by Edwin Sidney Hartland

Edwin Sidney Hartland's The Legend of Perseus (1894–1896) is a three-volume comparative study of narrative, custom, and belief. Twenty-one chapters move from the classical legend and supernatural-birth tales through life-tokens, sympathetic magic, healing, wells and trees, totemism, blood covenant, funeral and marriage rites, the couvade, Andromeda rescue narratives, sacrifice, and Medusa traditions. All three prefatory layers, the Volume III dedication, appendices, tables, bibliographies, two errata sections, and 1,876 numbered source endnote paragraphs are retained.

This is a historical work of late Victorian folklore and anthropology. Hartland's comparative method, evolutionary sequence, diffusion theories, racial categories, and accounts of religion, kinship, gender, sexuality, disability, magic, sacrifice, and Indigenous peoples contain outdated terminology and colonial assumptions. The many traditions cited are mediated through nineteenth-century collectors and should be compared with current scholarship and community sources.

Volume I — The Supernatural Birth

Preface

The classical myth of Perseus belongs to a group of folktales ranking among the foremost in interest for the student of the evolution of human thought and human institutions. It is compounded, like other folktales, of incidents which have varied in their order and prominence, as well as in their mode of presentment, at different times and in different lands. What constitutes its importance is the fact that certain of these incidents are grounded upon ideas, universal in their range, and found fully developed in the depths of savagery, which, rising with mankind from plane to plane of civilisation, have at last been embodied in the faith and symbolism of the loftiest and most spiritual of the great religions of the world—the religion of civilised Europe. The figure of Perseus, the god-begotten, the dragon-slayer, very early became a type of the Saviour of the World; while the conception underlying the Life-token (an incident not extant in classical sources) obtained its ultimate expression in the most sacred rite of Christian worship.

In these volumes I have attempted an examination of the myth upon scientific principles. The first three {vi} chapters of the present volume are devoted to an account of the story, as given by the poets and historians of antiquity, and in modern folklore. Taking, then, the four chief incidents in order, the remaining chapters comprise an inquiry into analogous forms of the Supernatural Birth, alike in tale and custom, throughout the world. They will be followed by similar inquiries into the incidents of the Life-token, the Rescue of Andromeda, and the Quest of the Gorgon’s Head. Having thus analysed the incidents, and determined, so far as the means at my command will permit, their foundation in belief and custom, and the large part played by some of the conceptions in savage life, I shall return to the story as a whole, and, treating it as an artistic work, I shall inquire whether it be possible to ascertain what was its primitive form, where it originated, and how it became diffused over the Eastern continent.

I am deeply sensible of the difficulties of the task I have undertaken, and of the very imperfect way in which I have hitherto performed it. Unfortunately, I cannot hope to succeed better in that portion which has yet to be laid before the reader. All I can hope is that I may have exhibited, however inadequately (if further exhibition were needful), the advantage for psychological purposes of research into the ideas and the usages of uncultured peoples and of the less cultured classes in civilised communities.

My sincere thanks are due to many friends who have rendered me valuable assistance from time to time; among others to Miss Marian Roalfe Cox, who has been kind {vii} enough to supply me with abstracts of several variants of the tale—some of them not readily accessible; to Mr. W. H. D. Rouse, M.A., and Mr. G. L. Gomme, F.S.A., President of the Folklore Society, to whom I am indebted for help on some important points; to Dr. Oscar W. Clark for calling my attention to various interesting superstitions; to the Rev. R. H. Codrington, D.D., for his ready response to my questions; and last, but not least, to Mr. Alfred Nutt, for his kindness in reading the proof-sheets, and for the suggestions and help he is so well qualified to give in many departments of folklore, particularly in all matters relating to Celtic literature and tradition. In making this acknowledgment, of course, I do not seek to shift from my own shoulders any portion of responsibility for the opinions I have expressed. In some of those opinions all the friends whose aid has been thus generously rendered would probably agree. Perhaps none of them would accept all. Our common possession is the single desire for truth and a perennial interest in everything which may cast light on the past—and the future—of humanity.

For the reader’s convenience I have compiled a list of the modern works cited, with such bibliographical information as will admit of the editions used being readily identified. An index will be issued in the concluding volume; and meanwhile it is hoped the list of contents will be found to contain a sufficient analysis of the chapters.

Barnwood Court, Gloucester,
June 1894.

The Vignette on the title-page is from the well-known 5th century bowl from Caere, figured by Gerhard, Berl. Winckelmann Progr. 1854.

Chapter I. the Legend of Perseus as Preserved in Classical Writers. Its Three Trains of Incident. the Danae Type of the Story in Modern Folklore

In The Earthly Paradise William Morris has made English the Doom of King Acrisius in such lovely wise, and in the main with such close adherence to the story as told by Ovid and other classical writers, as to render thankless the task of repeating it at length. But in undertaking an inquiry into the foundations and history of the legend of Perseus, it is needful to bear in mind its salient features. I shall therefore ask the reader’s patience for a summary of these.

Acrisius, the son of Abas and king of Argos, having been warned by an oracle that he should die by the hands of his daughter Danae’s son, built a tower of brass in which he imprisoned the maiden, that he might keep her celibate and so frustrate the oracle. Jupiter, however, visited her in a shower of gold; and she bore a son, Perseus. By the king’s orders, mother and babe were enclosed in a chest and cast into the sea. The chest came to land on the island of Seriphos, and was drawn ashore by a fisherman {2} named Dictys. Polydectes, the king of the island, took Danae under his protection, and in process of time desired to marry her. For this purpose he found it necessary first to get rid of her son. He accordingly set him the task of cutting off and bringing to him the head of Medusa, the only mortal of the three Gorgons, hoping, of course, that he would perish in the attempt. But the youth had friends in high places. Pallas provided him with a buckler brightly polished as a mirror, Pluto with a helmet of invisibility, Mercury with his own winged shoes, and Vulcan with a sword. Thus equipped, he set out on his adventure. Reaching the dwelling of the Graiæ, he possessed himself of the single eye which these three hideous sisters owned among them and passed from hand to hand, and thus compelled them to direct him where he might find the Gorgons. The chief danger of the expedition was Medusa’s power of turning to stone with a glance all who approached her. Perseus escaped this danger by coming upon her asleep, and by regarding her in his shield while he swept off her head with his sword. On his way back, with the prize deposited safely in his wallet, he visited Atlas, the giant king of Libya; but, receiving scant hospitality, he repaid it by trying the power of the Gorgon’s head on the king and his servants, and so converted them into the mountain range on whose huge top the heaven with all its stars (so the gods willed) has ever since reposed. Flying thence over land and sea, he descried Andromeda, the daughter of Cepheus, king of Ethiopia, and of his wife, Cassiope, bound to the rock. He descended, and learned that she was thus exposed to a marine monster to be devoured, in obedience to an oracle of Jupiter Ammon. The monster had been sent by Neptune to ravage the country, in order to revenge {3} a boast by Cassiope that she herself was equal to the Nereids in beauty. Perseus fought and killed the instrument of divine vengeance, and wedded Andromeda. The wedding feast, however, was disturbed by Cepheus’ brother, Phineus, to whom Andromeda had been betrothed, and who, though he had stood by while she was being bound and made no effort to save her, now came with a band of followers to claim his bride from her deliverer. He attacked Perseus and broke up the banquet with a bloody fight, described in much detail by Ovid, which was only ended by the hero’s producing Medusa’s head and petrifying his foes. Perseus, with his bride, afterward sailed for Argos, where he restored his grandfather, who had been dethroned by Proetus, his own brother; and, passing on, he reached Seriphos just in time to save his mother, Danae, from Polydectes. He turned the tyrant to stone, and gave the realm to the faithful Dictys. The oracle in reference to Acrisius was fulfilled later, at Larissa, on the occasion of the funeral games celebrated by Teutamias, king of Thessaly, for his father. Perseus, throwing a quoit in one of the contests, accidentally struck his grandfather on the head and killed him.^3.1^

This is the substance of the story that engaged the genius of some of the greatest poets of antiquity. I have followed in the main Ovid’s narrative; but the only parts he deals with at length are the episodes of Atlas and Andromeda. The absurdities and impossibilities of the tale were as obvious as its beauties to the ancients themselves; and many were the attempts to rationalise it. We need not concern ourselves with these. For our immediate purpose {4} the interest lies in the localisation of the different scenes and the variations we can trace of its episodes.

Perseus, like other Greek national heroes, was the object of worship. The chief seat of his cult seems to have been the isle of Seriphos, where it was believed that not only Polydektes, but also most of the inhabitants with him, were petrified by the dead Gorgon’s glances. The later coinage of the island exhibited Medusa’s head; and the peasants, when they find such coins now, relate that they are the coins of the first queen of the island, who dwelt in the mediæval castle upon the scarped hill above the port of Livadhi.^4.1^ Next to Seriphos, Argos and Mykene honoured, as was natural, the hero. He had ruled the one and founded the other. The name of Mykene was believed to record the place where he dropped the sheath of his sword; and a fountain, which bore his name, marked the spot where it fell. A different derivation of the name of Mykene is given in the lost work of Ctesias the Ephesian on Perseus. He there attributes it to the bellowing (μυκηθμὸς) made by Stheno and Euryale, the sisters of Medusa, in their impotent rage against the hero, whom they pursued as blood-avengers to this spot, and here finally abandoned the pursuit as hopeless.^4.2^ At Argos his tomb was shown; and in the forum there, beneath a barrow of earth, it was claimed that the awful trophy of his victory over the Gorgon lay—the trophy which, according to another version of the legend, was for ever fixed in Athene’s shield, the most dangerous of her {5} weapons. Elsewhere the Argives showed a subterranean building containing a brazen bedchamber, said to have been that made by Akrisios for his daughter—a variation from the brazen tower of the story usually current.^5.1^

But Argos and Seriphos were not allowed to monopolise the sacred scenes of Perseus’ life. The city of Ardea in Latium disputed with Seriphos the honour of being the refuge of Danae ‘pregnant with almighty gold.’ From her, according to Vergil, Turnus, who competed with Æneas for Lavinia’s hand, derived his lineage.^5.2^ Although Andromeda’s father is described as king of Ethiopia, the general consent of antiquity laid the scene of her rescue at Joppa. Near that town was a fountain wherein the hero washed away the stains of the combat, and whose water was coloured ever after by the monster’s blood.^5.3^ Upon the rocks which bounded the haven were pointed out the marks left by the maiden’s chains; and Marcus Scaurus, when ædile, brought from Joppa, and exhibited at Rome, the bones of the monster. A rumour of this event seems to have reached the forger of Sir John Maundeville’s travels, for he relates that the place was still shown where the great giant Andromeda was fastened with chains before the Flood, and not only the place where he was confined, but one of his ribs measuring forty feet in length!^5.4^ It is evident that he took pains to ascertain the exact truth.

In Egypt and in Persia, the Father of History found traditions of a personage identified with Perseus. “According {6} to the Persian story,” he tells us, “Perseus was an Assyrian who became a Greek; his ancestors, therefore, according to them, were not Greeks. They do not admit that the forefathers of Akrisios were in any way related to Perseus, but say they were Egyptians, as the Greeks likewise testify.” And elsewhere he represents Xerxes as telling the Greeks that Perses, from whom he claimed descent, was the child of Perseus, the son of Danae, and of Andromeda, the daughter of Kepheus—a statement apparently accepted by the historian, as well as by other Greek writers.^6.1^ Both these stories probably were Assyrian in origin, and obtained currency, first among the Persians and afterwards among the Greeks, from political causes. In the latter story Kepheus is presented as the son of Bel. It is unlikely that the Achæmenian kings of Persia would have claimed descent from him, had they not been conquerors of Babylon. The Assyrian hero equated with Perseus in the former story we are fortunately enabled by recent discoveries to identify. He is no other than Gilgames, whose name was at one time transliterated as Izdubar, the hero of the epos from the library of King Assurbanipal, preserved in an imperfect form in the British Museum. The fragments we have of the tablets do not include the hero’s birth. Upon this, however, the solution of the characters embodying his name has thrown unexpected light. For Ælian the rhetorician, writing in the third century of the Christian era, has transmitted to us an account of the birth of Gilgamos, whom he styles King of the Babylonians. According to this account, the Chaldeans predicted to a monarch, whose name is variously read as Sakchoros, Senéchoros and Enéchoros, that his daughter would have a {7} son who would deprive his grandfather of the kingdom. Fearing this, he ordered her to be kept in close confinement. His precautions were vain, for fate was cleverer than the Babylonian king. His daughter bore a son whose father was unknown. No sooner was the infant born than her guards threw it down, for fear of the king, from the citadel wherein she was immured. But an eagle, beholding the falling child, darted beneath it, and, receiving it on its back, bore it gently to the ground in a certain garden. The gardener found the boy, and adopted him for his beauty. “If anybody think this a fable,” says the rhetorician, eager to shuffle off all responsibility for it, “I admit I don’t believe it myself; yet I am told that Perses the Achæmenian, from whom the noble stock of the Persians is derived, was an eagle’s nursling.” On examining the epos of Gilgames we recognise none of the adventures as those of Perseus. This may be owing to its imperfect preservation, or to its being a literary recension wherein only those parts of the story proper to the writer’s purpose are combined. It can hardly be that the sole resemblance is in the circumstances of the hero’s birth. On the other hand, the career of Gilgames has many points of likeness to that of Herakles.^7.1^ He rejoices in a divine origin and in the favour of the gods; he conquers lions and monsters; he triumphantly accomplishes a journey to the other world. Now, a story of the rescue of a maiden similar to that by Perseus was told of Herakles. When Laomedon, king of Troy, had bound his daughter Hesione to a rock, to be devoured by a sea-monster sent by Poseidon, Herakles undertook her deliverance, and sprang full-armed into the fish’s throat, whence {8} he hacked his way forth again after three days’ imprisonment, hairless.^8.1^ We are left to conjecture that, if we had the traditions of Gilgames fully presented to us, we should not only have his birth as told by Ælian, but also some other features of his story linking it to that of Perseus—features that perhaps would at the same time explain why the king his grandfather is called an Egyptian.

Herodotus seems to have attached more credit to the tale he found in Egypt. He describes the temple to the hero at Chemmis in the canton of Thebes, and mentions the games celebrated in his honour. The Chemmites, he says, claimed Perseus as Chemmite by descent, and related that on his way from the slaughter of the Gorgon he paid a visit to their city, acknowledged them for his kinsfolk, and instituted the games. They declared that he was in the habit of appearing to them, sometimes in his temple, at other times in the open country, and that one of the sandals he had worn was often found, measuring two cubits in length; and it was a sign of prosperity to the kingdom. There was also a watch-tower called by the name of Perseus near the Canopic mouth of the Nile.^8.2^

But, with regard both to the Persian and to the Egyptian tales, it must be borne in mind that all classical writers had a light-hearted way of calling foreign gods and heroes by the names of their own divinities, whenever they could get an excuse for so doing in the resemblances they traced, or fancied, either in attributes or legends. This practice has introduced endless confusion into their accounts, perfunctory {9} at the best and often contemptuous, of the mythologies of other nations. If we learn little from the historian’s references to the Persian, or Assyrian, tradition, we know less of that of the Egyptians; and, with all our discoveries, we have yet to find the clew to the object of veneration at Chemmis, and the legends clustered about him.

Coming down to a later period, Ælian makes mention of a fish caught in the Red Sea, and called Perseus equally by the dwellers on the shore, by the Greeks, and by the Arabs. He informs us that the latter honoured Perseus, the son of Zeus, and declared that it was from him this fish derived its name. He also describes a gigantic marine cricket, something like a rock-lobster, which many persons abstained from eating, because they deemed it sacred. The inhabitants of Seriphos, if they caught it in their nets, would not keep it, but returned it to the sea; if they found one dead, they would bury it, weeping; and they held that these creatures were dear to Perseus. The importance of these statements will appear hereafter. Another tradition of Seriphos noticed by the same writer attributes the silence of the frogs (which never croaked) on the island to the prayers of Perseus, when they disturbed his sleep on his return from the contest with Medusa.^9.1^ The hero of the island would naturally be credited with many of its peculiarities.

The general result is that legends identical in substance with that of Perseus were widely known in ancient times. From Persia to Italy, from cultured Greece to the barbarous shores of the Red Sea, a tale was told, a hero was celebrated, identified by Greek and Roman writers with {10} the son of Danae. The tale, however, was not told without variations, of which the underground chamber in the Argive territory and the escape of Danae to Ardea are specimens; while the hero’s mysterious connection with a fish, or marine crustacean, points to another.

The legend consists of three leading trains of incident, namely:—

1. The Birth, including the prophecy, the precautions taken by Akrisios, the supernatural conception, the exposure of mother and babe, and the fulfilment of the prophecy by the death of Akrisios.

2. The Quest of the Gorgon’s Head, including the jealousy of Polydektes, the divine gift of weapons, the visit to the Graiæ, the slaughter of Medusa, and the vengeance on Polydektes.

3. The Rescue of Andromeda, including the fight with the monster and the quelling of Phineus, the pretender to the maiden’s hand.

Singly, these trains of incident appear in many traditions, sometimes in one form, sometimes in another. We shall consider them first in combination, with the object of tracing the legend in its wanderings and modifications. Afterwards, leaving out of account the surrounding details, we shall examine the central incidents, so as, if possible, to arrive at the ideas which underlie them. In other words, we shall first treat the story as a whole, and then analyse it into its component parts. A tale, however, in its passage through the world is susceptible of almost infinite modifications. It will be obviously impossible in the analysis to deal with more than a few of these; and I shall confine my attention to the above three leading trains of incident and one other, which appears in many modern versions, and {11} which we shall find to be not the least important and interesting of the four.

Considering the story as a story-whole, we may begin by reminding ourselves that the forms in which we receive it from Ovid and Lucian are literary forms of a pre-existing oral version. This version was probably the most widely accredited, though, as we have seen reason to think, not the only version current in classical times. And in transferring our inquiries from literature to tradition, we shall be met by variations much wider than those manifested in ancient writings. On the other hand, we shall not be left without approximations to the form with which we are familiar there.

