirrel, climbs up a tree to heaven, and afterwards climbs down again. (Compare A. Lang, Myth, Ritual and Religion (1887). i. 182, note 2.) Among the Indians the first man climbs into a tree, in chase of a squirrel, and so reaches heaven, whence he returns with the elements of civilisation, or, according to some, in order to take his sister up with him again. (Compare Tylor, Early History of Mankind (2nd ed.), p. 349.) The gipsies on the borders of Transylvania have a legend of a great tree from which flesh fell down to earth, and from whose leaves human beings sprang forth (H. von Wlislocki, Märchen und Sagen der transsilvanischen Zigeuner, No. 1.) There is probably some connection between these myths and the Greenland legend; it is quite natural that in the Eskimo version the tree should have disappeared.
- ↑ Compare A. Lang, Myth, Ritual, and Religion, i. 181.
