# Segnius Irritant: or Eight Primitive Folk-lore Stories/Explanation of the plates

EXPLANATION OF THE PLATES.
The preceding plate is a comparative illustration of the first half o the eight fairy stories, and shows to demonstration that they are all variants of one and the same primitive myth, the origin of which was the long winter night of the Arctic circle. The drawings are not fancy ones, they are simply plotted down from the stories. Truly astonishing is the absolute uniformity in segments seven, with the exception of the story of George and His Goat, the most confused of any of the stories. In all the rest we have the termination of a black forest or of the night spent in a black forest, or of journeying through kingdoms of darkness. In all these again we have a castle of gold with the figure of an old woman outside it, or some obvious variation to represent the re-appearance of the sun after the ong Arctic winter night, either a castle of gold or a castle where a green bird perches on the three queens’ snow-white hands, obviously the patches of green which appear at the melting of the snow; or a well which gives sight to the blind, or a lake with a gold fish in it, or a cleft rock with a gold nugget extracted from it, or a doll given the golden gift of speech and life. In George and His Goat we have an illustration of how in later variants the symbolical characters became mixed and interchanged. We know from the Venetian variant of the Three Citrons, Le tre narance, as well as from Il qestelo di fiori, that George’s goat properly signifies Capricornus, and that the incident of making the princess laugh belongs properly to the beginning of the winter fairy romance. But in this story the events occurring in the black forest being hastily sketched in, the first frosts at the end of November have become linked with the return of light in spring, a combination all the more easy to be made from the facility with which the goat Capricornus was confounded with Aries; thus we can explain the mayor looking out of the window, and the bull aflterwards brushing past and attaching itself to him, as the sun passing into the constellation of the bull in spring. The same is more or less true of the three mates in Long, Broad, and Sharp-Eyes; they are in part the long moonless night of the Arctic winter, its broad moonlight, and the returning sunlight after the dark period, in part the last autumn and two winter signs of the zodiac; and Broad is perhaps, besides this, a symbol of the autumn or spring floods, or perhaps both. We shall see soon how pre-eminently synthetic the speculation of primitive times was; this transformation and transposition of the symbolical characters is not, consequently, due to confusion of thought, but to a desire to establish recondite analogies between the part and the whole, to find the impress of the whole year in its microcosm, and of this in its six weeks’ sunless period. Thus in the Moravian story of the Four Brothers, the four seasons are symbolized by personages closely resembling Long, Sharp-Eyes, ​and the tailor of Reason and Happiness. Thus in the Bethlehem legend we have the three kings of the Sun-horse put in the place of the three Norns of Father Know-All. In the comparative illustration the dark line at the top of it indicates the long Arctic winter night, where the primitive legend was first invented; and so profoundly did it affect the consciousness of our ancestors, that, like the traditional blood-stain which cannot be effaced, faint or distinet it has remained within the web and woof of these eight primitive Slavonic fairy stories, and can be more or less clearly traced in all of them. There is, in fact, in all of them, a strange material kind of inertia. Just as the Noah’s Ark or cloud-wrack persists identical in form through the long winter’s night, and maintains its contours until the last flicker of white fleece melts away into the transparent ether, just as every vibration of the tide’s waves are mirrored in the sand pictures of the sand and coal dust in the Durham Sands, just as the cloud-line follows the mountain, just as the gyroscope retains the inclination given to it, just as the expression of face in a pencil sketch cannot wholly be got rid by any amount of after-altering of the lines which form the features, so in the first half of these stories the sun’s six weeks’ sojourn in the underworld of Arctic winter life has printed itself indelibly upon all of them. One of the most curious instances of this “inertia” is perhaps to be found in the Venetian story—in every respect modern—of a holiday dinner. As we shall see, the cat jumps into a spider’s web, her tail hangs down, and the dog Jumps at the tail, the wife at the dog, the husband at the wife, and they are all hung up together. Now this is George and His Goat over again: the goat is the old woman of the Tre narance, she is the old woman of the Three Citrons, who corresponds to the Norns of Father Know-All, the third of whom is found by the hero, spiderlike, spinning in a corner of the deserted castle of gold.
