/OM.C/S

MYTHS AND MYTH MAKERS

OLD TALES AND SUPERSTITIONS INTERPRETED BY COMPAR- ATIVE MYTHOLOGY

BY

JOHN FISKE

La mythologie, cette science toute nouvelle, qui nous fait suivre les croy- ances de nos peres, depuis le berceau du monde jusqu'aux superstitions de nos campagnes. — EDMOND SCHERXK.

BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY prcj-tf Cambribge

COPYRIGHT 1872 BY JAMES R. OSGOOD & CO.

TO MY DEAR FRIEND

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

IN REMEMBRANCE OF PLEASANT AUTUMN

EVENINGS SPENT AMONG WEREWOLVES

AND TROLLS AND NIXIES

3: ttetiicate

THIS RECORD OF OUR ADVENTURES

20074S7

PREFACE

IN publishing this somewhat rambling and unsystematic series of papers, in which I have endeavoured to touch briefly upon a great many of the most important points in the study of mythology, I think it right to observe that, in order to avoid confusing the reader with intricate discussions, I have sometimes cut the matter short, expressing myself with dogmatic definiteness where a sceptical vagueness might perhaps have seemed more becoming. In treat- ing of popular legends and superstitions, the paths of inquiry are circuitous enough, and sel- dom can we reach a satisfactory conclusion until we have travelled all the way around Robin Hood's barn and back again. I am sure that the reader would not have thanked me for ob- structing these crooked lanes with the thorns and brambles of philological and antiquarian discussion, to such an extent as perhaps to make him despair of ever reaching the high road. I have not attempted to review, other- wise than incidentally, the works of Grimm, Miiller, Kuhn, Breal, Dasent, and Tylor ; nor vii

PREFACE

can I pretend to have added anything of con- sequence, save now and then some bit of ex- planatory comment, to the results obtained by the labour of these scholars ; but it has rather been my aim to present these results in such a way as to awaken general interest in them. And accordingly, in dealing with a subject which de- pends upon philology almost as much as astro- nomy depends upon mathematics, I have omitted philological considerations wherever it has been possible to do so. Nevertheless, I believe that nothing has been advanced as established which is not now generally admitted by scholars, and that nothing has been advanced as probable for which due evidence cannot be produced. Yet among many points which are proved, and many others which are probable, there must always remain many other facts of which we cannot feel sure that our own explanation is the true one ; and the student who endeavours to fathom the primitive thoughts of mankind, as enshrined in mythology, will do well to bear in mind ' the modest words of Jacob Grimm, — himself the greatest scholar and thinker who has ever dealt with this class of subjects, — "I shall indeed interpret all that I can, but 1 can- not interpret all that I should like." PETERSHAM, September 6, 1872.

CONTENTS

PAGE

I. THE ORIGINS OF FOLK-LORE ... I

II. THE DESCENT OF FIRE . 50

III. WEREWOLVES AND SWAN-MAIDENS . . 94

IV. LIGHT AND DARKNESS ... 141 V. MYTHS OF THE BARBARIC WORLD . . 191

VI. JUVENTUS MUNDI .... 235

VII. THE PRIMEVAL GHOST-WORLD . . .282

NOTE . 325

INDEX •»..... 327

The portrait of Dr. Fiske is from a photograph taken in 1883

MYTHS AND MYTH- MAKERS

THE ORIGINS OF FOLK-LORE

FEW mediaeval heroes are so widely known as William Tell. His exploits have been celebrated by one of the greatest poets and one of the most popular musicians of mod- ern times. They are doubtless familiar to many who have never heard of Stauffacher or Winkel- ried, who are quite ignorant of the prowess of Roland, and to whom Arthur and Lancelot, nay, even Charlemagne, are but empty names. Nevertheless, in spite of his vast reputation, it is very likely that no such person as William Tell ever existed, and it is certain that the story of his shooting the apple from his son's head has no historical value whatever. In spite of the wrath of unlearned but patriotic Swiss, especially of those of the cicerone class, this conclusion is forced upon us as soon as we begin to study the legend in accordance with the canons of modern historical criticism. It is useless to point to I

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Tell's lime-tree, standing to-day in the centre of the market-place at Altdorf, or to quote for our confusion his crossbow preserved in the arsenal at Zurich, as unimpeachable witnesses to the truth of the story. It is in vain that we are told, " The bricks are alive to this day to testify to it ; therefore, deny it not." These proofs are not more valid than the handkerchief of St. Veronica, or the fragments of the true cross. For if relics are to be received as evidence, we must needs admit the truth of every miracle narrated by the Bollandists.

The earliest work which makes any allusion to the adventures of William Tell is the chroni- cle of the younger Melchior Russ, written in 1482. As the shooting of the apple was sup- posed to have taken place in 1296, this leaves an interval of one hundred and eighty-six years, during which neither a Tell, nor a William, nor the apple, nor the cruelty of Gessler, received any mention. It may also be observed, paren- thetically, that the charters of Kussenach, when examined, show that no man by the name of Gessler ever ruled there. The chroniclers of the fifteenth century, Faber and Hammerlin, who minutely describe the tyrannical acts by which the Duke of Austria goaded the Swiss to re- bellion, do not once mention Tell's name, or betray the slightest acquaintance with his exploits or with his existence. In the Zurich chronicle

THE ORIGINS OF FOLK-LORE

of 1479 he is not alluded to. But we have still better negative evidence. John of Winterthiir, one of the best chroniclers of the Middle Ages, was living at the time of the battle of Morgarten (1315), at which his father was present. He tells us how, on the evening of that dreadful day, he saw Duke Leopold himself in his flight from the fatal field, half dead with fear. He describes, with the loving minuteness of a con- temporary, all the incidents of the Swiss revo- lution, but nowhere does he say a word about William Tell. This is sufficiently conclusive. These mediaeval chroniclers, who never failed to go out of their way after a bit of the epigram- matic and marvellous, who thought far more of a pointed story than of historical credibility, would never have kept silent about the adven- tures of Tell if they had known anything about them.

After this, it is not surprising to find that no two authors who describe the deeds of William Tell agree in the details of topography and chronology. Such discrepancies never fail to confront us when we leave the solid ground of history and begin to deal with floating legends. Yet, if the story be not historical, what could have been its origin ? To answer this question we must considerably expand the discussion.

The first author of any celebrity who doubted the story of William Tell was Guillimann, in 3

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his work on Swiss Antiquities, published in 1598. He calls the story a pure fable, but, nevertheless, eating his words, concludes by proclaiming his belief in it, because the tale is so popular ! Undoubtedly he acted a wise part ; for, in 1760, as we are told, Uriel Freuden- berger was condemned by the canton of Uri to be burnt alive, for publishing his opinion that the legend of Tell had a Danish origin.1

The bold heretic was substantially right, how- ever, like so many other heretics, earlier and later. The Danish account of Tell is given as follows, by Saxo Grammaticus : —

" A certain Palnatoki, for some .time among King Harold's body-guard, had made his brav- ery odious to very many of his fellow soldiers by the zeal with which he surpassed them in the discharge of his duty. This man once, when talking tipsily over his cups, had boasted that he was so skilled an archer that he could hit the smallest apple placed a long way off on a wand at the first shot ; which talk, caught up at first by the ears of backbiters, soon came to the hearing of the king. Now, mark how the wick- edness of the king turned the confidence of the sire to the peril of the son, by commanding that this dearest pledge of his life should be placed instead of the wand, with the threat that, unless the author of this promise could strike off the 1 See Delepierre, Historical Difficulties, p. 75.

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apple at the first flight of the arrow, he should pay the penalty of his empty boasting by the loss of his head. The king's command forced the soldier to perform more than he had pro- mised, and what he had said, reported by the tongues of slanderers, bound him to accomplish what he had not said. Yet did not his sterling courage, though caught in the snare of slander, suffer him to lay aside his firmness of heart; nay, he accepted the trial the more readily because it was hard. So Palnatoki warned the boy urgently when he took his stand to await the coming of the hurtling arrow with calm ears and unbent head, lest, by a slight turn of his body, he should defeat the practised skill of the bowman ; and, taking further counsel to pre- vent his fear, he turned away his face, lest he should be scared at the sight of the weapon. Then, taking three arrows from the quiver, he struck the mark given him with the first he fitted to the string. . . . But Palnatoki, when asked by the king why he had taken more arrows from the quiver, when it had been settled that he should only try the fortune of the bow once, made answer, ' That I might avenge on thee the swerving of the first by the points of the rest, lest perchance my innocence might have been punished, while your violence escaped scot-free.' " l

1 Saxo Grammaticus, bk. x. p. 166, ed. Frankf. 1576.

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This ruthless king is none other than the famous Harold Blue-tooth, and the occurrence is placed by Saxo in the year 950. But the story appears not only in Denmark, but in England, in Norway, in Finland and Russia, and in Persia, and there is some reason for sup- posing that it was known in India. In Norway we have the adventures of Pansa the Splay- footed, and of Hemingr, a vassal of Harold Hardrada, who invaded England in 1066. In Iceland there is the kindred legend of Egil, brother of Wayland Smith, the Norse Vulcan. In England there is the ballad of William of Cloudeslee, which supplied Scott with many details of the archery scene in " Ivanhoe." Here says the dauntless bowman, —

'• I have a sonne seven years old;

Hee is to me full deere; I will tye him to a stake —

All shall see him that bee here — And lay an apple upon his head,

And goe six paces him froe, And I myself with a broad arrowe

Shall cleave the apple in to we."

In the " Malleus Maleficarum " a similar story is told of Puncher, a famous magician on the Upper Rhine. The great ethnologist Cas- tren dug up the same legend in Finland. It is common, as Dr. Dasent observes, to the Turks and Mongolians ; " and a legend of the wild 6

THE ORIGINS OF FOLK-LORE

Samoyeds, who never heard of Tell or saw a book in their lives, relates it, chapter and verse, of one of their marksmen." Finally, in the Persian poem of Farid-Uddin Attar, born in 1119, we read a story of a prince who shoots an apple from the head of a beloved page. In all these stories, names and motives of course dif- fer ; but all contain the same essential incidents. It is always an unerring archer who, at the ca- pricious command of a tyrant, shoots from the head of some one dear to him a small object, be it an apple, a nut, or a piece of coin. The archer always provides himself with a second arrow, and, when questioned as to the use he intended to make of his extra weapon, the invariable re- ply is, " To kill thee, tyrant, had I slain my son." Now, when a marvellous occurrence is said to have happened everywhere, we may feel sure that it never happened anywhere. Popular fancies propagate themselves indefinitely, but historical events, especially the striking and dra- matic ones, are rarely repeated. The facts here collected lead inevitably to the conclusion that the Tell myth was known, in its general features, to our Aryan ancestors, before ever they left their primitive dwelling-place in Central Asia.

It may, indeed, be urged that some one of these wonderful marksmen may really have ex- isted and have performed the feat recorded in the legend ; and that his true story, carried 7

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about by hearsay tradition from one country to another and from age to age, may have formed the theme for all the variations above men- tioned, just as the fables of La Fontaine were patterned after those of ./Esop and Phaedrus, and just as many of Chaucer's tales were con- sciously adopted from Boccaccio. No doubt there has been a good deal of borrowing and lending among the legends of different peoples, as well as among the words of different lan- guages ; and possibly even some picturesque fragment of early history may have now and then been carried about the world in this man- ner. But as the philologist can with almost un- erring certainty distinguish between the native and the imported words in any Aryan language, by examining their phonetic peculiarities, so the student of popular traditions, though working with far less perfect instruments, can safely as- sert, with reference to a vast number of legends, that they cannot have been obtained by any process of conscious borrowing. The difficul- ties inseparable from any such hypothesis will become more and more apparent as we proceed to examine a few other stories current in differ- ent portions of the Aryan domain.

As the Swiss must give up his Tell, so must the Welshman be deprived of his brave dog Gellert, over whose cruel fate I confess to hav- ing shed more tears than I should regard as 8

THE ORIGINS OF FOLK-LORE

well bestowed upon the misfortunes of many a human hero of romance. Every one knows how the dear old brute killed the wolf which had come to devour Llewellyn's child, and how the prince, returning home and finding the cradle upset and the dog's mouth dripping blood, hastily slew his benefactor, before the cry of the child from behind the cradle and the sight of the wolf's body had rectified his error. To this day the visitor to Snowdon is told the touching story, and shown the place called Beth-Gellert,1 where the dog's grave is still to be seen. Never- theless, the story occurs in the fireside lore of nearly every Aryan people. Under the Gellert- form it started in the Panchatantra, a collec- tion of Sanskrit fables ; and it has even been discovered in a Chinese work which dates from A. D. 668. Usually the hero is a dog, but sometimes a falcon, an ichneumon, an insect, or even a man. In Egypt it takes the following comical shape : " A Wali once smashed a pot full of herbs which a cook had prepared. The exasperated cook thrashed the well-intentioned but unfortunate Wali within an inch of his life, and when he returned, exhausted with his ef- forts at belabouring the man, to examine the

1 According to Mr. Isaac Taylor, the name is really de- rived from " St. Celert, a Welsh saint of the fifth century, to whom the church of Llangeller is consecrated. ' ' ( Words and Places, p. 3390

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broken pot, he discovered amongst the herbs a poisonous snake." l Now this story of the Wall is as manifestly identical with the legend of Gellert as the English word father is with the Latin pater ; but as no one would maintain that the word father is in any sense derived from pater, so it would be impossible to represent either the Welsh or the Egyptian legend as a copy of the other. Obviously the conclusion is forced upon us that the stories, like the words, are related collaterally, having descended from a common ancestral legend, or having been sug- gested by one and the same primeval idea.

Closely connected with the Gellert myth are the stories of Faithful John and of Rama and Luxman. In the German story, Faithful John accompanies the prince, his master, on a journey in quest of a beautiful maiden, whom he wishes to make his bride. As they are carrying her home across the seas, Faithful John hears some crows, whose language he understands, fore- telling three dangers impending over the prince, from which his friend can save him only by sacrificing his own life. As soon as they land,

1 Compare Krilof's story of the Gnat and the Shepherd, in Mr. Ralston' s excellent version, Krilof and his Fables, p. 170. Many parallel examples are cited by Mr. Baring- Gould, Curious Myths, vol. i. pp. 126-136. See, also, the story of Folliculus, — Swan, Gesfa Romanorum, ed. Wright, vol. i. p. Ixxxii.

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a horse will spring toward the king, which, if he mounts it, will bear him away from his bride forever ; but whoever shoots the horse, and tells the king the reason, will be turned into stone from toe to knee. Then, before the wed- ding a bridal garment will lie before the king, which, if he puts it on, will burn him like the Nessos shirt of Herakles ; but whoever throws the shirt into the fire and tells the king the reason will be turned into stone from knee to heart. Finally, during the wedding festivities, the queen will suddenly fall in a swoon, and " un- less some one takes three drops of blood from her right breast she will die ; " but whoever does so, and tells the king the reason, will be turned into stone from head to foot. Thus fore- warned, Faithful John saves his master from all these dangers ; but the king misinterprets his motive in bleeding his wife, and orders him to be hanged. On the scaffold he tells his story, and while the king humbles himself in an agony of remorse, his noble friend is turned into stone. In the South Indian tale Luxman accom- panies Rama, who is carrying home his bride. Luxman overhears two owls talking about the perils that await his master and mistress. First he saves them from being crushed by the falling limb of a banyan-tree, and then he drags them away from an arch which immediately after gives way. By and by, as they rest under ii

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a tree, the king falls asleep. A cobra creeps up to the queen, and Luxman kills it with his sword ; but, as the owls had foretold, a drop of the cobra's blood falls on the queen's fore- head. As Luxman licks off the blood, the king starts up, and, thinking that his vizier is kissing his wife, upbraids him with his ingratitude, whereupon Luxman, through grief at this un- kind interpretation of his conduct, is turned into stone.1

For further illustration we may refer to the Norse tale of the " Giant who had no Heart in his Body," as related by Dr. Dasent. This burly magician having turned six brothers with their wives into stone, the seventh brother — the crafty Boots or many-witted Odysseus of European folk-lore — sets out to obtain ven- geance if not reparation for the evil done to his kith and kin. On the way he shows the kind- ness of his nature by rescuing from destruction a raven, a salmon, and a wolf. The grateful wolf carries him on his back to the giant's castle, where the lovely princess whom the monster keeps in irksome bondage promises to act, in behalf of Boots, the part of Delilah, and to find out, if possible, where her lord keeps his heart. The giant, like the Jewish hero, finally succumbs to feminine blandishments.

1 See Cox, Mythology of the Aryan Nations, vol. i. pp. 145-149.

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" Far, far away in a lake lies an island ; on that island stands a church ; in that church is a well ; in that well swims a duck ; in that duck there is an egg ; and in that egg there lies my heart, you darling." Boots, thus instructed, rides on the wolf's back to the island ; the raven flies to the top of the steeple and gets the church keys ; the salmon dives to the bottom of the well, and brings up the egg from the place where the duck had dropped it ; and so Boots becomes master of the situation. As he squeezes the egg, the giant, in mortal terror, begs and prays for his life, which Boots promises to spare on condition that his brothers and their brides should be released from their enchantment. But when all has been duly effected, the treach- erous youth squeezes the egg in two, and the giant instantly bursts.

The same story has lately been found in Southern India, and is published in Miss Frere's remarkable collection of tales entitled " Old Deccan Days." In the Hindu version the seven daughters of a rajah, with their husbands, are transformed into stone by the great magician Punchkin, — all save the youngest daughter, whom Punchkin keeps shut up in a tower until by threats or coaxing he may prevail upon her to marry him. But the captive princess leaves a son at home in the cradle, who grows up to manhood unmolested, and finally undertakes 13

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the rescue of his family. After long and weary wanderings he finds his mother shut up in Punchkin's tower, and persuades her to play the part of the princess in the Norse legend. The trick is equally successful. " Hundreds of thousands of miles away there lies a desolate country covered with thick jungle. In the midst of the jungle grows a circle of palm-trees, and in the centre of the circle stand six jars full of water, piled one above another ; below the sixth jar is a small cage which contains a little green parrot ; on the life of the parrot depends my life, and if the parrot is killed I must die." * The young prince finds the place guarded by a host of dragons, but some eaglets whom he has saved from a devouring serpent in the course of his journey take him on their crossed wings and carry him to the place where the jars are standing. He instantly overturns the jars, and

1 The same incident occurs in the Arabian story of Seyf- el-Mulook and Bedeea-el-Jemal, where the Jinni's soul is in- closed in the crop of a sparrow, and the sparrow imprisoned in a small box, and this inclosed in another small box, and this again in seven other boxes, which are put into seven chests, contained in a coffer of marble, which is sunk in the ocean that surrounds the world. Seyf-el-Mulook raises the coffer by the aid ot Suleyman's seal-ring, and having extri- cated the sparrow, strangles it, whereupon the Jinni's body is converted into a heap of black ashes, and Seyf-el-Mulook escapes with the maiden Dolet-Khatoon. See Lane's Arabian Nights, vol. iii. p. 316.

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seizing the parrot, obtains from the terrified magician full reparation. As soon as his own friends and a stately procession of other royal or noble victims have been set at liberty, he proceeds to pull the parrot to pieces. As the wings and legs come away, so tumble ofF the arms and legs of the magician ; and finally as the prince wrings the bird's neck, Punchkin twists his own head round and dies.