Of these approximations, perhaps the closest was told a few years ago to Signor Giovanni Siciliano by an absolutely illiterate peasant woman of Pratovecchio in the Val d’Arno. It runs thus:—A childless king, praying for offspring, hears a voice asking him to choose between a son who will die and a daughter who will run away. By the advice of his subjects he chooses the latter; and a daughter is accordingly born. Some miles from his city the king has a palace in the midst of a fair garden. Thither he brings the child, with nurse and maid of honour, to keep her in safety; and he and his wife visit the little one but rarely. No sooner, however, had she arrived at the age of sixteen than the son of King Jonah, passing by, saw her and bribed her nurse to let him have access to her. The young people fell in love with one another, and were secretly married. In due time the bride gave birth to a son; and her father, learning this, refused to see her again. When the boy was fifteen years of age he went to find his grandfather, who would not so much as speak to him. He endured this silence for three {12} or four months, and then demanded the reason for it, offering the king, if he would tell him, to go and cut off the Witch’s head for him. The king replied that this was just what he wanted him to do. Now, the witch in question was so terrible that all who looked at her became statues; and the king hoped that the youth would perish in the adventure. But on the way he met an old man who gave him a flying steed, and directed him to a palace wherein dwelt two women who had only one eye between them, from whom he was to obtain a mirror. And the old man warned him always to regard the witch in the mirror, and never to look at her otherwise, lest he should become a statue. The flying steed carried the adventurer safely over a mountain inhabited by all sorts of wild and ravenous beasts; and he arrived in due course at the palace of the one-eyed women. There, by possessing himself of the eye while one of them was handing it to the other, he extorted the mirror which enabled him to accomplish the object of his journey. After cutting off the witch’s head, he returned home another way; and coming to a seaport town he found a chapel by the sea-side, and a lovely maiden within it, clad in mourning garb and weeping. She bids him depart, lest he also be eaten by the seven-headed dragon whereto she has been offered, and whose coming she is then awaiting. He refuses to leave her. Instead of doing so, he attacks the dragon on its rising from the sea, turns it to stone, and cuts out its seven tongues, which he ties up in a handkerchief and puts in his pocket. But, having delivered the lady, he ungallantly refuses to see her home, saying that he wishes to see a little more of the world. Before leaving her, however, he makes an appointment to return in six months. This inscrutable conduct gives opportunity to a cobbler, who {13} meets her alone, to threaten her with death unless she will tell her father that he is the slayer of the dragon. Deprived of her champion, she is compelled to submit to the terms; but when her father offers her in marriage to her supposed deliverer, she pleads for a delay of six months. Then the king sent placards through all his cities, announcing his daughter’s deliverance by a cobbler and her approaching marriage to him. Her real deliverer hears the placards, and returns to the capital just as the six months are expiring. He attends an audience, and inquires of the king how many heads the beast had, and whether the cobbler has any proof of his victory. The cobbler is summoned, and asked where are the dragon’s seven tongues? The damsel settles the question, however, by declaring that the youth it was who slew the dragon and cut out his tongues, and that the rascal of a shoemaker had taken her by force and compelled her to say that it was he. The shoemaker is promptly burned in the great square, and the hero married. He returns with his bride to his grandfather, to whom he shows the witch’s head, with the inevitable result, and then fetches his father from the garden where he had himself been born.^13.1^

That there should be so striking a resemblance between this story and that of the classical writers is not surprising to any one who realises the tenacity of popular traditions. It is not, indeed, necessary to suppose that it has been handed down from pagan times in Tuscany: it may only date, as a popular tale, from the revived paganism of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. If so, however, it would stand alone among Italian traditions, not one of which has been traced to the great movement known as the Revival of Learning, and a large number of which were already current {14} while that movement was in progress. The assumption, therefore, that the Tuscan tale is a relic of two thousand years or more does not seem unwarranted. Moreover, it is confirmed by an Albanian märchen, obtained from the recital of a woman at Ljabovo in the district of Riça. It had been foretold, we learn, to a certain king that he should be put to death by his grandson, yet unborn. Wherefore he flung into the sea and drowned every boy born of his two daughters. The third boy, however, escaped with his life, and was cast by a wave on the shore, where he was found by two herdsmen and taken home to their wives to bring up. When he was in his twelfth year, beautiful and strong, a Lubia, or ogress, dried up all the waters; and it was prophesied that she would never let them flow again until she had eaten the king’s daughter. The maiden is accordingly bound in a certain spot, to await the Lubia; but the hero of the story, accidentally finding her, learns the fate in store for her, and bids her fear not, but call him when the Lubia comes. Meanwhile he hides behind a rock, and covers himself with a cap, so that he is no longer visible. He slays the Lubia with his club; and at the same moment the waters begin again to flow. The king offers his daughter in marriage to the victor; and the hero proves his right to the reward by the possession of the Lubia’s head. During the wedding games he throws his club and by mischance kills the king, thus fulfilling the prophecy, and himself becomes king in his stead.^14.1^

Imperfections and confusion—especially the confusion between the king who is the hero’s grandfather and him who is the father of the maiden exposed to the ogress—are {15} to be noted in this version. They are probably due to the reporter, or perhaps, as Von Hahn (to whom the story was supplied) suggests, to defects in the telling. But it is clear withal that here, in another of the classic lands, the tale of Perseus has been preserved in its main features by oral transmission to this day. Whether it be due to the truncated character of this version that the hero’s birth is not actually ascribed to a supernatural cause, it is difficult to say. In this omission it agrees with the Tuscan variant; but in both, the circumstances, though different from one another, are similar to those of Perseus. As we shall shortly meet with types of the story in which the cause and circumstances of the birth are broadly distinguishable from those of the two foregoing tales, we may classify the latter as belonging to the Danae type.

The Albanian tale, it will be observed, omits the Quest of the Gorgon’s Head. A modern Irish saga, on the other hand, omits the rescue of Andromeda; and not only so, but modifies the supernatural birth, and identifies the hero’s grandfather with the Gorgon. Tory Island was the stronghold of a warrior, Balor by name, to whom a Druid had prophesied that he should be slain by his own grandson. Balor had two eyes, but not in the usual place. One of them was in the middle of his forehead, and the other in the back of his skull. The latter was venomous, and had the property of striking dead or petrifying all on whom its glances fell, wherefore it was usually kept covered. He had also an only daughter, Ethnea, whom, in consequence of the prediction, he kept secluded in an impregnable tower on the summit of Tor-more, an inaccessible rock at the eastern end of the island; and he placed with her in the tower a company of twelve matrons, with strict orders to keep {16} all men, and all knowledge of men, away from her. On the mainland, opposite the island, dwelt three brothers, Gavida, a famous smith, MacSamhthiann, and MacKineely. Balor, by a trick, robbed MacKineely of a wonderful cow whereon he set a high value; and MacKineely was determined on revenge. His Leanan-sidhe, or familiar spirit, called Biroge of the Mountain, dressed him in woman’s clothing, and wafted him on the wings of the storm across the Sound to the top of Tor-more, and there, knocking at the door of the tower, demanded admittance for a noble lady whom she had rescued from a tyrant. The matrons, fearing to disoblige the Banshee, admitted both to the tower. No sooner had MacKineely thus gained access to Ethnea than the Banshee, by her supernatural power, laid the twelve matrons asleep. When they awoke, the intruders were no longer there, and Ethnea had lost her maidenhood. In course of time she brought forth three sons, whom her father, on discovering, sent rolled up in a sheet, to be cast into a certain whirlpool. But on the way the pin fell out of the sheet, and one of the boys dropped into the harbour, where he was received by the Banshee and wafted safely across the Sound to his father, who sent him to be fostered by his brother Gavida. Balor, meanwhile, had learned from his Druid that MacKineely was the father of Ethnea’s children, and now set forth to punish him. With a band of followers he landed at Ballyconnell, seized MacKineely, and, laying his head on a large white stone, cut it off with one blow of his sword. The blood gushed forth and penetrated the stone to its very centre, thus forming the red veins which are still shown to the traveller; for the stone was raised in 1794, on a pillar sixteen feet high, and gives its name, Clogh-an-Neely, to a district comprising two parishes. Balor {17} now thought himself secure, for he believed his three grandsons were all drowned. But the heir of MacKineely grew up unknown to him at Gavida’s forge, and became an accomplished smith. One day Balor came to the forge to get some spears made. Gavida was absent, and his foster-son did the work. In the course of the day Balor happened to mention with pride his conquest of MacKineely. It was an evil moment for him; for the young smith, who had been nursing his revenge, watched his opportunity, and, taking a glowing rod from the furnace, thrust it through the basilisk eye and out through the other side of Balor’s head, thus slaying his grandfather and fulfilling the Druid’s prediction.^17.1^

For another story of the Danae type we must go as far as Germany; and we must piece it out as well as we can from Grimm’s notes to the tale of The Two Brothers, of which it is given as a variant. It is related in Hesse that a king’s daughter was pursued by mice, until, in order to save her, he was driven to building a tower, like the Mouse-tower of the Rhine, in the midst of the river. There she dwelt with one maid. One day a jet of water springs in through the window, and fills a tub which they set for it. Both princess and maid drink of it, and afterwards bear each a son, one of whom is called Water-Peter and the other Water-Paul. Both children are put into a chest and floated down the stream. They are rescued by a fisherman, and taught hunting. Going out together, they spare successively three animals, a bear, a lion, and a wolf: in return, each of them is gifted with one of the creature’s young. They part from one another, sticking their knives into a tree at the {18} parting-place, as a token of life or death of the owner. Water-Peter comes to a town hung with mourning for the king’s daughter, who is to be offered up to a seven-headed dragon the next day. With the help of his beasts he slays the dragon; and then, having cut out its tongues, he lies down and falls asleep, he and his animals, from weariness. The king’s marshal, who has been set to watch, comes and finds the dragon dead and its slayer sleeping. He kills the hero, and compels the maiden to admit that he and no other had delivered her. Now the king has promised her in marriage to any one who would save her from the dragon; but she succeeds in postponing the marriage for a year and a day. When the faithful beasts awake, they find their master dead; but happily they are able to bring him to life again by means of a magical herb. After wandering about the world he returns to the town in the nick of time, and by producing the dragon’s tongues he proves that he himself is the victor, and the marshal an impostor. His own wedding to the king’s daughter and the marshal’s death follow; and on the king’s demise Water-Peter receives the kingdom. One day, going out hunting, he loses his attendants, and at night rests with his beasts beside a fire. An old cat sitting on a tree asks if she may warm herself at the fire? When he says Yes, she gives him three of her hairs, and prays him to lay one on each of his beasts, else she will be afraid of them. As soon as he has done this, the animals die. Enraged, he is about to kill her, when she says there is a spring close by of the Water of Death, and another of the Water of Life: if he will take some of the latter and pour it over them, they will come to life again. This is accordingly done. Meanwhile, Water-Paul comes to his brother’s palace, and is received by the queen {19} as her husband. At night, however, he lays a naked sword in the bed between himself and her. When Water-Peter returns and finds Water-Paul in his place, he kills him from jealousy; but on learning the facts he restores him with the Water of Life.^19.1^

The divergence between this story and that of Perseus is considerable. Not merely is the hero duplicated; the gift of weapons is transformed into the acquisition of faithful attendant animals, and the incident of the Gorgon’s Head, postponed to the slaughter of the dragon, becomes a night adventure with a supernatural cat in the forest. The differences, in fact, are such as to preclude the notion of any lineal connection between them. A large proportion of the modern stories agree with that of Water-Peter and Water-Paul where it diverges most widely from the classical legend; and those which do not so agree differ in one way or other still further. Some of them we shall have to consider hereafter. There are, however, two other stories of the same type mentioned by Grimm, both apparently from Hesse. In the one, a king, having resolved that his daughter shall not marry, builds a house for her in the forest in the greatest solitude, where she has to dwell without ever seeing a stranger. But near the house rose a wonderful spring, whereof the maiden drank and bore two boys exactly alike, who received the names of John Waterspring and Casper Waterspring. John fights the dragon, and is brought to life again by the sap of an oak which the ants have been fetching for their dead, trampled down during the conflict. In other respects the tale contains nothing new. The second story omits the supernatural birth of the twins. It begins with a golden box, wherein two {20} fair boys are enclosed, falling from heaven into a fisherman’s net. The dragon is killed by a poisoned seed thrown by the hero into its throat. The princess’ intended bridegroom tries to poison her deliverer; but his faithful beasts discover the treachery. He is afterwards turned into stone by a witch; but his brother forces the witch to tell him by what means to bring him back to life. A wicked snake, the cause of the whole enchantment, is lying under a stone: it must be hewn in pieces, roasted at the fire, and the petrified brother smeared with its fat.^20.1^

There are resemblances here in some of the details to the story of Perseus. The petrifying witch in the latter of the two tales reminds us more nearly of Medusa than does the mysterious cat; while in the former the Supernatural Birth approaches the Argive tradition, though no motive is assigned for the king’s resolution not to permit his daughter’s marriage. The fatal prophecy, which is the centre of the whole plot in the classical tale, is, in fact, commonly omitted in modern folktales of this type. We do not find it in either of the German stories; and even in the Tuscan its force is greatly weakened. It is absent also from the Swedish märchen of Silverwhite and Littlewarder. In that story a widower-king, going to the wars, places his only daughter alone with a single waiting-woman in a tower to guard her honour. An old woman, suborned by youths who are angry at being denied access to the princess, gives her two enchanted apples. The princess and her maid, eating them, bear a son each. After seven years, when the king is expected to return, they let the boys down from the tower, that they may seek their fortunes. They meet a man who gives them each a sword and three dogs. At a {21} crossway they part. Silverwhite throws into the fountain that rises there his knife, given him by his mother, the princess, and charges his foster-brother, if the water become red and thick, to avenge him, for then he will be dead. Then, going on his way, by the help of his dogs he saves a king’s three daughters on successive days from three sea-trolls. Having killed the trolls, he cuts out their eyeballs, and goes away. A courtier claims to be the victor, and is to be married to the youngest of the three maidens; but on the wedding-day Silverwhite appears, produces the trolls’ eyeballs, and the king’s daughters recognise the rings they have bound in his hair previous to the fights. He takes the place of the bridegroom, who is punished. One night the brother of the trolls calls to Silverwhite, and challenges him to combat, that he may avenge them. The troll has three dogs, but they are driven away by the hero’s dogs; and the troll takes to flight also. Climbing a tree, he desires to parley, but the dogs bark furiously. In order to quiet them, he gives three hairs from his head to Silverwhite, with a request to lay them on the dogs. They lie silent and motionless; and the troll, descending from the tree, renews the contest and kills their master. Littlewarder, however, conquers the troll, and extorts from him two bottles. The water in one of these bottles restores the dead to life, that in the other holds fast whoever comes to a place where it has been spread. With the latter he binds the troll immovably; with the former he brings his foster-brother back to life. The incident of Water-Peter’s jealousy follows. Silverwhite’s wife has a sister conveniently ready and willing to marry Littlewarder; and so all ends happily.^21.1^

Only one other variant need be mentioned here. A story {22} obtained in Little Russia relates that a maiden coming home from the field was seized with thirst. She saw in the road two footprints filled with water, and, drinking, felt herself immediately pregnant; for they were divine footprints. She bears two sons, who grow with wonderful rapidity, and at the age of seven go out into the world. In a forest they meet, one after another, several troops of animals—hares, foxes, wolves, bears, lions—who dissuade the precocious twins from shooting them, by bestowing on each of them one of themselves. The brothers part. The elder rescues a princess from a dragon, and suffers death at the hands of a Gipsy who has watched the combat; but he is brought to life again by his beasts with the Water of Life and Healing, and weds the princess. He observes that a fire burns all night long in a certain house. On inquiry he is told that an old snake dwells there. Accordingly he rides thither with his beasts, and fastens his horse in the courtyard to a stake furnished with golden and silver rings. He enters, and meets an old woman in an iron mortar, propelled with an iron pestle—the inconvenient but usual vehicle of the Baba Yaga (witch, or ogress) in Russian folktales. She pretends to be afraid of his animals, and bids him flourish over them two rods which lie upon the oven. As he does it they are changed to stone, together with himself and his steed. Before they parted, the two brothers had buried beneath a certain tree, the one red, the other white, wine; when the white should become red, or the red white, it would be a token of the death of him whose wine had changed colour. The younger brother now, coming to the tree, finds that his elder brother is dead, and, going to seek him, reaches his wife, and is mistaken for her husband. With the object of getting some clew to his brother’s death, {23} he remains with her three nights, putting the sword between them every night. He then goes to the witch, for whom he is too wary. Seized by his animals, she gives him the Water of Life, which restores his brother. On the way home the elder brother strikes off his deliverer’s head from jealousy; but when, at his return, his wife upbraids him concerning the sword, he recognises his wrong, and hastens the next morning to set his brother’s head on his shoulders again, and sprinkle it with the Water of Life.^23.1^

CHAPTER II. THE STORY IN MODERN FOLKLORE—THE KING OF THE FISHES TYPE

In our previous chapter we have examined the classical legend of Perseus, and a few of the recently recorded popular traditions of Europe most nearly akin to it, all of which I have ventured to class together as the Danae type. Turn we now to another type, not less interesting and even more widely diffused, which may be called The King of the Fishes type, from the title of the Breton story I am about to summarise.

A poor and childless fisherman once caught in his net a fish whose scales shone like gold. He was going to put it into his basket, when, to his surprise, the fish addressed him. “I am the King of the Fishes,” it said; “spare me and thou shalt find many.” The fisherman accordingly let it slip back into the water, and was rewarded with a bountiful catch. His wife, however, rebuked him for letting the King of the Fishes go, and insisted on his trying again to catch it; for she desired to eat it. Accordingly, the next day he caught it again; and this time he was not to be moved by its supplications to return it to the water. Finding its prayers vain, the fish directed its captor to give its head to his wife to eat, and to throw its scales into a corner of his garden and cover them with earth, promising {25} that his wife should give birth to three beautiful boys with stars on their foreheads, who should be so perfectly alike that their mother herself should not be able to distinguish between them, and that from its scales should grow three rose-trees corresponding to the three children. The rose-trees were to have this property—that when either of the boys should be in danger of death, his tree should wither. The boys were born in due course, and grew up. A rumour then reached them that in a distant land was a seven-headed monster, to which every month a young maiden was given to devour; and the king of that land had promised his daughter to any one who would deliver the realm from so terrible a scourge. The eldest son set forth on the adventure, and arrived in time to rescue the princess herself from the fate of being eaten by the monster. He then married her as the reward of his valour. But this does not end the tale; for from the windows of the castle where they dwell together, he sees another castle, covered with diamonds and shining like the sun. On inquiring of his wife what it is, she tells him that it is a dangerous place; many persons have entered there, but none have been seen to return; and she prays him for her sake to beware of going thither. This, however, only excites his curiosity; so one day, without saying anything to the princess, he starts as for the chase, accompanied by a large dog. Entering the castle, he meets a wrinkled beldam, who spins as she comes towards him. He allows her to pass a thread of wool through his dog’s collar. The thread is instantly changed into an iron chain; and he himself is compelled to follow her. At that moment his next brother is walking in the garden at home; and, casting his eyes on his brother’s rose-tree, he sees that it {26} is withering. The youth understands at once that his elder brother is in mortal peril, and sets out to help him. He is received by the princess, who mistakes him for her husband; and, happening to catch sight of the castle of diamonds, he asks what it is. The princess replies that she has already told him it is a place whence no one who has once entered it ever comes forth. Immediately he suspects the truth. He makes an excuse to go out, and is joined as he sallies forth by a dog. With this animal he enters the castle, only to meet the doom that has previously befallen his brother. The youngest brother, following for the same reason, and attempting the same adventure, is more fortunate; for he resists the witch’s importunities to allow her to tie up his dog, and compels her to show him his brothers, whom he finds turned into statues of stone. She restores them at his bidding to life; the three then rifle her castle and return to the princess, who is puzzled to decide which of them is her true husband.^26.1^

The plot as developed in this story consists of four incidents, distinguishable as—

1. The Supernatural Birth, 2. The Life-token, 3. The Dragon-slaying, and 4. The Medusa-witch.

Of these the only one we did not find in the classical legend is that of the Life-token. It has already appeared in the German, Swedish, and Russian stories cited in the last chapter. There, however, it assumed an arbitrary form: the brothers stuck their knives into a tree, or threw them into a fountain, or buried a measure of wine apiece. In {27} the present type the Life-token is frequently a consequence of the Supernatural Birth; it is then inseparably connected with the hero whose well-being it indicates; it is not dependent on his will, but is, in fact, part of himself. Born with the heroes, and as inseparable from them as the Life-token, are usually also their horses and dogs, and sometimes their weapons.

