Note 82 — Lohengrin
Smith Ely Jelliffe translation
The “box” in certain myths is represented by the cave, which also distinctly symbolizes the womb; aside from statements in Abraham, Ion, and others, especially in case of Zeus, who is born in a cave of the Ida mountains, and nourished by the goat Amalthea, his mother concealing him for fear of her husband, Kronos. According to Homer’s Iliad (XVIII, 396, et seq.), Hephaistos is also cast into the water by his mother, on account of his lameness, and remains hidden, for nine years, in a cave surrounded by water. By exchanging the reversal, the birth (the fall into the water) is here plainly represented as the termination of the nine months of the intrauterine life. More common than the cave birth is the exposure in a box, which is likewise told in the Babylonian Marduk-Tammuz myth, as well as in the Egyptian-Phoenician Osiris-Adonis myth (compare Winckler, “Die Weltanschauung des alten Orients, Ex Oriente Lux” I, 1, p. 43, and Jeremias, loc. cit., p. 41). Bacchus, according to Paus, III, 24, is also removed from the persecution of the king, through exposure in a chest on the Nile, and is saved at the age of three months by a king’s daughter, which is remarkably suggestive of the Moses legend. A similar story is told of Tennes, the son of Kyknos, who has been mentioned in another connection (Siecke: Hermes, p. 48, annotation), and of many others.
The occurrence of the same symbolic representation among the aborigines is illustrated by the following examples: Stucken relates the New Zealand tale of the Polynesian Fire (and Seed) Robber, Mani-tiki-tiki, who is exposed directly after his birth, his mother throwing him into the sea, wrapped in an apron (chest, box). A similar story is reported by Frobenius (loc. cit., p. 379) from Betsimisaraka, where the child is exposed on the water, and is found and raised by a rich childless woman, but finally resolves to discover his actual parents. According to a report of Bab (Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 1906, p. 281) the wife of the Raja Besurjay was presented with a child floating on a bubble of water-foam (from Singapore).