The story is also told in the highlands of Scotland, and some portions of it will be recog- nized by the reader as incidents in the Arabian tale of the Princess Parizade. The union of close correspondence in conception with mani- fest independence in the management of the details of these stories is striking enough, but it is a phenomenon with which we become quite familiar as we proceed in the study of Aryan popular literature. The legend of the Master Thief is no less remarkable than that of Punchkin. In the Scandinavian tale the Thief, wishing to get possession of a farmer's ox, carefully hangs himself to a tree by the roadside. The farmer, passing by with his ox, is indeed struck by the sight of the dangling body, but thinks it none of his business, and does not stop to interfere. No sooner has he passed than the Thief lets himself down, and running swiftly along a by-path, hangs himself with equal precaution to a second tree. This 15

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time the farmer is astonished and puzzled ; but when for the third time he meets the same unwonted spectacle, thinking that three suicides in one morning are too much for easy credence, he leaves his ox and runs back to see whether the other two bodies are really where he thought he saw them. While he is framing hypotheses of witchcraft by which to explain the phenom- enon, the Thief gets away with the ox. In the Hitopadesa the story receives a finer point. " A Brahman, who had vowed a sacrifice, went to the market to buy a goat. Three thieves saw him, and wanted to get hold of the goat. They stationed themselves at intervals on the high- road. When the Brahman, who carried the goat on his back, approached the first thief, the thief said, * Brahman, why do you carry a dog on your back ? ' The Brahman replied, ' It is not a dog, it is a goat.' A little while after he was accosted by the second thief, who said, ' Brahman, why do you carry a dog on your back ? ' The Brahman felt perplexed, put the goat down, examined it, took it up again, and walked on. Soon after he was stopped by the third thief, who said, ' Brahman, why do you carry a dog on your back ? ' Then the Brah- man was frightened, threw down the goat, and walked home to perform his ablutions for hav- ing touched an unclean animal. The thieves took the goat and ate it." The adroitness of 16

THE ORIGINS OF FOLK-LORE

the Norse king in " The Three Princesses of Whiteland " shows but poorly in comparison, with the keen psychological insight and cynical sarcasm of these Hindu sharpers. In the course of his travels this prince met three brothers fighting on a lonely moor. They had been fighting for a hundred years about the posses- sion of a hat, a cloak, and a pair of boots, which would make the wearer invisible, and convey him instantly whithersoever he might wish to go. The king consents to act as umpire, pro- vided he may once try the virtue of the magic garments ; but once clothed in them, of course he disappears, leaving the combatants to sit down and suck their thumbs. Now in the " Sea of Streams of Story," written in the twelfth century by Somadeva of Cashmere, the In- dian king Putraka, wandering in the Vindhya Mountains, similarly discomfits two brothers who are quarrelling over a pair of shoes, which are like the sandals of Hermes, and a bowl which has the same virtue as Aladdin's lamp. " Why don't you run a race for them ? " sug- gests Putraka ; and, as the two blockheads start furiously off, he quietly picks up the bowl, ties on the shoes, and flies away ! l

It is unnecessary to cite further illustrations. The tales here quoted are fair samples of the

1 The same incident is repeated in the story of Hassan of El-Basrah. See Lane's Arabian Nights, vol. iii. p. 452.

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remarkable correspondence which holds good through all the various sections of Aryan folk- lore. The hypothesis of lateral diffusion, as we may call it, manifestly fails to explain coinci- dences which are maintained on such an im- mense scale. It is quite credible that one nation may have borrowed from another a solitary legend of an archer who performs the feats of Tell and Palnatoki ; but it is utterly incredible that ten thousand stories, constituting the en- tire mass of household mythology throughout a dozen separate nations, should have been handed from one to another in this way. No one would venture to suggest that the old gran- nies of Iceland and Norway, to whom we owe such stories as the Master Thief and the Prin- cesses of Whiteland, had ever read Somadeva or heard of the treasures of Rhampsinitos. A large proportion of the tales with which we are dealing were utterly unknown to literature until they were taken down by Grimm and Frere and Castren and Campbell, from the lips of ignorant peasants, nurses, or house-servants, in Germany and Hindustan, in Siberia and Scotland. Yet, as Mr. Cox observes, these old men and women, sitting by the chimney corner and somewhat timidly recounting to the literary explorer the stories which they had learned in childhood from their own nurses and grandmas, " repro- duce the most subtle turns of thought and 18

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expression, and an endless series of complicated narratives, in which the order of incidents and the words of the speakers are preserved with a fidelity nowhere paralleled in the oral tradition of historical events. It may safely be said that no series of stories introduced in the form of translations from other languages could ever thus have filtered down into the lowest strata of society, and thence have sprung up again, like Antaios, with greater energy and heightened beauty." There is indeed no alternative for us but to admit that these fireside tales have been handed down from parent to child for more than a hundred generations; that the primitive Aryan cottager, as he took his evening meal of yava and sipped his fermented mead, listened with his children to the stories of Boots and Cinder- ella and the Master Thief, in the days when the squat Laplander was master of Europe and the dark-skinned Sudra was as yet unmolested in the Punjab. Only such community of origin can explain the community in character between the stories told by the Aryan's descendants, from the jungles of Ceylon to the highlands of Scotland.

This conclusion essentially modifies our view of the origin and growth of a legend like that of William Tell. The case of the Tell legend is radically different from the case of the blind- ness of Belisarius or the burning of the Alexan- 19

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drian library by order of Omar. The latter are isolated stories or beliefs ; the former is one of a family of stories or beliefs. The latter are un- trustworthy traditions of doubtful events ; but in dealing with the former, we are face to face with a myth.

What, then, is a myth ? The theory of Euhe- meros, which was so fashionable a century ago, in the days of the Abbe Banier, has long since been so utterly abandoned that to refute it now is but to slay the slain. The peculiarity of this theory was that it cut away all the extraordi- nary features of a given myth, wherein dwelt its inmost significance, and to the dull and use- less residuum accorded the dignity of primeval history. In this way the myth was lost without compensation, and the student, in seeking good digestible bread, found but the hardest of peb- bles. Considered merely as a pretty story, the legend of the golden fruit watched by the dragon in the garden of the Hesperides is not without its value. But what merit can there be in the gratuitous statement which, degrading the grand Doric hero to a level with any vulgar fruit- stealer, makes Herakles break a close with force and arms, and carry off a crop of oranges which had been guarded by mastiffs ? It is still worse when we come to the more homely folk-lore with which the student of mythology now has to deal. The theories of Banier, which limped

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and stumbled awkwardly enough when it was only a question of Hermes and Minos and Odin, have fallen never to rise again since the problems of Punchkin and Cinderella and the Blue Belt have begun to demand solution. The conclusion has been gradually forced upon the student that the marvellous portion of these old stories is no illegitimate excrescence, but was rather the pith and centre of the whole,1 in days when there was no supernatural, because it had not yet been discovered that there was such a thing as nature. The religious myths of antiquity and the fireside legends of ancient and modern times have their common root in the mental habits of primeval humanity. They are the earliest recorded utterances of men concern- ing the visible phenomena of the world into which they were born.

That prosaic and coldly rational temper with which modern men are wont to regard natural phenomena was in early times unknown. We have come to regard all events as taking place regularly, in strict conformity to law : what- ever our official theories may be, we instinctively take this view of things. But our primitive ancestors knew nothing about laws of nature, nothing about physical forces, nothing about the relations of cause and effect, nothing about the

1 •* Retrancher le merveilleux d'un my the, c'est le sup- primer." Breal, Hercule et Cacus, p. 50. 21

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necessary regularity of things. There was a time in the history of mankind when these things had never been inquired into, and when no gen- eralizations about them had been framed, tested, or established. There was no conception of an order of nature, and therefore no distinct con- ception of a supernatural order of things. There was no belief in miracles as infractions of natural laws, but there was a belief in the occurrence of wonderful events too mighty to have been brought about by ordinary means. There was an unlimited capacity for believing and fancying, because fancy and belief had not yet been checked and headed off in various directions by estab- lished rules of experience. Physical science is a very late acquisition of the human mind, but we are already sufficiently imbued with it to be almost completely disabled from comprehending the thoughts of our ancestors. " How Finn cosmogonists could have believed the earth and heaven to be made out of a severed egg, the upper concave shell representing heaven, the yolk being earth, and the crystal surrounding fluid the circumambient ocean, is to us incom- prehensible ; and yet it remains a fact that they did so regard them. How the Scandinavians could have supposed the mountains to be the mouldering bones of a mighty Jotun, and the earth to be his festering flesh, we cannot con- ceive ; yet such a theory was solemnly taught

22

THE ORIGINS OF FOLK-LORE

and accepted. How the ancient Indians could regard the rain-clouds as cows with full udders milked by the winds of heaven is beyond our comprehension, and yet their Veda contains in- disputable testimony to the fact that they were so regarded." We have only to read Mr. Bar- ing-Gould's book of " Curious Myths," from which I have just quoted, or to dip into Mr. Thorpe's treatise on " Northern Mythology," to realize how vast is the difference between our standpoint and that from which, in the later Middle Ages, our immediate forefathers re- garded things. The frightful superstition of werewolves is a good instance. In those days it was firmly believed that men could be, and were in the habit of being, transformed into wolves. It was believed that women might bring forth snakes or poodle-dogs. It was believed that if a man had his side pierced in battle, you could cure him by nursing the sword which inflicted the wound. "As late as 1600 a German writer would illustrate a thunder- storm destroying a crop of corn by a picture of a dragon devouring the produce of the field with his flaming tongue and iron teeth."

Now if such was the condition of the human intellect only three or four centuries ago, what must it have been in that dark antiquity when not even the crudest generalizations of Greek or of Oriental science had been reached ? The

MYTHS AND MYTH-MAKERS

same mighty power of imagination which now, restrained and guided by scientific principles, leads us to discoveries and inventions, must then have wildly run riot in mythologic fictions whereby to explain the phenomena of nature. Knowing nothing whatever of physical forces, of the blind steadiness with which a given effect invariably follows its cause, the men of prime- val antiquity could interpret the actions of na- ture only after the analogy of their own actions. The only force they knew was the force of which they were directly conscious, — the force of will. Accordingly, they imagined all the out- ward world to be endowed with volition, and to be directed by it. They personified everything, — sky, clouds, thunder, sun, moon, ocean, earthquake, whirlwind.1 The comparatively en- lightened Athenians of the age of Perikles addressed the sky as a person, and prayed to it to rain upon their gardens.2 And for calling

1 " No distinction between the animate and inanimate is made in the languages of the Esquimaux, the Choctaws, the Muskoghee, and the Caddo. Only the Iroquois, Chero- kee, and the Algonquin-Lenape have it, so far as is known, and with them it is partial." According to the Fijians, " vegetables and stones, nay, even tools and weapons, pots and canoes, have souls that are immortal, and that, like the souls of men, pass on at last to Mbulu, the abode of departed spirits." M'Lennan, "The Worship of Animals and Plants," Fortnightly Review, vol. xii. p. 416.

a Marcus Aurelius, v. 7.

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THE ORIGINS OF FOLK-LORE

the moon a mass of dead matter, Anaxagoras came near losing his life. To the ancients the moon was not a lifeless ball of stones and clods : it was the horned huntress, Artemis, coursing through the upper ether, or bathing herself in the clear lake ; or it was Aphrodite, protectress of lovers, born of the sea-foam in the East near Cyprus. The clouds were no bodies of vapor- ized water : they were cows with swelling udders, driven to the milking by Hermes, the summer wind ; or great sheep with moist fleeces, slain by the unerring arrows of Bellerophon, the sun ; or swan-maidens, flitting across the firmament, Valkyries hovering over the battlefield to re- ceive the souls of falling heroes ; or, again, they were mighty mountains piled one above another, in whose cavernous recesses the divining wand of the storm-god Thor revealed hidden treasures. The yellow-haired sun, Phoibos, drove westerly all day in his flaming chariot ; or perhaps, as Meleagros, retired for a while in disgust from the sight of men ; wedded at eventide the violet light (Oinone, lole), which he had forsaken in the morning ; sank, as Herakles, upon a blazing funeral-pyre; or, like Agamemnon, perished in a blood-stained bath ; or, as the fish-god, Dagon, swam nightly through the subterranean waters, to appear eastward again at daybreak. Some- times Phaethon, his rash, inexperienced son, would take the reins and drive the solar chariot 25

MYTHS AND MYTH-MAKERS

too near the earth, causing the fruits to perish, and the grass to wither, and the wells to dry up. Sometimes, too, the great all-seeing divinity, in his wrath at the impiety of men, would shoot down his scorching arrows, causing pestilence to spread over the land. Still other conceptions clustered around the sun. Now it was the won- derful treasure-house, into which no one could look and live ; and again it was Ixion himself, bound on the fiery wheel in punishment for violence offered to Here, the queen of the blue air.

This theory of ancient mythology is not only beautiful and plausible, it is, in its essential points, demonstrated. It stands on as firm a foundation as Grimm's law in philology, or the undulatory theory in molecular physics. It is philology which has here enabled us to read the primitive thoughts of mankind. A large num- ber of the names of Greek gods and heroes have no meaning in the Greek language ; but these names occur also in Sanskrit, with plain physi- cal meanings. In the Veda we find Zeus or Jupiter (Dyaus-pitar) meaning the sky, and Sarameias or Hermes, meaning the breeze of a summer morning. We find Athene (Ahana), meaning the light of daybreak ; and we are thus enabled to understand why the Greek described her as sprung from the forehead of Zeus. There, too, we find Helena (Sarama), the fickle twilight, 26

THE ORIGINS OF FOLK-LORE

whom the Panis, or night demons, who serve as the prototypes of the Hellenic Paris, strive to seduce from her allegiance to the solar mon- arch. Even Achilleus (Aharyu) again confronts us, with his captive Briseis (Brisaya's offspring) ; and the fierce Kerberos (£arvara) barks on Vedic ground in strict conformity to the laws of pho- netics.1 Now, when the Hindu talked about Father Dyaus, or the sleek kine of Siva, he thought of the personified sky and clouds ; he had not outgrown the primitive mental habits of the race. But the Greek, in whose language these physical meanings were lost, had long be- fore the Homeric epoch come to regard Zeus and Hermes, Athene, Helena, Paris, and Achil- leus, as mere persons, and in most cases the originals of his myths were completely forgotten. In the Vedas the Trojan War is carried on in the sky, between the bright deities and the de- mons of night ; but the Greek poet, influenced perhaps by some dim historical tradition, has located the contest on the shore of the Helles- pont, and in his mind the actors, though super-

1 Some of these etymologies are attacked by Mr. Mahaffy in his Prolegomena to Ancient History, p. 49. After long consideration I am still disposed to follow Max Miiller in adopting them, with the possible exception of Achilleus. With Mr. Mahaffy's suggestion (p. 52) that many of the Homeric legends may have '•' clustered around some historical basis," I fully agree ; as will appear, further on, from my paper on " Juventus Mundi." 27

MYTHS AND MYTH-MAKERS

human, are still completely anthropomorphic. Of the true origin of his epic story he knew as little as Euhemeros, or Lord Bacon, or the Abbe Banier.

After these illustrations, we shall run no risk of being misunderstood when we define a myth as, in its origin, an explanation, by the uncivi- lized mind, of some natural phenomenon ; not an allegory, not an esoteric symbol, — for the ingenuity is wasted which strives to detect in myths the remnants of a refined primeval sci- ence, — but an explanation. Primitive men had no profound science to perpetuate by means of allegory, nor were they such sorry pedants as to talk in riddles when plain language would serve their purpose. Their minds, we may be sure, worked like our own, and when they spoke of the far-darting sun-god they meant just what they said, save that where we propound a sci- entific theorem they constructed a myth.1 A thing is said to be explained when it is classified with other things with which we are already ac- quainted. That is the only kind of explanation

1 "Les facultes qui engendrent la mythologie sont les memes que celles qui engendront la philosophic, et ce n'est pas sans raison que 1'Inde et la Grece nous presentent le phe- nomene de la plus riche mythologie a cote de la plus profonde metaphysique." " La conception de la multiplicite dans 1'univers, c'est le polytheisme chez les peuples enfants ; c'est la science chez les peuples arrives a 1'age mur." Renan, Hist, des Langues Semitiques, torn. i. p. 9. 28

THE ORIGINS OF FOLK-LORE

of which the highest science is capable. We explain the origin, progress, and ending of a thunderstorm when we classify the phenomena presented by it along with other more familiar phenomena of vaporization and condensation. But the primitive man explained the same thing to his own satisfaction when he had classified it along with the well-known phenomena of human volition, by constructing a theory of a great black dragon pierced by the unerring ar- rows of a heavenly archer. We consider the nature of the stars to a certain extent explained when they are classified as suns ; but the Mo- hammedan compiler of the " Mishkat-ul-Ma'- sabih " was content to explain them as missiles useful for stoning the Devil ! Now, as soon as the old Greek, forgetting the source of his con- ception, began to talk of a human Oidipous slaying a leonine Sphinx, and as soon as the Mussulman began, if he ever did, to tell his children how the Devil once got a good pelting with golden bullets, then both the one and the other were talking pure mythology.

We are justified, accordingly, in distinguish- ing between a myth and a legend. Though the words are etymologically parallel, and though in ordinary discourse we may use them inter- changeably, yet when strict accuracy is required, it is well to keep them separate. And it is per- haps needless, save for the sake of complete- 29

MYTHS AND MYTH-MAKERS

ness, to say that both are to be distinguished from stories which have been designedly fabri- cated. The distinction may occasionally be sub- tle, but is usually broad enough. Thus, the story that Philip II. murdered his wife Eliza- beth, is a misrepresentation ; but the story that the same Elizabeth was culpably enam- oured of her stepson Don Carlos, is a legend. The story that Queen Eleanor saved the life of her husband, Edward I., by sucking a wound made in his arm by a poisoned arrow, is a le- gend ; but the story that Hercules killed a great robber, Cacus, who had stolen his cattle, con- ceals a physical meaning, and is a myth. While a legend is usually confined to one or two local- ities, and is told of not more than one or two persons, it is characteristic of a myth that it is spread, in one form or another, over a large part of the earth, the leading incidents remain- ing constant, while the names and often the motives vary with each locality. This is partly due to the immense antiquity of myths, dating as they do from a period when many nations, now widely separated, had not yet ceased to form one people. Thus, many elements of the myth of the Trojan War are to be found in the Rig-Veda ; and the myth of St. George and the Dragon is found in all the Aryan nations. But we must not always infer that myths have a common descent, merely because they resemble 30

THE ORIGINS OF FOLK-LORE

each other. We must remember that the pro- ceedings of the uncultivated mind are more or less alike in all latitudes, and that the same phenomenon might in various places independ- ently give rise to similar stories.1 The myth of Jack and the Bean-Stalk is found not only among people of Aryan descent, but also among the Zulus of South Africa, and again among the American Indians. Whenever we can trace a story in this way from one end of the world to the other, or through a whole family of kindred nations, we are pretty safe in assuming that we are dealing with a true myth, and not with a mere legend.

Applying these considerations to the Tell myth, we at once obtain a valid explanation of its origin. The conception of infallible skill in archery, which underlies such a great variety of myths and popular fairy-tales, is originally derived from the inevitable victory of the sun over his enemies, the demons of night, winter, and tempest. Arrows and spears which never miss their mark, swords from whose blow no armour can protect, are invariably the weapons of solar divinities or heroes. The shafts of Bellerophon never fail to slay the black demon of the rain-cloud, and the bolt of Phoibos Chrysaor deals sure destruction to the serpent of

1 Cases coming under this head are discussed further on, in my paper on " Myths of the Barbaric World."

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winter. Odysseus, warring against the impious night-heroes, who have endeavoured through- out ten long years or hours of darkness to se- duce from her allegiance his twilight bride, the weaver of the never-finished web of vio- let clouds, — Odysseus, stripped of his beg- gar's raiment and endowed with fresh youth and beauty by the dawn-goddess, Athene, en- gages in no doubtful conflict as he raises the bow which none but himself can bend. Nor is there less virtue in the spear of Achilleus, in the swords of Perseus and Sigurd, in Roland's stout blade Durandal, or in the brand Excali- bur, with which Sir Bedivere was so loath to part. All these are solar weapons, and so, too, are the arrows of Tell and Palnatoki, Egil and Hemingr, and William of Cloudeslee, whose surname proclaims him an inhabitant of the Phaiakian land. William Tell, whether of Cloudland or of Altdorf, is the last reflection of the beneficent divinity of daytime and summer, constrained for a while to obey the caprice of the powers of cold and darkness, as Apollo served Laomedon, and Herakles did the bid- ding of Eurystheus. His solar character is well preserved, even in the sequel of the Swiss le- gend, in which he appears no less skilful as a steersman than as an archer, and in which, after traversing, like Dagon, the tempestuous sea of night, he leaps at daybreak in regained freedom 32

THE ORIGINS OF FOLK-LORE

upon the land, and strikes down the oppressor who has held him in bondage.

But the sun, though ever victorious in open contest with his enemies, is nevertheless not invulnerable. At times he succumbs to treach- ery, is bound by the frost giants, or slain by the demons of darkness. The poisoned shirt of the cloud fiend Nessos is fatal even to the mighty Herakles, and the prowess of Siegfried at last fails to save him from the craft of Hagen. In Achilleus and Meleagros we see the unhappy solar hero doomed to toil for the profit of others, and to be cut off by an untimely death. The more fortunate Odysseus, who lives to a ripe old age, and triumphs again and again over all the powers of darkness, must nevertheless yield to the craving desire to visit new cities and look upon new works of strange men, until at last he is swallowed up in the western sea. That the unrivalled navigator of the celestial ocean should disappear beneath the western waves is as intelligible as it is that the horned Venus or Astarte should rise from the sea in the far east. It is perhaps less obvious that winter should be so frequently symbolized as a thorn or sharp instrument. Achilleus dies by an arrow wound in the heel ; the thigh of Adonis is pierced by the boar's tusk, while Odysseus escapes with an ugly scar, which after- wards secures his recognition by his old servant, 33

MYTHS AND MYTH-MAKERS

the dawn nymph Euryldeia ; Sigurd is slain by a thorn, and Balder by a sharp sprig of mistle- toe ; and in the myth of the Sleeping Beauty, the earth-goddess sinks into her long winter sleep when pricked by the point of the spindle. In her cosmic palace all is locked in icy repose, naught thriving save the ivy which defies the cold, until the kiss of the golden-haired sun- god reawakens life and activity.