​If this second illustration, drawn as far as possible to scale, and representing the second half of the eight primitive annual solar fairy stories, be compared with the previous illustration, the symmetry of the one and the irregularity of the other cannot fail to strike the reader’s imagination. The first is symmetrical because it represents the conventional myth fashioned, so to say, upon the rigid un- changing block of the six weeks’ journey of the sun through the Arctic winter night from its first disappearance on the 1st December to its re-appearance forty-two days later in January. The second is irregular because the partial thaws and spells of warm weather, heralding the return of spring, are differently distributed in different years, and the final break-up of the reign of winter is also very variable in date. The only event which is of constant occurrence in this second half of the eight fairy stories, is the three days’ struggle for the light, and even this is absent in Right remains Right, that story being a degraded and moralized version of Father Know-All, in which the rape of the three hairs occurs within the castle of gold instead of a twelve hours’ journey beyond it. There is a certain correspondence—more apparent, however, than real—in the incident of the well; but in general the distribution of the incidents is so different in each of the eight stories as to form the strongest possible contrast with the mathematical regularity of the first group, which were capable of being exactly drawn to scale. Now the primitive annual solar fairy story’s period may be compared to a ribbon a little more than sixty-one inches in length, this length being constant to represent the one year, three months, one week, and a few days deduced roughly from Father Know-All, and confirmed by the Venetian variant of the end of the Three Citrons—L’omo morto (the dead man)—and we must imagine this ribbon pinned down for just six inches to represent the definite six weeks’ period of the Arctic winter night which gave rise to the myth. Hence, if a variant does not quite reach to the end of the period—the second week in March, and yet is to represent the whole of the year, three months, one week, and a few days, it will have to begin a little earlier, in other words, what is cut off one end of the ribbon will have to be added on to the other. Now Father Know-All is the only one of the eight myths which covers all, or nearly the whole of the period, and the end of it does not exactly tally with that of the Three Citrons, so that it is not wonderful if it begins a week or two earlier than the Three Citrons would have done if it had been complete, that is to say, if it had preserved its prologue or rapid sketch of the year previous to the prince’s wandering through the forty-two days of the Arctic winter night. Consequently, in drawing the following diagram, which forms a rough plan of the primitive annual myth, it has been necessary to extend 1t rather beyond the exact limit of sixty-one equal spaces and a fraction, because the internal evidence of Father Know-All points to the birth of Plavachek having been imagined to occur about the middle of November instead of at the end of it, though it is not absolutely necessary to make this assumption. In any case absolute identity of parts and relation of parts in eight elaborate annual solar weather myths of great antiquity is hardly to be expected.