In the story of The Fisherman’s Sons, collected in Lorraine by M. Cosquin, the fish puts forth no claim to royalty. It is caught thrice ere it is finally taken home to the fisher’s wife. The counsel it gives to her husband is to place some of its bones under his bitch, some under the mare, and some in the garden behind his house, and to fill three phials with its blood. When the three boys that would be born should grow up, the fisher was to give one of these phials to each of them; and if any mischance happened to either, forthwith the blood would boil. Not only does the woman give birth to three sons, but the mare also has three colts, and the bitch three puppies. From the bones in the garden sprang up three lances. The boys, when grown to manhood, set out together, each with his horse, dog, lance, and phial of blood. They separated at a crossway; and the eldest reached a village where every one was in mourning because year by year a maiden was delivered to a seven-headed monster, and the lot had fallen that year on a princess. Aided by his dog, he slays the beast, and wrapping up its seven tongues in the lady’s handkerchief (which she gives him for the purpose) he bids her goodbye, and leaves her to find her way back alone to her father’s castle. She meets on the way three charcoal-burners. Hearing her story, they compel her to show them the corpse of the beast, whose heads they take, and make {28} her swear to tell her father it was they who had killed it. The king, overjoyed, promises his daughter to one of them; but she obtains a delay of a year and a day. At the end of that time her true deliverer reaches Paris just as the marriage festivities are beginning, and sends his dog to get him of the best from the palace. The dog brings him two good dishes. The cooks complain to the king, who orders some of his guard to pursue the hound. The hero kills them all but one, whom he spares to carry back the tidings. Then he sends the dog to steal the best cakes from the king. Other guards, following the dog, share the fate of the first; and the king concludes to go himself. He brings the hero back in his carriage to the feast. Over the dessert the king calls upon every one to tell his own story—the charcoal-burners first. They of course relate that they had delivered the princess; and in proof they produce the monster’s seven heads. The hero asks the king to see if the seven tongues are in the heads; but the tongues are not to be found. The hero then brings them forth in the handkerchief, which the princess at once recognises, and declares that it was he, and not the charcoal-burners, who had rescued her. The three impostors are hanged without more ado, and the fisherman’s son weds the princess. After supper, when he is in the chamber with his bride, he looks out of window and beholds a castle all on fire; and she tells him, in reply to his question, that she sees it every night without being able to explain it. As soon as she is asleep, he gets up and goes out with his horse and dog to see what it is. The castle stands in the middle of a fair meadow; and there he meets a wicked old fairy who asks him to jump down from his horse and help her with a bundle of grass, that she wishes to lift upon her back. {29} He politely complies; but no sooner has he touched the ground than she strikes him with a wand and changes into a tuft of grass himself, his horse and his dog. His brothers find the blood in their phials boiling; and the second starts to discover what has become of the eldest. His reception by the princess as her husband, his inquiry as to the castle on fire, and his fate correspond with those of the second brother in the Breton tale. But the youngest, by refusing to come down from his horse and seizing the fairy by her hair, compels her, under threat of death, to restore his brothers to life, which she does by striking the tufts of grass with her wand. When she has finished, the youngest hero cuts her in pieces. On their return, the princess cannot tell which of the three brothers is her husband. The eldest claims her; and the two others are provided with her two sisters, of whom we thus hear for the first time.^29.1^

In this tale we have the additional detail of the charcoal-burners who pretend to the princess’ hand on the ground that they have slain the monster. This has already appeared in some of the stories recounted in the first chapter, and is the counterpart in modern folktales of Phineus, the betrothed bridegroom who lifted no finger to avert Andromeda’s fate, but came to claim her when the fight was safely over. It is not usual, however, and assuredly it is unnecessary, for the impostor to be multiplied by three. In a Tirolese tale we find a cobbler making the same preposterous claim. Here is no mention of the seven heads, the brothers are two only, and their two dogs, horses and lances, as well as themselves, are derived from the King of the Fishes. Setting out together they meet an old woman, who bestows on each of them a bottle of {30} clear water, which will become foul when the other meets with misfortune. The day following his marriage the elder hero sees from the balcony a glittering castle, where dwells a witch. He goes thither secretly; and the witch meets him, carrying her brazier, and requests him to blow, for she is cold. He blows and is turned into stone. The younger brother, on being mistaken for his elder, lays his sword in the bed, as in the Hessian story; but the elder brother’s jealousy is omitted.^30.1^

A Gascon variant was told to M. Bladé by an illiterate peasant-girl. Here the speaking fish directs its head to be given to the bitch, its tail to the mare; and the fisherman’s wife is to eat the rest. Two puppies, two colts and two boys are the result. The twins set out together, with their horses and dogs. They part at a cross-road where a great stone cross is erected; and the life-token given by the elder to his brother is to strike the cross on his return with his sword: if blood flow out, it is a sign of misfortune. No impostor appears to claim the rescued maiden; but the hero cuts out the seven tongues and wraps them in his own handkerchief. After his marriage he walks with his wife—who is no princess, only the fairest girl of the town—in the fields, and sees a little house, which he thinks he should like to buy as a hunting-box. She bids him beware, for it has a bad reputation. This whets his curiosity, and he goes to make inquiries. Having knocked at the door, he is answered from within and told that he cannot break the door in, as he threatens to do, but the way to enter is to pull out a hair from his head and pass it through the hole for the cat. The earth swallows him as soon as he complies. The younger {31} brother is wiser. He passes a horse-hair through the hole, and his horse is swallowed up. Then the door opens; and he enters with his dog, slays the wicked persons within, makes his way to the cellar, and delivers thence his brother and his brother’s horse. So much alike are the brothers that the lady, who has already mistaken the younger for her husband, cannot decide between the two when they both present themselves together, until the elder brother pulls out of his pocket the beast’s seven tongues, which he seems meanwhile to have carried about in his handkerchief as an agreeable souvenir.^31.1^

The foregoing story doubtless once contained the episode of the impostor. So many are the variants wherein the episode is found, and usually associated with the seven tongues, that it is hardly likely the Gascon tale could have originally preserved the tongues merely for the purpose for which they are now kept. Occasionally indeed the impostor is detected without their aid. In the Swedish tale of The Wonderful Pike, told in East Gothland, the impostor is the princess’ coachman; and she recognises her true deliverer by the ring she has fastened in his locks.^31.2^ A curious Norwegian tale goes further. In it the impostor is detected in spite of his thoughtfulness in collecting the tongues. A poor woman, already rich in children, bears a son who, immediately after his birth, insists on going out to seek his fortune. He has hardly left the house when another son is born, who, quite as hastily, starts in search of his brother and overtakes him. They choose names—the younger, Lillekort (Littleshort), the elder, King Lavring—and then part, King Lavring telling his brother if ever he fall into {32} extreme peril (but only then) to call him by name, and he will come and help him. This is the equivalent of the Life-token. Lillekort meets a one-eyed, humpbacked old woman; he steals her eye, and only restores it in exchange for a magical sword. Erelong the adventure is twice repeated; and he gets a magical ship and the secret art of brewing a hundred lasts of malt at once. Thus armed, he takes service as a scullion in the palace; and on successive Thursday evenings he fights a five-, a ten-, and a fifteen-headed troll, to whom the princess has been promised, and slays them all. Lillekort and the trolls defy one another in a style leaving nothing to be desired. “Fire!” screamed the fifteen-headed troll. “Fire likewise!” shouted Lillekort. “Canst thou fight?” cried the troll. “If I cannot, I can learn,” retorted the undaunted hero. “I’ll learn thee!” cried the troll, and struck out with his iron bar so that the earth flew fifteen ells high in the air. “Fuh!” exclaimed Lillekort, “that was good! But now thou shalt see a stroke from me!” And therewithal he grasped his sword and dealt such a blow at the troll that all fifteen heads danced over the sand. After each combat Lillekort laid his head on the princess’ lap and slept, and she drew over him on the first occasion a gold, on the second a silver, and on the third a brazen dress. Meanwhile the Knight Röd (or The Red, a title for the impostor which reappears in the Danish variant), who had previously undertaken her defence, came upon the scene when all was safely over, and compelled her to promise to say it was he who had rescued her. Moreover, in proof of his victory he took the tongues and lungs of the trolls in his handkerchief, but left the monsters’ ships untouched. Lillekort, on the other hand, on awaking proceeded to sack the ships; and by the {33} gold, silver, and other precious articles they contained, he ultimately made good his claim to be the true deliverer against the trophies brought by the Knight Röd. He afterwards goes in search of the king’s other daughter, held captive by a troll beneath the bottom of the sea. By means of his gift of brewing he brews beer of such enormous strength that even the trolls on tasting it fall down dead like so many flies. Both princesses then insist on marrying him. In this awkward dilemma—this extreme peril—he bethinks himself of his brother, King Lavring, whom he summons to his aid; and the ladies are suited with a husband apiece.^33.1^

The encounters with the one-eyed hags here fuse together into one thrice-repeated episode the divine gifts bestowed upon Perseus and the adventure with the Graiæ; but the brewing for the troll bears no resemblance to the slaughter of the Gorgon. In some variants the Medusa-witch is a relative of the monster, bent upon revenging his death. In the Swedish tale already referred to, she is the dragon’s sister. In the Danish tale a cock, by his repeated crowing, keeps the hero and his bride awake for the first three nights. The bridegroom, convinced that it is no common fowl, pursues it through the forest to the sea-shore, where he had fought the sea-monster. There the cock vanishes, and an old woman appears. She beguiles the hero into accompanying her over a magical bridge across the sea to her den, and laying hairs from her head upon his horse, hound, sparrow-hawk and sword, thus rendering them harmless. Then she reveals herself as the sea-monster’s mother, and revenges her loss by striking his conqueror dead with her wand. The younger brother, repeating the {34} adventure, burns the hairs, and forces the witch to restore the hero with the Water of Life. The murder of the younger by the elder brother from jealousy, and his resuscitation with the Water of Life, follow, as in many of the other variants.^34.1^

The Greek story of The Little Red Mullet-Sorcerer contains some curious variations. There the desire to eat the fish does not arise in the bosom of the fisherman’s wife; but it is suggested to her by lady-friends, who amiably envy her husband’s good-fortune, and refuse to believe that he is not a wizard. The fish requests to be divided between the fisherman’s wife, his mare and his bitch, and that its tail be planted in the garden. From the tail two cypresses grow up, which are the life-tokens of the two boys thereafter born to the fisherman. The king’s only daughter was possessed of an evil spirit. She had an awkward habit of ascending a balcony every evening and invoking the stars with insane gestures. Everybody whom she saw looking at this queer spectacle she struck with madness. The elder of the brothers, however, overcame her by stealing unawares upon her and seizing her by the hair of her head. In this way he terrified her into swearing never to do it again. When the king found his daughter in her right mind, he desired to know to whom he was indebted for her recovery; but his benefactor had fled to the inn where he was staying. Wherefore, in order to find him out, the king issued a proclamation commanding all the men in the town to pass beneath the palace windows, at one of which the princess was posted with an apple in her hand, ready to drop it on her deliverer. The latter, however, was burdened with the modesty which {35} often affects the heroes of folktales, and tried to evade the proclamation, but in vain. Even when he was caught and brought before the king, he refused the offer of the princess’ hand: evidently he knew too much about her. He travels on, and delivers another princess from a seven-headed monster who haunts a fountain. The impostor is a charcoal-burner, discovered in the usual manner. While the princess, his wife, is bathing one day, the hero takes the opportunity of walking through some of the rooms of their castle which he has not before examined. At the end of a corridor he opens a door, and finds himself in a vast plain filled with statues of human form. He meets an old woman who hands him a stick, on taking which he is immediately petrified. His brother, warned of the witch’s tricks, and going in search of him, refused the stick and set his dog on her. The dog tore her to pieces, and thus delivered his master and many others from her power. Among her effects the younger brother luckily discovered a bottle of the Water of Immortality, with which he restored to life not only his brother, but so many other persons beside that they formed an entire nation and chose him, out of gratitude, for their king.^35.1^

It would be tedious to relate all the variants of the tale found in Europe; nor do the minuter differences between them concern us at this moment. I am anxious merely to lay before the reader the general outlines of the plot as they are found in the more striking and important examples. For that purpose it will be needful to mention one or two more variants falling under the present type, before proceeding to consider some {36} in which one or more of the essential incidents are wanting.

An Argyllshire story runs as follows:—A sea-maiden appears at the side of a fisherman’s boat one day, and gives him three grains for his wife, three for the dog, three for the mare, and three to be planted behind the house, promising him three sons, three puppies, three colts, and three trees which will be his sons’ life-token. In return, one of the sons is to be hers at three years of age. This period is afterwards extended first to seven, and then to fourteen years. The eldest son, who apparently is the promised one, gets a smith to forge a sword for him, and goes out upon his horse, with his dog by his side, to seek his fortune. The carcase of a sheep lay beside the road, and a great dog, a falcon and an otter were disputing over it. He divided it between these animals to their satisfaction, and each of them promised him in reward assistance in the time of need. Going onward until he reached a king’s house, he took service as a cowherd; and while in this situation he slew two giants, who owned green pastures, and fed the herd upon their meadows. Now there was in the loch a great three-headed she-beast to which some one was thrown every year; and it happened that year that the lot fell on the king’s daughter. Her suitor, “a great general of arms,” undertook to rescue her; but when he saw “this terror of a beast” stirring far off in the midst of the loch, he took fright and slunk away. In this emergency the hero appeared; the damsel put a ring on his finger; he fought the beast and cut one of her heads off. She retired for the night beneath the waters of the loch. The deliverer sent the maiden home with the beast’s head over her shoulder, but refused to accompany her. On the way she met the {37} general, who threatened to kill her unless she would say it was he who had cut off the monster’s head. The next day the beast returned, and a second head was struck off. On the third day the hero struck off the third head and slew the beast. But each day he ungallantly allowed the princess to go home alone; the general met her as on the first day, and got the credit for the achievement. When it came to the point of marriage, however, she refused point-blank to marry any one but him who could take the heads off the withy on which the hero had strung them, without cutting it. Of course the cowherd alone succeeded. He also produced the ring, and two earrings beside, which the lady averred she had given to the man who took the heads off the beast. What became of the general is not stated: the cowherd married the king’s daughter. His adventures were now fairly begun: they were far from being at an end. Another, “a more wonderfully terrible,” beast came out of the loch and tore him away from his bride. By the advice of a smith (smiths are often men of more than ordinary powers and wisdom, in fairy tales) the lady spread all her jewellery out on the strand, on the spot where her husband had been captured. The bait took: in exchange for this finery the beast gave up the man. Encouraged, probably, by success, the beast, shortly after, seized the princess. Again it is the old smith who gives advice. The beast was only to be killed in one way. Her soul was in an egg, in the mouth of a trout, inside a hoodie, which was inside a white-footed hind that dwelt on an island in the midst of the loch. If the egg were broken, the beast would die. The hero invoked the help of the great dog, the falcon and the otter. The great dog caught the hind. A hoodie sprang out of her, and the falcon brought it to earth. A {38} trout leaped out of the hoodie into the water, and the otter brought the trout to land. The egg fell out of the trout’s mouth, and the hero put his foot on it. He made the beast give up his wife, and then broke the egg. After that the hero and his wife were walking one day, and he noticed a little castle beside the loch in a wood. On inquiry, his wife warned him that no one who went thither had ever returned to tell the tale. He goes to see who dwells there; and the crone who meets him draws “the Slachdan druidhach on him, on the back of his head, and at once—there he fell.” His tree accordingly withers; his next brother sets out to find his corpse, and shares his fate. The third brother is beforehand with the hag, and after a terrible tussle slays her with the “Slachdan druidhach.” Then with the same weapon he strikes his brothers’ corpses, and they rise to their feet. The three take the spoil and come back rejoicing.^38.1^

This long and not very coherent story gains a little in unity in a variant by the identification of the second and “more wonderfully terrible beast” with the sea-maiden to whom the hero had been promised ere his birth. Omitting this episode and that of the giants, we have the ordinary plot of the King of the Fishes with little change, beyond the substitution of the sea-maiden for the wizard-fish. The alteration does not affect the substance of the tale, for it matters little whether the food which results in the birth of the twin heroes be the flesh of the King of the Fishes, or some other gift of supernatural power.

The opening of the North German tale of The Two Similar Brothers approaches that of The Sea-Maiden, while {39} it also recalls one of the great stories of The Arabian Nights. A fisherman, casting his net into a pool, brings up, instead of fish, a little urn covered with a lid. On his opening the urn, a thick red cloud curls up from within; and before he is aware of it a big burly fellow appears in the midst of the cloud and begs to be put back into the vase. “How can I put you back,” asks the fisherman, “when you are so big and the vase so little?” But the apparition prevails on him to try, promising in reward not merely a good catch of fishes, but also a casket which he must divide into six parts, whereof one is to be given to his wife, one to his horse, one to his dog, and the remaining three are to be buried under the eaves of his dwelling; but he is to beware of looking into the casket before he gets home. Thereupon the fisherman lays hands upon the apparition, finds him as collapsible as a modern travelling-bag, and soon succeeds in fastening down this fairy Jack-in-the-box once more. Flinging the vase again into the water, he cast his net, and was rewarded as the apparition had promised. Before a year had passed, the fisherman’s wife had borne twin boys so much alike as to be indistinguishable. Two foals and two puppies were also added to the household; and under the eaves up-sprouted two swords, two pistols and two guns. The twins set out together. They obtained the usual helpful animals—in this case, two young bears, wolves and lions. Parting at a crossway, one of them sticks his knife into a tree; and it is agreed that they will meet there again in a year’s time. Whichever of them comes first is to examine the blade of the knife: if it be rusted, that will be a token that his brother is dead. The dragon in this tale has no fewer than fourteen heads, and is beside reinforced by fourteen giants, to whom he belongs. The {40} hero, of course, kills them all; and the rest of the story follows the ordinary course.^40.1^

In the Pentameron the magical food is a sea-dragon’s heart, which must be cooked by a pure maiden. A king who wants offspring is advised by a beggar to get this powerful medicine. When it is brought to him he gives it to a pretty maid of honour to cook. No sooner has she put it on the fire than it begins to emit a pitch-black smoke so powerful in its effects that not merely the condition of the queen who tastes the heart, but that of the maiden who cooks it, as well as of every article of furniture in the room where it is cooked, becomes interesting. The old four-post bedstead gives birth to a cradle, the chest to a little chest, the settle to a little settle, the table to a little table: nay, the very night-commode brings forth a tiny night-commode so charming and pretty that one could have kissed it! At the end of four days the queen and her maiden bear each a son, who grow up fast friends. The queen’s jealousy, however, causes Canneloro, the maid’s son, to leave his friend. Before departing, in a final interview with Fonzo, the queen’s son, he flings his dagger on the ground, and a spring starts forth, which he declares will run clear so long as his life is clear and serene. Not satisfied with this, he sticks his sword in the earth, and there sprouts a bilberry bush from the soil as a further token. But whereas the magical elements in the opening scenes are thus grotesquely exaggerated, the central portion of the story is tamed down to a commonplace tournament, at which Canneloro wins a king’s daughter. This treatment has for its purpose to throw into relief the episode of the Medusa-witch. As the Enchanted Hind, the witch {41} gives her name to the story. Pursuing this animal, Canneloro is met by a snowstorm, and takes refuge in a cave, where he kindles a fire. The hind he has been following appears at the door of the cave, and asks leave to come in and warm herself. To calm her fears the hero binds his dogs, his horse and his sword. The hind then changes into an ogre, who throws Canneloro into a pit, whence he is of course rescued by Fonzo.^41.1^

That Basile took some liberties with the story might thus be suspected from internal evidence. How slight those liberties really were has been proved by the discovery of an almost exact parallel as a folktale in the Basilicata. Even the hero’s name is preserved as Cannelora. His life-tokens are a jet of water and a myrtle. He is directed at a crossway by two gardeners whose quarrel he has reconciled; and he rescues a fairy under guise of a serpent from some boys who are persecuting it and have already cut off its tail. The Medusa-witch is a golden-horned snake. The storm is a tempest of thunder and lightning, from which he takes refuge in a cavern. The snake becomes a giant and imprisons the hero, exactly as in Basile’s version. Delivered by Emilio, as the queen’s son is here called, together with the giant’s other prisoners, he weds the fairy, who provides wives also for Emilio and the rest.^41.2^

In a Pisan tale of the same collection we are brought back to the talking fish of the typical story. The life-token is a bone tied to a beam in the kitchen: it sweats blood when anything untoward happens to either of the fisherman’s three sons. The dragon is a fairy in the shape of a cloud that carries away a girl every year. The lot having {42} fallen on the king’s daughter, the cloud sucks her blood through her finger, and, when she faints, carries her away. The hero, having previously obtained from three grateful animals, a lion, an eagle and an ant, the power of transforming himself into their shapes, sets out after the cloud, in the form of an eagle. The fairy-cloud could only be slain by hitting her on the forehead with an egg, which was in the body of a seven-headed tigress. The hero accomplishes this, and weds the princess. The Medusa-witch is a supernatural mist. Penetrating this, the hero is invited to play a game with some ladies. He loses, and is, with his horse and dog, turned into marble.^42.1^ In a Tuscan variant, imperfectly recollected by the teller, the fish is an eel with two heads and two tails; the boys are twins; the tails, planted in the garden, yield two swords; and the heads, given to the bitch, produce puppies; the life-token is a cornel-tree planted by the hero before leaving home. The hero’s brother, arriving in search of him, finds that he is imprisoned with his horse and dog in an enchanted castle, leaves him to his fate, and, being precisely like the unhappy prisoner in appearance, he takes possession of the princess his wife. This chivalrous conduct, however, is perhaps to be imputed rather to the teller’s defective memory than to the original sin of the younger brother.^42.2^