The wintry sleep of nature is symbolized in innumerable stories of spell-bound maidens and fair-featured youths, saints, martyrs, and heroes. Sometimes it is the sun, sometimes the earth, that is supposed to slumber. Among the American Indians the sun-god Michabo is said to sleep through the winter months ; and at the time of the falling leaves, by way of composing himself for his nap, he fills his great pipe and divinely smokes ; the blue clouds, gently float- ing over the landscape, fill the air with the haze of Indian summer. In the Greek myth the shepherd Endymion preserves his freshness in a perennial slumber. The German Siegfried, pierced by the thorn of winter, is sleeping until he shall be again called forth to fight. In Swit- zerland, by the Vierwaldstattersee, three Tells are awaiting the hour when their country shall again need to be delivered from the oppressor. Charlemagne is reposing in the Untersberg, sword in hand, waiting for the coming of Anti- 34

THE ORIGINS OF FOLK-LORE

christ ; Olger Danske similarly dreams away his time in Avallon ; and in a lofty mountain in Thuringia, the great Emperor Frederic Barba- rossa slumbers with his knights around him, until the time comes for him to sally forth and raise Germany to the first rank among the kingdoms of the world. The same story is told of Olaf Tryggvesson, of Don Sebastian of Portugal, and of the Moorish King Boabdil. The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, having taken refuge in a cave from the persecutions of the heathen Decius, slept one hundred and sixty- four years, and awoke to find a Christian em- peror on the throne. The monk of Hilde- sheim, in the legend so beautifully rendered by Longfellow, doubting how with God a thousand years ago could be as yesterday, listened three minutes entranced by the singing of a bird in the forest, and found, on waking from his rev- erie, that a thousand years had flown. To the same family of legends belong the notion that St. John is sleeping at Ephesus until the last days of the world ; the myth of the enchanter Merlin, spellbound by Vivien ; the story of the Cretan philosopher Epimenides, who dozed away fifty -seven years in a cave ; and Rip Van Winkle's nap in the Catskills.1

1 A collection of these interesting legends may be found in Baring-Gould's Curious Myths of the Middle Ages, of which work this paper was originally a review.

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We might go on almost indefinitely citing household tales of wonderful sleepers ; but, on the principle of the association of opposites, we are here reminded of sundry cases of marvellous life and wakefulness, illustrated in the Wander- ing Jew ; the dancers of Kolbeck ; Joseph of Arimathaea with the Holy Grail ; the Wild Huntsman, who to all eternity chases the red deer ; the Captain of the Phantom Ship ; the classic Tithonos ; and the Man in the Moon.

The lunar spots have afforded a rich subject for the play of human fancy. Plutarch wrote a treatise on them, but the myth-makers had been before him. " Every one," says Mr. Baring-Gould, " knows that the moon is inhab- ited by a man with a bundle of sticks on his back, who has been exiled thither for many cen- turies, and who is so far off that he is beyond the reach of death. He has once visited this earth, if the nursery rhyme is to be credited when it asserts that —

' The Man in the Moon Came down too soon And asked his way to Norwich ; '

but whether he ever reached that city the same authority does not state." Dante calls him Cain ; Chaucer has him put up there as a pun- ishment for theft, and gives him a thorn bush to carry ; Shakespeare also loads him with the thorns, but by way of compensation gives him

36

THE ORIGINS OF FOLK-LORE

a dog for a companion. Ordinarily, however, his offence is stated to have been, not stealing, but Sabbath-breaking, — an idea derived from the Old Testament. Like the man mentioned in the Book of Numbers, he is caught gather- ing sticks on the Sabbath ; and, as an example to mankind, he is condemned to stand forever in the moon, with his bundle on his back. In- stead of a dog, one German version places him with a woman, whose crime was churning but- ter on Sunday. She carries her butter- tub ; and this brings us to Mother Goose again : —

" Jack and Jill went up the hill

To get a pail of water. Jack fell down and broke his crown, And Jill came tumbling after."

This may read like mere nonsense ; but there is a point of view from which it may be safely said that there is very little absolute nonsense in the world. The story of Jack and Jill is a venerable one. In Icelandic mythology we read that Jack and Jill were two children whom the moon once kidnapped and carried up to heaven. They had been drawing water in a bucket, which they were carrying by means of a pole placed across their shoulders ; and in this atti- tude they have stood to the present day in the moon. Even now this explanation of the moon spots is to be heard from the mouths of Swed- ish peasants. They fall away one after the 37

MYTHS AND MYTH-MAKERS

other, as the moon wanes, and their water-pail symbolizes the supposed connection of the moon with rain-storms. Other forms of the myth occur in Sanskrit.

The moon-goddess, or Aphrodite, of the ancient Germans was called Horsel, or Ursula, who figures in Christian mediaeval mythology as a persecuted saint, attended by a troop of eleven thousand virgins, who all suffer martyr- dom as they journey from England to Cologne. The meaning of the myth is obvious. In Ger- man mythology, England is the Phaiakian land of clouds and phantoms ; the succubus^ leaving her lover before daybreak, excuses herself on the plea that " her mother is calling her in England." 1 The companions of Ursula are the pure stars, who leave the cloudland and suffer martyrdom as they approach the regions of day. In the Christian tradition, Ursula is the pure Artemis ; but, in accordance with her ancient character, she is likewise the sensual Aphro- dite, who haunts the Venusberg; and this brings us to the story of Tannhauser.

The Horselberg, or mountain of Venus, lies in Thuringia, between Eisenach and Gotha. High up on its slope yawns a cavern, the Hor-

1 See Procopius, De Bella Gothico, iv. 20; Villemarque, Barzas Breiz, i. 1 36. As a child I was instructed by an old nurse that Van Diemen's Land is the home of ghosts and de- parted spirits.

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THE ORIGINS OF FOLK-LORE

selloch, or cave of Venus, within which is heard a muffled roar, as of subterranean water. From this cave, in old times, the frightened inhabitants of the neighbouring valley would hear at night wild moans and cries issuing, mingled with peals of demon-like laughter. Here it was believed that Venus held her court ; " and there were not a few who declared that they had seen fair forms of female beauty beckoning them from the mouth of the chasm." * Tannhauser was a Prankish knight and famous minnesinger, who, travelling at twilight past the Horselberg, " saw a white glimmering figure of matchless beauty standing before him and beckoning him to her." Leaving his horse, he went up to meet her, whom he knew to be none other than Venus. He descended to her palace in the heart of the mountain, and there passed seven years in care- less revelry. Then, stricken with remorse and yearning for another glimpse of the pure light of day, he called in agony upon the Virgin Mother, who took compassion on him and released him. He sought a village church, and to priest after priest confessed his sin, without obtaining absolution, until finally he had re- course to the Pope. But the holy father, horri- fied at the enormity of his misdoing, declared that guilt such as his could never be remitted : sooner should the staff in his hand grow green 2 Baring-Gould, Curious Myths, vol. i. p. 197.

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and blossom. " Then Tannhauser, full of de- spair and with his soul darkened, went away, and returned to the only asylum open to him, the Venusberg. But lo ! three days after he had gone, Pope Urban discovered that his pastoral staff had put forth buds and had burst into flower. Then he sent messengers after Tann- hauser, and they reached the Horsel vale to hear that a wayworn man, with haggard brow and bowed head, had just entered the Horsel- loch. Since then Tannhauser has not been seen" (p. 201).

As Mr. Baring-Gould rightly observes, this sad legend, in its Christianized form, is doubt- less descriptive of the struggle between the new and the old faiths. The knightly Tannhauser, satiated with pagan sensuality, turns to Chris- tianity for relief, but, repelled by the hypocrisy, pride, and lack of sympathy of its ministers, gives up in despair, and returns to drown his anxieties in his old debauchery.

But this is not the primitive form of the myth, which recurs in the folk-lore of every people of Aryan descent. Who, indeed, can read it without being at once reminded of Thomas of Erceldoune (or Horsel-hill), entranced by the sorceress of the Eilden ; of the nightly vis- its of Numa to the grove of the nymph Ege- ria; of Odysseus held captive by the Lady Kalypso ; and, last but not least, of the delight- 40

THE ORIGINS OF FOLK-LORE

ful Arabian tale of Prince Ahmed and the Peri Banou ? On his westward journey, Odysseus is ensnared and kept in temporary bondage by the amorous nymph of darkness, Kalypso (KctXvTrnu, to veil or cover). So the zone of the moon- goddess Aphrodite inveigles all-seeing Zeus to treacherous slumber on Mount Ida ; and by a similar sorcery Tasso's great hero is lulled in unseemly idleness in Armida's golden paradise, at the western verge of the world. The dis- appearance of Tannhauser behind the moonlit cliff, lured by Venus Ursula, the pale goddess of night, is a precisely parallel circumstance.

But solar and lunar phenomena are by no means the only sources of popular mythology. Opposite my writing-table hangs a quaint Ger- man picture, illustrating Goethe's ballad of the Erlking, in which the whole wild pathos of the story is compressed into one supreme moment ; we see the fearful, half-gliding rush of the Erl- king, his long, spectral arms outstretched to grasp the child, the frantic gallop of the horse, the alarmed father clasping his darling to his bosom in convulsive embrace, the siren-like elves hovering overhead, to lure the little soul with their weird harps. There can be no better illustration than is furnished by this terrible scene of the magic power of mythology to in- vest the simplest physical phenomena with the most intense human interest ; for the true sig-

MYTHS AND MYTH-MAKERS

nificance of the whole picture is contained in the father's address to his child, —

et Sei ruhig, bleibe ruhig, mein Kind ; In diirren Blattern sauselt der Wind."

The story of the Piper of Hamelin, well known in the version of Robert Browning, leads to the same conclusion. In 1284 the good peo- ple of Hamelin could obtain no rest, night or day, by reason of the direful host of rats which infested their town. One day came a strange man in a bunting suit, and offered for five hun- dred guilders to rid the town of the vermin. The people agreed : whereupon the man took out a pipe and piped, and instantly all the rats in town, in an army which blackened the face of the earth, came forth from their haunts, and followed the piper until he piped them to the river Weser, where they all jumped in and were drowned. But as soon as the torment was gone, the townsfolk refused to pay the piper, on the ground that he was evidently a wizard. He went away, vowing vengeance, and on St. John's day reappeared, and putting his pipe to his mouth blew a different air. Whereat all the little, plump, rosy-cheeked, golden-haired children came merrily running after him, their parents standing aghast, not knowing what to do, while he led them up a hill in the neighbourhood. A door opened in the mountain-side, through which he led them in, and they never were 42

THE ORIGINS OF FOLK-LORE

seen again ; save one lame boy, who hobbled not fast enough to get in before the door shut, and who lamented for the rest of his life that he had not been able to share the rare luck of his comrades. In the street through which this procession passed no music was ever afterward allowed to be played. For a long time the town dated its public documents from this fearful calamity, and many authorities have treated it as an historical event.1 Similar stories are told of other towns in Germany, and, strange to say, in remote Abyssinia also. Wesleyan peasants in England believe that angels pipe to children who are about to die ; and in Scandinavia youths are said to have been enticed away by the songs of elf-maidens. In Greece the sirens by their magic lay allured voyagers to destruction ; and Orpheus caused the trees and dumb beasts to follow him. Here we reach the explanation. For Orpheus is the wind sighing through un- told acres of pine forest. " The piper is no other than the wind, and the ancients held that in the wind were the souls of the dead." To this day the English peasantry believe that they hear the wail of the spirits of unbaptized chil- dren, as the gale sweeps past their cottage doors. The Greek Hermes resulted from the fusion of two deities. He is the sun and also the wind ,•

2 Hence perhaps the adage, " Always remember to pay the piper."

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and in the latter capacity he bears away the souls of the dead. So the Norse Odin, who like Hermes fulfils a double function, is supposed to rush at night over the treetops, "accom- panied by the scudding train of brave men's spirits." And readers of recent French litera- ture cannot fail to remember Erckmann-Cha- trian's terrible story of the wild huntsman Vittikab, and how he sped through the forest, carrying away a young girl's soul.

Thus, as Tannhauser is the Northern Ulys- ses, so is Goethe's Erlking none other than the Piper of Hamelin. And the piper, in turn, is the classic Hermes or Orpheus, the counterpart of the Finnish Wainamoinen and the Sanskrit Gunadhya. His wonderful pipe is the horn of Oberon, the lyre of Apollo (who, like the piper, was a rat-killer), the harp stolen by Jack when he climbed the bean-stalk to the ogre's castle.1 And the father, in Goethe's ballad, is no more than right when he assures his child that the siren voice which tempts him is but the rustle of the wind among the dried leaves ; for from such a simple class of phenomena arose this entire family of charming legends.

1 And it reappears as the mysterious lyre of the Gaelic musician, who —

" Could harp a fish out o' the water, Or bluid out of a stane, Or milk out of a maiden's breast, That bairns had never nane."

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THE ORIGINS OF FOLK-LORE

But why does the piper, who is a leader of souls (Psycho-pompQs\ also draw rats after him ? In answering this we shall have occasion to note that the ancients by no means shared that curi- ous prejudice against the brute creation which is indulged in by modern anti-Darwinians. In many countries rats and mice have been re- garded as sacred animals ; but in Germany they were thought to represent the human soul. One story out of a hundred must suffice to illustrate this. "In Thuringia, at Saalfeld, a servant-girl fell asleep whilst her companions were shelling nuts. They observed a little red mouse creep from her mouth and run out of the window. One of the fellows present shook the sleeper, but could not wake her, so he moved her to another place. Presently the mouse ran back to the former place and dashed about, seeking the girl ; not finding her, it vanished ; at the same moment the girl died." 1 This completes the explanation of the piper, and it also furnishes the key to the horrible story of Bishop Hatto.

This wicked prelate lived on the bank of the Rhine, in the middle of which stream he pos- sessed a tower, now pointed out to travellers as the Mouse Tower. In the year 970 there was a dreadful famine, and people came from far and near craving sustenance out of the Bishop's ample and well-filled granaries. Well, he told

, * Baring-Gould, Curious Myths, vol. ii. p. 159.

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them all to go into the barn, and when they had got in there, as many as could stand, he set fire to the barn and burnt them all up, and went home to eat a merry supper. But when he arose next morning, he heard that an army of rats had eaten all the corn in his granaries, and was now ad- vancing to storm the palace. Looking from his window, he saw the roads and fields dark with them, as they came with fell purpose straight toward his mansion. In frenzied terror he took his boat and rowed out to the tower in the river. But it was of no use : down into the water marched the rats, and swam across, and scaled the walls, and gnawed through the stones, and came swarming in about the shrieking Bishop, and ate him up, flesh, bones, and all. Now, bearing in mind what was said above, there can be no doubt that these rats were the souls of those whom the Bishop had murdered. There are many versions of the story in different Teutonic countries, and in some of them the avenging rats or mice issue directly, by a strange metamorphosis, from the corpses of the victims. St. Gertrude, moreover, the heathen Holda, was symbolized as a mouse, and was said to lead an army of mice ; she was the receiver of chil- dren's souls. Odin, also, in his character of a Psychopompos, was followed by a host of rats.1

1 Perhaps we may trace back to this source the frantic ter- ror which Irish servant-girls often manifest at sight of a mouse.

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THE ORIGINS OF FOLK-LORE

As the souls of the departed are symbolized as rats, so is the psychopomp himself often figured as a dog. Sarameias, the Vedic counter- part of Hermes and Odin, sometimes appears invested with canine attributes ; and countless other examples go to show that by the early Aryan mind the howling wind was conceived as a great dog or wolf. As the fearful beast was heard speeding by the windows or over the housetop, the inmates trembled, for none knew but his own soul might forthwith be required of him. Hence, to this day, among ignorant people, the howling of a dog under the window is supposed to portend a death in the family. It is the fleet greyhound of Hermes, come to escort the soul to the river Styx.1

But the wind-god is not always so terrible. Nothing can be more transparent than the phraseology of the Homeric Hymn, in which Hermes is described as acquiring the strength of a giant while yet a babe in the cradle, as sallying out and stealing the cattle (clouds) of Apollo, and driving them helter-skelter in va- rious directions, then as crawling through the keyhole, and with a mocking laugh shrinking

1 In Persia a dog is brought to the bedside of the person who is dying, in order that the soul may be sure of a prompt escort. The same custom exists in India. Breal, Hercule et Cacus, p. 123.

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into his cradle. He- is the Master Thief, who can steal the burgomaster's horse from under him and his wife's mantle from off her back, the prototype not only of the crafty architect of Rhampsinitos, but even of the ungrateful slave who robs Sancho of his mule in the Sierra Morena. He furnishes in part the conceptions of Boots and Reynard ; he is the prototype of Paul Pry and peeping Tom of Coventry ; and in virtue of his ability to contract or expand himself at pleasure, he is both the Devil in the Norse Tale,1 whom the lad persuades to enter a walnut, and the Arabian Efreet, whom the fisherman releases from the bottle.

The very interesting series of myths and pop- ular superstitions suggested by the storm-cloud and the lightning must be reserved for a future occasion. When carefully examined, they will richly illustrate the conclusion which is the re- sult of the present inquiry, that the marvellous tales and quaint superstitions current in every Aryan household have a common origin with the classic legends of gods and heroes, which formerly were alone thought worthy of the student's serious attention. These stories — some of them familiar to us in infancy, others

1 The Devil, who is proverbially «' active in a gale of wind," is none other than Hermes.

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THE ORIGINS OF FOLK-LORE

the delight of our maturer years — constitute the debris, or alluvium, brought down by the stream of tradition from the distant highlands of ancient mythology.

September, 1870.

49

II

THE DESCENT OF FIRE

IN the course of my last summer's vaca- tion, which was spent at a small inland village, I came upon an unexpected illus- tration of the tenacity with which conceptions descended from prehistoric antiquity have now and then kept their hold upon life. While sit- ting one evening under the trees by the road- side, my attention was called to the unusual conduct of half a dozen men and boys who were standing opposite. An elderly man was moving slowly up and down the road, holding with both hands a forked twig of hazel, shaped like the letter Y inverted. With his palms turned upward, he held in each hand a branch of the twig in such a way that the shank pointed upward ; but every few moments, as he halted over a certain spot, the twig would gradually bend downwards until it had assumed the like- ness of a Y in its natural position, where it would remain pointing to something in the ground beneath. One by one the bystanders proceeded to try the experiment, but with no variation in the result. Something in the ground 50

THE DESCENT OF FIRE

seemed to fascinate the bit of hazel, for it could not pass over that spot without bending down and pointing to it.

My thoughts reverted at once to Jacques Aymar and Dousterswivel, as I perceived that these men were engaged in sorcery. During the long drought more than half the wells in the village had become dry, and here was an attempt to make good the loss by the aid of the god Thor. These men were seeking water with a

divining rod. Here, alive before my eyes, was a superstitious observance, which I had supposed long since dead and forgotten by all men except students interested in mythology.

As I crossed the road to take part in the ceremony a farmer's boy came up, stoutly affirm- ing his incredulity, and offering to show the

5*

MYTHS AND MYTH-MAKERS

company how he could carry the rod motion- less across the charmed spot. But when he came to take the weird twig he trembled with an ill-defined feeling of insecurity as to the soundness of his conclusions, and when he stood over the supposed rivulet the rod bent in spite of him, — as was not so very strange ; for, with all his vague scepticism, the honest lad had not, and could not be supposed to have, the/0* scientifique of which Littre speaks.1

Hereupon I requested leave to try the rod ; but something in my manner seemed at once to excite the suspicion and scorn of the sorcerer. " Yes, take it," said he, with uncalled-for vehe- mence, " but you can't stop it ; there 's water below here, and you can't help its bending, if you break your back trying to hold it." So he gave me the twig, and awaited, with a smile which was meant to express withering sarcasm, the discomfiture of the supposed scoffer. But when I proceeded to walk four or five times across the mysterious place, the rod pointing steadfastly toward the zenith all the while, our friend became grave and began to philosophize. " Well," said he, " you see your temperament

1 «« II faut que la cceur devienne ancien parmi les anciennes choses, et la plenitude de 1'histoire ne se devoile qu'a celui qui descend, ainsi dispose, dans le passe. Mais il faut que 1'esprit demeure moderne, et n'oublie jamais qu'il n'y a pour lui d'autre foi que la foi scientifique." Littre.

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is peculiar ; the conditions ain't favourable in your case ; there are some people who never can work these things. But there 's water below here, for all that, as you '11 find, if you dig for it ; there 's nothing like a hazel rod for finding out water."