​This general plan sums up in a more or less graphical form many of the results arrived at in the previous notes and comments to the eight stories. I have introduced the principal incidents in the last, and in many ways the most remarkable of the Venetian folk-lore stories, collected orally by the late D. G. Bernoni, because it confirms in a remarkable manner the inferences as to the dates and periods which were drawn from a comparison of Father Know-All, The Three Citrons, The Sun-horse, and L’omo morto. This story, called El Rè Corvo (King Raven), is a Venetian and consequently later variant of the Three Citrons; but while it has lost the anti-climax, it has preserved its prologue which links it more or less with Father Know-All. The main points of the story are briefly as follows: A queen, under a “conjuration,” gives birth to a raven, which just twenty years afterwards returns and demands for a wife the baker’s daughter. He has three. The king and queen go to the baker, who reluctantly agrees, after receiving a bribe to give his first daughter in marriage to the raven. On the eve of this marriage a beautiful youth passes the door of the baker’s daughter, and says: “The idea of a beautiful girl like you to go and marry a raven. It will sit on your shoulder and dirty you.” The girl replies: “If it does I shall kill it.” The marriage takes place. On the following morning the girl is found strangled in bed. The raven has flown. The raven returns exactly at the end of a year, and the same happens to the second daughter of the baker. At the end of another year the raven returns and is betrothed to the third daughter of the baker. When the beautiful youth passes her door and taunts her, she replies: “Mind your own business; if it dirties me I shall have plenty of fine changes of raiment.” The raven says to his parents: “This is the girl for me, I won’t kill her.” They marry, and in bed the raven turns into a beautiful youth. The young bride carries the raven about on her shoulder all day, and is devoted to it. Unfortunately, though bade keep the matter secret by her husband, she divulges to his aunt the secret of their marriage, and the raven flies away. His disconsolate wife begs of her father-in-law a pilgrim’s dress and three pairs of iron shoes, and goes in search of him. Much the same events occur as in the Three Citrons, but she meets no flocks of ravens. The first castle is the castle of the wind, and the old woman gives her a chestnut, and bids her only open it in case of extreme need. The wind is prevented from eating the heroine by being well fed up and gorged with a plate of ‘pasta’ and haricot beans, and sends her on to the castle of the moon. Here much the same happens, except that the old woman gives the heroine a walnut instead of a chestnut, and the moon (of course, a lady giant in Italian) is gorged with a saucepanful of rice, and sends the heroine on to the castle of the sun. Here the sun is gorged with maccaroni; the heroine is given an apple by the old woman, and is carried by the sun on his ray to the castle of King Raven. At the castle of King Raven the heroine engages herself as goose-girl, opens the chestnut, and a splendid robe comes out. The geese cackle on seeing it; the queen ​enquires why; the heroine informs her, and shews her the dress. The queen desires to buy it; the heroine will only give it for a night with king Corvo; the queen, to get the robe, consents, and possets the king’s wine. Baulked of her desire, the heroine laments throughout the night. The same happens with the walnut; but the king’s confidential servant, who sleeps in the adjoining room, overhears the heroine lamenting, and informs the king. When the apple is opened, and the queen is bribed by the beautiful dress to concede a third night to the heroine, the king throws the possetted wine, unseen by the queen, under the table, and when the heroine sleeps with him the whole mystery is explained. A banquet is then announced, and the twelve neighbouring kings invited. At dessert, when the cloth is removed, each recounts his adventures, and last of all King Raven his. The end of the story is so quaint that I give it in full: “And now (says he) it’s my turn to speak; and I have to relate what happened to a king, a friend of mine. Well, you must know, that this king was, in person, as we others are, and in the presence of his parents, in the form of a raven; because his mother, while enceinte with him, was under a conjuration; and so to her eyes he was a raven. In his kingdom of so and so, he married, and told his young spouse not to divulge that he was a youth; and she confided it all—every bit, to a friend of hers. And so it happened to this king to scamper off all at once, and to go a long, long way into another city. There he married again, never dreaming that his first wife would go and find him in that city so far away. Instead of that, this first wife of his, to go and find him again, she has worn out three pairs of iron shoes, and she has passed through all sorts of hardships. And his second wife has had the courage to arrange that for three suits of clothes his first wife should sleep with him for three nights. If it had been anyone who had had the idea of murdering him, that there second wife would have let him be deprived of life for three suits of clothes. Now what would she deserve, this second wife?” And he turns to the oldest king present, and says to him: “Sacred majesty, he who is the oldest king of all we others here, let him say what this second wife would deserve.” He rises to his feet, this king, and he says: “She would deserve to be burnt in the middle of the piazza on a barrel of tar.” Then King Raven causes his second wife to come forth, and he says: “And burnt let her be; it is your own daughter.”
And so it was done; and this King Raven took with him the goose-girl, and they have renewed their marriage, and have always felt a world of love for one another.
