Of the Milky Way--so called because Hêrê, indignant at the bantling Herakles being put to her breast, spilt her milk along the sky (the solar mythologers say that the "red cow of evening passes during the night across the sky scattering her milk")--the Ottawas say that it was caused by a turtle swimming along the bottom of the sky and stirring up the mud. According to the Patagonians it is the track along which the departed tribesmen hunt ostriches, the clouds being their feathers; in African myth it is some wood-ashes long ago thrown up into the sky by a girl, that her people might be able to see their way home at night; in Eastern myth it is chaff dropped by a thief in his hurried flight.
The idea of a land beyond the sky--be it the happy hunting-ground of the Indian, or the Paradise of Islam, or the new Jerusalem of the Apocalypse--would not fail to arise, and in both the Milky Way and the Rainbow barbaric fancy sees the ladders and bridges whereby the departed pass from earth to heaven. So we find in the lower and higher culture alike the beautiful conceptions of the _chemin des ames_, the Red man's road of the dead to their home in the sun; the ancient Roman path of, or to, the gods; the road of the birds, in both Lithuanian and Finnish myth, because the winged spirits flit thither to the free and happy land. In prosaic contrast to all this, it is curious to find among ourselves the Milky Way described as Watling Street! That famous road, which ran from Richborough through Canterbury and London to Chester, now gives its name to a narrow bustling street of Manchester warehousemen in the City. But who the Wætlingas were--whether giants, gods, or men--and why their name was transferred from Britain to the sky, we do not know,[7] although the fact is plainly enough set down in old writers, foremost among whom is Chaucer. In his _House of Fame_[8] he says:--
"Lo, there, quod he, cast up thine eye, se yondir, to, the galaxie, the whiche men clepe the Milky Way, for it is white, and some parfay ycallin it han Watlingestrete."
To the savage the rainbow is a living monster, a serpent seeking whom it may devour, coming to earth to slake its unquenchable thirst, and preying on the unwary. But in more poetic myth, its mighty many-coloured arch touching, as it seems to do, the earth itself, is a road to glory. In the _Edda_ it is the three-coloured bridge Bifröst, "the quivering track" over which the gods walk, and of which the red is fire, so that the Frost-giants may not cross it. In Persian myth it is Chinvad, the "bridge of the gatherer," flung across the gloomy depths between this world and the home of the blessed; in Islam it is El-Sirat, the bridge thin as a hair and sharp as a scimitar, stretching from this world to the next; among the Greeks it was Iris, the messenger from Zeus to men, charged with tidings of war and tempest; to the Finns it was the bow of Tiernes, the god of thunder; whilst to the Jew it was the messenger of grace from the Eternal, who did set "his bow in the clouds" as the promise that never again should the world be destroyed by flood. Such belief in the heavens as the field of activities profoundly affecting the fortunes of mankind, and in the stars as influencing their destinies, has been persistent in the human mind. The delusions of the astrologer are embalmed in language, as when, forgetful of a belief shared not only by sober theologians, but by Tycho Brahe and Kepler, we speak of "disaster," and of our friends as "jovial," "saturnine," or "mercurial." But the illusions of the savage or semi-civilised abide as an animating part of many a faith, undisturbed by a science which has swept the skies and found no angels there, and whose keen analysis separates for ever the ancient belief in a connection between the planets and man's fate. For convenience' sake, we retain on our celestial maps and globes the men and monsters pictured by barbaric fancy in the star-positions and clusters, noting these as interesting examples of survival. Yet we are the willing dupes of illusions nebulous as these, and, charm he never so wisely, the Time-spirit fails to disenchant us.