Very true : there are some persons who never can make such things work ; who somehow always encounter " unfavourable conditions " when they wish to test the marvellous powers of a clairvoyant ; who never can make " Plan- chette " move in conformity to the requirements of any known alphabet ; who never see ghosts, and never have " presentiments," save such as are obviously due to association of ideas. The ill-success of these persons is commonly ascribed to their lack of faith ; but, in the majority of cases, it might be more truly referred to the strength of their faith, — faith in the constancy of nature, and in the adequacy of ordinary hu- man experience as interpreted by science.1 La foi scientifique is an excellent preventive against that obscure, though not uncommon, kind of self-deception which enables wooden tripods to write and tables to tip and hazel twigs to twist upside down, without the conscious inter-

1 For an admirable example of scientific self-analysis tracing t/ne of these illusions to its psychological sources, see the ac- count of Dr. Lazarus, in Taine, De I' Intelligence t vol. i* pp. 121-125.

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vention of the performer. It was this kind of faith, no doubt, which caused the discomfiture of Jacques Aymar on his visit to Paris,1 and which has in late years prevented persons from obtaining the handsome prize offered by the French Academy for the first authentic case of clairvoyance.

But our village friend, though perhaps con- structively right in his philosophizing, was cer- tainly very defective in his acquaintance with the time-honoured art of rhabdomancy. Had he extended his inquiries so as to cover the field of Indo-European tradition, he would have learned that the mountain-ash, the mistletoe, the white and black thorn, the Hindu asvattha, and sev- eral other woods are quite as efficient as the hazel for the purpose of detecting water in times of drought ; and in due course of time he would have perceived that the divining rod itself is but one among a large class of things to which popular belief has ascribed, along with other talismanic properties, the power of opening the ground or cleaving rocks, in order to reveal hidden treasures. Leaving him in peace, then, with his bit of forked hazel, to seek for cooling

1 See the story of Aymar in Baring-Gould, Curious Myths, vol. i. pp. 57—77. The learned author attributes the dis- comfiture to the uncongenial Parisian environment ; which is a style of reasoning much like that of my village sorcerer, I fear.

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springs in some future thirsty season, let us en- deavour to elucidate the origin of this curious superstition.

The detection of subterranean water is by no means the only use to which the divining rod has been put. Among the ancient Frisians it was regularly used for the detection of criminals ; and the reputation of Jacques Aymar was won by his discovery of the perpetrator of a horrible murder at Lyons. Throughout Europe it has been used from time immemorial by miners for ascertaining the position of veins of metal ; and in the days when talents were wrapped in napkins and buried in the field, instead of being exposed to the risks of financial speculation, the divining rod was employed by persons covetous of their neighbours' wealth. If Boulatruelle had lived in the sixteenth century, he would have taken a forked stick of hazel when he went to search for the buried treasures of Jean Valjean. It has also been applied to the cure of disease, and has been kept in households, like a wizard's charm, to insure general good-fortune and im- munity from disaster.

As we follow the conception further into the elfland of popular tradition, we come upon a rod which not only points out the situation of hidden treasure, but even splits open the ground and reveals the mineral wealth contained therein. In German legend, " a shepherd, who was driv- 55

MYTHS AND MYTH-MAKERS

ing his flock over the Ilsenstein, having stopped to rest, leaning on his staff, the mountain sud- denly opened, for there was a springwort in his staff without his knowing it, and the princess [Use] stood before him. She bade him follow her, and when he was inside the mountain she told him to take as much gold as he pleased. The shepherd filled all his pockets, and was going away, when the princess called after him, c Forget not the best.' So, thinking she meant that he had not taken enough, he filled his hat also ; but what she meant was his staff with the springwort, which he had laid against the wall as soon as he stepped in. But now, just as he was going out at the opening, the rock suddenly slammed together and cut him in two." ]

Here the rod derives its marvellous proper- ties from the inclosed springwort, but in many cases a leaf or flower is itself competent to open the hillside. The little blue flower, forget-me- not, about which so many sentimental associa- tions have clustered, owes its name to the legends told of its talismanic virtues.2 A man, travel- ling on a lonely mountain, picks up a little blue flower and sticks it in his hat. Forthwith' an iron door opens, showing up a lighted passage- way, through which the man advances into a

1 Kelly, Indo- European Folk- Lore, p. 177.

2 The story of the luck -flower is well told in verse by Mr. Baring-Gould, in his Silver Store, p. 115, seq.

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magnificent hall, where rubies and diamonds and all other kinds of gems are lying piled in great heaps on the floor. As he eagerly fills his pock- ets his hat drops from his head, and when he turns to go out the little flower calls after him, " Forget me not ! " He turns back and looks around, but is too bewildered with his good for- tune to think of his bare head or of the luck- flower which he has let fall. He selects several more of the finest jewels he can find, and again starts to go out ; but as he passes through the door the mountain closes amid the crashing of thunder, and cuts off one of his heels. Alone, in the gloom of the forest, he searches in vain for the mysterious door : it has disappeared for- ever, and the traveller goes on his way, thank- ful, let us hope, that he has fared no worse.

Sometimes it is a white lady, like the Princess Use, who invites the finder of the luck-flower to help himself to her treasures, and who utters the enigmatical warning. The mountain where the event occurred may be found almost any- where in Germany, and one just like it stood in Persia, in the golden prime of Haroun Al- raschid. In the story of the Forty Thieves, the mere name of the plant sesame serves as a talis- man to open and shut the secret door which leads into the robbers' cavern ; and when the avaricious Cassim Baba, absorbed in the con- templation of the bags of gold and bales of rich 57

MYTHS AND MYTH-MAKERS

merchandise, forgets the magic formula, he meets no better fate than the shepherd of the Ilsen- stein. In the story of Prince Ahmed, it is an enchanted arrow which guides the young ad- venturer through the hillside to the grotto of the Peri Banou. In the tale of Baba Abdallah, it is an ointment rubbed on the eyelid which reveals at a single glance all the treasures hid- den in the bowels of the earth.

The ancient Romans also had their rock- breaking plant, called Saxifragay or " sassafras." And the further we penetrate into this charmed circle of traditions the more evident does it ap- pear that the power of cleaving rocks or shat- tering hard substances enters, as a primitive element, into the conception of these treasure- showing talismans. Mr. Baring-Gould has given an excellent account of the rabbinical legends concerning the wonderful schamir, by the aid of which Solomon was said to have built his temple. From Asmodeus, prince of the Jann, Benaiah, the son of Jehoiada, wrested the secret of a worm no bigger than a barley-corn, which could split the hardest substance. This worm was called schamir. "If Solomon desired to possess himself of the worm, he must find the nest of the moor-hen, and cover it with a plate of glass, so that the mother bird could not get at her young without breaking the glass. She would seek schamir for the purpose, and the

THE DESCENT OF FIRE

worm must be obtained from her." As the Jewish king did need the worm in order to hew the stones for that temple which was to be built without sound of hammer, or axe, or any tool of iron,1 he sent Benaiah to obtain it. According to another account, schamirwas a mystic stone which enabled Solomon to penetrate the earth in search of mineral wealth. Directed by a Jinni, the wise king covered a raven's eggs with a plate of crystal, and thus obtained schamir which the bird brought in order to break the plate.2

In these traditions, which may possibly be of Aryan descent, due to the prolonged inter- course between the Jews and the Persians, a new feature is added to those before enumerated : the rock-splitting talisman is always found in the possession of a bird. The same feature in the myth reappears on Aryan soil. The springwort, whose marvellous powers we have noticed in the case of the Ilsenstein shepherd, is obtained, according to Pliny, by stopping up the hole in a tree where a woodpecker keeps its young. The bird flies away, and presently returns with

1 i Kings vi. 7.

2 Compare the Mussulman account of the building of the temple, in Baring-Gould, Legends of the Patriarchs ana Prophets, pp. 337, 338. And see the story of Diocletian's ostrich, Swan, Gesta Romanorum, ed. Wright, vol. i. p. Ixiv. See, also, the pretty story of the knight unjustly imprisoned, id. p. cii.

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the springwort, which it applies to the plug, causing it to shoot out with a loud explosion. The same account is given in German folk-lore. Elsewhere, as in Iceland, Normandy, and an- cient Greece, the bird is an eagle, a swallow, an ostrich, or a hoopoe.

In the Icelandic and Pomeranian myths the schamir, or " raven-stone," also renders its pos- sessor invisible, — a property which it shares with one of the treasure-finding plants, the fern.1 In this respect it resembles the ring of Gyges, as in its divining and rock-splitting qualities it resembles that other ring which the African magician gave to Aladdin, to enable him to de- scend into the cavern where stood the wonder- ful lamp.

In the north of Europe schamir appears strangely and grotesquely metamorphosed. The hand of a man that has been hanged, when dried

1 " We have the receipt of fern-seed. We walk invisible." Shakespeare, Henry IF. See Ralston, Songs of the Russian People, p. 98.

According to one North German tradition, the luck-flower also will make its finder invisible at pleasure. But, as the myth shrewdly adds, it is absolutely essential that the flower be found by accident : he who seeks for it never finds it! Thus all cavils are skilfully forestalled, even if not satisfactorily disposed of. The same kind of reasoning is favoured by our .modern dealers in mystery : somehow the "conditions " al- ways are askew whenever a scientific observer wishes to test their pretensions.

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and prepared with certain weird unguents and set on fire, is known as the Hand of Glory ; and as it not only bursts open all safe locks, but also lulls to sleep all persons within the circle of its influence, it is of course invaluable to thieves and burglars. I quote the following story from Thorpe's " Northern Mythology : " " Two fellows once came to Huy, who pre- tended to be exceedingly fatigued, and when they had supped would not retire to a sleeping- room, but begged their host would allow them to take a nap on the hearth. But the maid- servant, who did not like the looks of the two guests, remained by the kitchen door and peeped through a chink, when she saw that one of them drew a thief's hand from his pocket., the fingers of which, after having rubbed them with an ointment, he lighted, and they all burned except one. Again they held this finger to the fire, but still it would not burn, at which they appeared much surprised, and one said, l There must surely be some one in the house who is not yet asleep.' They then hung the hand with its four burning fingers by the chimney, and went out to call their associates. But the maid followed them instantly and made the door fast, then ran upstairs, where the landlord slept, that she might wake him, but was unable, not- withstanding all her shaking and calling. In the mean time the thieves had returned and 61

MYTHS AND MYTH-MAKERS

were endeavouring to enter the house by a win- dow, but the maid cast them down from the ladder. They then took a different course, and would have forced an entrance, had it not oc- curred to the maid that the burning fingers might probably be the cause of her master's profound sleep. Impressed with this idea she ran to the kitchen and blew them out, when the master and his men-servants instantly awoke, and soon drove away the robbers." The same event is said to have occurred at Stainmore in England ; and Torquemada relates of Mexican thieves that they carry with them the left hand of a woman who has died in her first childbed, before which talisman all bolts yield and all opposition is benumbed. In 1831 u some Irish thieves attempted to commit a robbery on the estate of Mr. Naper, of Loughcrew, county Meath. They entered the house armed with a dead man's hand with a lighted candle in it, be- lieving in the superstitious notion that a candle placed in a dead man's hand will not be seen by any but those by whom it is used ; and also that if a candle in a dead hand be introduced into a house, it will prevent those who may be asleep from awaking. The inmates, however, were alarmed, and the robbers fled, leaving the hand behind them." l

1 Henderson, Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties of Eng- land t p. 202.

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In the Middle Ages the hand of glory was used, just like the divining rod, for the detec- tion of buried treasures.

Here, then, we have a large and motley group of objects — the forked rod of ash or hazel, the springwort and the luck-flower, leaves, worms, stones, rings, and dead men's hands — which are for the most part competent to open the way into cavernous rocks, and which all agree in pointing out hidden wealth. We find, more- over, that many of these charmed objects are carried about by birds, and that some of them possess, in addition to their generic properties, the specific power of benumbing people's senses. What, now, is the common origin of this whole group of superstitions ? And since mythology has been shown to be the result of primeval attempts to explain the phenomena of nature, what natural phenomenon could ever have given rise to so many seemingly wanton conceptions ? Hopeless as the problem may at first sight seem, it has nevertheless been solved. In his great treatise on " The Descent of Fire," Dr. Kuhn has shown that all these legends and tra- ditions are descended from primitive myths ex- planatory of the lightning and the storm-cloud.1

To us, who are nourished from childhood on the truths revealed by science, the sky is known

1 Kuhn, Die Herabkunft des Fetters und des Gottertranks. Berlin, 1859.

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to be merely an optical appearance due to the partial absorption of the solar rays in pass- ing through a thick stratum of atmospheric air ; the clouds are known to be large masses of watery vapour, which descend in raindrops when sufficiently condensed ; and the lightning is known to be a flash of light accompanying an electric discharge. But these conceptions are extremely recondite, and have been attained only through centuries of philosophizing and after careful observation and laborious experi- ment. To the untaught mind of a child or of an uncivilized man, it seems far more natural and plausible to regard the sky as a solid dome of blue crystal, the clouds as snowy mountains, or perhaps even as giants or angels, the light- ning as a flashing dart or a fiery serpent. In point of fact, we find that the conceptions ac- tually entertained are often far more grotesque than these. I can recollect once framing the hypothesis that the flaming clouds of sunset were transient apparitions, vouchsafed us by way of warning, of that burning Calvinistic hell with which my childish imagination had been unwisely terrified;1 and I have known of a

1 " Saga me forwhan byth seo sunne read on asfen ? Ic the secge, forthon heo locath on helle. — Tell me, why is the sun red at even ? I tell thee, because she looketh on hell." Thorpe, Analecta Anglo-Saxonica, p. 1 1 $ , apud Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. ii. p. 63. Barbaric thought had partly anticipated my childish theory. 64

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four-year-old boy who thought that the snowy clouds of noonday were the white robes of the angels hung out to dry in the sun.1 My little daughter is anxious to know whether it is ne- cessary to take a balloon in order to get to the place where God lives, or whether the same end can be accomplished by going to the horizon and crawling up the sky ; 2 the Mohammedan of old was working at the same problem when he called the rainbow the bridge Es-Sirat, over which souls must pass on their way to heaven. According to the ancient Jew, the sky was a solid plate, hammered out by the gods, and spread over the earth in order to keep up the ocean overhead ; 3 but the plate was full of little windows, which were opened whenever it became necessary to let the rain come through.4

1 " Still in North Germany does the peasant say of thunder, that the angels are playing skittles aloft, and of the snow, that they are shaking up the feather-beds in heaven." Baring- Gould, Book of Werewolves, p. 172.

2 " The Polynesians imagine that the sky descends at the horizon and incloses the earth. Hence they call foreigners papalangi, or * heaven-bursters,' as having broken in from another world outside." Max Miiller, Chips, ii. 268.

8 •" Way-yo'hmer 'helohim yehi raquianh be-thok ham- mayim wihi mavdil beyn mayim la-mayim. — And said the gods, Let there be a hammered plate in the midst of the wa- ters, and let it be dividing between waters and waters." Genesis i. 6.

* Genesis vii. 1 1.

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With equal plausibility the Greek represented the rainy sky as a sieve in which the daughters of Danaos were vainly trying to draw water ; while to the Hindu the rain-clouds were celes- tial cattle milked by the wind-god. In primi- tive Aryan lore, the sky itself was a blue sea, and the clouds were ships sailing over it ; and an English legend tells how one of these ships once caught its anchor on a gravestone in the churchyard, to the great astonishment of the people who were coming out of church. Cha- ron's ferry-boat was one of these vessels, and another was Odin's golden ship, in which the souls of slain heroes were conveyed to Valhalla. Hence it was once the Scandinavian practice to bury the dead in boats ; and in Altmark a penny is still placed in the mouth of the corpse, that it may have the means of paying its fare to the ghostly ferryman.1 In such a vessel drifted the Lady of Shalott on her fatal voyage ; and of similar nature was the dusky barge, " dark as a funeral scarf from stem to stern," in which

1 See Kelly, Indo-European Folk-Lore, p. 120; who states also that in Bengal the Garrows burn their dead in a small boat, placed on top of the funeral pile.

In their character of cows, also, the clouds were regarded as psychopomps ; and hence it is still a popular superstition that a cow breaking into the yard foretokens a death in the family.

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Arthur was received by the black-hooded queens.1

But the fact that a natural phenomenon was explained in one way did not hinder it from be- ing explained in a dozen other ways. The fact that the sun was generally regarded as an all- conquering hero did not prevent its being called an egg, an apple, or a frog squatting on the waters, or Ixion's wheel, or the eye of Poly- phemos, or the stone of Sisyphos, which was no sooner pushed up to the zenith than it rolled down to the horizon. So the sky was not only a crystal dome or a celestial ocean, but it was also the Aleian land through which Bellerophon wandered, the country of the Lotos-eaters, or again the realm of the Graiai beyond the twilight ; and finally it was personified and wor- shipped as Dyaus or Varuna, the Vedic proto- types of the Greek Zeus and Ouranos. The clouds, too, had many other representatives

1 The sun-god Freyr had a cloud-ship called Skithblath- nir, which is thus described in Dasent's Prose Edda : " She is so great that all the vEsir, with their weapons and war- gear, may find room on board her ; " but " when there is no need of faring on the sea in her, she is made . . . with so much craft that Freyr may fold her together like a cloth, and keep her in his bag." This same virtue was possessed by the fairy pavilion which the Peri Banou gave to Ahmed ; the cloud which is no bigger than a man's hand may soon over- spread the whole heaven, and shade the Sultan's army from the solar rays.

6?

MYTHS AND MYTH-MAKERS

besides ships and cows. In a future paper it will be shown that they were sometimes re- garded as angels or houris ; at present it more nearly concerns us to know that they appear, throughout all Aryan mythology, under the form of birds. It used to be a matter of hope- less wonder to me that Aladdin's innocent re- quest for a roc's egg to hang in the dome of his palace should have been regarded as a crime worthy of punishment by the loss of the won- derful lamp ; the obscurest part of the whole affair being perhaps the Jinni's passionate allu- sion to the egg as his master : " Wretch ! dost thou command me to bring thee my master, and hang him up in the midst of this vaulted dome ? " But the incident is to some extent cleared of its mystery when we learn that the roc's egg is the bright sun, and that the roc itself is the rushing storm-cloud which, in the tale of Sindbad, haunts the sparkling starry fir- mament, symbolized as a valley of diamonds.1 According to one Arabic authority, the length

1 Euhemerism has done its best with this bird, represent- ing it as an immense vulture or condor or as a reminiscence of the extinct dodo. But a Chinese myth, cited by Klaproth, well preserves its true character when it describes it as " a bird which in flying obscures the sun, and of whose quills are made water-tuns." See Nouveau Journal Asiatique, torn, xii. p. 235. The big bird in the Norse tale of the " Blue Belt ' ' belongs to the same species.

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of its wings is ten thousand fathoms. But in European tradition it dwindles from these huge dimensions to the size of an eagle, a raven, or a woodpecker. Among the birds enumerated by Kuhn and others as representing the storm- cloud are likewise the wren, or " kinglet " (French roitelet] ; the owl, sacred to Athene ; the cuckoo, stork, and sparrow ; and the red- breasted robin, whose name Robert was origi- nally an epithet of the lightning-god Thor. In certain parts of France it is still believed that the robbing of a wren's nest will render the cul- prit liable to be struck by lightning. The same belief was formerly entertained in Teutonic countries with respect to the robin ; and I sup- pose that from this superstition is descended the prevalent notion, which I often encountered in childhood, that there is something peculiarly wicked in killing robins.

Now, as the raven or woodpecker, in the various myths of schamir, is the dark storm- cloud, so the rock-splitting worm or plant or pebble which the bird carries in its beak and lets fall to the ground is nothing more or less thun the flash of lightning carried and dropped by the cloud. " If the cloud was supposed to be a great bird, the lightnings were regarded as vt rithing worms or serpents in its beak. These fiery serpents, eXi/acu y/oa/i/xoetSoj? (£e/>o- i, are believed in to this day by the Cana-

MYTHS AND MYTH-MAKERS

dian Indians, who call the thunder their hiss- ing." *

But these are not the only mythical concep- tions which are to be found wrapped up in the various myths of schamir and the divining rod. The persons who told these stories were not weaving ingenious allegories about thunder- storms ; they were telling stories, or giving utterance to superstitions, of which the original meaning was forgotten. The old grannies who, along with a stoical indifference to the fate of quails and partridges, used to impress upon me the wickedness of killing robins, did not add that I should be struck by lightning if I failed to heed their admonitions. They had never heard that the robin was the bird of Thor ; they merely rehearsed the remnant of the supersti- tion which had survived to their own times, while the essential part of it had long since faded from recollection. The reason for regarding a robin's life as more sacred than a partridge's had been forgotten ; but it left behind, as was natu- ral, a vague recognition of that mythical sanc- tity. The primitive meaning of a myth fades away as inevitably as the primitive meaning of a word or phrase ; and the rabbins who told of a worm which shatters rocks no more thought of the writhing thunderbolts than the modern

1 Baring-Gould, Curious Myths, vol. ii. p. 146. Com- pare Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. ii. p. 237, seq. 70

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reader thinks of oyster shells when he sees the word ostracism, or consciously breathes a prayer as he writes the phrase good-by. It is only in its callow infancy that the full force of a myth is felt, and its period of luxuriant development dates from the time when its physical signifi- cance is lost or obscured. It was because the Greek had forgotten that Zeus meant the bright sky, that he could make him king over an anthropomorphic Olympos. The Hindu Dy- aus, who carried his significance in his name as plainly as the Greek Helios, never attained such an exalted position ; he yielded to deities of less obvious pedigree, such as Brahma and Vishnu.