When the childless fisherman, in a Lettish tale, catches a certain pike, the latter gets its freedom by giving two fishes in its stead, both of which the fisher’s wife is to eat. The two boys thereafter born set out on their adventures together, and part at a cross-road, leaving as their life-token a knife sticking in an oak. The one who goes to the right {43} spares to shoot five animals in succession, and out of gratitude they follow him. With their help he wins a princess from demons who haunt a castle; and by virtue of his victory over them he becomes king. The other brother is, for our purpose, the hero. Going to the left, he obtains similar animals, which conquer the nine-headed devil to whom a princess is to be given. The princess’ coachman is the impostor; and the Medusa-witch is the mother of the nine-headed devil, who lures and petrifies the hero in revenge. He is rescued at last by his brother.^43.1^

A Gipsy tale from Hungary attributes the Supernatural Birth to the mother’s having drunk from the two breasts of an urme, or fairy, who also suckled at the same time the dog and mare, and dropped milk into two holes in the earth. Each of the two boys had a golden star on his forehead; and from the earth sprang two oaks, the twins’ life-tokens. The hero’s horse and dog assist him in winning his bride by the performance of three tasks, the third of which is the lady’s deliverance from the enchanted form of a dragon watching three golden apples. Her father then sends him to hunt for the wedding-feast, and he meets the Medusa-witch. His younger brother delivers him, with his animals, from the enchantment by means of the golden apples; and by the same means the witch is destroyed. In the fit of jealousy often found in stories of this type, the hero subsequently kills his deliverer, who is, after explanations, restored to life with a magical plant.^43.2^

In two Russian tales the Medusa-witch incident precedes that of the Rescue of Andromeda. One of these calls for no special mention. But in the other—from Great {44} Russia—the two heroes are the sons of the king’s granddaughter and her maid, born in consequence of their eating fish. The Medusa-witch is the Baba Yaga, who finds the youth sleeping on her meadow, and, giving him a hair, directs him to tie three knots in it and blow, whereupon he is, with his horse, turned to stone. His brother, having rescued him, passes on to the fight with the dragon. The life-token is a knife which runs with sweat.^44.1^

A Sanskrit tale departs more widely from the type than any of the foregoing. In The Ocean of the Streams of Story, a work of the end of the eleventh or the beginning of the twelfth century of our era, Somadeva relates that a childless king sacrificed to the goddess Durgá, and did penance, to obtain a son. The goddess appeared to him in a dream, giving him two heavenly fruits, one for each of his two wives. But one of the wives, not satisfied with the prospect of one son, ate both fruits, and in due time gave birth to twins. The other wife nursed vengeance in her heart; and when the two princes attained manhood, and were sent on a warlike expedition, she forged a despatch in the king’s name to the chiefs in the camp, commanding them to put both princes to death. Their maternal grandfather, however, was with the army in his capacity of royal minister. He found means to escape with them, but died of the hardships of the road; and his two grandsons made their way to the shrine of Durgá in the Vindhya Hills, where they underwent a course of fasting and asceticism to propitiate her. Pleased with their austerities, she appeared in a dream to Indívarasena, the elder brother, and presented him with a magical sword. Armed with this, he forced an entrance into the palace of the king of the {45} Rákshasas, or ogres, and found the mighty monarch sitting on his throne, “having a mouth terrible with tusks, with a lovely woman at his left hand, and a virgin of heavenly beauty on his right hand.” Indívarasena challenged the ogre to fight, but found it useless to cut off his head, for as often as he cut it off it grew again, until he took a hint from the virgin, who made him a sign to cut the head in two after smiting it off. The treacherous virgin turned out to be the Rákshasa’s sister. She had fallen in love at first sight with the valorous youth, and on his victory immediately offered herself in marriage to him. This conduct is not uncommon in Somadeva’s amusing work, and is always eagerly responded to by the lucky (and polygamous) heroes. Indívarasena was no exception. He married her on the spot, and lived happily with her for some time. By virtue of his magical sword he obtained everything he wished for. In this way he got a flying chariot, and sent his brother in it to bear tidings of him to his parents. Meanwhile the other lady, who was the widow of the Rákshasa, attracted Indívarasena’s attention. His wife naturally grew jealous, and in a fit of pique flung his magical sword into the fire. She hardly expected the consequence. The sword was dimmed by the fire, and her husband lay senseless on the ground. Warned by a dream at that instant, his brother returned; and on hearing the miserable woman’s confession he thought he ought not to kill her, on account of her repentance; so he prepared to cut off his own head. However logical and proper this alternative may have been, the goddess interfered. He heard a voice arresting him, declaring that Durgá had struck his brother senseless—not, of course, for flirting, but for not taking enough care of the divine sword—and {46} directing him to propitiate her. When he complied, the sword lost its stain, and his brother regained consciousness. By a revelation as convenient as those of Mohammed, the hero then learned that both ladies had been his wives in a former existence, and therefore it was quite right for him to have both now. So they were all happy ever after—especially Indívarasena.^46.1^

Here we have the Supernatural Birth, the Dragon-slaying, and the Medusa-witch, though the two latter are somewhat disguised. For the Life-token a miraculous dream is substituted. And the whole is overlaid by the practices and beliefs of the revived Hinduism paramount in India after the expulsion of Buddhism.

Chapter III. the Remaining Types of the Story

We have now surveyed the stories of the Danae type and those of the King of the Fishes type. There remain a large number of variants wherein one or more of the incidents are wanting. Some of these have already been mentioned. Where, as in many stories of the Danae type, the hero is not duplicated, the Life-token is not found. A few stories, however, approximate to the King of the Fishes type, but want the Life-token. We may, perhaps, class these together as The Mermaid type, from a variant of Campbell’s Argyllshire tale, told him by an aged man in South Uist, which lays the scene in the Isle of Skye. The eldest of three sons is promised to the mermaid; and when, at the age of eighteen, he learns this, he wisely sets out for a place where there is no salt water. He divides equitably the carcase of an old horse between a lion, a wolf and a falcon, who are disputing over it, and receives in return the power to transform himself into either of their forms at pleasure, or (for Mr. Campbell was uncertain which) the promise of their help at need. By this means, when acting as a king’s herd, he overcomes three giants and a giantess, and obtains three enchanted flying horses, {48} three splendid dresses and a washing-basin and silver comb, on using which he would become the most beautiful man in the world. He fights the “draygan” from the sea on three successive days, and rescues the king’s daughter. The latter afterwards recognises him by a scratch that she had made on his forehead, as he lay with his head in her lap the third day, waiting for the dragon. They are married, but their happiness is of no great length; for the lady longs for dulse, and as he goes to seek it the mermaid catches and swallows him. But mermaids are susceptible to music; so by playing on the harp the hero’s wife succeeds in inducing the creature to bring up her husband, who in the form of a falcon flies to shore. The mermaid then takes the wife instead. A soothsayer informs him that the mermaid’s soul is an egg, inside a goose, inside a ram, inside a hurtful bull that dwells in a certain glen. With the help of the Grateful Animals he succeeds in recovering his wife and slaying the mermaid.^48.1^

Here, after the beginning, the hero’s brothers drop out of the story. The more complex Lithuanian tale of Strong Hans and Strong Peter retains both twins. An angel brings to a childless queen a golden fish; and a witch brings her a silver fish. She eats both and bears twins, the elder with golden hair and a golden star on his forehead, the younger with the like in silver. In their nurses’ absence they are suckled, the one by a lioness and the other by a she-bear. Two snakes, deputed by the witch to kill Hans, the golden twin, are taken by him one in each hand, though he is only a few weeks old, and strangled. The witch, later on, sends a monster to kill him; but an angel meets him, and bids {49} him bathe in a certain brook and then anoint his body with an ointment, which he gives him. This renders Hans invulnerable, and enables him to overcome the monster. The brothers then set out together, and part at a crossway. Hans encounters a twelve-headed dragon, and slays him in the same manner as Herakles did the Hydra, dipping subsequently his arrows in the poisonous blood. He thus rescues the princess; but before allowing him to marry her, her father imposes other Herculean tasks upon him—among them, the slaughter of the Nemean lion, the capture of the stag of Mount Mænalus (here a horse, captured by wounding his foot), and the theft of the apples from the Garden of the Hesperides. The way to the apple-tree (here called the Tree of Health and Life), we are told, lay through Hell; and incidentally Hans overthrew both Cerberus and the Devil. To his astonishment, he found his brother Peter bound to a rock in the place of torture, together with his wife. He freed them both, and sent them back to earth. On bringing the apples to the king, Hans was at last permitted to wed his daughter. The story then turns to Peter, to explain how he and his wife had had the misfortune to get into Hell. It appears that Peter’s first adventure after quitting his brother was that of Theseus overcoming the Minotaur. It naturally ended in his marrying the king’s daughter and becoming ruler. Various neighbouring peoples, however, made war on him—among them, the Amazons, described as a tribe of women whose hands were swords. Against this foe he invoked the Devil, and gave his wife in return for help. But ere long, repenting of the bargain, he descended into Hell to fetch her back. He had reckoned without his host: the Devil was too strong for him; and it was only {50} by his brother’s intervention that he and his wife were delivered.^50.1^

In a Sicilian tale, a dethroned king catches a golden fish, which desires to be cut into eight pieces, two to be given to his wife, two to his horse, two to his dog, and two to be buried in the garden. The two latter pieces shoot up into magical swords. The twins set out together and afterwards part. One of them wins in a tournament the daughter of the king who had dethroned his father. This recalls Basile’s Neapolitan tale; but, unlike that, there is no stress laid on the episode of the Medusa-witch. On the contrary, it is presented as a mere ordinary hunt at which the hero is detained for three days, while his brother comes to the city and is mistaken for him.^50.2^ In the stories previously given of this type the same episode is hardly, if at all, to be recognised.

Another type, wanting the Dragon-slaughter, contains the Life-token. The best-known story of this type is Grimm’s tale of The Gold Children. There the life-token is a golden lily which grows up with each of the twins. Disguised in bear-skins, the hero wins the love of a beautiful village-maiden. After his marriage he goes to hunt and chases a stag. The stag disappears; and he finds himself standing before a hut inhabited by a witch, who petrifies him for threatening her obstreperous dog. His brother compels the witch to restore him to life.^50.3^

As told in Flanders, the talking fish directs the fisher to cut it into three pieces, one for himself, one for his wife, {51} and the third to be buried in the garden. Three boys of marvellous beauty are the result; and digging, in accordance with the fish’s instructions, where he had buried the third piece, the fisherman finds three swords, three pistols, and three flageolets of stone. The eldest son, going to seek his fortune, reaches a magnificent palace, where one of the king’s daughters, looking out of window, falls over head and ears in love with him. Against her advice he goes to visit a palace of crystal, inside whose glittering walls whosoever put his foot was changed into a pillar of salt. Seeking in vain for the entrance, he meets an old witch, who opens the door by her magical wand, and invites him to enter. Before doing so, he puts his flageolet to his lips to warn his brothers; for the instrument’s property was that wherever in the world its owner played on it his brothers would hear, and would know where to find him. Then he enters, and, like thousands before him, is changed into a black stone. The second brother, on hearing the pipe, set out to seek his brother; and he too was changed into a pillar of salt. The youngest draws his sword and pistol upon the witch, and compels her to disenchant her victims. Then, on opening the door, hundreds and hundreds of men and women pour forth, with one voice thanking heaven and their courageous deliverer. The three brothers marry the king’s daughters with banging of bells and clanging of cannon.^51.1^

This type is found not only in Germany and Flanders, but also among the southern branches of the Slavonic race, as well as in Greece, in northern Italy, and in Brittany. Two more examples, however, must suffice. The Mantuan {52} version follows that of Grimm in its opening, where the Father of the Fishes, as he is here called, repeatedly enriches the fisherman before the latter’s wife insists on knowing the secret of his wealth, and seeing the fish. The boys, as in the Flemish tale, are three in number; and the life-token is the fish’s blood preserved in three vases. The first of the brothers, going to liberate a king’s daughter who is enslaved by an ogre in an enchanted palace, is touched by a witch with a magical berry and turned to stone. The second brother meets the same fate. They are both delivered, together with the princess, by the youngest, who restores them to life by anointing them with the fish’s blood. The maiden is the reward of the youngest brother’s heroism.^52.1^ In the Breton story the fisher’s wife is already pregnant, and has a fancy for eating fish. The large fish caught by her husband gives directions for the wife to eat its flesh, the mare to drink the water wherein it has been washed, and the dog to eat its entrails and lungs. The life-token is a laurel, into whose trunk a knife is to be stuck daily by the twin-brother (there are but two) left at home: if blood follow, the absent one is dead. Being hired as groom, the first brother is married by his master’s daughter. He notices that the windows on one side of the castle are always closed; and on asking why, his wife tells him that there is a yard on that side full of venomous reptiles. He goes that way, and is entertained by the Medusa-witch, who pushes him upon an enormous wheel covered with razors, where he is hacked to pieces. He is revenged by his brother upon the witch, at whose death a princess transformed into a vixen resumes her human shape, and aids her deliverer in putting the bits of his {53} brother’s body together and reviving him with the Water of Life.^53.1^

A Bosnian märchen presents us with a type wherein only the Supernatural Birth and the Medusa-witch are preserved. A pilgrim gives an apple to a childless man. His wife is to eat it, the peel is to be divided between the mare and the bitch, and the seeds are to be planted in the garden. The elder twin, with his horse and dog, and his lance of apple-wood, swims across the sea, and in doing so becomes gilt. He marries a king’s daughter, and pursues a stag with golden horns, which leads him to a tower. There he gambles with a lady for the stag; but, losing, he is thrown into her dungeon, whence he is rescued by his brother, who wins him back and weds the lady. The elder’s jealousy, however, is aroused on the way home; and he draws his sword against the younger, but is prevented from doing him any harm, and at his return recognises how groundless his passion has been.^53.2^ In a Portuguese variant it does not end quite so innocently; for when the elder learned that his wife had mistaken the younger for her husband, he put him to death from which there was no revival.^53.3^ The Bosnian version differs also in its opening from the other variants, all of which refer the supernatural birth to a fish, or eel. This type is found in Sicily and in Germany, as well as in the Balkan and Iberian peninsulas. It may be called, from the Portuguese variant just cited, The Tower of Babylon type.

A type more interesting, because more various in its evolution, is that which comprises only the Life-token and {54} the Medusa-witch. It is usually associated with Galland’s tale of The Two Sisters who envied their Cadette, where it appears as an episode. In the Wortley Montagu Codex, at Oxford, it is found as a separate tale, and has been thence translated by Sir Richard Burton. The eldest of three brothers, it tells us, determines to procure a certain little nightingale which transmews to stone all who come to it. Before starting, he takes his seal-ring from his finger and gives it to his next brother as his life-token: it will squeeze his finger if a mishap occur. The bird’s habit was to cry out to its would-be captor, and, if he replied, to take a pinch of dust and, scattering it upon him, turn him to stone. The third brother only is successful in holding his tongue and catching the bird. By sprinkling another material upon his unfortunate predecessors, they are disenchanted, and among them his elder brothers. The latter fling him into a well, that they may take the credit of the exploit; but he escapes by means of a ring he has obtained from the bird, and vindicates his claim.^54.1^

Another variant is found in the Tirol as a pendant to a story of an innocent persecuted wife. The elder brother exhibits a dancing bear to the king of Babylon, who is so delighted with it that he bestows his daughter on the exhibitor, and names him viceroy. The viceroy goes to hunt with his bear in the forest. He is overtaken by a tempest, and kindles a fire to warm himself. The Medusa-witch conquers him by the usual wiles. His brother is his deliverer, and happily there is no jealousy. The life-token is a knife stuck in a tree and becoming rusty when a misfortune befalls either of the brothers.^54.2^

A tale from Normandy leads us back to the fisherman. He catches the King of the Fishes, who recommends that, after frying, its bones be buried in the garden. A treasure would be found at the spot indicated; from its head three faithful dogs would spring for his three sons, and three rose-trees would grow from the earth—his son’s life-tokens. The eldest son, having married a rich wife, sees the castle of the Medusa-witch, and falls a victim to her. When the youngest, by his dog’s help, destroys her, the second and third brothers wed two of the loveliest ladies, who are disenchanted by her death.^55.1^ A Milanese variant omits all the marriages, and gives as the life-token a handkerchief, which is besmirched with blood when its owner is bewitched.^55.2^

The Scottish märchen of The Red Etin represents the three youths as the sons of two widows. The two sons of one of the widows depart successively with their mother’s malison. The life-token is a knife which will become rusty, as in the Tirolese variant. The Medusa-witch is the Red Etin of Ireland. He puts three questions, and petrifies him who is unable to answer them. Moreover, he holds in captivity King Malcolm’s daughter. The third youth gets his mother’s blessing and half a cake by way of provisions for his journey; the others had got whole cakes, though small ones, thanks to their carelessness in drawing water to make them. He meets an old woman, to whom he gives a piece of his bannock, and receives in return the solution of the three questions, as well as a magical wand enabling him to quell the dreadful beasts he encounters. When the questions are answered the monster’s power is {56} gone. The youth hews off his three heads, delivers King Malcolm’s daughter, and disenchants his two friends.^56.1^ The relation between this tale and that of Œdipus need not be pointed out.

The Tirolese tale of The Knife-grinder’s Sons will afford us the next type. Two brothers catch a bird on whose head is inscribed the words: “Whosoever roasts and eats my head will find every day a bagful of gold.” Their father, reading this, intends to eat the head; but the two boys steal the bird when it is cooked; and the elder eats the body, and the younger the head. They wander out together, and part at a giant oak-tree. The life-token is a knife stuck in the tree. Hans, the elder, by sparing the lives of a fox, a wolf and a bear, gets them as followers. With their help he slays the seven-headed dragon and rescues the king’s daughter. She meets him in the chapel whence the dragon was to fetch her, and gives him a ring, a chain, and a silk neckerchief. Too weary with the contest to accompany her back to her father, he lies down to rest, and is found and put to death by her father’s servant, who cuts off the dragon’s heads and compels the maiden to identify him as the dragon-slayer. The faithful animals, however, find the Herb of Life, and revive their master. The false servant is torn to pieces by the animals, and Hans is recognised by the princess as her true deliverer. We may note that he had cut out and preserved the dragon’s tongues, but they are not referred to in the recognition scene. On retiring with his bride, he sees a magical roebuck, and at once pursues it, thus falling into the hands of the Medusa-witch. He is delivered by the younger brother; but the two brothers, quarrelling {57} for the bride, are drowned in crossing a river on the way back.^57.1^

In this type only the Supernatural Birth is wanting. The story is found in almost identical terms elsewhere in the Tirol and other German lands. In a version preserved by Pröhle, one of the two brothers is lucky, the other unlucky. The unlucky one goes to an inn, whose hostess is a witch and strangles him and his dog. The lucky one delivers the princess from the seven-headed dragon, and then goes in search of his brother. He comes to the inn, and is attacked at night by twelve witches, of whom he slays eleven, but spares the twelfth. She turns out to be the hostess. He forces her to bring his brother to life again by means of some magical ointment, a portion whereof she also gives him in case of any other misfortune to the luckless brother. Both brothers then go to the town. The king’s servant has possessed himself of the dragon’s tongues, and is about to be married to the princess as her saviour. This catastrophe is happily prevented by the assistance of the dog and the production of the princess’ kerchief given to the dragon-slayer after the fight. One day, while hunting, the lucky brother is seized with jealousy of the unlucky one, whom he has left at the palace with his wife. He suddenly goes home and finds his brother gazing at her. Deeming this confirmation strong as Holy Writ, he draws his sword and hews the unlucky brother to pieces, thus finding occasion for the use of the ointment thoughtfully provided by the witch; for he soon discovers how groundless his suspicions have been.^57.2^ This variant distinguishes {58} between the victim of the Medusa-witch and the dragon-slayer, disconnects the hero’s jealousy from the Medusa-witch incident, and, like the Scandinavian tale cited in a previous chapter, gives the impostor the dragon’s tongues. Moreover, it contains a mere relic of the Life-token; for the brothers on parting agree to obtain tidings of one another through their two dogs. These dogs, with the heroes’ horses and spears, have grown up from seed sown by their father in a small plot of ground. It is probable that both this variant and that cited in the preceding paragraph have been derived by degradation from some version, or versions, of The King of the Fishes, or the Danae, type.