Now this story is full of points of interest. In the first place it is obviously a form of the Three Citrons, and the three citrons were shewn by a comparison of the word haluze (a branch), and halusky (Slovenian for dumplings), to have come from the north through some Slavonian region north of Slavonia, and where haluze meant a branch; because in the north the Jack in the Bean Stalk legend speaks of branches but not of dumplings. In the Venetian variant a ​trace of the bean stalk remains in the dish of scarlet runners, and as the scarlet runner is a symbol-of the moon, this proves that the castle of the wind and the castle of lead really do, as was before inferred, represent the dark moon. The dumplings of the Slovenian legend have been transformed, the lead ones into a chestnut, the silver ones into a walnut, and the gold ones into an apple, the invariable high latitude symbol of the sun. It is, therefore, an absolutely unavoidable conclusion that the legend was transferred from Slovenia to Venice, and not the other way. Veronese gnocchi, a diminutive sort of dumplings, are indeed found in the restaurants of Venice, but they do not play the semi-comic rôle the dumpling has in Germany and Slavonia, nor are they, as there, to anything like the same extent popular national dishes; on the other hand, chestnuts, walnuts, and roast apples are sold everywhere in Venice, and form a substantial part of the common people’s bill of fare.
As an instance of this, and of the large part plays upon words have in the formation of popular superstitions, I may cite the popular Venetian remedy for hœmorrhoids, viz.: to put a chestnut in your pocket; as it shrinks so, it is said, will the hœmorrhoids. This superstition is due to the similarity between the Venetian for hœmorrhoids, ‘marroide, and the word for the larger chestnus, marroni: the remedy, however, is not recommended to be applied, because, according to popular Venetian superstition, the malady carries with it the promise of longevity. Again, what else can the three pairs of iron shoes be but skates?—another indication of the northern origin of the legend, just as Mercury’s, the mirk-god’s, winged feet are most likely only another southern form of the Norsemen’s ice-runners. But most significant of all is the prominence given to the raven element, that pre-eminently Scandinavian and anything but Venetian bird.
Still more important perhaps are the time elements of the story. It was shewn that, in Father Know-All, by assuming the twenty years of Plavachek to be twenty dark and light moons, that is, ten months, we brought the king’s thirst after his hot summer ride to somewhere about the middle of September, and that the rest of the story would complete itself within the limits of a year and three months, as indicated by the Dead Man, the Three Citrons, etc. Now making the same assumption for King Raven, and supposing him to be born at the end of November—for his flight out of the window with the consequent gap or blank in the story is a faint palimpsest or inertia-print of the six weeks’ Arctic winter night—his marriage with the first baker’s daughter (i.e., the successor to the baker or summer), will fall at the beginning of October. Now as there is an interval of a year, that is, a fortnight (light or dark moon) between each wedding, the second wedding will fall on the 15th October (about), and the third at the beginning of November. No straining of the imagination, therefore, is required to place the flight of King Raven at the end of November, and the journey of his bride through the dark world at the 1st of December. Thus the uniformity ​of all these stories, because fashioned upon the same block of the six weeks’ Arctic winter night, is again and again confirmed by different lines of reasoning. Lastly, as to the marriage of King Raven in October, it is to be observed that October in Slavonic is called rijen or the rutting month, and also that in that month and in the second week in November occur St. Martin’s summer, and his little summer respectively. It may be considered too large and gratuitous an assumption to make that a fortnight corresponds to a year. Let us see. The whole character of the