Since, therefore, the myth-tellers recounted merely the wonderful stories which their own nurses and grandmas had told them, and had no intention of weaving subtle allegories or wrapping up a physical truth in mystic em- blems, it follows that they were not bound to avoid incongruities or to preserve a philosophi- cal symmetry in their narratives. In the great majority of complex myths, no such symmetry is to be found. A score of different mythical conceptions would get wrought into the same story, and the attempt to pull them apart and construct a single harmonious system of con- ceptions out of the pieces must often end in ingenious absurdity. If Odysseus is unques- 71

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tionably the sun, so is the eye of Polyphemos, which Odysseus puts out.1 But the Greek poet knew nothing of the incongruity, for he was thinking only of a superhuman hero freeing himself from a giant cannibal ; he knew no- thing of Sanskrit, or of comparative mythology, and the sources of his myths were as com- pletely hidden from his view as the sources of the Nile.

We need not be surprised, then, to find that in one version of the schamir myth the cloud is the bird which carries the worm, while in another version the cloud is the rock or moun- tain which the talisman cleaves open ; nor need we wonder at it, if we find stories in which the two conceptions are mingled together without regard to an incongruity which in the mind of the myth-teller no longer exists.2

1 « 'If Polyphemos' s eye be the sun, then Odysseus, the solar hero, extinguishes himself, a very primitive instance of suicide." Mahaffy, Prolegomena, p. 57. See, also, Brown, Poseidon, pp. 39, 40. This objection would be relevant only in case Homer were supposed to be constructing an allegory with entire knowledge of its meaning. It has no validity whatever when we recollect that Homer could have known nothing of the incongruity.

2 The Sanskrit myth-teller indeed mixes up his materials in a way which seems ludicrous to a Western reader. He describes Indra (the sun-god) as not only cleaving the cloud- mountains with his sword, but also cutting off their wings and hurling them from the sky. See Burnouf, Bhagavatd Pur ana, vi. 12, 26.

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In early Aryan mythology there is nothing by which the clouds are more frequently repre- sented than by rocks or mountains. Such were the Symplegades, which, charmed by the harp of the wind-god Orpheus, parted to make way for the talking ship Argo, with its crew of solar heroes.1 Such, too, were the mountains Ossa and Pelion, which the giants piled up one upon another in their impious assault upon Zeus, the lord of the bright sky. As Mr. Baring-Gould observes: "The ancient Aryan had the same name for cloud and mountain. To him the piles of vapour on the horizon were so like Alpine ranges that he had but one word whereby to designate both.2 These great mountains of heaven were opened by the lightning. In the sudden flash he beheld the dazzling splendour within, but only for a moment, and then, with

1 Mr. Tylor offers a different, and possibly a better, ex- planation of the Symplegades as the gates of Night through which the solar ship, having passed successfully once, may henceforth pass forever. See the details of the evidence in his Primitive Culture, i. 315.

2 The Sanskrit parvata, a bulging or inflated body, means both "cloud" and "mountain." " In the Edda, too, the rocks, said to have been fashioned out of Ymir's bones, are supposed to be intended for clouds. In Old Norse Klakkr means both cloud and rock ; nay, the English word cloud itself has been identified with the Anglo-Saxon clud, rock. See Justi, Orient und Occident, vol. ii. p. 62." Max Miiller, Rig- Veda, vol. i. p. 44.

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a crash, the celestial rocks closed again. Believ- ing these vaporous piles to contain resplendent treasures of which partial glimpse was obtained by mortals in a momentary gleam, tales were speedily formed, relating the adventures of some who had succeeded in entering these treasure mountains."

This sudden flash is the smiting of the cloud- rock by the arrow of Ahmed, the resistless ham- mer of Thor, the spear of Odin, the trident of Poseidon, or the rod of Hermes. The forked streak of light is the archetype of the divining rod in its oldest form, — that in which it not only indicates the hidden treasures, but, like the staff of the Ilsenstein shepherd, bursts open the enchanted crypt and reveals them to the aston- ished wayfarer. Hence the one thing essential to the divining rod, from whatever tree it be chosen, is that it shall be forked.

It is not difficult to comprehend the reasons which led the ancients to speak of the light- ning as a worm, serpent, trident, arrow, or forked wand ; but when we inquire why it was some- times symbolized as a flower or leaf, or when we seek to ascertain why certain trees, such as the ash, hazel, white-thorn, and mistletoe, were supposed to be in a certain sense embodiments of it, we are entering upon a subject too com- plicated to be satisfactorily treated within the limits of the present paper. It has been said 74

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that the point of resemblance between a cow and a comet, that both have tails, was quite enough for the primitive word-maker : it was certainly enough for the primitive myth-teller.1 Sometimes the pinnate shape of a leaf, the fork- ing of a branch, the tri-cleft corolla, or even the red colour of a flower, seems to have been suffi- cient to determine the association of ideas. The Hindu commentators of the Veda certainly lay great stress on the fact that the palasa, one of their lightning-trees, is trident-leaved. The mistletoe branch is forked, like a wish-bone,2 and so is the stem which bears the forget-me- not or wild scorpion grass. So, too, the leaves of the Hindu ficus religiosa resemble long spear- heads.3 But in many cases it is impossible for

1 In accordance with the mediaeval " doctrine of signa- tures," it was maintained " that the hard, stony seeds of the Gromwell must be good for gravel, and the knotty tubers of scrophularia for scrofulous glands ; while the scaly pappus of scaliosa showed it to be a specific in leprous diseases, the spotted leaves of pulmonaria that it was a sovereign remedy for tuberculous lungs, and the growth of saxifrage in the fis- sures of rocks that it would disintegrate stone in the bladder." Prior, Popular Names of British Plants, introd., p. xiv. See, also, Chapiel, La Doctrine des Signatures. Paris, 1866.

2 Indeed, the wish-bone, or forked clavicle of a fowl, it- self belongs to the same family of talismans as the divining tod.

8 The ash, on the other hand, has been from time im- memorial used for spears in many parts of the Aryan domain. The word essc meant, in Anglo-Saxon, indifferently " ash"

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us to determine with confidence the reasons which may have guided primitive men in their choice of talismanic plants. In the case of some of these stories, it would no doubt be wasting ingenuity to attempt to assign a mythical origin for each point of detail. The ointment of the dervise, for instance, in the Arabian tale, has probably no special mythical significance, but was rather suggested by the exigencies of the story, in an age when the old mythologies were so far disintegrated and mingled together that any one talisman would serve as well as another the purposes of the narrator. But the lightning plants of Indo-European folk-lore cannot be thus summarily disposed of; for however diffi- cult it may be for us to perceive any connection between them and the celestial phenomena which they represent, the myths concerning them are so numerous and explicit as to render it certain that some such connection was imagined by the myth-makers. The superstition concerning the hand of glory is not so hard to interpret. In the mythology of the Finns, the storm-cloud is a black man with a bright copper hand ; and in Hindustan, Indra Savitar, the deity who slays

tree " or " spear ; " and the same is, or has been, true of the French fresne and the Greek /leXt'a. The root of eesc appears in the Sanskrit as, "to throw " or " lance," whence asa, " a bow," and asana, " an arrow." See Pictet, Ori- gines Indo-Europeennes, i. 222.

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the demon of the cloud, is golden-handed. The selection of the hand of a man who has been hanged is probably due to the superstition which regarded the storm-god Odin as peculiarly the lord of the gallows. The man who is raised upon the gallows is placed directly in the track of the wild huntsman, who comes with his hounds to carry off the victim ; and hence the notion, which, according to Mr. Kelly, is "very com- mon in Germany and not extinct in England," that every suicide by hanging is followed by a storm.

The paths of comparative mythology are devious, but we have now pursued them long enough, I believe, to have arrived at a tolerably clear understanding of the original nature of the divining rod. Its power of revealing treasures has been sufficiently explained ; and its affinity for water results so obviously from the character of the lightning myth as to need no further comment. But its power of detecting criminals still remains to be accounted for.

In Greek mythology, the being which detects and punishes crime is the Erinys, the prototype of the Latin Fury, figured by late writers as a horrible monster with serpent locks. But this is a degradation of the original conception. The name Erinys did not originally mean Fury, and it cannot be explained from Greek sources alone. It appears in Sanskrit as Saranyu, a word which 77

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signifies the light of morning creeping over the sky. And thus we are led to the startling conclusion that, as the light of morning re- veals the evil deeds done under the cover of night, so the lovely Dawn, or Erinys, came to be regarded under one aspect as the terrible detector and avenger of iniquity. Yet startling as the conclusion is, it is based on established laws of phonetic change, and cannot be gain- said.

But what has the avenging daybreak to do with the lightning and the divining rod ? To the modern mind the association is not an obvious one : in antiquity it was otherwise. Myths of the daybreak and myths of the light- ning often resemble each other so closely that, except by a delicate philological analysis, it is difficult to distinguish the one from the other. The reason is obvious. In each case the phe- nomenon to be explained is the struggle be- tween the day-god and one of the demons of darkness. There is essentially no distinction to the mind of the primitive man between the Panis, who steal Indra's bright cows and keep them in a dark cavern all night, and the throt- tling snake Ahi, or Echidna, who imprisons the waters in the stronghold of the thunder-cloud and covers the earth with a short-lived dark- ness. And so the poisoned arrows of Bellero- phon, which slay the storm dragon, differ in no

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essential respect from the shafts with which Odysseus slaughters the night demons who have for ten long hours beset his mansion. Thus the divining rod, representing as it does the weapon of the god of day, comes legiti- mately enough by its function of detecting and avenging crime.

But the lightning not only reveals strange treasures and gives water to the thirsty land and makes plain what is doing under cover of darkness ; it also sometimes kills, benumbs, or paralyzes. Thus the head of the Gorgon Me- dusa turns into stone those who look upon it. Thus the ointment of the dervise, in the tale of Baba Abdallah, not only reveals all the trea- sures of the earth, but instantly thereafter blinds the unhappy man who tests its powers. And thus the hand of glory, which bursts open bars and bolts, benumbs also those who happen to be near it. Indeed, few of the favoured mortals who were allowed to visit the caverns opened by sesame, or the luck-flower, escaped without disaster. The monkish tale of " The Clerk and the Image," in which the primeval mythical features are curiously distorted, well illustrates this point.

In the city of Rome there formerly stood

an image, with its right hand extended, and on

its forefinger the words " Strike here." Many

wise men puzzled in vain over the meaning of

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the inscription ; but at last a certain priest ob- served that whenever the sun shone on the fig- ure, the shadow of the finger was discernible on the ground at a little distance from the statue. Having marked the spot, he waited until mid- night, and then began to dig. At last his spade struck upon something hard. It was a trap- door, below which a flight of marble steps de- scended into a spacious hall, where many men were sitting in solemn silence amid piles of gold and diamonds and long rows of enamelled vases. Beyond this he found another room, a gyn<ecium filled with beautiful women reclining on richly embroidered sofas ; yet here, too, all was profound silence. A superb banqueting- hall next met his astonished gaze ; then a silent kitchen ; then granaries loaded with forage ; then a stable crowded with motionless horses. The whole place was brilliantly lighted by a carbuncle which was suspended in one corner of the reception room ; and opposite stood an archer, with his bow and arrow raised, in the act of taking aim at the jewel. As the priest passed back through this hall, he saw a diamond-hiked knife lying on a marble table ; and wishing to carry away something wherewith to accredit his story, he reached out his hand to take it ; but no sooner had he touched it than all was dark. The archer had shot with his arrow,, the bright jewel was shivered into a thousand pieces, the 80

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staircase had fled, and the priest found himself buried alive.1

Usually, however, though the lightning is wont to strike dead, with its basilisk glance, those who rashly enter its mysterious caverns, it is regarded rather as a benefactor than as a destroyer. The feelings with which the myth- making age contemplated the thunder-shower as it revived the earth paralyzed by a long drought are shown in the myth of Oidipous. The Sphinx, whose name signifies " the one who binds," is the demon who sits on the cloud- rock and imprisons the rain, muttering dark sayings which none but the all-knowing sun may understand. The flash of solar light, which causes the monster to fling herself down from the cliff with a fearful roar, restores the land to prosperity. But besides this, the association of the thunderstorm with the approach of sum- mer has produced many myths in which the lightning is symbolized as the life-renewing wand of the victorious sun-god. Hence the use of the divining rod in the cure of disease ; and hence the large family of schamir myths in

1 Compare Spenser's story of Sir Guyon, in the Faery Queen, where, however, the knight fares better than this poor priest. Usually these lightning caverns were like Ixion's treasure-house, into which none might look and live. This conception is the foundation of part of the story of Blue-Beard and of the Arabian tale of the third one-eyed Calender.

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which the dead are restored to life by leaves or herbs. In Grimm's tale of the Three Snake Leaves, " a prince is buried alive (like Sindbad) with his dead wife, and seeing a snake approach- ing her body, he cuts it in three pieces. Pre- sently another snake, crawling from the corner, saw the other lying dead, and going away soon returned with three green leaves in its mouth ; then laying the parts of the body together so as to join, it put one leaf on each wound, and the dead snake was alive again. The prince, applying the leaves to his wife's body, restores her also to life." l In the Greek story, told by JEli&n and Apollodoros, Polyidos is shut up with the corpse of Glaukos, which he is ordered to restore to life. He kills a dragon which is ap- proaching the body, but is presently astonished at seeing another dragon come with a blade of grass and place it upon its dead companion, which instantly rises from the ground. Polyi- dos takes the same blade of grass, and with it resuscitates Glaukos. The same incident occurs in the Hindu story of Panch Phul Ranee, and in Fouque's " Sir Elidoc," which is founded on a Breton legend.

We need not wonder, then, at the extraordi- nary therapeutic properties which are in all Ar- yan folk-lore ascribed to the various lightning-

1 Cox, Mythology of the Aryan Nations, vol. i. p. 161.

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plants. In Sweden sanitary amulets are made of mistletoe twigs, and the plant is supposed to be a specific against epilepsy and an antidote for poisons. In Cornwall children are passed through holes in ash-trees in order to cure them of hernia. Ash rods are used in some parts of England for the cure of diseased sheep, cows, and horses ; and in particular they are supposed to neutralize the venom of serpents. The no- tion that snakes are afraid of an ash-tree is not extinct even in the United States. The other day I was told, not by an old granny, but by a man fairly educated and endowed with a very unusual amount of good common sense, that a rattlesnake will sooner go through fire than creep over ash leaves or into the shadow of an ash-tree. Exactly the same statement is made by Pliny, who adds that if you draw a circle with an ash rod around the spot of ground on which a snake is lying, the animal must die of starvation, being as effectually imprisoned as Ugolino in the dungeon at Pisa. In Corn- wall it is believed that a blow from an ash stick will instantly kill any serpent. The ash shares this virtue with the hazel and fern. A Swedish peasant will tell you that snakes may be deprived of their venom by a touch with a hazel wand ; and when an ancient Greek had occasion to make his bed in the woods, he se-

MYTHS AND MYTH-MAKERS

lected fern leaves if possible, in the belief that the smell of them would drive away poisonous animals.1

But the beneficent character of the light- ning appears still more clearly in another class of myths. To the primitive man the shaft of light coming down from heaven was typical of the original descent of fire for the benefit and improvement of the human race. The Sioux Indians account for the origin of fire by a myth of unmistakable kinship ; they say that " their first ancestor obtained his fire from the sparks which a friendly panther struck from the rocks as he scampered up a stony hill." 2 This pan- ther is obviously the counterpart of the Aryan bird which drops schamir. But the Aryan im- agination hit upon a far more remarkable con- ception. The ancient Hindus obtained fire by a process similar to that employed by Count Rumford in his experiments on the generation of heat by friction. They first wound a couple of cords around a pointed stick in such a way that the unwinding of the one would wind up the other, and then, placing the point of the stick against a circular disk of wood, twirled it rapidly by alternate pulls on the two strings. This instrument is called a chark, and is still

i Kelly, Indo-European Folk-lore, pp. 147, 183, 1 86,

193- 3 Brinton, Myths of the New World, p. 151.

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used in South Africa,1 in Australia, in Sumatra, and among the Veddahs of Ceylon. The Rus- sians found it in Kamtchatka ; and it was for- merly employed in America, from Labrador to the Straits of Magellan.2 The Hindus churned milk by a similar process ; 3 and in order to ex- plain the thunderstorm, a Sanskrit poem tells how " once upon a time the Devas, or gods, and their opponents, the Asuras, made a truce, and joined together in churning the ocean to procure amrita, the drink of immortality. They took Mount Mandara for a churning stick, and, wrapping the great serpent Sesha round it for a rope, they made the mountain spin round to

1 Callaway, Zulu Nursery Tales, i. 173, note 12.

2 Tylor, Early History of Mankind, p. 238 ; Primitive Culture, vol. ii. p. 254 ; Darwin, Naturalist's Voyage, p. 409.

"Jacky's next proceeding was to get some dry sticks and wood, and prepare a fire, which, to George's astonishment, he lighted thus. He got a block of wood, in the middle of which he made a hole ; then he cut and pointed a long stick, and inserting the point into the block, worked it round be- tween his palms for some time and with increasing rapidity. Presently there came a smell of burning wood, and soon after it burst into a flame at the point of contact. Jacky cut slices of shark and roasted them." Reade, Never too Late to Mend, chap, xxxviii.

8 The production of fire by the drill is often called churn- ing, e. g., " He took the uvati [chark], and sat down and churned it, and kindled a fire." Callaway, Zulu Nursery Tales, i. 1 74.

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and fro, the Devas pulling at the serpent's tail, and the Asuras at its head." l In this myth the churning stick, with its flying serpent-cords, is the lightning, and the amrita, or drink of immortality, is simply the rain-water, which in Aryan folk-lore possesses the same healing vir- tues as the lightning. " In Sclavonic myths it is the water of life which restores the dead earth, a water brought by a bird from the depths of a gloomy cave." 2 It is the celestial soma or mead which Indra loves to drink; it is the ambrosial nectar of the Olympian gods ; it is the charmed water which in the Arabian Nights restores to human shape the victims of wicked sorcerers ; and it is the elixir of life which me- diaeval philosophers tried to discover, and in quest of which Ponce de Leon traversed the wilds of Florida.3

The most interesting point in this Hindu myth is the name of the peaked mountain Mandara, or Manthara, which the gods and devils took for their churning stick. The word means " a churning stick," and it appears also, with a prefixed preposition, in the name of the

1 Kelly, Indo-European Folk-Lore , p. 39. Burnouf, Bhagavata Pur ana, viii. 6, 32.

2 Baring-Gould, Curious Myths, p. 149.

8 It is also the regenerating water of baptism, and the '« holy water " of the Roman Catholic.

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fire drill, pramantha. Now Kuhn has proved that this name, pramantha, is etymologically identical with Prometheus, the name of the bene- ficent Titan, who stole fire from heaven and be- stowed it upon mankind as the richest of boons. This sublime personage was originally nothing but the celestial drill which churns fire out of the clouds ; but the Greeks had so entirely for- gotten his origin that they interpreted his name as meaning " the one who thinks beforehand," and accredited him with a brother, Epimetheus, or " the one who thinks too late." The Greeks had adopted another name, trypanon, for their fire drill, and thus the primitive character of Prometheus became obscured.

I have said above that it was regarded as ab- solutely essential that the divining rod should be forked. To this rule, however, there was one exception, and if any further evidence be needed to convince the most sceptical that the divining rod is nothing but a symbol of the lightning, that exception will furnish such evi- dence. For this exceptional kind of divining rod was made of a pointed stick rotating in a block of wood, and it was the presence of hid- den water or treasure which was supposed to excite the rotatory motion.

In the myths relating to Prometheus, the lightning-god appears as the originator of civili-

MYTHS AND MYTH-MAKERS

zation, sometimes as the creator of the human race, and always as its friend,1 suffering in its behalf the most fearful tortures at the hands of the jealous Zeus. In one story he creates man by making a clay image and infusing into it a spark of the fire which he had brought from heaven ; in another story he is himself the first man. In the Peloponnesian myth Phoroneus, who is Prometheus under another name, is the first man, and his mother was an ash-tree. In Norse mythology, also, the gods were said to have made the first man out of the ash-tree Yggdrasil. The association of the heavenly fire with the life-giving forces of nature is very com- mon in the myths of both hemispheres, and in view of the facts already cited it need not sur- prise us. Hence the Hindu Agni and the Norse Thor were patrons of marriage, and in Norway the most lucky day on which to be married is still supposed to be Thursday, which in old times was the day of the fire-god.2 Hence the lightning plants have divers virtues in matters pertaining to marriage. The Romans made their wedding torches of white-thorn; hazel-

1 In the Vedas the rain-god Soma, originally the personi- fication of the sacrificial ambrosia, is the deity who imparts to men life, knowledge, and happiness. See Breal, Hercule et Cafus, p. 85. Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. ii. p. 277.