The Slavs of various parts of Russia are familiar with the type now under consideration. In a Lettish tale the brothers steal and eat the bird after having sold it. They then flee together. Coming to a crossway, they find an old man who gives them each a horse, dog, whip and bottle. The bottle is the life-token: its contents turn red if the owner’s brother die. The dragon is a serpent with thrice nine heads. The hero is enticed to the Medusa-witch’s hut by a roebuck.^58.1^ A soldier’s two sons, in a story given by Afanasief, receive from an old man wonderful horses and swords. The life-token is not detailed in the abstract of the story before me. One brother weds a king’s daughter. The other delivers another king’s daughter from a dragon, and marries her. He follows a stag, whose tracks he loses, and, after shooting a pair of ducks, comes to a deserted castle. There he meets the Medusa-witch, in the shape of a fair maiden, who changes into a lioness and swallows him. His brother compels her to cast him up and bring {59} him to life again with Living-and-Healing-Water. She then changes back into a maiden and begs forgiveness. They weakly pardon her. Afterwards each of them is met by a beggar, who, being transformed into a lion, tears him to pieces. These lions are the Medusa-witch’s brothers.^59.1^ A Lithuanian tale speaks of three brothers and a sister. The brothers, sparing a wolf, boar, fox, lion, hare and bear, receive a whelp apiece. Parting from one another, each of them chooses a birch-tree and strikes it with his axe: the mark will run with milk or blood, according as he is alive or dead. The eldest brother takes charge of the sister, by whom he is betrayed to a robber. He subdues the robber with the assistance of his beasts, nails his sister by hands and feet to the wall of the robber’s castle, and leaves her. After slaying a nine-headed dragon and rescuing the princess, the latter takes him into her carriage; but on the way to her house he is put to death by the coachman and lackey. His lion catches a crow and compels it to bring the Water of Life to restore him. He is recognised by means of the ring and handkerchief the princess has given him, and marries her. Going hunting, he falls at night into the power of the Medusa-witch, whom he finds in the shape of an old woman at a fire. The youngest brother first attempts his rescue, and afterwards the second, who is successful.^59.2^

The incident of the sister’s treachery, which forms part of the Lithuanian tale, is found in several Slav versions. {60} In a Swedish tale from north-western Finland the sister plays a different part. She has been carried off by a dragon. The brothers are twins. Their father, a fisherman, had caught a pike, which had bequeathed its eyes as the life-tokens, to turn black when the heroes were in mortal peril. The elder brother goes into the world, visiting on the way his sister, from whom he receives a sword. He saves the king’s only daughter from a sea-troll, and marries her. The Medusa-witch dwells on a floating island, which the youth must needs explore. Since his rescue by the younger brother, and the slaughter of the witch, the island is no longer visible.^60.1^ The fish reappears in a Sicilian tale, though in a different capacity. There it is caught by the brothers, who are fishermen. It is a voparedda, a poor kind of fish; and its life is spared in consequence of its piteous appeals. In return, it furnishes the brothers with horses, clothing, armour, swords and money; and they ride forth to seek adventures. The life-token is a cut in a fig-tree, which flows with milk or blood. The elder youth is the dragon-slayer. A slave is the impostor who claims the reward of the victory. The worm’s seven tongues in the lady’s handkerchief prove his treachery and the hero’s right. One evening after his marriage the hero goes out to see a bright light upon a certain mountain, and falls a victim to the Medusa-witch. On his way to rescue him the younger is met by Saint Joseph, who advises him how to accomplish his task. The incident of the rescued man’s jealous fury follows.^60.2^

The Kabyles are tribes of Libyan stock, inhabiting the mountains of Algeria. They have a tale of two brothers, sons of a man by different wives. One of the wives is {61} dead; and the other so persecutes the dead woman’s son that he determines to go away. Before doing so, he plants a fig-tree as his life-token. He slays a seven-headed serpent which dwelt in a fountain and withheld the water. The king’s daughter in this case is not a sacrifice to the snake: she is simply charged with the duty of bringing it food. She gives the food to the hero after the slaughter; and, taking one of his sandals, she returns and reports the event to her father. He calls a public assembly, in order to try the sandal on the men. The hero dresses in rags, and lames his horse, his falcon and his hound. Consequently, he is at first passed by in contempt; but he cannot escape the trial. The ascetic instincts of the heroes of these tales are remarkable: they will do anything to escape recognition and marriage. In the present case, when the sandal is fitted to his foot, the king generously says to the dragon-slayer: “I will give you my daughter gratis: become king, and I will be your minister.” This is an offer the masculine Cinderella cannot refuse. The Medusa-witch is an ogress, whose domain he invades with his horse, hound and falcon. She binds the animals with hairs, and then eats them and their master. The younger brother and his animals avenge him. He watches two tarantulas fighting; the one kills the other, and brings it to life again by pressing the juice of a herb under its nose. The younger brother takes the hint, and thus revives the hero and his beasts.^61.1^

Two Italian variants omit the Life-token. As Basile tells the tale, there are two brothers, sons of a Neapolitan merchant. The elder, playing with the king’s son, wounds him and has to flee the country. He passes the night at a {62} deserted house, and by his courage frees it from three ghosts and acquires a treasure, which, however, he leaves to the lord of a neighbouring tower, and goes on his way with horse and hound. His next feat is to deliver a fairy from a band of robbers, from whom her honour was in danger. The Dragon-slaughter follows. He takes the seven tongues and goes to an inn, allowing the king’s daughter to return alone to her father. His want of gallantry results, as usual, in the pretensions of an impostor, who possesses himself of the dragon’s heads, and is about to be married to the princess, when the hero puts in his claim. The morning after the wedding he goes to the house of a lovely maiden, seen from his window. She is, of course, the Medusa-witch. He is rescued by his brother, and afterwards kills the latter in an access of jealousy. On finding out his mistake, he restores him by means of a herb which he has seen the dragon use, during the fight, to mend his own heads when struck off.^62.1^ The other variant is a folktale recently collected in Tuscany. It is much less elaborate, and reads like a half-forgotten narrative. Here are three brothers born at a single birth. Each of them owns a horse and dog which came into the world at the same time. The first, seeking adventures, meets an old woman in the mountains, and asks for a steel that he may light a fire, for it is cold. She replies by transforming his horse, his dog and himself into salt. The second brother is dealt with in the same manner. The third, instead of asking for a steel, threatens the witch with death unless she revive his brothers. By way of recompense, he takes his two elder brothers’ animals, and goes further. With the aid of his dogs he saves the king’s {63} daughter from a seven-headed lion. He takes the tongues; but a charcoal-burner takes the heads, and pretends to be the deliverer. On the hero’s vindicating his right, he marries the lady, and the charcoal-burner is condemned to the fire.^63.1^

From the remaining types the Medusa-witch is absent, and from the first of them the Life-token also. Traces of the witch’s influence, however, are found in some of the stories. Such a story is that of The Enchanted Twins, of which we have two versions, almost exactly alike, from different parts of Sicily. It seems properly to belong to the Albanian colonists settled in the island for the last four or five hundred years. A king, childless and dethroned, catches a fine red fish, which gives him the accustomed directions. In this case it is to be cut, according to one version into four, or according to the other into eight, pieces, which are to be equally distributed to the fisherman’s wife, his bitch, his mare, and for burial in the garden. Two boys, two colts and two puppies are born, and, according to one version, two magical swords grow up in the garden. The twins set out together, but part. One of them wins, in a tournament, the daughter of the king, who has dethroned his father. After his marriage he goes hunting. While absent, his brother comes to the town, and is mistaken for him as in most of the foregoing types, but puts the customary sword between himself and his sister-in-law when he goes to bed. The dragon-slayer, returning, is about to kill his wife from jealousy, but is happily informed of the facts in time.^63.2^

An African variant, told, presumably at Blantyre, on {64} Lake Nyassa, to the Rev. Duff Macdonald of the Church of Scotland Mission, by a native of Quilimane, speaks of a fisherman who caught a large fish. The fish gave him millet and some of its own flesh, and spoke to him, directing him to cause his wife to eat the flesh alone, while he ate the millet. Compliance with these instructions was followed by the birth of two sons, who were called Rombao and Antonyo, with their two dogs, two spears and two guns. The explanation, however, of the origin of the dogs and weapons has been forgotten. The boys became hunters, not hesitating to kill whoever opposed them and to take possession of his land and other property. There was a whale which owned a certain water, and the chief of that country gave his daughter to buy water from the whale. But Rombao slew the whale, thus saving the maiden, and cut out its tongue, which he providently salted and preserved. The credit of the exploit is claimed by the captain of a band of soldiers, commissioned by the chief to ascertain why the whale had not sent the usual wind as a token that the girl had been eaten. The chief accordingly gives the captain his daughter in marriage. When, however, the marriage-feast is ready, and the people assembled, the lady is unwilling. Rombao, who has made it his business to be present, interferes at the critical moment with the inquiry why she is to wed the captain, and is told it is because he has killed the whale. “But where,” he asks, “is the whale’s tongue?” The head, of course, has been produced in evidence of the captain’s brag; but the incident is omitted by the narrator. The tongue cannot be found until Rombao triumphantly produces it, and proves that he, not the captain, is entitled to the victor’s honours. He marries the maiden, while the captain and his men, {65} who aided and abetted his falsehood, are put to death.^65.1^ This variant contains manifest traces of weathering, which may point to a foreign, perhaps a Portuguese, provenience. The atmosphere and most of the details, however, are purely native. The husband and wife eating apart, the hunting and filibustering proceedings of the twins, the scarcity of water, the salting of the monster’s tongue (which, I think, never occurs in an European variant), and the wedding customs, are among the indications of the complete assimilation of the story by the native mind. The only details distinctly traceable to Portuguese influence, paramount on the Quilimane coast, are the names Rombao and Antonyo, and the guns—neither of them essential to the story.

In an Abruzzian version the fisherman has but one son, born after his wife has consumed broth made of the magical fish. The bitch, having eaten the head, brings forth a puppy, and the mare, having eaten the flesh, a foal. Swords sprout up in the garden where the bones have been buried. The boy, grown to manhood, fights a seven-headed dragon and rescues the princess who was to have been its prey; and the story ends with his confutation of the fraudulent charcoal-burner in the ordinary way.^65.2^

Three Swabian variants substitute the Life-token for the Supernatural Birth. Two of them, almost exactly the same, display, so far as they go, some similarity to the Argyllshire tale mentioned in a previous chapter. Three brothers depart on their travels together. At the first finger-post they separate, each of them sticking his staff into the post until he return, so that either, coming back to the place, would know whether the others had gone home. Hans, {66} the hero, takes service with a nobleman as a shepherd, and is cautioned never to go into the forest; for three giants dwell there, and they will kill him. One Sunday he goes into the forest and finds a castle. Entering it, he meets with no one until he gets to the last room of the top story, where is an enchanted princess. She gives him a pipe, by blowing into which he can make all things dance that hear him. He afterwards drives the sheep repeatedly into the forest, to feed on the excellent pasture there. At length the giants catch him on successive days; but Hans blows in his pipe and sets them dancing, and then takes the opportunity to kill them. He cuts out their tongues and eyes, which he wraps in his handkerchief. The princess whom he thus frees asks him to marry her and become king; but he excuses himself at present on the ground that his time of service is not up. After a while, the maiden’s father, being tired of waiting, issues a proclamation for her deliverer. The nobleman, to whom Hans has foolishly confided his victory, sends his own son to court, with the bodies of the giants, to claim the reward. Hans, however, by means of the tongues and eyes, easily convicts him of falsehood. But before permitting Hans to marry the princess, the king requires him to win at the sport of running at the ring. The giants’ servants in the castle furnish him with horse and splendid clothes, and instruct him in the game, so that he wins. But the king, under pretence of sending him to a monastery to learn, shuts him in an enchanted castle, haunted by thirteen devils. Hans with his pipe dances the devils to death, and the king can no longer withhold the promised reward of the princess’ hand and the kingdom. After some years, Hans makes up his mind to go home, whither his brothers have preceded {67} him. So he puts on his old shepherd-clothing, and is despised by his brothers, one of whom has become a general, and the other a merchant. He endures all their indignities for some six weeks, until his consort, wearying of his absence, comes to look for him. He still pretends stupidity, and does all sorts of foolish things; but she recognises him through it all, and induces him to resume his royal garb, to the confusion of his father and brothers, who have been ill-using him.^67.1^

Here the Life-token has dwindled into a mere token of the brothers’ having returned home, and all its magic is lost. The remaining variant presents no special points of interest, save that it too is obviously in a state of decay. There are three brothers who depart together. The life-token is a sword stuck in a fir-tree, to become spotted with rust if its owner die. The hero obtains helpful animals (a bear, a wolf and a lion) in the old familiar manner. The dragon is seven-headed; the coachman is the impostor, and is found out by the want of the tongues. What became of the hero’s brothers nobody knows.^67.2^

Finally, there is a type, not very common, which includes only the three incidents of the Supernatural Birth, the Life-token, and the Dragon-slaying. The Portuguese legend of Saint George may be taken as the typical form. The saint is represented as one of the twin sons of a fisherman who caught the same fish three days successively. The first two days it had begged for life; but the third day it directed that it should be cut into six pieces, two for the fisherman’s wife, two for his mare, and two to be buried behind his garden-gate. From the last-mentioned pieces two lances grow. Saint George and his brother start on their adventures together, but soon part, the saint giving his brother a branch of basil-gentle, and saying: “When it withers, come in search of me, because I shall then be in danger.” George rescues the princess from the dragon; and her father desires to make him general and give him the maiden in marriage. At this critical moment his brother perceives the branch withering, and hurries off to find him. The difficulty is that George, by virtue of vows he has taken, cannot marry. His brother comes in time to accommodate his tender conscience, by taking the lady himself and leaving George the honours of canonisation.^68.1^ In a story from Lorraine a different turn is given to the characters of the two younger brothers, but one which indicates a close relation with the Portuguese legend: they are the impostors who pretend to have slain the dragon. Here the fisherman catches the Queen of the Fishes repeatedly, until his wife insists on eating her majesty. The fish requests that some of its bones be placed under the bitch, some under the mare, and the rest under a rose-tree in the garden. Three puppies are found {69} under the bitch, three foals under the mare, and three boys beneath the rose-tree. The life-tokens are the roses on the tree, one of which falls when misfortune happens to either of the brothers. The first brother takes all three dogs; and, with their help, in a three days’ conflict he quells the seven-headed beast and delivers the princess. She thereupon invites him to come home with her; but he prefers to return to his father’s house, carrying the beast’s heads. The king issues a proclamation for him. The youngest brother personates him; but the heads he brings turn out to be of wood, with which the real victor has deceived him. The king throws him into prison, and condemns him to be hanged the next day. His rose falls from the tree. The next brother goes to rescue him; and the king condemns him to the like punishment. His rose falls. The real victor then takes the seven heads and the seven tongues to the castle. For his sake his brothers are spared. He weds the princess, and they wed two of her maids of honour.^69.1^

The mention of the seven tongues, as it were by accident, is a reminiscence of what I hold to be the ancient and typical form of the Imposture-episode. A similar survival occurs in another tale from Lorraine, wherein the dragon and the Medusa-witch are confounded together. In this tale there are likewise three brothers, sons of a fisherman who had given three drops of blood of a certain big fish to his wife, three to his mare, and three to his bitch, and had preserved three in a glass as the life-token. The eldest brother, seeking adventures, enters the castle of a seven-headed witch, and is forthwith changed into a toad. The blood at home boils in the glass; and {70} the second brother sets out, only to meet with the same reverse. The third brother conquers the witch with the assistance of a charcoal-burner, and cuts out her tongues. Now, he who slew the witch, and brought her tongues in proof, would have the castle and marry the king’s daughter. The charcoal-burner bethinks himself of his folly in not taking the tongues. To secure them, he kills the youth; and, exhibiting them to the king, he succeeds in obtaining the princess.^70.1^ Charcoal-burners are the favourite villains of the Perseus märchen; but it is rarely they are successful. Nor, indeed, is it often that the folktale descends to a style of art worthy of Miss Braddon.

CHAPTER IV. THE INCIDENT OF THE SUPERNATURAL BIRTH IN MÄRCHEN

We have found the story of Perseus to consist of three leading trains of incident, namely, the Supernatural Birth, the Quest of the Gorgon’s Head, and the Rescue of Andromeda. In a large number of modern variants, however, the hero is duplicated, or even tripled. This introduces a fresh element, that of the Life-token. And in nearly all the modern European variants the Quest of the Gorgon’s Head undergoes a modification, and suffers a displacement to the end of the narrative. Other incidents are of course frequently mixed up with these, or even substituted for one or other of them. But, speaking broadly, the tale may be taken to consist essentially of the four elements I have named, which I now propose to examine separately.

The first in order is the Supernatural Birth. Stories of supernatural birth may be said to have a currency as wide as the world. Heroes of extraordinary achievement or extraordinary qualities were necessarily of extraordinary birth. The wonder or the veneration they inspired seemed to demand that their entrance upon life, and their departure from it, should correspond with the impression left by their {72} total career. Tales of supernatural birth are accordingly so numerous that it is hopeless to give an adequate account of them here. The utmost that can be done is to lay before the reader a few of the most interesting and important examples analogous to those we have been considering in previous chapters.

If we examine stories of the Danae type, or The King of the Fishes type, we find that when, as usually in the former case, a maiden is the hero’s mother, only one child is born of her. It is sufficiently remarkable for a virgin to bring forth one child. But when, as in the greater number of variants of the latter type, a married woman is the mother, the prodigy must be placed beyond doubt by a double or threefold birth, and often by its repetition upon other animals who partake of the impregnating influence. This influence is generally conveyed in food. The peoples among whom the stories originated were either savages, or in a stage of civilisation but little advanced beyond that of savagery. They credited every marvel because they knew little of the properties of nature. Of the organisation of their own bodies they entertained the most rudimentary notions. Whether from an analogy between the normal act of impregnation and that of eating and drinking, or because they had learned that at least one mode of operating effectively on the organism, for purposes alike of injury and healing, was by drugs taken through the mouth, this was the favourite method of supernatural impregnation. In the stories we have already considered, fish or fruit has been the kind of food oftenest employed. Similar incidents are very numerous outside the Perseus group.

