The Bushmen, almost the lowest tribe of South Africa, have the same star-lore and much the same myths as the Greeks, Australians, Egyptians, and Eskimo.  According to Dr. Bleek, ’stars, and even the sun and moon, were once mortals on earth, or even animals or inorganic substances, which happened to get translated to the skies.  The sun was once a man, whose arm-pit radiated a limited amount of light round his house.  Some children threw him into the sky, and there he shines.’  The Homeric hymn to Helios, in the same way, as Mr. Max Muller observes, ’looks on the sun as a half-god, almost a hero, who had once lived on earth.’  The pointers of the Southern Cross were ‘two men who were lions,’ just as Callisto, in Arcadia, was a woman who was a bear.  It is not at all rare in those queer philosophies, as in that of the Scandinavians, to find that the sun or moon has been a man or woman.  In Australian fable the moon was a man, the sun a woman of indifferent character, who appears at dawn in a coat of red kangaroo skins, the present of an admirer.  In an old Mexican text the moon was a man, across whose face a god threw a rabbit, thus making the marks in the moon. {132a}

Many separate races seem to recognise the figure of a hare, where we see ‘the Man in the Moon.’  In a Buddhist legend, an exemplary and altruistic hare was translated to the moon.  ’To the common people in India the spots on the moon look like a hare, and Chandras, the god of the moon, carries a hare:  hence the moon is called sasin or sasanka, hare-mark.  The Mongolians also see in these shadows the figure of a hare.’ {132b} Among the Eskimo, the moon is a girl, who always flees from her cruel brother, the sun, because he disfigured her face.  Elsewhere the sun is the girl, beloved by her own brother, the moon; she blackens her face to avert his affection.  On the Rio Branco, and among the Tomunda, the moon is a girl who loved her brother and visited him in the dark.  He detected her wicked passion by drawing his blackened hand over her face.  The marks betrayed her, and, as the spots on the moon, remain to this day. {133}

Among the New Zealanders and North American Indians the sun is a great beast, whom the hunters trapped and thrashed with cudgels.  His blood is used in some New Zealand incantations; and, according to an Egyptian myth, was kneaded into clay at the making of man.  But there is no end to similar sun-myths, in all of which the sun is regarded as a man, or even as a beast.

To return to the stars—­

The Red Indians, as Schoolcraft says, ’hold many of the planets to be transformed adventurers.’  The Iowas ’believed stars to be a sort of living creatures.’  One of them came down and talked to a hunter, and showed him where to find game.  The Gallinomeros of Central California, according to Mr. Bancroft, believe that the sun and moon were made and lighted up by the Hawk and the Coyote, who one day flew into each other’s faces in the