2 We may, perhaps, see here the reason for making the Greek fire-god Hephaistos the husband of Aphrodite.

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nuts are still used all over Europe in divina- tions relating to the future lover or sweetheart ; * and under a mistletoe bough it is allowable for a gentleman to kiss a lady. A vast number of kindred superstitions are described by Mr. Kelly, to whom I am indebted for many of these examples.2

Thus we reach at last the completed concep- tion of the divining rod, or as it is called in this sense the wish rod, with its kindred talismans, from Aladdin's lamp and the purse of Bedred- din Hassan, to the Sangreal, the philosopher's stone, and the goblets of Oberon and Tristram. These symbols of the reproductive energies of nature, which give to the possessor every good and perfect gift, illustrate the uncurbed belief in the power of wish which the ancient man shared with modern children. In the Norse story of Frodi's quern, the myth assumes a whimsical shape. The prose Edda tells of a

1 " Our country maidens are well aware that triple leaves plucked at hazard from the common ash are worn in the breast for the purpose of causing prophetic dreams respecting a dilatory lover. The leaves of the yellow trefoil are sup- posed to possess similar virtues." Harland and Wilkinson, Lancashire Folk-Lore, p. 20.

2 '* In Peru, a mighty and far- worshipped deity was Cat- equil, the thunder-god, ... he who in thunder-flash and clap hurls from his sling the small, round, smooth thunder- stones, treasured in the villages as fire fetiches and charms to kindle the flames of love. " Tylor, op. fit. vol. ii. p. 239.

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primeval age of gold, when everybody had whatever he wanted. This was because the giant Frodi had a mill which ground out peace and plenty and abundance of gold withal, so that it lay about the roads like pebbles. Through the inexcusable avarice of Frodi, this wonderful implement was lost to the world. For he kept his maid-servants working at the mill until they got out of patience, and began to make it grind out hatred and war. Then came a mighty sea- rover by night and slew Frodi and carried away the maids and the quern. When he got well out to sea, he told them to grind out salt, and so they did with a vengeance. They ground the ship full of salt and sank it, and so the quern was lost forever, but the sea remains salt unto this day.

Mr. Kelly rightly identifies Frodi with the sun-god Fro or Freyr, and observes that the magic mill is only another form of the fire- churn, or chark. According to another version the quern is still grinding away and keeping the sea salt, and over the place where it lies there is a prodigious whirlpool or maelstrom which sucks down ships.

In its completed shape, the lightning wand is the caduceus, or rod of Hermes. I observed, in the preceding paper, that in the Greek con- ception of Hermes there have been fused to- gether the attributes of two deities who were 90

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originally distinct. The Hermes of the Ho- meric Hymn is a wind-god ; but the later Hermes Agoraios, the patron of gymnasia, the mutilation of whose statues caused such terri- ble excitement in Athens during the Pelopon- nesian War, is a very different personage. He is a fire-god, invested with many solar attributes, and represents the quickening forces of nature. In this capacity the invention of fire was as- cribed to him as well as to Prometheus ; he was said to be the friend of mankind, and was sur- named Ploutodotes, or " the giver of wealth." The Norse wind-god Odin has in like man- ner acquired several of the attributes of Freyr and Thor.1 His lightning spear, which is bor- rowed from Thor, appears by a comical meta- morphosis as a wish rod which will administer a sound thrashing to the enemies of its posses- sor. Having cut a hazel stick, you have only to lay down an old coat, name your intended victim, wish he was there, and whack away : he will howl with pain at every blow. This won- derful cudgel appears in Dasent's tale of " The Lad who went to the North Wind," with which we may conclude this discussion. The story is told, with little variation, in Hindustan, Ger- many, and Scandinavia.

1 In Polynesia, €f the great deity Maui adds a new com- plication to his enigmatic solar-celestial character by appearing as a wind-god." Tylor, op. cit. vol. ii. p. 242.

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The North Wind, representing the mischiev- ous Hermes, once blew away a poor woman's meal. So her boy went to the North Wind and demanded his rights for the meal his mother had lost. " I have n't got your meal," said the Wind, " but here 's a tablecloth which will cover itself with an excellent dinner whenever you tell it to." So the lad took the cloth and started for home. At nightfall he stopped at an inn, spread his cloth on the table, and ordered it to cover itself with good things, and so it did. But the landlord, who thought it would be money in his pocket to have such a cloth, stole it after the boy had gone to bed, and substituted another just like it in appearance. Next day the boy went home in great glee- to show off for his mother's astonishment what the North Wind had given him, but all the dinner he got that day was what the old woman cooked for him. In his despair he went back to the North Wind and called him a liar, and again demanded his rights for the meal he had lost. " I have n't got your meal," said the Wind, " but here 's a ram which will drop money out of its fleece when- ever you tell it to." So the lad travelled home, stopping over-night at the same inn, and when he got home he found himself with a ram which did n't drop coins out of its fleece. A third time he visited the North Wind, and obtained a bag with a stick in it which, at the word of command, 92

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would jump out of the bag and lay on until told to stop. Guessing how matters stood as to his cloth and ram, he turned in at the same tavern, and going to a bench lay down as if to sleep. The landlord thought that a stick carried about in a bag must be worth something, and so he stole quietly up to the bag, meaning to get the stick out and change it. But just as he got within whacking distance, the boy gave the word, and out jumped the stick and beat the thief until he promised to give back the ram and the tablecloth. And so the boy got his rights for the meal which the North Wind had blown away.

October, 1870

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IT is related by Ovid that Lykaon, king of Arkadia, once invited Zeus to dinner, and served up for him a dish of human flesh, in order to test the god's omniscience. But the trick miserably failed, and the impious mon- arch received the punishment which his crime had merited. He was transformed into a wolf, that he might henceforth feed upon the viands with which he had dared to pollute the table of the king of Olympos. From that time forth, according to Pliny, a noble Arkadian was each year, on the festival of Zeus Lykaios, led to the margin of a certain lake. Hanging his clothes upon a tree, he then plunged into the water and became a wolf. For the space of nine years he roamed about the adjacent woods, and then, if he had not tasted human flesh during all this time, he was allowed to swim back to the place where his clothes were hanging, put them on, and return to his natural form. It is further related of a certain Demainetos, that, having once been present at a human sacrifice to Zeus 94

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Lykaios, he ate of the flesh, and was transformed into a wolf for a term of ten years.1

These and other similar mythical germs were developed by the mediaeval imagination into the horrible superstition of werewolves.

A werewolf, or kup-getrou? was a person who had the power of transforming himself into a wolf, being endowed, while in the lupine state, with the intelligence of a man, the ferocity of a wolf, and the irresistible strength of a demon. The ancients believed in the existence of such persons ; but in the Middle Ages the meta- morphosis was supposed to be a phenomenon of daily occurrence, and even at the present day, in secluded portions of Europe, the supersti- tion is still cherished by peasants. The belief, moreover, is supported by a vast amount of evidence, which can neither be argued nor pooh- poohed into insignificance. It is the business of the comparative mythologist to trace the pedi- gree of the ideas from which such a conception may have sprung ; while to the critical historian belongs the task of ascertaining and classifying the actual facts which this particular conception was used to interpret.

The mediaeval belief in werewolves is es-

1 Compare Plato, Republic, viii. 15.

2 Were-?volf= man-wolf, wer meaning " man." Garou is a Gallic corruption of werewolf, so that loup-garou is a tau- tological expression.

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pecially adapted to illustrate the complicated manner in which divers mythical conceptions and misunderstood natural occurrences will com- bine to generate a long-enduring superstition. Mr. Cox, indeed, would have us believe that the whole notion arose from an unintentional play upon words ; but the careful survey of the field, which has been taken by Hertz and Bar- ing-Gould, leads to the conclusion that many other circumstances have been at work. The delusion, though doubtless purely mythical in its origin, nevertheless presents in its developed state a curious mixture of mythical and histor- ical elements.

With regard to the Arkadian legend, taken by itself, Mr. Cox is probably right. The story seems to belong to that large class of myths which have been devised in order to explain the meaning of equivocal words whose true signifi- cance has been forgotten. The epithet Lykaios, as applied to Zeus, had originally no reference to wolves : it means " the bright one," and gave rise to lycanthropic legends only because of the similarity in sound between the names for "wolf" and " brightness." Aryan mythology furnishes numerous other instances of this con- fusion. The solar deity, Phoibos Lykegenes, was originally the " offspring of light ; " but popular etymology made a kind of werewolf of him by interpreting his name as the " wolf- 96

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born." The name of the hero Autolykos means simply the " self-luminous ; " but it was more frequently interpreted as meaning " a very wolf," in allusion to the supposed character of its pos- sessor. Bazra, the name of the citadel of Car- thage, was the Punic word for " fortress ; " but the Greeks confounded it with byrsa, " a hide," and hence the story of the ox-hides cut into strips by Dido in order to measure the area of the place to be fortified. The old theory that the Irish were Phoenicians had a similar origin. The name Fena, used to designate the old Scoti or Irish, is the plural of Fion, " fair," seen in the name of the hero Fion Gall, or " Fin- gal ; " but the monkish chroniclers identified Fena with Phoinix, whence arose the myth ; and by a like misunderstanding of the epithet Mi~ ledh, or "warrior," applied to Fion by the Gaelic bards, there was generated a mythical hero, Mi- lesius, and the sobriquet " Milesian," colloqui- ally employed in speaking of the Irish.1 So the Franks explained the name of the town Daras, in Mesopotamia, by the story that the Em- peror Justinian once addressed the chief magis- trate with the exclamation, daras, " thou shalt give : " 2 the Greek chronicler, Malalas, who spells the name Doras, informs us with equal

1 Meyer, in Bunsen's Philosophy of Universal History, vol. i. p. 151.

2 Aimoin, De Gestis Franc or urn, ii. 5.

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complacency that it was the place where Alex- ander overcame Codomannus with S6pvy " the spear." A certain passage in the Alps is called Scaletta, from its resemblance to a staircase ; but according to a local tradition it owes its name to the bleaching skeletons of a company of Moors who were destroyed there in the eighth century, while attempting to penetrate into Northern Italy. The name of Antwerp denotes the town built at a "wharf; " but it sounds very much like the Flemish handt werpen, " hand-throwing : " " hence arose the legend of the giant who cut off the hands of those who passed his castle without paying him blackmail, and threw them into the Scheldt." 1 In the myth of Bishop Hatto, related in a previous paper, the Mause- thurm is a corruption of maut-thurm ; it means " customs-tower," and has nothing to do with mice or rats. Doubtless this etymology was the cause of the floating myth getting fastened to this particular place ; that it did not give rise to the myth itself is shown by the existence of the same tale in other places. Somewhere in Eng- land there is a place called Chateau Vert ; the peasantry have corrupted it into Shotover, and say that it has borne that name ever since Little John shot over a high hill in the neighbour- hood.2 Latium means " the flat land ; " but,

1 Taylor, Words and Places, p. 393. a Very similar to this is the etymological confusion upon 98

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according to Virgil, it is the place where Saturn once. hid (latuisset) from the wrath of his usurp- ing son Jupiter.1

It was in this way that the constellation of the Great Bear received its name. The Greek word arktosy answering to the Sanskrit riksha, meant originally any bright object, and was ap- plied to the bear — for what reason it would not be easy to state — and to that constella- tion which was most conspicuous in the lati- tude of the early home of the Aryans. When the Greeks had long forgotten why these stars were called arktoi, they symbolized them as a Great Bear fixed in the sky. So that, as Max Miiller observes, " the name of the Arctic re- gions "Vests on a misunderstanding of a name framed thousands of years ago in Central Asia, and the surprise with which many a thoughtful

which is based the myth of the " confusion of tongues '* in the eleventh chapter of Genesis. The name "Babel** is really Bab- 1 1, or " the gate of God ; '* but the Hebrew writer erroneously derives the word from the root V22» balal, "to confuse;" and hence arises the mythical explanation that Babel was a place where human speech became confused. See Rawlinson, in Smith's Dictionary of the Bible, vol. i. p. 149 ; Renan, Histoire des Langues Semitiques, vol. i. p. 32; Donaldson, New Cratylus, p. 74, note; Colenso on the Pen- tateuch, vol. iv. p. 268.

1 Virg. &n, viii. 322. With Latium compare TrAcmk, Skr. prath (to spread out), Eng. fiat. Ferrar, Comparative Grammar of Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, vol. i. p. 31.

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observer has looked at these seven bright stars, wondering why they were ever called the Bear, is removed by a reference to the early annals of human speech." Among the Algonquins the sun-god Michabo was represented as a hare, his name being compounded of michiy " great," and waboSy "a hare ; " yet wabos also meant "white," so that the god was doubtless originally called simply " the Great White One." The same naive process has made bears of the Arkadians, whose name, like that of the Lykians, merely signified that they were " children of light ; " and the metamorphosis of Kallisto, mother of Arkas, into a bear, and of Lykaon into a wolf, rests apparently upon no other foundation than an erroneous etymology. Originally Lykaon was neither man nor wolf; he was but another form of Phoibos Lykegenes, the light-born sun, and, as Mr. Cox has shown, his legend is but a variation of that of Tantalos, who in time of drought offers to Zeus the flesh of his own offspring, the withered fruits, and is punished for his impiety.

It seems to me, however, that this explana- tion, though valid as far as it goes, is inadequate to explain all the features of the werewolf su- perstition, or to account for its presence in all Aryan countries and among many peoples who are not of Aryan origin. There can be no

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doubt that the myth-makers transformed Ly- kaon into a wolf because of his unlucky name ; because what really meant " bright man " seemed to them to mean " wolf-man ; " but it has by no means been proved that a similar equivocation occurred in the case of all the primitive Aryan werewolves, nor has it been shown to be probable that among each people the being with the uncanny name got thus acci- dentally confounded with the particular beast most dreaded by that people. Etymology alone does not explain the fact that while Gaul has been the favourite haunt of the man-wolf, Scandinavia has been preferred by the man- bear, and Hindustan by the man-tiger. To ac- count for such a widespread phenomenon we must seek a more general cause.

Nothing is more strikingly characteristic of primitive thinking than the close community of nature which it assumes between man and brute. The doctrine of metempsychosis, which is found in some shape or other all over the world, implies a fundamental identity between the two ; the Hindu is taught to respect the flocks browsing in the meadow, and will on no account lift his hand against a cow, for who knows but it may be his own grandmother ? The recent researches of Mr. M'Lennan and Mr. Herbert Spencer have served to connect

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this feeling with the primeval worship of ances- tors and with the savage customs of totemism.1 The worship of ancestors seems to have been everywhere the oldest systematized form of fetichistic religion. The reverence paid to the chieftain of the tribe while living was contin- ued and exaggerated after his death. The un- civilized man is everywhere incapable of grasp- ing the idea of death as it is apprehended by civilized people. He cannot understand that a man should pass away so as to be no longer capable of communicating with his fellows. The image of his dead chief or comrade remains in his mind, and the savage's philosophic realism far surpasses that of the most extravagant me- diaeval schoolmen ; to him the persistence of the idea implies the persistence of the reality. The dead man, accordingly, is not really dead ; he has thrown off his body like a husk, yet still retains his old appearance, and often shows himself to his old friends, especially after night- fall. He is no doubt possessed of more exten- sive powers than before his transformation,2 and

1 M'Lennan, " The Worship of Animals and Plants," Fortnightly Review, N. s. vol. vi. pp. 407-427, 562-582, vol. vii. pp. 194-216 ; Spencer, The Origin of dnimal Wor- ship, id. vol. vii. pp. 535-550, reprinted in his Recent Discussions in Science, etc., pp. 31—56.

8 Thus is explained the singular conduct of the Hindu, who slays himself before his enemy's door, in order to acquire greater power of injuring him. " A certain Brahman, on 102

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may very likely have a share in regulating the weather, granting or withholding rain. There- fore, argues the uncivilized mind, he is to be cajoled and propitiated more sedulously now than before his strange transformation.

This kind of worship still maintains a lan- guid existence as the state religion of China, and it still exists as a portion of Brahmanism ; but in the Vedic religion it is to be seen in all its vigour and in all its naive simplicity. Accord- ing to the ancient Aryan, the Pitrisy or " Fa- thers " (Lat. patres), live in the sky along with Yama, the great original Pitri of mankind. This first man came down from heaven in the lightning, and back to heaven both himself and all his offspring must have gone. There they distribute light unto men below, and they shine themselves as stars ; and hence the Christian-

whose lands a Kshatriya raja had built a house, ripped him- self up in revenge, and became a demon of the kind called Brahmadasyu, who has been ever since the terror of the whole country, and is the most common village-deity in Kharakpur. Toward the close of the last century there were two Brahmans, out of whose house a man had wrongfully, as they thought, taken forty rupees ; whereupon one of the Brahmans pro- ceeded to cut off his own mother's head, with the professed view, entertained by both mother and son, that her spirit, excited by the beating of a large drum during forty days, might haunt, torment, and pursue to death the taker of their money and those concerned with him." Tylor, Primitivl Culture, vol. ii. p. 103.

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ized German peasant, fifty centuries later, tells his children that the stars are angels' eyes, and the English cottager impresses it on the youth- ful mind that it is wicked to point at the stars, though why he cannot tell. But the Pitris are not stars only, nor do they content themselves with idly looking down on the affairs of men, after the fashion of the laissez-faire divinities of Lucretius. They are, on the contrary, very busy with the weather ; they send rain, thun- der, and lightning ; and they especially delight in rushing over the housetops in a great gale of wind, led on by their chief, the mysterious huntsman, Hermes or Odin.

It has been elsewhere shown that the howl- ing dog, or wish-hound of Hermes, whose ap- pearance under the windows of a sick person is such an alarming portent, is merely the tem- pest personified. Throughout all Aryan my- thology the souls of the dead are supposed to ride on the night-wind, with their howling dogs, gathering into their throng the souls of those just dying as they pass by their houses.1 Some- times the whole complex conception is wrapped up in the notion of a single dog, the messen- ger of the god of shades, who comes to sum- mon the departing soul. Sometimes, instead of

1 Hence, in many parts of Europe, it is still customary to open the windows when a person dies, in order that the soul may not be hindered in joining the mystic cavalcade. 104

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a dog, we have a great ravening wolf who comes to devour its victim and extinguish the sunlight of life, as that old wolf of the tribe of Fenrir devoured little Red Riding-Hood with her robe of scarlet twilight.1 Thus we arrive at a true werewolf myth. The storm-wind, or howling Rakshasa of Hindu folk-lore, is "a great mis- shapen giant with red beard and red hair, with pointed protruding teeth, ready to lacerate and devour human flesh ; his body is covered with coarse, bristling hair, his huge mouth is open, he looks from side to side as he walks, lusting after the flesh and blood of men, to satisfy his raging hunger and quench his consuming thirst.

1 The story of little Red Riding- Hood is " mutilated in the English version, but known more perfectly by old wives in Germany, who can tell that the lovely little maid in her shining red satin cloak was swallowed with her grandmother by the wolf, till they both came out safe and sound when the hunter cut open the sleeping beast." Tylor, Primitive Culture, i. 307, where also see the kindred Russian story of Vasilissa the Beautiful. Compare the case of Tom Thumb, who " was swallowed by a cow and came out unhurt;" the story of Saktideva swallowed by the fish and cut out again, in Somadeva Bhatta, ii. 118—184; anc^ tne story of Jonah swallowed by the whale, in the Old Testament. All these are different versions of the same myth, and refer to the alternate swallowing up and casting forth of Day by Night, which is commonly personified as a wolf, and now and then as a great fish. Compare Grimm's story of the Wolf and Seven Kids, Tylor, loc. cit., and see Early History of Man- kind, p. 337 ; Hardy, Manual of Buddhism, p. 501.

MYTHS AND MYTH-MAKERS

Toward nightfall his strength increases mani- fold ; he can change his shape at will ; he haunts the woods, and roams howling through the jungle."1

Now if the storm-wind is a host of Pitris, or one great Pitri who appears as a fearful giant, and is also a pack of wolves or wish-hounds, or a single savage dog or wolf, the inference is obvious to the mythopoeic mind that men may become wolves, at least after death. And to the uncivilized thinker this inference is strength- ened, as Mr. Spencer has shown, by evidence registered on his own tribal totem or heraldic emblem. The bears and lions and leopards of heraldry are the degenerate descendants of the totem of savagery which designated the tribe by a beast symbol. To the untutored mind there is everything in a name ; and the descendant of Brown Bear or Yellow Tiger or Silver Hy- aena cannot be pronounced unfaithful to his own style of philosophizing, if he regards his ances- tors, who career about his hut in the darkness of night, as belonging to whatever order of beasts his totem associations may suggest.