Among Slavonic nations, the agency of a fish, even in the special form in which it appears in the story of The King {73} of the Fishes, is not uncommon as an opening to other tales. Several are cited by Leskien and Brugman in the notes to their Litauische Märchen; and of them we may mention one or two. A Serbo-Croatian tale exhibits an eel cut into four pieces, of which the woman, the mare and the bitch eat one each and bear twins; the remaining piece, being buried, grows up into two golden swords. In a tale from the seaboard of Croatia a fisherman cuts a fish into three, giving a part each to his wife, the mare and the bitch, and hanging the scales in the chimney. The latter are forgotten in the sequel; but twins are born to the woman and the animals. A king in a Czech tale causes two fish with golden and silver fins to be caught. He eats one and his consort the other, with the result that she bears two boys, one with a golden, the other with a silver, star on his forehead. One of Afanasief’s Russian tales relates how a beggar advised a king to assemble boys and girls of seven years old, and let the maidens spin and the boys in one night knit together a net with which a carp having golden fins is to be caught for the queen to eat. The dog, however, gets the intestines, and the three mares the water wherein the fish has been washed; while the cookmaid gnaws the bones. Queen, cook and dog bear each a son named Ivan, of whom the dog’s son is the strongest; and he makes a successful raid underground on the realm of the monsters. The mares bear a foal each. A childless king, in another of Afanasief’s tales, builds a bridge over a pathless swamp; and when it is finished he sends a servant to hide and listen to the remarks of the wayfarers. Two beggars approach. The one praises the king; the other says: “One ought to wish him posterity.” And he goes on to prescribe a silken draw-net knit by night {74} before cock-crow. This, if let down into the sea, would catch a golden fish; and the queen, eating thereof, would bear a son. A Polish tale represents a Gipsy woman as counselling a noble, but barren, lady to catch a fish full of roe in the sea, and to eat the roe at sunset at full-moontide. Her chambermaid, however, tastes it also, and, like her mistress, bears a son.^74.1^ In Bohemia the tale is related of a childless monarch, who issues a proclamation offering a reward to any one who will find means whereby he may obtain an heir. An old woman presents herself and offers her help, on condition of being maintained until her death in honour in the royal palace. Her terms being accepted, she hastens to the brook which flows through the royal gardens and draws forth a gold-fish and a silver-fish. When these are cooked the queen eats the gold-fish and the beldam the silver-fish. The former bears a son on whose forehead beams a golden star, and the latter a son similarly adorned with a star of silver.^74.2^

The population of Eastern Pomerania is probably in the main Slavonic. There the people tell of a queen to whom a beggar-woman brought two fishes to be eaten by herself; nobody else was to taste them. The cat, however, stole one; and she and the queen bore a son apiece.^74.3^ Outside the Slavonic populations, the incident in this form does not seem a favourite in Europe. But we find in Iceland a story of an earl’s wife, to whom three women in blue mantles appear in a dream, and command her to go to a stream at hand, and, laying herself down, to drink of it and try to get into her mouth a certain trout she will see {75} there, when she will at once conceive. These women are doubtless Norns, for they appear again at the birth and pronounce the fate of the daughter who is born to the lady in consequence.^75.1^

Among the Eskimo it is also a woman who provides the fish. She meets the husband, and from her bag produces two small dried fishes, a male and a female. His wife is to eat the former if a son be desired, the latter if a daughter. As he does not want a daughter, he himself eats the female fish, with the wholly unexpected result that he himself gives birth to the daughter.^75.2^

Two curious tales are recorded from Annam. One of them, thought by M. Landes, who collected it, to be of Chinese provenience, speaks of a childless man who determined to eat an enormous eel known to inhabit a certain river-confluence. To him a bonze comes and begs him to spare it. When he cannot prevail, the holy man asks for food ere he retires. He is given the usual vegetables, cooked according to Buddhist ritual for this purpose without salt or seasoning, and then goes away. The other man catches the eel by poisoning the water; and when it is cooked the food offered to the bonze is found in its stomach: hence it is known that the bonze was no other than a manifestation of the eel. After the man has eaten the eel, his wife becomes pregnant and gives birth to a son, who ultimately proves the ruin of his parents. In short, he is no other than the eel, who thus avenges itself on its murderer.^75.3^ Here we find expressly asserted the identity of the progeny with the mysterious fish, a subject whereto {76} I shall have to return in a future chapter. The other Annamite story is a variant of the well-known group of The Lucky Fool. A lazy man was once lying on a raft when a fish leaped upon it. The man caught the fish, scraped off its scales; and, being too slothful to rise and wash it in the water, he rinsed it in his own urine, and threw it on the raft to dry. It is, however, carried off by a raven into the king’s daughter’s garden. Her maids bring it to her; and when it is cooked she eats it, and immediately becomes pregnant. In due time she gives birth to a son; and the king summons all the men of his kingdom that he may choose a husband for her. The lazy man floats his raft to the front of the palace. The princess’ son sees him from the palace-roof, and hails him as his father. Believing in this wise child, the king sends for the lazy man to his presence, and gives him the princess in marriage.^76.1^ Such was the reward of laziness.

In India the ordinary mode of supernatural conception is by the eating of fruit. A few examples will suffice. I have in a previous chapter related Somadeva’s tale of Indívarasena and his brother, who were born in consequence of their mother’s eating two heavenly fruits. The Kathá-sarit-Ságara, or Ocean of the Streams of Story, contains other narratives to the same effect. Concerning the birth of the famous hero Vikramáditya, it tells us that Siva appeared to his mother in a dream and gave her a fruit.^76.2^ Another childless queen, after propitiating Siva, receives a fruit in a dream from “a certain man with matted locks,” no doubt a fakir.^76.3^ In modern folklore Siva appears in the garb of a jogí, or fakir, to a childless king {77} and hands him four fruits, which the queen is to eat the following Sunday before sunrise, and she will then bear four sons, who will be exceedingly clever and good.^77.1^ Elsewhere we are told of a rajah, who has seven wives, but no offspring. He is given by a fakir a stick, with instructions to knock down seven mangoes from a certain tree and, catching them as they fall, to take them home to his seven wives. Six of the wives eat the seven mangoes; and the seventh wife is reduced to eating one of the mango-stones thrown away by the other wives. All seven give birth to sons; but the son of the seventh is born in monkey-form. He is, of course, the hero, his brothers playing the same part towards him as those of Joseph, or those of Khodadad in the Arabian Nights.^77.2^ A barren woman in another tale goes to Mahadeo, or Siva. He meets with her in his customary disguise as a fakir, and gives her a mango, whereof she and two other women, who desire the same boon but have been deterred from reaching the god by the dangers of the way, are to eat. She is blessed with a son, and the other women with a daughter each.^77.3^ Mangoes, indeed, seem the usual prescription in Indian folktales.

Other fruits are not wanting. A fakir gives to a monarch who is without issue one hundred and sixty lichí fruits, which resemble plums—one for each of his wives.^77.4^ Barleycorns are given by another holy man for the same pious purpose.^77.5^ The Adventures of Kâmrûp, a literary romance {78} in Hindustani, tells of a king who had no children. He is presented by a fakir with a fruit of srî, or prosperity. It is eaten by his queen; and she and six other ladies who taste it add to the population on the same day.^78.1^ The youngest of seven brothers, in a Santali story, plants a certain vegetable which bears a fruit. He measures its growth daily, until it becomes a span long and then remains stationary. He warns his sisters-in-law: “Do not eat my fruit, for whoever does so will give birth to a child only one span long.” The temptation is too great for one of them. She plucks the fruit and eats it; and though she, in common with the other sisters-in-law, positively denies the theft, she is found out in due time by the advent of a baby one span long—a Santali Tom Thumb.^78.2^

According to a tale of the Altaic tribes of South Siberia, a girl when married is found to be already pregnant. On being questioned, her account of the matter was that she had picked up a lump of ice which had fallen with a heavy rain, and on breaking it in pieces she had found inside, and eaten, two grains of wheat. When her time came she bore twin boys.^78.3^ A curious legend obtained by Professor Haddon from an islander of Torres Straits declares that a woman, who had been deprived of her husband by a supernatural female and set adrift on the sea, was cast away on an island where she had no other food than some seeds which ornamented her ear-pendants. After consuming them she discovered that she was in the way to become a mother, and laid an egg, like a sea-eagle’s, out of which she hatched a bird. The bird supported her, and at length brought her back to her husband.^78.4^

Mohammedan stories attach, as we might expect, inordinate value to the male sex. They represent the fruit as eaten by the father, rather than by the mother. The Qissa Agar o Gul is an Urdu adaptation of a Persian romance. It was published as lately as 1880 at Lucknow. Here the fruit, a couple of apples, is given by a dervish to a king and his vizier, neither of whom has issue. Each of them eats his apple, and begets—the king, a son, and the vizier, twins, boy and girl.^79.1^ I have already referred incidentally to the case of Khodadad, who was one of fifty brethren begotten by a childless monarch upon his fifty wives, after eating as many pomegranate seeds. He had incessantly prayed for offspring, and was commanded in a dream by a man “of semblance like unto a prophet” to rise at dawn, and, saying certain prayers, to go to his Chief Gardener, from whom he was to require a pomegranate and to take of it as many seeds as seemed best to him.^79.2^ Another sultan is represented in the same great collection as receiving from a Takrúri, one of a Moslem negroid people credited by the Arabs with magical powers, a portion of certain medicinal roots, to be eaten by himself.^79.3^ So in the Turkish History of Forty Vezirs, where a childless king beseeches the intercession of a convent of dervishes, and sends them a fat ram and an offering of rice, honey and oil, the sheykh of the convent returns him a bowlful “of that meat,” ordering him to “desire a son and eat of the dervishes’ portion.”^79.4^ Yet the rule is not without exception. A sovereign of Serendib, in the Bahar Danush, receives from a religious recluse an apple with instructions to give {80} it to his consort.^80.1^ A tale told by the Kabyles of the Lower Atlas speaks of a man who bought seven apples for his seven wives. Growing hungry, he ate half of one, or, according to a variant, he gave it to a man who met him. The result was that the wife who had only the other half brought forth a dwarf.^80.2^ And in a Balochi tale a fakir gives a king two kunar-fruits (Zizyphus Jujuba), one to be eaten by himself and the other by his wife.^80.3^ These exceptions, however, are more apparent than real. The Bahar Danush is an Indian work, composed in the reign of Shah Jehan by Ināyatu ’llāh of Delhi, who professed to have received the stories of which it is composed from a Brahman. This is merely another way of saying that they are drawn from earlier Indian sources. The Kabyles are mountain tribes related to the Berbers. The religion of the Apostle of Allah sits lightly upon them. Their aboriginal precepts are at least as much regarded as those of the Koran; and so far are their social relations from being dominated by Arab customs, that their women enjoy free and unrestricted intercourse with both sexes, and are looked upon as almost if not quite the equals of men. The Balochis pay little more respect than the Kabyles to Islam; and their religious practices are largely tinged with their ancestral paganism and that of their neighbours.

When a European folktale, on the other hand, exhibits the husband as devouring the magical fruit meant for his wife, it does not fail to make him repent it. For example, in a Portuguese tale from Algarve, a woman who confesses to Saint Antony, and confides to him her despair of children, receives from the saint three apples to be eaten fasting. Arrived at home, she puts the apples down and {81} prepares breakfast. Her husband, meanwhile, coming in, finds and eats them. When he learned what he had done he was terrified, and sent his wife back to the holy man, only to have his terrors confirmed. As the time arrived he began to scream; nor had he any alleviation of his agony until a person who understood came and cut him open, and brought forth a daughter.^81.1^ But in cases where both parents partake of the fruit, the natural way of birth is the result. An old woman in an Abruzzian tale gives a fisherman’s wife an orange, to be eaten, half by herself and the other half by her husband. The rind is to be thrown at the foot of an orange-tree in the garden. A boy is born, and a sword grows at the foot of the orange-tree.^81.2^ A Greek tradition belonging to the Bluebeard cycle relates that an ogre divided an apple between a king and his wife, on condition that the eldest son was to be given to him. The queen thereafter bears three boys. This is from the island of Syra. A story from Ziza in Epirus speaks of two spouses who had lived with one another for forty years without issue, and who obtained a boy under similar conditions; and a mare to which they give the apple-parings bore a foal.^81.3^ On the whole we are probably warranted in {82} conjecturing that Mohammedanism has influenced all the stories where the husband consumes the fruit without evil results; and that they are a departure from the earlier form, in which the wife eats it alone. A variant of the last-mentioned märchen, also from Epirus, follows the usual rule. There a queen was presented with an apple by a Jew. She ate it and threw the peel away, and the mare devoured it. By and by the queen and the mare were both found pregnant.^82.1^ Beyond the Ægean Sea the Hellenic population has preserved the same version of the incident in a tale from Smyrna of a queen on whom a dervish confers three apples, with directions to eat them and she will have three boys.^82.2^ So, in a French tale from Louisiana, a lady is given an apple by an old woman. She eats the apple and throws the peel in the yard, where it is eaten by a mare. The next morning, so rapid is the effect of magical power, both she and the mare have brought forth young.^82.3^

The Russians have the story in a shape recalling some of the variants of the Danae type. A Tsaritsa, to quench her thirst, draws water from a white marble well in a golden cup. She drinks eagerly, and with the water swallows a pea, thus becoming pregnant of a son who is destined to achieve the destruction of the Savage Serpent.^82.4^ In White Russia we hear of a woman who, having drawn water, is returning with her bucket when she sees a pea rolling along. Saying to herself, “This is the gift of God,” she picks it up, eats it, and in course of time becomes the {83} mother of a tiny boy, “who grew not by years, but by hours, like millet-dough when leavened,” and became a hero of enormous strength and wisdom, called Little Rolling-pea.^83.1^

The consumption of some kind of drug, or enchanted compound, is also an approved method of causing pregnancy, especially (if we may judge by the proportion of tales wherein it appears) in India. In the Bengali tale of Life’s Secret a fakir offers a drug to a childless queen, to remove her barrenness, telling her that if she swallow it with the juice of a pomegranate flower a son will be born, whose life shall be bound up in a golden necklace, in a wooden box, in the heart of a big boal-fish, in the tank in front of the palace.^83.2^ A Buddhist tale, originally from India, has been found, containing the incident, in Ceylon, and also in the Kah-gyur, a Tibetan version of an Indian collection no longer extant. It narrates how Indra, the king of the gods, taking pity on his friend, King Sakuni, sends him a medicine, of which his wives are to drink, and he will thereby obtain sons and daughters.^83.3^ Often a bargain is made, as in some of the European tales already cited, that the queen shall bear twins, one of whom is to be given to the holy man, or supernatural being, through whose gift the curse of barrenness has been taken away. So in another Bengali tale a religious mendicant came to a king who had no issue, and said: “As you are anxious to have a son, I can give the queen a drug, by swallowing which she will give birth to twin sons; but I will give the medicine on this condition, that of those twins you will {84} give one to me and keep the other yourself.”^84.1^ And the same bargain is made by a jogi in a folktale from the Kamaon in the Himalaya, in giving a fruit, which, divided between a king’s seven wives, causes them to bear a son apiece.^84.2^ Nor is the bargain confined to India. In a tale told by the Swahili, or mongrel inhabitants, half Negro half Arab, of Zanzibar, a demon came disguised as a man to a sultan who lacked a son, and asked: “If I give you a medicine, and you get a son, what will you give me?” The sultan offers half his property; but it is rejected. He then offers half his towns. The demon replies: “I am not satisfied.” The sultan inquires: “What do you want, then?” And he said: “If you get two children, give me one, and take one yourself.” The sultan said: “I have consented.” The demon accordingly brings him a medicine, which his wife takes and bears three sons.^84.3^

Sometimes the drug is given by one of the lower animals, most of which, it is hardly necessary to remind the reader, are regarded by peoples in the lower culture as of superhuman power or knowledge. In a Kaffir story, a bird gives a childless wife some pellets to be taken before food, and she consequently bears a beautiful daughter.^84.4^ A curious tale was related to the Rev. Charles Swynnerton in the Panjab of a snake who was about to eat a young man, when his wife wept and asked the creature what would become of her when her husband was eaten;—why was he {85} going to inflict this injury upon her? The serpent in remorse crept back to his hole and fetched two magical globules, saying: “Here, foolish woman, take these two pills and swallow them, and you will have two sons to whom you can devote yourself, and who will take good care of you!” The girl, however, replied: “But what about my good name?” The snake, who knew not that she was already wed, became exasperated. “Women are such preposterous beings!” he cried, as he fetched two more pills. These he gave to the disconsolate girl, telling her: “When any of your neighbours revile you on account of your sons, take one of these pills between finger and thumb, hold it over them, rubbing it gently so that some of the powder may fall on them, and immediately you will see them consume away to ashes.” Tying the former pills in her cloth, the girl looked at these new pills incredulously. Then, with a sudden thought, she gently rubbed them over the snake, saying with an innocent air: “O snake, explain this mystery to me again! Is this the way I am to rub them?” The moment the magical powder touched the snake he was set on fire; and in another instant he was merely a long wavy line of grey dust lying on the ground.^85.1^ In one of the Arabian Nights the potent drug is the flesh of two serpents. It is prescribed by King Solomon to a king of Egypt and his vizier, both of whom were without issue. The serpents in question were remarkable: the one had a head like an asp’s, the other a head like an ifrit’s. And their flesh forms an exception to the Mohammedan rule already noted in these cases, for it was to be given to the wives of the childless men.^85.2^

Coming to Europe, we find a story told at Torricella {86} Pelligna, in the Abruzzi, where a fairy, under the form of an old woman, tells the king that he will have no children until the queen shall drink a decoction made with three hairs from the devil’s beard. A servant is accordingly despatched for these precious materials; and when, after various adventures, he returns with them, the prescription proves so successful that the queen bears a daughter fair as the sun.^86.1^ The medicine, however, is more frequently used in European märchen to gratify spite against an unfortunate maiden, by putting her unwittingly into a condition inconsistent with maidenhood. In a Tuscan tale, for example, a stepmother hates her stepdaughter, and is taught by a beggar-woman how to injure her. She accordingly prepares, from the blood of seven wild beasts, a philtre whose property it is to cause pregnancy. Her father consents to her being put to death; but the ruffians charged with the crime content themselves by simply abandoning her in the wood. She is delivered in due time of a dragon with seven heads of different animals, who becomes his mother’s guardian, procures for her an honourable marriage with a king, and ultimately transforms himself into a man.^86.2^ A South Slavonic tale from Varadzin yields a similar plot. There it is a queen whose daughter is beloved by her father to such an extent as to rouse her jealousy. She is advised by a tramp to go on Good Friday to a churchyard, dig up a bone, grate it, and give the gratings to her daughter next {87} morning in her coffee. The girl becomes pregnant, and is set adrift on a ship. She bears a son who is spotted, but who, after various adventures, is disenchanted of his foul deformity.^87.1^

We shall hereafter have to consider several superstitious beliefs and practices in connection with the dead. Here I simply pause to mention two other Slav stories attributing to portions of dead human bodies the reproductive faculty. The first comes to us from Bohemia, where it is said that a gravedigger’s beautiful daughter was followed about by a skull that never quitted her feet. By a witch’s advice her father burned it and made his daughter swallow the ashes. In consequence of so doing, she gave birth to a son who held mysterious converse with the Sleeping Heroes beneath Mount Blanik.^87.2^ The other is a Lithuanian story from Godleva, concerning a hermit who, in obedience to God’s express command, burned himself alive by way of penance. The day after his immolation a hunter passed by the place, and turned aside to see the remains of the pyre, and ascertain the cause of the strange smell. Poking among the ashes he found the hermit’s heart, which he took home to his daughter to cook for his supper. She, however, ate it herself and in two hours bore a son of powers, it need hardly be said, as remarkable as his parentage.^87.3^ It is {88} interesting to observe that in India potency of this kind is attached to fakirs and religious mendicants. A special privilege would seem to belong in the popular mind to such religious consecration. Vows of celibacy and other ascetic usages have their compensation. In all ages and countries, indeed, the virtue of asceticism, of self-sacrifice, or of suffering however caused, has been recognised. The Egyptian märchen of The Two Brothers, which was written down more than twelve hundred years before the Christian era, exhibits this as one of its central ideas. I shall have to refer to this legend again. It is enough to remark here that, just as the self-immolation of the hermit in the Lithuanian story seems to have conferred upon his heart the strange quality we are discussing, Bata, the younger of the Two Brothers, by his unmerited sufferings acquired an inherent and miraculous capacity of metamorphosis and reproduction. When the persea-trees, in whose form he found himself during his chequered career, were being cut down, a chip flew from one of them and entered the mouth of the king’s favourite, once his own wife. She swallowed it and, conceiving, gave birth to a male child, who was no other than a new manifestation of her former husband, Bata.^88.1^