stories, Father Know-All and the Three Citrons, shews them to be more archaic than the moralized variants, such as Right remains Right and Fortune and Happiness. Now we know from George and his Goat, and a comparison between this and the other eight stories together, and with their Venetian variants, that the laughing of the prince or princess is an incident which allegorizes the first bright winter frost after the fogs and gloom of November; we also know from similar evidence that the hero and heroine were supposed to be born at the same date, and that this date was either the end of November or the beginning of December. In a late variant like Reason and Happiness, the stain, so to say, of the December-January Arctic winter night would have almost disappeared, and the heroine would be born at the beginning of December. Thus when the story says the heroine never spoke or laughed since the beginning of her twelfth year, this can only mean that nature was rendered dumb and gloomy by the fogs of November; that it was sad and cheerless without the laughter of the sunlight. Hence, if in two stories a year is found to correspond to a calendar month, and in another that it corresponds to a fortnight, we may safely infer that the origin of the latter was the more ancient, or, at any rate, that in this particular it had maintained the more ancient form, because it was only in very primitive times that the years were reckoned by light and dark moons, and not by calendar months. And it has been already pointed out that this method of reckoning most likely originated in the Arctic circle where, during the long winter night, the moon was of supreme importance as the measurer par excellence. There would also be another reason, the desire of symmetry and the tendency to synthesize and to endeavour to discover the whole remirrored in the part, characteristic of primitive thought. In Polar regions, and nowhere else, the system of reckoning by dark and light moons would satisfy this yearning, for the six microcosms of dark and light moons would reflect in miniature the year’s bi-fold divinity, its long summer day and long winter night, the cerny bog and bily bog, the black and white divinity of the primitive Polar Slavs or Finno-Slavs. Now a long time must have elapsed for the legend of the Miraculous Hair to detach itself from the anti-climax of the Three Citrons and develop into so different a variant. But the Miraculous Hair was certainly prior to Virgil’s account of the death of Dido in the fourth book of the Ænid, which was copied from it. Much older, therefore, than the time of Virgil was the story of the Three Citrons, and also, therefore, of its companion story the ​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 ​foundation of the world been sacrified against their will to symbolize that mystery-no wonder if he came to believe that it was possible for him, singly and alone, to cause the sun of righteousness to rise with healing on its wings, to bring back the age of gold, a spring and fountain of eternal happiness, and some few years after his own death, to come flying through the air in person on clouds of glory to inaugurate an era of peace and happiness when all things should become new. For that was the gigantic delusion to which he sacrificed his life. If it were not so tragical, we, with our present knowledge of the vastness of the universe and our own insignificance, should be inclined to smile at the ludicrous want of a sense of proportion between the means and the end that such an idea displayed, and no doubt no Greek philosopher or even Greek lyric poet, with their instinctive sense of proportion and harmony, could ever have been betrayed into so glaring and fatal an error; but it should be remembered that Christ was most likely, in part at any rate, by birth a Jew, and that that people have always tenaciously held the savages’ view of creation, which causes individual Scotch Presbyterians to this day to believe that they can affect the local weather by the action of their own wills, and Protestants to declare when hard pressed and getting the worst of an argument, that they are God, and that it is impious to endeavour to confute them.