Thus we not only see a ray of light thrown on the subject of metempsychosis, but we get a glimpse of the curious process by which the intensely realistic mind of antiquity arrived at

1 Baring-Gould, Book of Werewolves, p. 178 ; Muir, Sanskrit Texts, ii. 435.

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the notion that men could be transformed into beasts. For the belief that the soul can tem- porarily quit the body during lifetime has been universally entertained ; and from the concep- tion of wolf-like ghosts it was but a short step to the conception of corporeal werewolves. In the Middle Ages the phenomena of trance and catalepsy were cited in proof of the theory that the soul can leave the body and afterward return to it. Hence it was very difficult for a person accused of witchcraft to prove an alibi; for to any amount of evidence showing that the body was innocently reposing at home and in bed, the rejoinder was obvious that the soul may never- theless have been in attendance at the witches' sabbath or busied in maiming a neighbour's cattle. According to one mediaeval notion, the soul of the werewolf quit its human body, which remained in a trance until its return.1

The mythological basis of the werewolf su- perstition is now, I believe, sufficiently indicated. The belief, however, did not reach its complete development, or acquire its most horrible fea- tures, until the pagan habits of thought which had originated it were modified by contact with Christian theology. To the ancient there was nothing necessarily diabolical in the transforma- tion of a man into a beast. But Christianity,

1 In those days even an after-dinner nap seems to have been thought uncanny. See Dasent, Burnt Njal, i. xxi. 107

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which retained such a host of pagan concep- tions under such strange disguises, which de- graded the " All-father " Odin into the ogre of the castle to which Jack climbed on his bean- stalk, and which blended the beneficent light- ning-god Thor and the mischievous Hermes and the faun-like Pan into the grotesque Teu- tonic Devil, did not fail to impart a new and fearful character to the belief in werewolves. Lycanthropy became regarded as a species of witchcraft ; the werewolf was supposed to have obtained his peculiar powers through the favour or connivance of the Devil ; and hundreds of persons were burned alive or broken on the wheel for having availed themselves of the priv- ilege of beast metamorphosis. The superstition, thus widely extended and greatly intensified, was confirmed by many singular phenomena which cannot be omitted from any thorough discussion of the nature and causes of lycanthropy.

The first of these phenomena is the Berserker insanity, characteristic of Scandinavia, but not unknown in other countries. In times when kill- ing one's enemies often formed a part of the ne- cessary business of life, persons were frequently found who killed for the mere love of the thing ; with whom slaughter was an end desir- able in itself, not merely a means to a desirable end. What the miser is in an age which worships mammon, such was the Berserker in an age 108

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when the current idea of heaven was that of a place where people could hack each other to pieces through all eternity, and when the man who refused a challenge was punished with con- fiscation of his estates. With these Northmen, in the ninth century, the chief business and amusement in life was to set sail for some pleasant country, like Spain or France, and make all the coasts and navigable rivers hide- ous with rapine and massacre. When at home, in the intervals between their freebooting expe- ditions, they were liable to become possessed by a strange homicidal madness, during which they would array themselves in the skins of wolves or bears, and sally forth by night to crack the backbones, smash the skulls, and sometimes to drink with fiendish glee the blood of unwary travellers or loiterers. These fits of madness were usually followed by periods of utter ex- haustion and nervous depression.1

Such, according to the unanimous testimony of historians, was the celebrated " Berserker rage," not peculiar to the Northland, although there most conspicuously manifested. Taking

1 See Dasent, Burnt Njal, vol. i. p. xxii. ; Grettis Saga, by Magnusson and Morris, chap. xix. ; Viga Glum's Saga, by Sir Edmund Head, p. 13, note, where the Berserkers are said to have maddened themselves with drugs. Dasent compares them with the Malays, who work themselves into a frenzy by means of arrack, or hasheesh, and run amuck. 109

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now a step in advance, we find that in com- paratively civilized countries there have been many cases of monstrous homicidal insanity. The two most celebrated cases, among those collected by Mr. Baring-Gould, are those of the Marechal de Retz, in 1440, and of Eliza- beth, a Hungarian countess, in the seventeenth century. The Countess Elizabeth enticed young girls into her palace on divers pretexts, and then coolly murdered them, for the purpose of bath- ing in their blood. The spectacle of human suffering became at last such a delight to her that she would apply with her own hands the most excruciating tortures, relishing the shrieks of her victims as the epicure relishes each sip of his old Chateau Margaux. In this way she is said to have murdered six hundred and fifty persons before her evil career was brought to an end ; though, when one recollects the fa- mous men in buckram and the notorious trio of crows, one is inclined to strike off a cipher, and regard sixty-five as a sufficiently imposing and far less improbable number. But the case of the Marechal de Retz is still more frightful. A marshal of France, a scholarly man, a patriot, and a man of holy life, he became suddenly possessed by an uncontrollable desire to murder children. During seven years he continued to inveigle little boys and girls into his castle, at the rate of about two each week^ (?) and then no

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put them to death in various ways, that he might witness their agonies and bathe in their blood ; experiencing after each occasion the most dreadful remorse, but led on by an irre- sistible craving to repeat the crime. When this unparalleled iniquity was finally brought to light, the castle was found to contain bins full of children's bones. The horrible details of the trial are to be found in the histories of France by Michelet and Martin.

Going a step further, we find cases in which the propensity to murder has been accompanied by cannibalism. In 1598 a tailor of Chalons was sentenced by the parliament of Paris to be burned alive for lycanthropy. " This wretched man had decoyed children into his shop, or at- tacked them in the gloaming when they strayed in the woods, had torn them with his teeth and killed them, after which he seems calmly to have dressed their flesh as ordinary meat, and to have eaten it with a great relish. The number of little innocents whom he destroyed is un- known. A whole caskful of bones was discov- ered in his house."1 About 1850 a beggar in the village of Polomyia, in Galicia, was proved to have killed and eaten fourteen children. A house had one day caught fire and burnt to the ground, roasting one of the inmates, who was unable to escape. The beggar passed by soon 1 Baring-Gould, Werewolves, p. 81. Ill

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after, and, as he was suffering from excessive hunger, could not resist the temptation of mak- ing a meal off the charred body. From that moment he was tormented by a craving for human flesh. He met a little orphan girl, about nine years old, and giving her a pinchbeck ring told her to seek for others like it under a tree in the neighbouring wood. She was slain, car- ried to the beggar's hovel, and eaten. In the course of three years thirteen other children mysteriously disappeared, but no one knew whom to suspect. At last an innkeeper missed a pair of ducks, and having no good opinion of this beggar's honesty, went unexpectedly to his cabin, burst suddenly in at the door, and to his horror found him in the act of hiding under his cloak a severed head ; a bowl of fresh blood stood under the oven, and pieces of a thigh were cooking over the fire.1

This occurred only about twenty years ago, and the criminal, though ruled by an insane ap- petite, is not known to have been subject to any mental delusion. But there have been a great many similar cases, in which the homicidal or cannibal craving has been accompanied by gen- uine hallucination. Forms of insanity in which the afflicted persons imagine themselves to be brute animals are not perhaps very common, but they are not unknown. I once knew a poor 1 Baring-Gould, op. fit. chap. xiv. 112

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demented old man who believed himself to be a horse, and would stand by the hour together before a manger, nibbling hay, or deluding him- self with the pretence of so doing. Many of the cannibals whose cases are related by Mr. Baring-Gould, in his chapter of horrors, actually believed themselves to have been transformed into wolves or other wild animals. Jean Gre- nier was a boy of thirteen, partially idiotic, and of strongly marked canine physiognomy ; his jaws were large and projected forward, and his canine teeth were unnaturally long, so as to protrude beyond the lower lip. He believed himself to be a werewolf. One evening, meet- ing half a dozen young girls, he scared them out of their wits by telling them that as soon as the sun had set he would turn into a wolf and eat them for supper. A few days later, one little girl, having gone out at nightfall to look after the sheep, was attacked by some creature which in her terror she mistook for a wolf, but which afterward proved to be none other than Jean Grenier. She beat him off with her sheep- staff, and fled home. As several children had mysteriously disappeared from the neighbour- hood, Grenier was at once suspected. Being brought before the parliament of Bordeaux, he stated that two years ago he had met the Devil one night in the woods and had signed a com- pact with him and received from him a wolfskin. "3

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Since then he had roamed about as a wolf after dark, resuming his human shape by daylight. He had killed and eaten several children whom he had found alone in the fields, and on one occasion he had entered a house while the fam- ily were out and taken the baby from its cra- dle. A careful investigation proved the truth of these statements, so far as the cannibalism was concerned. There is no doubt that the miss- ing children were eaten by Jean Grenier, and there is no doubt that in his own mind the half- witted boy was firmly convinced that he was a wolf. Here the lycanthropy was complete.

In the year 1598, "in a wild and unfre- quented spot near Caude, some countrymen came one day upon the corpse of a boy of fif- teen, horribly mutilated and bespattered with blood. As the men approached, two wolves, which had been rending the body, bounded away into the thicket. The men gave chase im- mediately, following their bloody tracks till they lost them ; when, suddenly crouching among the bushes, his teeth chattering with fear, they found a man half naked, with long hair and beard, and with his hands dyed in blood. His nails were long as claws, and were clotted with fresh gore and shreds of human flesh." 1

This man, Jacques Roulet, was a poor, half- witted creature under the dominion of a can- 1 Baring-Gould, op. fit. p. 82. 114

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nibal appetite. He was employed in tearing to pieces the corpse of the boy when these country- men came up. Whether there were any wolves in the case, except what the excited imaginations of the men may have conjured up, I will not presume to determine ; but it is certain that Roulet supposed himself to be a wolf, and killed and ate several persons under the influence of the delusion. He was sentenced to death, but the parliament of Paris reversed the sentence, and charitably shut him up in a madhouse.

The annals of the Middle Ages furnish many cases similar to these of Grenier and Roulet. Their share in maintaining the werewolf super- stition is undeniable ; but modern science finds in them nothing that cannot be readily ex- plained. That stupendous process of breeding, which we call civilization, has been for long ages strengthening those kindly social feelings by the possession of which we are chiefly dis- tinguished from the brutes, leaving our primi- tive bestial impulses to die for want of exercise, or checking in every possible way their further expansion by legislative enactments. But this process, which is transforming us from savages into civilized men, is a very slow one ; and now and then there occur cases of what physiologists call atavism, or reversion to an ancestral type of character. Now and then persons are born, in civilized countries, whose intellectual powers "5

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are on a level with those of the most degraded Australian savage, and these we call idiots. And now and then persons are born possessed of the bestial appetites and cravings of primitive man, his fiendish cruelty and his liking for human flesh. Modern physiology knows how to clas- sify and explain these abnormal cases, but to the unscientific mediasval mind they were ex- plicable only on the hypothesis of a diabolical metamorphosis. And there is nothing strange in the fact that, in an age when the prevailing habits of thought rendered the transformation of men into beasts an easily admissible notion, these monsters of cruelty and depraved appetite should have been regarded as capable of tak- ing on bestial forms. Nor is it strange that the hallucination under which these unfortunate wretches laboured should have taken such a shape as to account to their feeble intelligence for the existence of the appetites which they were conscious of not sharing with their neigh- bours and contemporaries. If a myth is a piece of unscientific philosophizing, it must some- times be applied to the explanation of obscure psychological as well as of physical phenomena. Where the modern calmly taps his forehead and says, " Arrested development," the terrified an- cient made the sign of the cross and cried, " Werewolf."

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We shall be assisted in this explanation by turning aside for a moment to examine the wild superstitions about "changelings," which contributed, along with so many others, to make the lives of our ancestors anxious and miserable. These superstitions were for the most part at- tempts to explain the phenomena of insanity, epilepsy, and other obscure nervous diseases. A man who has hitherto enjoyed perfect health, and whose actions have been consistent and rational, suddenly loses all self-control and seems actuated by a will foreign to himself. Modern science possesses the key to this phe- nomenon ; but in former times it was explicable only on the hypothesis that a demon had en- tered the body of the lunatic, or else that the fairies had stolen the real man and substituted for him a diabolical phantom exactly like him in stature and features. Hence the numerous legends of changelings, some of which are very curious. In Irish folk-lore we find the story of one Rickard, surnamed the Rake, from his worthless character. A good-natured, idle fel- low, he spent all his evenings in dancing, — an accomplishment in which no one in the village could rival him. One night, in the midst of a lively reel, he fell down in a fit. " He 's struck with a fairy dart," exclaimed all the friends, and they carried him home and nursed him ; but

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his face grew so thin and his manner so morose that by and by all began to suspect that the true Rickard was gone and a changeling put in his place. Rickard, with all his accomplish- ments, was no musician ; and so, in order to put the matter to a crucial test, a bagpipe was left in the room by the side of his bed. The trick succeeded. One hot summer's day, when all were supposed to be in the field making hay, some members of the family secreted in a clothes- press saw the bedroom door open a little way, and a lean, foxy face, with a pair of deep-sunken eyes, peer anxiously about the premises. Hav- ing satisfied itself that the coast was clear, the face withdrew, the door was closed, and pre- sently such ravishing strains of music were heard as never proceeded from a bagpipe before or since that day. Soon was heard the rustle of in- numerable fairies, come to dance to the change- ling's music. Then the " fairy-man " of the vil- lage, who was keeping watch with the family, heated a pair of tongs red-hot, and with deafen- ing shouts all burst at once into the sick cham- ber. The music had ceased and the room was empty, but in at the window glared a fiendish face, with such fearful looks of hatred, that for a moment all stood motionless with terror. But when the fairy-man, recovering himself, ad- vanced with the hot tongs to pinch its nose, it vanished with an unearthly yell, and there on 118

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the bed was Rickard, safe and sound, and cured of his epilepsy.1

Comparing this legend with numerous others relating to changelings, and stripping off the fantastic garb of fairy-lore with which popular imagination has invested them, it seems impos- sible to doubt that they have arisen from myths devised for the purpose of explaining the ob- scure phenomena of mental disease. If this be so, they afford an excellent collateral illustra- tion of the belief in werewolves. The same mental habits which led men to regard the insane or epileptic person as a changeling, and which allowed them to explain catalepsy as the temporary departure of a witch's soul from its body, would enable them to attribute a wolf's nature to the maniac or idiot with cannibal ap- petites. And when the myth-forming process had got thus far, it would not stop short of assigning to the unfortunate wretch a tangible lupine body; for all ancient mythology teemed with precedents for such a transformation.

It remains for us to sum up, — to tie into a bunch the keys which have helped us to pene- trate into the secret causes of the werewolf superstition. In a previous paper we saw what a host of myths, fairy-tales, and superstitious observances have sprung from attempts to inter- pret one simple natural phenomenon, — the

1 Kennedy, Fictions of the Irish Celts, p. 90. 119

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descent of fire from the clouds. Here, on the other hand, we see what a heterogeneous multi- tude of mythical elements may combine to build up in course of time a single enormous supersti- tion, and we see how curiously fact and fancy have cooperated in keeping the superstition from falling. In the first place the worship of dead ancestors with wolf totems originated the notion of the transformation of men into divine or superhuman wolves ; and this notion was con- firmed by the ambiguous explanation of the storm-wind as the rushing of a troop of dead men's souls or as the howling of wolf-like monsters. Mediaeval Christianity retained these conceptions, merely changing the superhuman wolves into evil demons ; and finally the occur- rence of cases of Berserker madness and canni- balism, accompanied by lycanthropic hallucina- tions, being interpreted as due to such demo- niacal metamorphosis, gave rise to the werewolf superstition of the Middle Ages. The etymo- logical proceedings, to which Mr. Cox would incontinently ascribe the origin of the entire superstition, seemed to me to have played a very subordinate part in the matter. To suppose that Jean Grenier imagined himself to be a wolf, because the Greek word for wolf sounded like the word for light, and thus gave rise to the story of a light deity who became a wolf, seems to me quite inadmissible. Yet as far as such 120

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verbal equivocations may have prevailed, they doubtless helped to sustain the delusion.

Thus we need no longer regard our werewolf as an inexplicable creature of undetermined pedigree. But any account of him would be quite imperfect which should omit all consider- ation of the methods by which his change of form was accomplished. By the ancient Ro- mans the werewolf was commonly called a "skin- changer " or " turn-coat " (versipellis), and sim- ilar epithets were applied to him in the Middle Ages. The mediaeval theory was that, while the werewolf kept his human form, his hair grew inwards; when he wished to become a wolf, he simply turned himself inside out. In many trials on record, the prisoners were closely in- terrogated as to how this inversion might be accomplished ; but I am not aware that any one of them ever gave a satisfactory answer. At the moment of change their memories seem to have become temporarily befogged. Now and then a poor wretch had his arms and legs cut off, or was partially flayed, in order that the ingrowing hair might be detected.1 Another theory was,

1 " En 1541, a Padoue, dit Wier, un homme qui se croyait change en loup courait la campagne, attaquant et met- tant a mort ceux qu'il rencontrait. Apres bien des difficultes, on parvint s'emparer de lui. II dit en confidence a ceux qui 1'arreterent : Je suis vraiment un loup, et si ma peau ne parait pas etre celle d'un loup, c'est parce qu'elle est retour- 121

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that the possessed person had merely to put on a wolf's skin, in order to assume instantly the lupine form and character ; and in this may per- haps be seen a vague reminiscence of the alleged fact that Berserkers were in the habit of haunt- ing the woods by night, clothed in the hides of wolves or bears.1 Such a wolfskin was kept by the boy Grenier. Roulet, on the other hand, confessed to using a magic salve or ointment. A fourth method of becoming a werewolf was to obtain a girdle, usually made of human skin. Several cases are related in Thorpe's " North- ern Mythology." One hot day in harvest-time

nee et que les poils sont en dedans. — Pour s' assurer du fait, on coupa le malheureux aux differentes parties du corps, on lui emporta les bras et les jambes." Taine, De I* Intelli- gence, torn. ii. p. 203. See the account of Slavonic were- wolves in Ralston, Songs of the Russian People, pp. 404- 418.

1 Mr. Cox, whose scepticism on obscure points in history rather surpasses that of Sir G. C. Lewis, dismisses with a sneer the subject of the Berserker madness, observing that «« the unanimous testimony of the Norse historians is worth as much and as little as the convictions of Glanvil and Hale on the reality of witchcraft." I have not the special knowledge requisite for pronouncing an opinion on this point, but Mr. Cox's ordinary methods of disposing of such questions are not such as to make one feel obliged to accept his bare assertion, unaccompanied by critical arguments. The madness of the bearsarks may, no doubt, be the same thing as the frenzy of Herakles ; but something more than mere dogmatism is needed to prove it.

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some reapers lay down to sleep in the shade ; when one of them, who could not sleep, saw the man next him arise quietly and gird him with a strap, whereupon he instantly vanished, and a wolf jumped up from among the sleepers and ran off across the fields. Another man, who possessed such a girdle, once went away from home without remembering to lock it up. His little son climbed up to the cupboard and got it, and as he proceeded to buckle it around his waist he became instantly transformed into a strange-looking beast, just then his father came in, and seizing the girdle restored the child to his natural shape. The boy said that no sooner had he buckled it on than he was tormented with a raging hunger.

Sometimes the werewolf transformation led to unlucky accidents. At Caseburg, as a man and his wife were making hay, the woman threw down her pitchfork and went away, telling her husband that if a wild beast should come to him during her absence he must throw his hat at it. Presently a she-wolf rushed toward him. The man threw his hat at it, but a boy came up from another part of the field and stabbed the animal with his pitchfork, whereupon it van- ished, and the woman's dead body lay at his feet.

A parallel legend shows that this woman wished to have the hat thrown at her, in order that she might be henceforth free from her Ha- 123

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bility to become a werewolf. A man was one night returning with his wife from a merry- making when he felt the change coming on. Giving his wife the reins, he jumped from the wagon, telling her to strike with her apron at any animal which might come to her. In a few moments a wolf ran up to the side of the ve- hicle, and, as the woman struck out with her apron, it bit off a piece and ran away. Pre- sently the man returned with the piece of apron in his mouth, and consoled his terrified wife with the information that the enchantment had left him forever.