For in these tales not only the fruit but also other parts of a tree or shrub are endowed with the power of causing conception. In Denmark we are told of a wise woman, by whose counsel a childless queen goes down before sunrise into the royal garden and eats the three buds of a certain {89} thorny bush. After six months the queen bears a daughter, who must be kept from her parents’ sight until her fourteenth birthday, else both mother and child will suffer a dire misfortune.^89.1^ An Icelandic tale gives, by a beggar-woman’s mouth, the following recipe for growing the magical plant: “Your majesty must make them bring in two pails of water some evening before you go to bed. In each of them you must wash yourself, and afterwards throw away the water under the bed. When you look under the bed next morning, two flowers will have sprung up, one fair and one ugly. The fair one you must eat; the ugly one you must let stand.” The temptation, however, was too great for the lady. Having eaten the fair one and found it delicious, she proceeded to eat the ugly one, and gave birth in due time to two daughters, a fair and a loathly one. The latter, though hideous, is her sister’s good angel, and eventually wedding the king’s son, becomes the most beautiful woman in the world.^89.2^ It will be remembered that the fakir in one of the Bengali tales already cited prescribes the juice of a pomegranate-flower to be taken with his drug. Annamese folklore recounts the history of a maiden who, walking in a garden, plucks and eats a lovely flower. Her parents (who seem to have had a shrewd opinion of religious celibates) suspected the bonze of a neighbouring pagoda of having dishonoured her, and sent her to the pagoda, where she was delivered of no fewer than five sons of marvellous powers, and all exactly alike. Questioned as to their names, the first calls himself The Strong, the second Steel-body-iron-liver, the third Search-cloud-drive-dust, the fourth The Dry, and the fifth The Damp. They get up a quarrel with the king, and ultimately compel him {90} to yield his throne to Search-cloud, who is the wisest of the brothers.^90.1^ In the Pentameron a nobleman’s sister offers a prize to that one of her maids who succeeds in clearing a certain rosebush at a jump. All fail; and the lady herself, trying it, knocks off a leaf. With great adroitness she picks it up and swallows it unobserved, and thus wins the prize. After three days, mysterious pains seize her; and she learns with horror from a friendly fairy that no doubt she is pregnant from the roseleaf she has swallowed. This turns out to be the fact. A lovely baby-girl is born, for whom a strange destiny is in store. A spell is laid upon her by the fairies that if, at seven years of age, her mother be allowed to comb her, the comb will be left stuck in her hair, and she will thereupon die. The story follows a similar course to that of the Danish one just cited.^90.2^ In a Tuscan folktale a woman wedded for many years, but childless, obtains a son by eating “a certain herb” pointed out to her by a fairy, to whom she promises in return a fair present. But she and her husband neglect to fulfil the promise; and to punish them the boy is born and remains of diminutive size.^90.3^ The Passamaquoddies, a North American tribe of tolerably pure blood in New England, attribute the birth of a medicine-man, a hero of their folklore, to his mother’s biting off every bush as she travelled through the woods. From one of these bushes, the narrative does not say which of them, she comes to be with child.^90.4^

Romances are, of course, literature, not folklore. In {91} other words, they are the deliberate productions of civilisation, they are works of conscious art. Their authority, therefore, as evidence of tradition is greatly inferior to that with which the report of a folktale is invested. Folktales, when written down, cease to be traditions. They are merely evidence of tradition preserved for us by reporters. Their value depends on the accuracy and knowledge with which they have been reported. The more closely they represent the very words of the tellers of the tales—the bearers of the traditions—the more valuable, the more authentic, they are. Romances, on the other hand, cannot claim to be reports of traditions. They are subject to the laws of art, as developed under the influences of civilisation. Even when starting from real traditions, their aim is not accuracy but amusement. Whatever changes are required by the development of taste or fashion, whatever changes will from any cause add to the pleasure of the reader, their authors are at liberty—nay, they are bound—to make. But when all this is conceded there remains the fact that an immense number of romances start from tradition, and embody its characteristic barbarisms and its fantastic impossibilities. Of this kind is an incident in the Spanish Romance de don Tristan by Alonso de Salaya, written towards the end of the fifteenth century. It is related there that, Tristram being wounded in a transport of jealousy by King Mark, Isolte visited him; and the two lovers shed abundant tears. From these tears a lily sprang. “Every woman who eats of it forthwith feels herself pregnant; Queen Isolte ate of it to her sorrow.”^91.1^

In the Annamite story of The Lazy Man mentioned {92} just now, the fish had been washed in the man’s urine. A variant, also from Annam, describes a sort of female Tom Thumb, born in answer to prayer, as eating the rind of a water-melon, the substance of which had been eaten by a prince. The prince, before throwing the rind away, had made water into it; and the heroine consequently became pregnant.^92.1^ In both these cases it is the man’s urine that confers the efficacy upon the food. A nasty Nubian tale ascribes the same result to a woman’s drinking, under stress of great thirst, the urine of an ass.^92.2^

Other stories recall the German Water Peter and Water Paul, discussed in a previous chapter. A maiden in a Tjame tale, being thirsty, sees water spring from the midst of some rocks in the forest and fill a rocky basin. There she drinks and bathes. But when, on returning to her father who is at work hard by, he asks her to show him the spring that he may drink also, it is already dried up. Her subsequent pregnancy is said to be the result of having drunk of that spring. She gives birth to a son round as a cocoa-nut, and covered with a cocoa-nut envelope. He turns out to be a great magician. A princess penetrates his disguise and marries him. At night when he comes out of his envelope, his wife buries it and persuades him to exhibit himself in his true and beautiful manhood.^92.3^ A Wallachian märchen brings before us a maiden condemned by the king, her father, to seclusion from her earliest infancy in a castle to which no men were allowed access. {93} His precautions were vain. At the age of sixteen a Gipsy woman gives her a flower she declares herself to have found in the forest, not far from the castle. The princess plays with it until the evening, and then puts it in water until the morning. The water becomes purple-red, like the lovely flower itself, with little golden and silver stars swimming in it, like the fragrant dust on the petals. The princess had never seen anything of the kind. She was so delighted that she dipped the whole flower into the water and crumpled it up. At last she lifted up the glass, and, finding the water had taken a delicious scent, she drank it to the bottom. Before long she had reason to repent. Her condition became manifest, and her stern father would listen to no denials. Beside himself with rage, he caused her to be fastened up in a cask and thrown into the sea. There she bore a son, and was, with the child, cast after a while on shore. The rest of the story unfortunately is not so much to her credit; for she forms a tender connection with an ogre, and plots against the son who has been her support and comforter in her outcast condition.^93.1^ A Gipsy story from southern Hungary represents a childless woman as given by a witch a certain liquid, with instructions to pour it into a gourd, and drink it in the waxing of the moon. Unhappily, however, the child is born dead. Now, a stillborn child becomes a Mulo, a kind of ghoul dwelling in the mountains and guarding hidden treasure. This prospect was so terrible to the woman and her husband, that the latter made a journey to the mountains, and at last got the child back from the Mulo-folk, and he grew up a clever man.^93.2^

Nor is it only by the mouth that supernatural impregnation has been fabled to take place. A variant from Varadzin of one of the South Slavonic tales quoted a few paragraphs back mentions a youth who was fated to kill his parents. Rather than fulfil so horrible a doom he burnt himself to death. But his heart remained intact and palpitating. A maiden passed by, saw and smelt the heart, and gave birth to a boy, who was no other than the first come to life again. He had struggled against his fate in vain, and in due course, though unwittingly, he slew his former parents.^94.1^ In a Sanskrit romance, the Princess Chand Ráwati, bathing in the Ganges, sees a flower afloat on the water and takes it up to smell. It contains some sperma genitale which has escaped from a Rishi; the lady inhales this, with consequences readily guessed, having regard to the holiness of the ascetic. But in this case her son appropriately finds his way into the world by his mother’s nose. It is satisfactory to add that she eventually marries the lad’s father, and that the lad himself by his filial obedience and courage obtains immortality.^94.2^ Even without the adventitious aid of a saint, the scent or the touch of flowers has been known in traditional songs and fairy tales to produce the same result. A Gipsy story from the Land beyond the Forest speaks of a woman who, by smelling a certain flower, became pregnant of a son, born in the form of a serpent; and in another, from southern Hungary, a childless queen receives from a beldam a camomile flower to bear in her bosom, on the stipulation she should give in exchange one of the sons whom she would bring into the world.^94.3^ A Portuguese {95} romanceiro speaks of an enchanted herb, which any woman who touched would at once feel herself fertilised. A ballad current in Asturia narrates that the princess Alexandra was fated to tread on so apparently innocent a herb as borage. The king of Spain, her father, with his parental eyes, detected that there was something the matter. He summoned the doctors; and when she had given birth to a boy he executed summary justice upon her by cutting off her head.^95.1^ In Sardinia the folk tell of a maiden who, while buying some roses from a woman, took them up to examine, when they all fell to pieces. The woman, annoyed, cursed her to become pregnant by the petals; and her imprecation was only too effective.^95.2^ Here it is the curse which provides the magical power. A different origin is attributed to it in a Bulgarian ballad. A widow, we are told, had nine sons who were all carried off by the plague. One of them was his mother’s idol. She buried him in her courtyard, and every day she came to weep upon his grave. In obedience to a voice proceeding from the earth, she gathered two hyacinth flowers which grew upon the tomb, hid them in her bosom, and thus conceived afresh. A son was born, over whom she uttered the wish: “Mayest thou one day reave the kingdom from the king!” When her words were reported to the monarch he ordered the boy to be thrown into an underground dungeon, and there left. After several years the king was attacked by a horrible malady; grass grew between his bones and his eyes littered mice. He naturally believed that this was the consequence of the widowed mother’s curses, and sent to the dungeon for the boy’s bones, for the purpose of forwarding them to her, as the only consolation in his power to give her. But {96} the messengers found the boy alive and reading the gospel, which was held before him by Saint Friday, while Saint Sunday further contributed to his convenience by holding the candle. The youth, fated by his mother’s words, arose from his pious exercises, and going to the king, tore out his eyes, cut off his hands, and turned him out of doors to beg his bread. Then he placed himself upon the throne, trifling the while with a sceptre that weighed, mere toy that it was, some three hundred pounds.^96.1^

I have cited fully the substance of this ballad as given by M. Dragomanov, because that scholar is inclined to trace the influence of Buddhism in the last touch. Buddha, he says, is considered as a man of great physical force, and in several places his sceptres of considerable weight are shown. The learned critic specifies none of the places in question; but we may for the nonce admit the literal accuracy of his statement. He does not commit himself, however, to the assertion that no other hero of legend or fairy tale had ever been possessed of gigantic strength or material “properties” of unusual proportions. He merely assumes it; and upon the validity of this assumption his reasoning is founded. Gautama no doubt underwent many incarnations; and perhaps European students may yet be persuaded to hold that the paladin Roland was a Bodisat and Thor a full-blown Buddha. They will then probably extend their articles of belief over the rest of the world, including the countless personages of wondrous might and bulk that swarm in the traditions of the Slavonic race, to which, in great part at all events, the Bulgars belong. The task of converting them may be commended to M. Dragomanov; {97} and, meanwhile, we may dismiss the suggestion of Buddhist influence on this Bulgarian ballad.

But it is not only flowers and herbs that possess the magical virtue of causing conception by the touch. In an Eskimo tradition a man who longs for offspring is advised to set off in his kayak to the open sea. When he hears a voice like that of a child crying, he must go towards it; and he will then find a worm, which he must bring home and throw on his wife’s body. Having followed this counsel, he beholds the worm disappear in the woman’s body; and soon afterward she gives birth to a son, who becomes a seal-fisher of marvellous powers.^97.1^ According to a story given by Dr. von Wlislocki as current among the Armenian settlers at the foot of the Carpathians, a childless queen picked up in her garden a half-dead bird. She restored it to life, putting its bill between her lips to give it breath. Her saliva touched its tongue and gave it human speech. By its directions she hid in the garden at midnight and watched until a Luckwife—that is to say, a Fate or Norn—came to bathe in the pool. Then she caught up the golden veil left by the Luckwife lying on the margin, and ran off with it. Binding it round her body, she wore it next her skin for nine months, until she at length brought forth a lovely daughter.^97.2^

Another form of assistance by birds is found among the Zulus. The birth of Unthlatu was on this wise. Two pigeons came to his mother, who was a chief’s wife. One said: “Vukutu;” the other asked: “Why do you say ‘Vukutu,’ since she has no children?” They bargain with {98} her for a feed of castor-oil berries in exchange for the promise of a child. When they had eaten the berries they scarified her in two places on the loins, saying: “You will now have a child.” She accordingly gave birth to a beautiful boy, whom she hid in a boa’s skin to save him from the envy of her fellow-wives; for they had only given birth to brutes. In a variant the pigeons direct the woman to take a horn and cup herself, draw out a clot of blood, place it in a pot, lute it down and only uncover it in the ninth month. She acts accordingly; and on opening the pot a child is found within, to the astonishment of herself and her husband. Here, too, she has to hide the boy from the envy of the other women.^98.1^

A favourite märchen in Italy and Sicily is one which approaches far more nearly to the Danae type of the Perseus group. As told in Sicily, a king unblessed with {99} issue summons a wizard, to inquire of him whether his queen will have a babe, or not. The wizard replies that she will have a daughter, who in her fourteenth year will be impregnated by the sun. The child is accordingly born, and shut up with her nurse in a tower where the sun cannot penetrate. One day the little maiden finds a pointed bone in her food; and with its aid she scratches the wall of the tower until she scrapes a hole in it. Through this hole the sun shines on her and fulfils the prediction. A daughter is born in due course and exposed, but found by a king’s son, who ultimately falls in love with her, and weds her after learning of what ancestry she comes.^99.1^ The opening of this tale admits of many variations having nothing to do with the Supernatural Birth. Thus, in a Greek story from Epirus, a woman prays to the sun for a daughter, promising him that he may take her away when she is twelve years old. When she obtains the child, however, she seeks to evade the fulfilment of her promise, and hides the girl in the house, stopping up all windows, chinks and holes whereby the sun can reach her. But she forgets to stop up the keyhole; and the sun sends a ray that way into the house to seize and bring him the maiden.^99.2^ A Florentine story represents the astrologer as predicting that the lass will be carried away by the wind; and all {100} precautions against her destiny are vain.^100.1^ In another Sicilian tradition the soothsayer is wisely vaguer, his denunciations only extending to a dreadful fate at the age of eleven. A bird comes in through the hole the maiden has bored in the wall of her tower, and becomes a man. He is, in fact, an enchanted prince; and the misfortune she undergoes is the loss of her beauty in disenchanting him—a woe of light account in fairyland, where the virtuous are ever rewarded.^100.2^ A tale from the Azores relates that a king to whom a daughter had been born consulted his book of astrology; and in obedience to the directions he there found he confined her at the age of twelve in a tower having only one aperture, by which food was conveyed to her, and commanded that no bones be left in the meat supplied. By accident his command was disobeyed; a duke dressed, like MacKineely in the Irish tale, in female attire gains an opportunity of talking with her through the aperture. Who could resist such a temptation? The bone she had found in her food she utilises to enlarge the opening, so as to get out and flee with him.^100.3^ A similar illustration of the impossibility of cheating fate occurs in an old Hebrew manuscript. King Solomon, we learn from this veracious authority, had a beautiful daughter whose horoscope disclosed that she was to marry a poor Israelite of low birth. He therefore built a very high tower with no entrance, and there he imprisoned her with a stock of victuals. For some time his precautions appeared successful; but after a while a poor youth, exhausted from long travel, took shelter for the night in the carcase of an ox. When he had fallen asleep a large bird obligingly carried {101} carcase and youth up to the roof of the tower. There to his great surprise he found himself the next morning; and, like the prince borne by the Enchanted Horse in the Arabian Nights, he lost no time in making the princess’ acquaintance. They speedily fell in love with one another; but, with scruples that King Solomon perhaps would hardly have appreciated, he wrote a marriage contract in his own blood, calling upon God and the angels Michael and Gabriel to witness it.^101.1^ In a modern Transylvanian Gipsy version the foreign “common” man is carried up by a magical wooden bird, with which he has been gifted by Saint Nicholas in return for hospitality when the saint appeared to him in beggar’s guise. Though a favourite with the saint, his conscience does not seem to have been quite so tender as that of the poor Israelite.^101.2^ These tales carry us back to that of Gilgamos, as it is recounted by Ælian.

Happily I am not called upon to stand sponsor here for every irregular birth in a fairy tale. Cases of birth direct from fruit, diminutive births, impregnation in the ordinary way but by a supernatural being, and other instances, therefore need not detain us. But we ought not altogether to overlook the widespread story of The Lucky Fool. In the Pentameron Basile has given us what may be regarded as the typical form. Pervonto is a ninny who, going to cut wood in the forest, finds three youths asleep and perspiring in the hot sunshine. Taking pity on them, he sets up a shade of oak-leaves over their heads; and on their awaking they endow him with the power of obtaining anything by a wish. When the hero has made up a bundle of wood he sets himself astride of it and wishes it to carry him home. On the {102} way he passes on his strange palfrey the king’s palace; and the princess Vastolla, beholding him from the window, bursts out into loud laughter. Pervonto retorts by wishing her to become pregnant by him. The wish takes effect. Her children are twin boys; and at a banquet given by the king, to which all his male subjects are summoned, they identify their father. The king, enraged, encloses them with his daughter and Pervonto in a cask, and flings the cask into the sea. Again Pervonto’s magical wish becomes useful; for by its means he saves them all from peril, changes himself into a fair youth, and at last is reconciled to the king and recognised as Vastolla’s husband. Whence Basile, or the lady into whose mouth he puts the tale, draws the very relevant moral: Man proposes, God disposes.^102.1^

Chapter V. the Supernatural Birth in Sagas

Hitherto, dealing exclusively with märchen, or tales told for simple amusement, we have found the incident of the Supernatural Birth, outside the cycle of the Perseus myth, widely scattered in Europe, in Asia as far east as Annam, southward among the Zulu kraals of Africa and northward among the snows of Greenland. Nor does it occur in modern folklore only. It formed one of the chain of events in a tale of wonder carefully guarded for us through the long silence of three thousand years by an Egyptian mummy, to whose arms it had been intrusted at his burial, a precious fragment of the literature he had known and loved in life, and therefore deemed a gift appropriate to his service in his everlasting home. But the story of Perseus was, at all events in early ages, believed as an actual occurrence by the simple folk of Greece and wherever Greek influence extended the hero’s cult. Has the possibility of a Supernatural Birth of this kind been credited elsewhere and under other conditions of culture? In a land dominated by Christian thought the question seems superfluous. The mystery taught by the creeds of the Church, however, is believed to be something apart from all the other beliefs of the world, something altogether above {104} them, alike in its evidence and its consequences. Christians in thus thinking overlook the fact that to the believer in any religion its evidences are undeniable and its claims are supreme. The fact is that the incident in question is part and parcel of many other religions than the Christian, and is also gravely accepted among what we may call the secular and quasi-historical traditions of tribes in various parts of the Old and New World. Beyond this, as we shall see in another chapter, pregnancy is held actually producible by means analogous to those described in the legends, means outside the ordinary operations of nature. Into the bearing of these facts on the dogma of the Supernatural Birth of Jesus Christ, or on the historical evidence on which that dogma rests, it is not my purpose to inquire. This is a question of apologetics, not of folklore.

Many stories of Supernatural Birth belong to the cosmogonic legends of savage and barbarous tribes. These we may for the most part pass over. What may have happened to the monsters that in the dawn of things were the first to loom upon the horizon is hardly relevant. They may have had reasons of their own for their extraordinary conduct. Our business is with beings conceived in distinctly human terms and something like human proportions. The distinction may be hard to define, seeing that savage tribes hold savage opinions as to the power of men and brutes (or of some men, at least, and some brutes) to change their forms at will. In the same way märchen have no clear dividing line in the savage mind from sagas (or stories believed in as recording actual events) nor religious narratives from secular histories. It is one of the characteristics of savagery that these things are not as yet differentiated. Intellectual evolution is going on; but until a {105} much higher grade of civilisation be reached we cannot be sure that the divergence is complete. If, therefore, some of the stories I am going to refer to seem scarcely within the limits I have laid down, these difficulties in the way of definition must be borne in mind.