And if there be any truth in this theory of the Christian legend, it helps to explain a good many things in it. It may be, as the great folk-lorist Gubernatis has pointed out, that the finding of the piece of gold in the fish’s mouth is merely a form of the Sakuntala, Golden Locks, and Long, Broad, and Sharp-Eyes legends; but it may also be a fact, Christ having deliberately acted the legend by ground-baiting, and, if he did, we ought not exactly to accuse him of charlatanism, for the importance of the esoteric truth thereby symbolized may in his eyes have justified the trick; but we ought to remember, although a sufficient quantity has never yet been accumulated in any individual or even congregation, that by faith we can remove mountains—as Sharp-Eyes did. Symbolical, too, may have been the so-called miraculous draught or draughts of fishes, which, if they happened, were no miracle at all, they having been repeated in a much more remarkable form in the lake at Nostell Priory by the late Charles Waterton. We are not even informed how often Christ failed to divine the presence of the shoal of fish by observing their shadows in the water. In fishing with the grasshopper or spinning the minnow for large trout in the Oglio of Val Camonica, the success of the fisherman depends in great part upon his power of seeing the fish in the water as it follows the bait. This faculty depends upon the power of rapidly changing the eyes’ focus when viewing anything isolated in a transparent medium, and this, I believe, to the more or less perfect adjustment of range of vision in the right and left eye. In most people the range of sight differs more or less in the right and left eye, and where this is very much the case, it is often impossible to judge at a moment’s notice whether an object flying be ​a gnat near at hand or a bird a long way off. Christ, like Waterton, very probably picked up the art of seeing fish deep down in the water from some savage fisherman, and then perfected himself by practice in his rambles about the Lake of Galilee. And speculating on the cause of his success, the aphorism ascribed to him would naturally occur of itself: “If thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light, but if thy eye be dark, how great is that darkness.” This theory of the Gospel legend would also explain the confidence with which Christ confronted death, and if there be any grain of truth in the Scripture account, the terrible collapse upon the cross itself. All at once the vision of death as a reality swept away the fine-spun reasonings and inductions of the Idealist, and he saw as if in a lightning-flash the vast gulf of nothingness, which was all that in reality he had to hope for, the dream of returning within a few brief years through clouds of glory was at an end, the grand idea of awakening the dead and bringing them back to earth in a bodily resurrection, as the prince with the help of Long, Broad, and Sharp-Eyes had recalled the frozen warriors to life in the enchanted castle of iron, had dissipated itself as a summer mist or a thin dream of dawning. Oh! the pity of it, that so genial, well-meaning and poetical an intelligence, bent upon benefiting the world at large, and sacrificing itself for the good of mankind, should in reality have sacrificed itself to so gigantic a delusion; oh, the double pity of it, that the sacrifice, so far from having any good results whatever, was destined to perpetuate the horrors of religious mania, of Christianity, of the savages’ barbarous conception of the universe for another two thousand years, and to deluge great part of the western hemisphere with tears and blood.
The idea, like all ill weeds, grew apace, and soon it was the whole creation—just imagine it!—from the earth-centre to the farthest limits of the Milky Way, that was groaning and travailing in pain together, and which man’s regeneration was somehow to set to rights. After this, the monster of religious arrogance grew beyond all bounds, the poisonous seed which would never have had a chance amongst a primitive and healthy people living in the open air, throve apace on the hot-bed of the expiring classic world which the toadstools of superstition converted little by little into the fetid ichor and gaudy corruption, covered by the long dark autumnal and winter night of the Middle Ages. But when, after centuries of pious fraud, it gradually began to dawn upon even the stupidest believer, after centuries of practical experience, that no amount of bottling even the purest faith in the most suitable human organism, would transform even the most ascetic of saints into blasting-powder and dynamite, religious arrogance, to preserve itself, suffered a gradual transformation. Human conduct must somehow certainly be all-important, and if faith was useless from an engineering point of view, it must be all the more effective in the moral and spiritual world, determining the condition of the individual soul after death and for all eternity. Thus religious vanity has managed, by hook or by crook, ​to save its bacon, and to this day our religious world bears witness to and perpetuates, in a slightly modified form, the grotesque delusions, more pardonable in them from their want of our accumulated stores of knowledge of our savage ancestry.
Lastly, when the authority of Rome, and the respect felt even in its decay for the classic world by the rude northern tribes, had attracted the northern chiefs to the Christian superstition, and had caused them to be baptized themselves and to order the conversion en masse of their serfs and vassals, half unconsciously, perhaps, it would come to be felt, if our theory be the true one, that underlying the new faith and incorporated with it, lay large fragments of the half-forgotten primitive Arctic winter myth, with its glittering jewels of ice and snow, and this half-recognition of the old friends under new faces may help to explain the strange tenacity with which the northern people of Europe have clung to the arid, cruel and vain superstition which developed itself by degradation from the genial, poetical, and, if in part mistaken, not at all events sour or absurd beliefs, myths and generalizations of their lusty savage ancestry.