The ascent of Olympus / by Rendel Harris.

  • J. Rendel Harris
Date:
1917
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The ascent of Olympus / by Rendel Harris. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    of a lion. We will not, however, go to ancient literature, but to something much more ancient, the traditions and folk-lore of existing peoples. For instance, there is a wide-spread folk-tale, according to which Jesus asks bread from an old woman who is baking, and upon re¬ fusal turns her into a woodpecker or an owl : you have a reminiscence of the story in Ophelia’s statement in the play of Hamlet, that “ the owl was a baker’s daughter ”. This story, the explanation of which is not difficult, is, amongst the peasants of little Russia, embroidered with another story from quite a different cycle. The old woman in this tale strikes Jesus on the head and makes a wound. In the wound is found a little worm, which Peter is bidden to extract and place in the hollow of a tree. The story-teller goes on to say that when they next passed that way, there was an abundance of honey in the tree. Bees had been produced out of the Lord's head. In another form of the story, as told in Poland, Jesus is travelling with Peter and Paul, and asks for hospitality for the night from an old woman. Instead of a welcome they have stones thrown at them, and Paul is struck in the head. As the weather was hot, the wound putrified, and little maggots were produced, which Jesus took from the wound and placed in the hollow of a tree. A good while after, they passed that way again, and Jesus directed Paul to look in the tree- hollow, where to his surprise he found bees and honey sprung from his own head. In German Bohemia, the story is told without the introduction of the old woman. Jesus and Paul walk through the woods together. Christ’s forehead itches, and Peter extracts the troublesome maggot and puts it in a hollow tree. Result as before. Sometimes the peasant says that the bee-larva was found in a hole in the body of God, either an artificial hole made in his forehead, or elsewhere, from which it is removed into a corresponding hole in the tree, where bees are to be found. In all these stories the oak in whose holes the bees are found has been externalised into the body of God in which the bees exist in germ-form. The Thunder-man is seen to be the externalisation of the Thunder-tree ; the phytomorph and the anthropomorph standing side by side, and each of them being read in terms of the other, for each is the Thunder. Christ as the Thunder-man has, in fact, stepped
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