Custom and Myth | Page 6

the Spaniards conquered Mexico, and when
Sahagun (one of the earliest missionaries) collected the legends of the
people, he found them, like the Cingalese, strong believers in the
mystic tree-felling. We translate Sahagun's account of the 'midnight
axe':--
When so any man heareth the sound of strokes in the night, as if one
were felling trees, he reckons it an evil boding. And this sound they call
youaltepuztli (youalli, night; and tepuztli, copper), which signifies 'the
midnight hatchet.' This noise cometh about the time of the first sleep,
when all men slumber soundly, and the night is still. The sound of
strokes smitten was first noted by the temple-servants, called
tlamacazque, at the hour when they go in the night to make their
offering of reeds or of boughs of pine, for so was their custom, and this
penance they did on the neighbouring hills, and that when the night was
far spent. Whenever they heard such a sound as one makes when he
splits wood with an axe (a noise that may be heard afar off), they drew
thence an omen of evil, and were afraid, and said that the sounds were
part of the witchery of Tezeatlipoca, that often thus dismayeth men
who journey in the night. Now, when tidings of these things came to a
certain brave man, one exercised in war, he drew near, being guided by
the sound, till he came to the very cause of the hubbub. And when he
came upon it, with difficulty he caught it, for the thing was hard to
catch: natheless at last he overtook that which ran before him; and
behold, it was a man without a heart, and, on either side of the chest,
two holes that opened and shut, and so made the noise. Then the man
put his hand within the breast of the figure and grasped the breast and
shook it hard, demanding some grace or gift.
As a rule, the grace demanded was power to make captives in war. The
curious coincidence of the 'midnight axe,' occurring in lands so remote
as Ceylon and Mexico, and the singular attestation by an English lady

of the actual existence of the disturbance, makes this youaltepuztli one
of the quaintest things in the province of the folklorist. But, whatever
the cause of the noise, or of the beliefs connected with the noise, may
be, no one would explain them as the result of community of race
between Cingalese and Aztecs. Nor would this explanation be offered
to account for the Aztec and English belief that the creaking of
furniture is an omen of death in a house. Obviously, these opinions are
the expression of a common state of superstitious fancy, not the signs
of an original community of origin.
Let us take another piece of folklore. All North-country English folk
know the Kernababy. The custom of the 'Kernababy' is commonly
observed in England, or, at all events, in Scotland, where the writer has
seen many a kernababy. The last gleanings of the last field are bound
up in a rude imitation of the human shape, and dressed in some tag-rags
of finery. The usage has fallen into the conservative hands of children,
but of old 'the Maiden' was a regular image of the harvest goddess,
which, with a sickle and sheaves in her arms, attended by a crowd of
reapers, and accompanied with music, followed the last carts home to
the farm. {18} It is odd enough that the 'Maiden' should exactly
translate [Greek], the old Sicilian name of the daughter of Demeter.
'The Maiden' has dwindled, then, among us to the rudimentary
kernababy; but ancient Peru had her own Maiden, her Harvest Goddess.
Here it is easy to trace the natural idea at the basis of the superstitious
practice which links the shores of the Pacific with our own northern
coast. Just as a portion of the yule-log and of the Christmas bread were
kept all the year through, a kind of nest-egg of plenteous food and fire,
so the kernababy, English or Peruvian, is an earnest that corn will not
fail all through the year, till next harvest comes. For this reason the
kernababy used to be treasured from autumn's end to autumn's end,
though now it commonly disappears very soon after the harvest home.
It is thus that Acosta describes, in Grimston's old translation (1604), the
Peruvian kernababy and the Peruvian harvest home:--
This feast is made comming from the chacra or farme unto the house,
saying certaine songs, and praying that the Mays (maize) may long
continue, the which they call Mama cora.

What a chance this word offers to etymologists of the old school: how
promptly they would recognise, in mama mother--[Greek], and in
cora--[Greek], the Mother and the Maiden, the feast of