A terrible case at a village in Auvergne has found its way into the annals of witchcraft. " A gentleman while hunting was suddenly attacked by a savage wolf of monstrous size. Impene- trable by his shot, the beast made a spring upon the helpless huntsman, who in the struggle luckily, or unluckily for the unfortunate lady, contrived to cut off one of its fore-paws. This trophy he placed in his pocket, and made the best of his way homewards in safety. On the road he met a friend, to whom he exhibited a bleeding paw, or rather (as it now appeared) a woman's hand, upon which was a wedding-ring. His wife's ring was at once recognized by the other. His suspicions aroused, he immediately went in search of his wife, who was found sit- ting by the fire in the kitchen, her arm hidden 124

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beneath her apron, when the husband, seizing her by the arm, found his terrible suspicions verified. The bleeding stump was there, evi- dently just fresh from the wound. She was given into custody, and in the event was burned at Riom, in presence of thousands of spec- tators." 1

Sometimes a werewolf was cured merely by recognizing him while in his brute shape. A Swedish legend tells of a cottager who, on en- tering the forest one day without recollecting to say his Pater Noster, got into the power of a Troll, who changed him into a wolf. For many years his wife mourned him as dead. But one Christmas eve the old Troll, disguised as a beggar-woman, came to the house for alms ; and being taken in and kindly treated, told the woman that her husband might very likely ap- pear to her in wolf shape. Going at night to the pantry to lay aside a joint of meat for to- morrow's dinner, she saw a wolf standing with its paws on the window-sill, looking wistfully

1 Williams, Superstitions of Witchcraft, p. 179. See a parallel case of a cat-woman, in Thorpe's Northern Mytho- logy, ii. 26. "Certain witches at Thurso for a long rime tormented an honest fellow under the usual form of cats, till one night he put them to flight with his broadsword, and cut off the leg of one less nimble than the rest ; taking it up, to his amazement he found it to be a woman's leg, and next morning he discovered the old hag its owner with but one leg left." Tylor, Primitive Culture, i. 283. 125

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in at her. " Ah, dearest," said she, " if I knew that thou wert really my husband, I would give thee a bone." Whereupon the wolfskin fell off, and her husband stood before her in the same old clothes which he had on the day that the Troll got hold of him.

In Denmark it was believed that if a woman were to creep through a colt's placental mem- brane stretched between four sticks, she would for the rest of her life bring forth children with- out pain or illness ; but all the boys would in such cases be werewolves, and all the girls Maras, or nightmares. In this grotesque super- stition appears that curious kinship between the werewolf and the wife or maiden of super- natural race, which serves admirably to illus- trate the nature of both conceptions, and the elucidation of which shall occupy us through- out the remainder of this paper.

It is, perhaps, needless to state that in the personality of the nightmare, or Mara, there was nothing equine. The Mara was a female demon,1 who would come at night and torment men or women by crouching on their chests or stomachs and stopping their respiration. The scene is well enough represented in Fuseli's picture, though the frenzied-looking horse which

1 " The mare in nightmare means spirit, elf, or nymph; compare Anglo-Saxon wudumare (wood-mare) =: echo." Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. ii. p. 173. 126

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there accompanies the demon has no place in the original superstition. A Netherlandish story illustrates the character of the Mara. Two young men were in love with the same damsel. One of them, being tormented every night by a Mara, sought advice from his rival, and it was a treacherous counsel that he got. " Hold a sharp knife with a point towards your breast, and you '11 never see the Mara again," said this false friend. The lad thanked him, but when he lay down to rest he thought it as well to be on the safe side, and so held the knife han- dle downward. So when the Mara came, in- stead of forcing the blade into his breast, she cut herself badly, and fled howling ; and let us hope, though the legend here leaves us in the dark, that this poor youth, who is said to have been the comelier of the two, revenged himself on his malicious rival by marrying the young lady.

But the Mara sometimes appeared in less revolting shape, and became the mistress or even the wife of some mortal man to whom she happened to take a fancy. In such cases she would vanish on being recognized. There is a well-told monkish tale of a pious knight who, journeying one day through the forest, found a beautiful lady stripped naked and tied to a tree, her back all covered with deep gashes, streaming with blood, from a flogging which 127

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some bandits had given her. Of course he took her home to his castle and married her, and for a while they lived very happily together, and the fame of the lady's beauty was so great that kings and emperors held tournaments in honour of her. But this pious knight used to go to mass every Sunday, and greatly was he scandal- ized when he found that his wife would never stay to assist in the Credo, but would always get up and walk out of chur.chjust as the choir struck up. All her husband's coaxing was of no use ; threats and entreaties were alike powerless even to elicit an explanation of this strange conduct. At last the good man determined to use force ; and so one Sunday, as the lady got up to go out, according to custom, he seized her by the arm and sternly commanded her to remain. Her whole frame was suddenly convulsed, and her dark eyes gleamed with weird, unearthly bril- liancy. The services paused for a moment, and all eyes were turned toward the knight and his lady. "In God's name, tell me what thouart," shouted the knight ; and instantly, says the chronicler, " the bodily form of the lady melted away, and was seen no more ; whilst, with a cry of anguish and of terror, an evil spirit of monstrous form rose from the ground, clave the chapel roof asunder, and disappeared in the air."

In a Danish legend, the Mara betrays her 128

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affinity to the Nixies, or Swan-maidens. A peasant discovered that his sweetheart was in the habit of coming to him by night as a Mara. He kept strict watch until he discovered her creeping into the room through a small knot- hole in the door. Next day he made a peg, and after she had come to him drove in the peg so that she was unable to escape. They were mar- ried and lived together many years ; but one night it happened that the man, joking with his wife about the way in which he had secured her, drew the peg from the knot-hole, that she might see how she had entered his room. As she peeped through, she became suddenly quite small, passed out, and was never seen again.

The well-known pathological phenomena of nightmare are sufficient to account for the me- diaeval theory of a fiend who sits upon one's bosom and hinders respiration ; but as we com- pare these various legends relating to the Mara, we see that a more recondite explanation is needed to account for all her peculiarities. In- digestion may interfere with our breathing, but it does not make beautiful women crawl through keyholes, nor does it bring wives from the spirit world. The Mara belongs to an ancient family, and in passing from the regions of monkish superstition to those of pure mytho- logy we find that, like her kinsman the were- wolf, she had once seen better days. Chris tian- 129

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ity made a demon of the Mara, and adopted the theory that Satan employed these seductive creatures as agents for ruining human souls. Such is the character of the knight's wife, in the monkish legend just cited. But in the Danish tale the Mara appears as one of that large fam- ily of supernatural wives who are permitted to live with mortal men under certain conditions, but who are compelled to flee away when these conditions are broken, as is always sure to be the case. The eldest and one of the loveliest of this family is the Hindu nymph Urvasi, whose love adventures with Pururavas are nar- rated in the Puranas, and form the subject of the well-known and exquisite Sanskrit drama by Kalidasa. Urvasi is allowed to live with Pururavas so long as she does not see him, undressed. But one night her kinsmen, the Gandharvas, or cloud-demons, vexed at her long absence from heaven, resolved to get her away from her mortal companion. They stole a pet lamb which had been tied at the foot of her couch, whereat she bitterly upbraided her hus- band. In rage and mortification, Pururavas sprang up without throwing on his tunic, and grasping his sword sought the robber. Then the wicked Gandharvas sent a flash of lightning, and Urvasi, seeing her naked husband, instantly vanished.

The different versions of this legend, which 130

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have been elaborately analyzed by comparative mythologists, leave no doubt that Urvasi is one of the dawn-nymphs or bright fleecy clouds of early morning, which vanish as the splendour of the sun is unveiled. We saw, in the preced- ing paper, that the ancient Aryans regarded the sky as a sea or great lake, and that the clouds were explained variously as Phaiakian ships with birdlike beaks sailing over this lake, or as bright birds of divers shapes and hues. The light fleecy cirrhi were regarded as mermaids, or as swans, or as maidens with swan's plu- mage. In Sanskrit they are called Apsaras, or "those who move in the water," and the Elves and Maras of Teutonic mythology have the same significance. Urvasi appears in one le- gend as a bird ; and a South German prescrip- tion for getting rid of the Mara asserts that if she be wrapped up in the bedclothes and firmly held, a white dove will forthwith fly from the room, leaving the bedclothes empty.1

In the story of Melusina the cloud-maiden appears as a kind of mermaid, but in other respects the legend resembles that of Urvasi. Raymond, Count de la Foret, of Poitou, having by an accident killed his patron and benefactor during a hunting excursion, fled in terror and

1 See Kuhn, Herabkunft des Fetters, p. 91 ; Weber, In disc he Studien, i. 197; Wolf, Eeitr age zur deutschen ie, ii. 233-281 ; Miiller, Chips, ii. 114-128.

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despair into the deep recesses of the forest. All the afternoon and evening he wandered through the thick dark woods, until at midnight he came upon a strange scene. All at once " the boughs of the trees became less interlaced, and the trunks fewer; next moment his horse, crashing through the shrubs, brought him out on a pleasant glade, white with rime, and illu- mined by the new moon ; in the midst bubbled up a limpid fountain, and flowed away over a pebbly floor with a soothing murmur. Near the fountain-head sat three maidens in glimmer- ing white dresses, with long waving golden hair, and faces of inexpressible beauty." l One of them advanced to meet Raymond, and accord- ing to all mythological precedent, they were betrothed before daybreak. In due time the fountain-nymph 2 became Countess de la Foret, but her husband was given to understand that all her Saturdays would be passed in strictest seclusion, upon which he must never dare to intrude, under penalty of losing her forever. For many years all went well, save that the fair Melusina's children were, without excep- tion, misshapen or disfigured. But after a while this strange weekly seclusion got bruited about

1 Baring-Gould, Curious Myths, ii. 207.

a The word nymph itself means " cloud-maiden," as is illustrated by the kinship between the Greek vv^rj and the Latin nubes.

. 132

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all over the neighbourhood, and people shook their heads and looked grave about it. So many gossiping tales came to the Count's ears, that he began to grow anxious and suspicious, and at last he determined to know the worst. He went one Saturday to Melusina's private apart- ments, and going through one empty room after another, at last came to a locked door which opened into a bath ; looking through a key- hole, there he saw the Countess transformed from the waist downwards into a fish, disport- ing herself like a mermaid in the water. Of course he could not keep the secret, but when some time afterward they quarrelled, must needs address her as "a vile serpent, contaminator of his honourable race." So she disappeared through the window, but ever afterward hovered about her husband's castle of Lusignan, like a Banshee, whenever one of its lords was about to die.

The well-known story of Undine is similar to that of Melusina, save that the naiad's desire to obtain a human soul is a conception foreign to the spirit of the myth, and marks the de- gradation which Christianity had inflicted upon the denizens of fairyland. In one of Dasent's tales the water-maiden is replaced by a kind of werewolf. A white bear marries a young girl, but assumes the human shape at night. She is never to look upon him in his human shape, '33

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but how could a young bride be expected to obey such an injunction as that ? She lights a candle while he is sleeping, and discovers the handsomest prince in the world ; unluckily she drops tallow on his shirt, and that tells the story. But she is more fortunate than poor Raymond, for after a tiresome journey to the " land east of the sun and west of the moon," and an arduous washing-match with a parcel of ugly Trolls, she washes out the spots, and ends her husband's enchantment.1

In the majority of these legends, however, the Apsaras, or cloud-maiden, has a shirt of swan's feathers which plays the same part as the wolfskin cape or girdle of the werewolf. If you could get hold of a werewolf's sack and burn it, a permanent cure was effected. No danger of a relapse, unless the Devil furnished him with a new wolfskin. So the swan-maiden kept her human form, as long as she was deprived of her tunic of feathers. Indo-European folk-lore teems with stories of swan-maidens forcibly wooed and won by mortals who had stolen their clothes. A man travelling along the road passes by a lake where several lovely girls are bathing ; their dresses, made of feathers curiously and daintily woven, lie on the shore. He approaches the place cautiously and steals one of these

1 This is substantially identical with the stories of Beauty and the Beast, Eros and Psyche, Gandharba Sena, etc.

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dresses.1 When the girls have finished their bathing, they all come and get their dresses and swim away as swans ; but the one whose dress is stolen must needs stay on shore and marry the thief. It is needless to add that they live happily together for many years, or that finally the good man accidentally leaves the cupboard door unlocked, whereupon his wife gets back her swan-shirt and flies away from him, never to return. But it is not always a shirt of feathers. In one German story, a nobleman hunting deer finds a maiden bathing in a clear pool in the forest. He runs stealthily up to her and seizes her necklace, at which she loses the power to flee. They are married, and she bears seven sons at once, all of whom have gold chains about their necks, and are able to transform them- selves into swans whenever they like. A Flem- ish legend tells of three Nixies, or water-sprites, who came out of the Meuse one autumn even- ing, and helped the villagers celebrate the end of the vintage. Such graceful dancers had never been seen in Flanders, and they could sing as well as they could dance. As the night was warm, one of them took ofF her gloves and gave them to her partner to hold for her. When the

1 The feather dress reappears in the Arabian story of Has- san of El-Basrah, who by stealing it secures possession of the Jinniya. See Lane's Arabian Nights , vol. iii. p 380. Ralston, Songs of the Russian People, p. 179.

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clock struck twelve the other two started off in hot haste, and then there was a hue and cry for gloves. The lad would keep them as love- tokens, and so the poor Nixie had to go home without them ; but she must have died on the way, for next morning the waters of the Meuse were blood-red, and those damsels never re- turned.

In the Faro Islands it is believed that seals cast off their skins every ninth night, assume human forms, and sing and dance like men and women until daybreak, when they resume their skins and their seal natures. Of course a man once found and hid one of these sealskins, and so got a mermaid for a wife ; and of course she recovered the skin and escaped.1 On the coasts of Ireland it is supposed to be quite an ordinary thing for young sea-fairies to get human hus- bands in this way ; the brazen things even come to shore on purpose, and leave their red caps lying around for young men to pick up ; but it behooves the husband to keep a strict watch over the red cap if he would not see his chil- dren left motherless.

This mermaid's cap has contributed its quota to the superstitions of witchcraft. An Irish story tells how Red James was aroused from sleep one night by noises in the kitchen. Going down

1 Thorpe, Northern Mythology, iii. 173; Kennedy, Fic- tions of the Irish Celts, p. 123.

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to the door, he saw a lot of old women drinking punch around the fireplace, and laughing and joking with his housekeeper. When the punch- bowl was empty, they all put on red caps, and singing

" By yarrow and rue, And my red cap too,

Hie me over to England,"

they flew up chimney. So Jimmy burst into the room, and seized the housekeeper's cap, and went along with them. They flew across the sea to a castle in England, passed through the keyholes from room to room and into the cel- lar, where they had a famous carouse. Unluck- ily, Jimmy, being unused to such good cheer, got drunk, and forgot to put on his cap when the others did. So next morning the lord's butler found him dead-drunk on the cellar floor, sur- rounded by empty casks. He was sentenced to be hung without any trial worth speaking of; but as he was carted to the gallows an old woman cried out, " Ach, Jimmy alanna ! Would you be afther dyin' in a strange land without your red birredh ? " The lord made no objections, and so the red cap was brought and put on him. Accordingly when Jimmy had got to the gal- lows and was making his last speech for the edification of the spectators, he unexpectedly and somewhat irrelevantly exclaimed, " By yar- row and rue," etc., and was off like a rocket, 137

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shooting through the blue air en route for old Ireland.1

In another Irish legend an enchanted ass comes into the kitchen of a great house every night, and washes the dishes and scours the tins, so that the servants lead an easy life of it. After a while in their exuberant gratitude they offer him any present for which he may feel inclined to ask. He desires only " an ould coat, to keep the chill off of him these could nights ; " but as soon as he gets into the coat he resumes his human form and bids them good-by, and thence- forth they may wash their own dishes and scour their own tins, for all him.

But we are diverging from the subject of swan-maidens, and are in danger of losing our- selves in that labyrinth of popular fancies which is more intricate than any that Daidalos ever planned. The significance of all these sealskins and feather dresses and mermaid caps and were- wolf girdles may best be sought in the etymo- logy of words like the German leichnam^ in which the body is described as a garment of flesh for the soul.2 In the nai've philosophy of primitive thinkers, the soul, in passing from one visible shape to another, had only to put on the out- ward integument of the creature in which it wished to incarnate itself. With respect to the

1 Kennedy, Fictions of the Irish Celts, p. 168.

2 Baring- Gould, Book of Werewolves, p. 163.

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WEREWOLVES AND SWAN-MAIDENS

mode of metamorphosis, there is little difference between the werewolf and the swan-maiden ; and the similarity is no less striking between the genesis of the two conceptions. The original werewolf is the night-wind, regarded now as a manlike deity and now. as a howling lupine fiend ; and the original swan-maiden is the light fleecy cloud, regarded either as a woman-like goddess or as a bird swimming in the sky sea. The one conception has been productive of little else but horrors ; the other has given rise to a great vari- ety of fanciful creations, from the treacherous mermaid and the fiendish nightmare to the gentle Undine, the charming Nausikaa, and the stately Muse of classic antiquity.

We have seen that the original werewolf, howling in the wintry blast, is a kind of psycho- pomp, or leader of departed souls ; he is the wild ancestor of the death-dog, whose voice under the window of a sick-chamber is even now a sound of ill omen. The swan-maiden has also been supposed to summon the dying to her home in the Phaiakian land. The Valkyries, with their shirts of swan plumage, who hovered over Scandinavian battlefields to receive the souls of falling heroes, were identical with the Hindu Apsaras ; and the Houris of the Mussul- man belong to the same family. Even for the angels, — women with large wings, who are seen in popular pictures bearing mortals on high to- 139

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ward heaven, — we can hardly claim a different kinship. Melusina, when she leaves the castle of Lusignan, becomes a Banshee ; and it has been a common superstition among sailors, that the appearance of a mermaid, with her comb and looking-glass, foretokens shipwreck, with the loss of all on board.

October, 1870.

140

IV

LIGHT AND DARKNESS

WHEN Maitland blasphemously as- serted that God was but "a Bogie of the nursery," he unwittingly made a remark as suggestive in point of philology as it was crude and repulsive in its atheism. When examined with the lenses of linguistic science, the " Bogie " or " Bug-a-boo " or " Bugbear" of nursery lore turns out to be identical, not only with the fairy " Puck," whom Shakespeare has immortalized, but also with the Slavonic " Bog " and the " Baga " of the Cuneiform Inscriptions, both of which are names for the Supreme Being. If we proceed further, and inquire after the an- cestral form of these epithets, — so strangely incongruous in their significations, — we shall find it in the Old Aryan " Bhaga," which reap- pears unchanged in the Sanskrit of the Vedas, and has left a memento of itself in the sur- name of the Phrygian Zeus " Bagaios." It seems originally to have denoted either the un- clouded sun or the sky of noonday illumined by the solar rays. In Sayana's commentary on the Rig- Veda, Bhaga is enumerated among the 141

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seven (or eight) sons of Aditi, the boundless Orient ; and he is elsewhere described as the lord of life, the giver of bread, and the bringer of happiness.1

Thus the same name which, to the Vedic poet, to the Persian of the time of Xerxes, and to the modern Russian, suggests the supreme majesty of deity, is in English associated with an ugly and ludicrous fiend, closely akin to that grotesque Northern Devil of whom Southey was unable to think without laughing. Such is the irony of fate toward a deposed deity. The German name for idol — Abgott, that is, " ex- god " or " dethroned god " — sums up in a sin- gle etymology the history of the havoc wrought by monotheism among the ancient symbols of deity. In the hospitable Pantheon of the Greeks and Romans a niche was always in readiness for every new divinity who could produce respect- able credentials ; but flie triumph of mono- theism converted the stately mansion into a Pandemonium peopled with fiends. To the monotheist an " ex-god " was simply a devilish deceiver of mankind whom the true God had succeeded in vanquishing ; and thus the word demon, which to the ancient meant a divine or semi-divine being, came to be applied to fiends

1 Muir's Sanskrit Texts, vol. iv. p. 12 ; Miiller, Rig- Veda Sanhita, vol. i. pp. 2 3 0—2 5 1 ; Pick, Woerterbuch der Indogermanischen Grundsprache, p. 124, s. v. Bhaga. 142

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exclusively. Thus tHe Teutonic races, who preserved the name of their highest divinity, Odin, — originally, Guodan, — by which to de- signate the God of the Christian,1 were unable to regard the Bog of ancient tradition as anything but an " ex-god " or vanquished demon.

The most striking illustration of this process is to be found in the word devil itself. To a reader unfamiliar with the endless tricks which language delights in playing, it may seem shock- ing to be told that the Gypsies use the word devil as the name of God.2 This, however, is not because these people have made the arch- fiend an object of worship, but because the

1 In the North American Review, October, 1869, p. 354, I have collected a number of facts which seem to me to prove beyond question that the name God is derived from Guodan, the original form of Odin, the supreme deity of our pagan forefathers. The case is exactly parallel to that of the French Dieu, which is descended from the Deus of the pagan Roman.

2 See Pott, Die Zigeuner, ii. 311 ; Kuhn, Beitrage, i. 147. Yet in the worship of dewel by the Gypsies is to be found the element of diabolism invariably present in barbaric worship. " Dewel, the great