We began our review of märchen containing the incident of the Supernatural Birth by examples of the results of eating a magical fish or fruit. The fish is a means of impregnation comparatively little known in sagas. A legend of the Tupis of Brazil, however, bearing resemblances to stories of the type of Beauty and the Beast, represents the hero, a supernatural being, as fertilising a young virgin by means of a mysterious fish.^105.1^ A curious piece of gossip is recorded by John Aubrey concerning Archbishop Abbot’s mother, who is said to have dreamed that if she ate a jack the son then in her womb would be a great man. Accordingly, “she arose early the next morning and went with her pail to the river-side (which runneth by the house, now an ale-house, the sign of the Three Mariners) to take up some water, and in the water in the pail she found a good jack, which she dressed, and ate it all, or very near.” Her son in due time was born, and grew up to be Archbishop of Canterbury.^105.2^ If not exactly a great man, he was an able and honest one and a patriot, who suffered, by no means alone, from the superstition, or the malignity, of his successor, the “martyr” Laud.

On the other hand, the eating of fruit is found in {106} both hemispheres. In India it is told, as we might have expected, of the birth of Râjâ Rasâlû. Rânî Lonân, one of the two wives of Râjâ Sâlbâhan of Siâlkot, fell in love with her stepson Pûran, and, because he did not return her passion, traduced him to her husband, who cut off his hands and feet and threw him into a well. Pûran, however, like the hero of the Bulgarian ballad, survived this cruel treatment. After some years he was rescued by the Gurû Gorakhnâth, a Brahman of great sanctity, and became a celebrated fakir. Not knowing who he really was, the Rânî and her husband, desirous of offspring, came to him to pray for a son. He induced her to confess her crime; then, revealing himself, he gave her a grain of rice to eat, and told her she would bear a son who would be learned and brave and holy. That son was Râjâ Rasâlû, a monarch identified with the historical Sri Syâlapati Deva.^106.1^ Gogá, a favourite Mahratta saint, is said to have been childless until his guardian deity bestowed upon him two barleycorns, one of which he gave to his wife and the other to his favourite mare. A son and the famous steed Javadia were the consequence.^106.2^ The ancestry of the present, or Manchu, dynasty of China is traced to a heavenly maiden, who, having bathed one day in a certain pool, found on the skirt of her raiment a red fruit, placed there by a magpie. After eating it she found herself pregnant, and was delivered of a son of remarkable appearance, who spoke on the day of his birth. In obedience to a supernatural {107} voice she called him Aisin-gioro, ‘the heaven-born to restore order to disturbed nations.’ Having grown up, he embarked in a boat and drifted down the river, until he reached a place where families of three surnames were in constant broils. There he landed, and was breaking off willow branches, when a warrior, coming to draw water, saw him. Amazed at the hero’s aspect, the warrior fetched his people, who came and inquired who he was. “I am the son of the heavenly maiden Fokolun,” replied the youth, “ordained by heaven to restore peace among you.” They took him and made him king; and he reigned there in Odoli city, in the desert of Omohi, east of the mountains of Ch’ang-pai-shan. A Japanese tradition, reported by Père Amyot, appears to be a variant of the same story. It relates that three heavenly maids, of whom Fokolun was one, descended to bathe. While they were praying Fokolun saw a tree half-covered with black cherries. She proceeded to eat of them, with the consequences we know. Being in this condition, she could not return with her sisters until she had brought forth her son and handed him over to a fisherman to be bred up.^107.1^ Fokolun is identified by Amyot with a goddess whom he calls Pussa. It is quite possible that the present dynasty of China owes this legendary origin to a similar feeling to that which dictated so many of the mediæval miracle-stories in Europe. Fo-hi, the original founder of the Empire, was said to have sprung from a virgin named Ching-Mon, who ate a certain flower found on her garment after bathing. The striking resemblance {108} to this tale of that of Fokolun is due to conscious forgery as little, and as much, as the achievements of Christian saints, equalling and surpassing the wonders recorded in the Bible.^108.1^

The magpie mentioned in the Chinese version of the legend just recorded is replaced by a crow in the analogous incident at the opening of the Volsungasaga. A childless king and queen, we are told, besought the gods for an heir. Frigg, the mother-goddess, heard their prayers and sent them, in the guise of a crow, the daughter of the giant Hrimnir, and with her an apple, of which when the queen had eaten, she soon perceived that her wish would come to pass.^108.2^ In the fiftieth rune, that beautiful postscript to the Kalevala, Marjatta, the fair and gentle virgin, is addressed by the red bilberry and invited to pluck and eat. With the help of a staff she reaches down the mysterious fruit; but from the ground it climbs her shoe and then her knee, and so upward to her mouth, into which it slips and is swallowed. In this way she conceives. Her parents’ reproaches are met by the assertion that she is the paramour of none unless it be of fire, and that she will bear a hero who will rule the mighty, albeit Väinämöinen himself. In her extremity she applies to Ruotus for the vapour-bath which Finnish women are accustomed to take to facilitate delivery; but from him and his loathsome wife she gets nothing better than a contemptuous recommendation of a stable in the fir-forest. There, in a vapour-bath of the breath of horses, her child is born, and cradled in a {109} manger. She cares for him as a mother; but after a while he suddenly disappears, and she goes seeking him everywhere. In her wandering she meets a star, and, sinking before it on her knees, she asks:

“ ‘O thou star, that God created! Of my son dost thou know nothing, Where my darling son abideth, Where my golden apple tarries?’ And the star made haste to answer: ‘If I knew I would not say it; He it is who hath created Me to gleam thro’ cold and evil, Me to sparkle in the darkness.’ ”

The moon gives her the like answer. Then she meets the sun; and the sun tells her:

“ ‘Well I know thy little loved one. He it is who hath created Me thro’ all the hours of daylight In the sheen of gold to dazzle, Me to glint in sheen of silver. Well I know thy little loved one. Yonder, woman, is thy darling, Plunged in marshes to the girdle, In the moor e’en to the armpit.’ ”

Thus directed, Marjatta found her son and brought him home. He grew up beautiful but nameless. His mother called him Floweret, but strangers dubbed him Idler. An old man named Virokannas came to baptize and bless him, but hesitated to do so ere he had been examined and proved. Then came Väinämöinen old and trusty, who sentenced the boy, as he had been taken from the marsh and was sprung from a berry, to be laid upon the ground of the berry-bearing meadow, or taken to the marsh, and {110} his head crushed with a tree. But the son of the berry replies:

“ ‘O thou old man without insight, Without insight, full of folly! Thou hast given a foolish sentence; Ill thou hast the laws expounded!’ ”

Väinämöinen himself had taken the child of his own mother and thrown it into the water to redeem his own life. The boy reminds him of this, and hints that he will have to pay the penalty of his deed. Virokannas then quickly baptizes the boy, and blesses him to become king of Karjala and guardian of all powers.

I have narrated this incident somewhat at length, to exhibit the obvious mixture of heathen and Christian elements which it contains. Marjatta, there can be little doubt, is the Virgin Mary; Ruotus has been identified with Herod; and the discomfiture and departure of Väinämöinen, which follow the cited passages, point very clearly to the expulsion of paganism as typified by the mighty figure of the great sorcerer. Lönnröt’s method in the compilation of the epic from fragmentary songs leaves much to be desired in the certainty of traditional origin of many of its verses, perhaps of entire episodes; and the one before us may not be free from suspicion. Yet it is hardly likely that the poet would have had recourse to the savage conceit of the berry, had he not found it already in the legend he has presented to us. It would be difficult to match it in the sagas of modern Europe. As we saw just now, the analogous conceit of the fish is found in the case of Archbishop Abbot in no bolder shape than a dream. So the Irish Life of Saint Molasius of Devenish, preserved to us in a manuscript, written, probably from dictation, in {111} the sixteenth century—that is to say, not long before the English tale became current—presents the holy man’s mother as dreaming “that she got seven fragrant apples; and the last apple of them that she took into her hand her grasp could not contain it for its size; gold (as it seemed to her) was not lovelier than the apple.” Her husband interprets the dream of “an offspring, excellent and famous, with which the mouths of all Ireland shall be filled:” an interpretation of course justified by the saint’s birth.^111.1^ We may conjecture that the legend in an earlier form related that impregnation took place by means of an apple; but before it was put into writing, perhaps long before, the incident had been modified by the slowly growing intelligence of the folk who related it.

To the aborigines of North America, however, this unusual mode of generation has always been within the limits of belief. Yehl, the famous hero of the North-west Coast, effected one of his numerous births by transforming himself into a spear of cedar or a blade of grass, or, as it is told in a variant, a drop of water, and being swallowed by his principal opponent’s daughter, or sister, as she was drinking. Most legendary heroines have been satisfied with one such miracle. This lady seems to have been {112} specially unfortunate; and we do not wonder at the suspicions of her natural guardian, when we are expressly told that she was not allowed to eat or drink anything until the chief had examined it, as she had become pregnant from eating certain things many times before. One man cannot know all Yehl’s adventures, as the Thlinkit very truly assert; for all their accounts differ. The adventure we are now dealing with was undertaken for the purpose of rescuing the sun, moon and stars, which his antagonist, whose favourite grandson he thus became, had stored away in three mysterious chests. On a previous occasion he had assumed the unlikely form of a small pebble on the sea-shore. A woman whose sons had all been slain by her brother was pacing the beach and weeping for the dead, when a large fish—it is equally credible whether a dolphin or a whale—pitied her and spoke to her, telling her to swallow the pebble and drink some sea-water. She did so, and bore a child, Yehl, who avenged her on his uncle. After all his various achievements on behalf of mankind, Yehl became the totem of the Raven Clan of the Thlinkit.^112.1^ When America was discovered, the Aztecs, though they had not emerged from the Stone Age, were, compared with the Thlinkit, a civilised people. Yet they continued to believe in the generation of their famous god Quetzalcoatl in a similar manner to that of Yehl. One {113} account relates that he owed his birth to a precious green stone, identified by Captain Bourke with the turquoise, which his mother Chimalma found one day while sweeping, and swallowed.^113.1^

I shall have to recur to American traditions; but I must first mention other instances of pregnancy from eating or drinking. Heitsi-Eibib, the Hottentot ancestor-god, owed his birth to this cause. In one of the legends a young girl picks a kind of juicy grass, chews it and swallows the sap. Thence becoming pregnant, she gives birth to the hero. In another legend it is a cow that eats of a certain grass, and Heitsi-Eibib is consequently born as a bull-calf.^113.2^ In the saga of Ardshi-Bordshi we are told that a childless queen procured from a hermit a handful of earth to be boiled in sesame oil in a porcelain vessel. On boiling it, behold! it was changed into barley porridge, which she ate, but neglected to eat the whole of it, as the hermit commanded. When she had eaten she found herself “in blessed circumstances,” and bore Vikramâditya, a Bodisat and a king of renown. Her maid, having finished what was left of the porridge, was also delivered of a boy, who became the Bodisat’s faithful companion.^113.3^ Here, as M. Cosquin remarks, we are reminded of the märchen in the Pentameron, already cited. The material eaten bears us back to a story alleged to be part of the Siamese cosmology. {114} After a gradual degeneration of the human race, we are assured, the sea will be dried up and the earth destroyed by fire. Converted into dust and ashes, it will be purified by a wind, which will carry off all remains of the conflagration. So sweet an odour will then exhale from the purified soil that it will draw from heaven a female angel, who will take of this sweet-smelling substance and eat. The pleasure will cost her dear; for she will no more be able to ascend to her native home, and by means of her strange food she will conceive and give birth to twelve sons and daughters, who will repopulate the world. For an inconceivably long period this new race will remain gross and ignorant, until in the fulness of time a god will be born to dissipate the darkness by teaching the true religion, the virtues that must be practised, the vices that must be shunned and all other sciences needful to be known, giving to the people scriptures where all these things are explained, and writing upon their hearts the holy law, so long effaced from the mind of man.^114.1^

The Shih King, one of the sacred books of the Chinese, contains an ode intended to be recited at a sacrifice in the ancestral temple of Shang. It refers to the origin of Shang’s father Hsieh. His mother was a concubine of Khû, a ruler who flourished in the twenty-fifth century before Christ. She was bathing, as these Chinese heroines frequently are on such occasions, when a heaven-commissioned {115} swallow dropped an egg, which she took and gulped down, becoming in this way the mother of Hsieh.^115.1^ The lady is not here, as in the case of other founders of Chinese dynasties, represented as a maiden. Yu’s mother, for instance, appears to be thus regarded. A pearl, a substance not more unpromising than a pebble, fell in her bosom, and she swallowed it. According to one version the boy was born from her breast.^115.2^ A Mongolian tale traces the origin of the Chinese nation to a Khan’s daughter, who compelled a poor Bandé to disgorge a precious stone as big as a sheep’s eye, which he had stolen from two men, and swallowed. As soon as he brought it up, she seized and swallowed it in her turn. It rendered her pregnant. The Bandé, by reading a charm, turned her into a she-ass; and in this form she gave birth to twin boys, one good, the other evil. From them the Chinese nation is descended.^115.3^ Several Tartar tribes ascribe their lineage to Alankava, the virgin daughter of Gioubiné, son of Bolduz, king of the Mongols. One night a great light awakened and embraced her, entering her mouth and passing through her body. As this peculiar proceeding was repeated every night, in order to dissipate suspicions of her virtue (for she had become pregnant) the chiefs of the national assembly were introduced into her chamber to witness the occurrence. When her time was come she gave birth to three boys, each of whom was the ancestor of a tribe, and from one of whom Genghis Khan and Tamerlane descended.^115.4^ An Irish tradition more modestly (probably {116} for reasons discussed on a previous page) presents the mother of Kieran, the first saint born on Hibernian soil, as only dreaming that a star fell into her mouth.^116.1^

The heroic traditions of Ireland—at least those of Ulster—do not stick at a dream. Both Conchobar and Cuchulainn were of supernatural birth. Cathba, the noble Druid, was thirsty one night; and Ness, his wife, finding nothing in the house, went down to the river Conchobar and drew from thence, filtering the water through her veil. When she brought it to her husband and a light was struck, lo! there were two worms in the water. Thereupon Cathba drew his sword and forced his wife, under threat of death, to drink what she had brought for him. She drank two mouthfuls, and swallowed at each mouthful one of the worms. She soon found she had conceived; and it was of those worms she had conceived, though later times discredited this, asserting that the king of Ulster was her lover and the father of her child Conchobar.^116.2^ This mode of conception was a family failing, for Cuchulainn, Conchobar’s nephew, was born in the same way. His mother, Dechtire, Conchobar’s sister, returning from the funeral of a foster-son of whom she had been very fond, asked for a drink in a bronze cup. As she put the cup to her lips she felt a little creature enter her mouth with the drink. After drinking she lay down to sleep, and a man appeared to her in a dream, telling her, among other things, that {117} he had been her foster-son, that now he had entered her womb and she was pregnant of him, and that he was to be called Setanta. This man was Lug, one of the ancient Celtic divinities, identified with the grandson of Balor, the mythical warrior of Tory Island.^117.1^

The manuscripts in which both these stories are preserved are much older than those that record the dreams preceding the births of Saints Kieran and Molasius. Yet the life of Saint Molasius, modern though it be in the recension we possess, attributes to its hero the power so often wielded by an Indian fakir. When he was journeying, with certain of his clerics, in the land of Carbery he saw a woman milking, who replied courteously and even generously to a request for a drink for his attendant. In return, she prayed for the saint’s intercession to be relieved of her barrenness, for hitherto she was childless. Then Molasius bade her: “Call thy husband; let him take my cup to the well and bring us back its fill of water in it.” When the water was given into his hand he blessed and consecrated it, and passed it to the woman to drink, prophesying that henceforth she should be pregnant and bear a son, who was to be “good, miraculous, saintly, wonder-working, righteous.” Thus was born “the very noble bishop Finnacha,” so named by Molasius when he gave his mother to drink.^117.2^ The Book of the Dun Cow at the end of the eleventh century gives a similar incident in a much more savage form. Dermot, king of Ireland, had {118} several wives, of whom Mughain was unhappy, because she had no children and the king was purposing to dismiss her. So she sought out Finnian and bishop Aedh, and implored their succour. They blessed water and gave it her to drink; but the result was nothing more encouraging than a lamb. Finnian consoled her as best he could for the mishap, and blessed more water. The next time she brought forth a salmon literally of silver. This, of course, was appropriated by the holy man for the service of the church as material for a reliquary and other sacred objects. Then he and bishop Aedh made another and supreme effort. They blessed her, and one of them put water into his cup and gave it to the queen, who both drank of it and washed in it. She ought perhaps to have done this before, for “by this process she found herself with child, and, this time, had a son, who was Aedh Sláine.”^118.1^

Before considering other stories of impregnation by drinking, let me refer to one more Irish tale. It concerns the birth of Boethíne, son of Cred, the daughter of Ronán, king of Leinster, and is found in the Leabhar breac, a manuscript of the beginning of the fifteenth century. The maiden gathered cress on which the sperma genitale of a certain robber, Findach by name, had just fallen, and ate it, “and thereof was born the everliving Boethín.”^118.2^ This unsavoury story reminds us of the Princess Chand Ráwati in the Sanskrit romance. It bears even a closer resemblance to two legends from opposite quarters of the globe. One of them relates to a Peruvian goddess, Cavillaca. She {119} was a beautiful maiden who spurned the advances of the gods. One day she sat down to weave a mantle at the foot of a lucma-tree. The wise Coniraya Uiracocha thereupon turned himself into a beautiful bird, and sat in the boughs of the tree. He took some of his semen, made it into the likeness of a ripe and luscious lucma, and dropped it at the maiden’s feet. She picked it up, ate it with much relish, and immediately conceived. In due course she gave birth to a son. When the boy could crawl, she called an assembly of the gods, and, indignantly protesting her virginity, demanded which of them was the father of the child. As nobody came forward to claim the honour, she put the little one on the ground, saying: “Doubtless his father will be the one to whom he crawls, and at whose feet he rests.” The child crawled to the feet of a ragged beggar, who sat humbly in the lowest place of all. The beggar was Coniraya; but Cavillaca, not recognising him, disdained the thought of being mated with such dirt and squalor; and, catching up her boy, she fled from his pursuit, though he assumed magnificent golden robes and divine splendour, until she came to the sea-coast of Pachacamac, where she and the child, entering the sea, were changed into two rocks, yet visible long after the Spanish Conquest, and doubtless to the present day.^119.1^ The other legend is that of the nymph Adrikâ in the Mahâbhârata. Being by the curse of some god metamorphosed into a fish, Adrikâ feeds on a leaf dropped into the water by the favourite agency of a bird—in this instance, a hawk. {120} Upon the leaf was the sperm of her lover, King Uparicharas. The fish is then caught by fishermen and brought to him. When it is opened the nymph resumes her proper form, and two fish, a male and female, are born of her.^120.1^ The same incident is the substance of a folktale slightly less loathsome in form among the Gipsies of southern Hungary. They say that a rich peasant’s wife repulsed Saint Nicholas, who appeared to her as a beggar, and was transformed by him into a little fish and condemned to remain in that state until impregnated by her husband. Her husband threw the fish into the brook; and there it abode a long time, until one day the goodman sat before his door and thought of his wife, and how he could deliver her. So as he sat there he spat, and the spittle fell on a green leaf at his feet. Then a magpie, so often a go-between in these matters, snapped up the leaf in her beak and flew away with it. But as she flew she met another who would have torn the leaf from her; and in their struggle it fell into the water and was devoured by the little fish. Thereupon the heroine returned to her true woman-form and to her husband, for she had been fertilised by his spittle.^120.2^ The Gipsy version appears to be derived from the Mahâbhârata, or more probably from the saga whence the poet fashioned the episode in question, and was doubtless brought from the East by the remote forefathers of the tribe.

We might linger long on the supernatural might of Indian {121} kings and rishis, as well as the equally chaste and pious saints and reavers of Irish legend; but we must tear ourselves away from their edifying and veracious histories to seek the magical potation and the magical food elsewhere. The most illustrious birth by the former means was that of Zoroaster. A Parsee tradition preserved in the Selections of Zâd-sparam, who wrote shortly before the year A.D. 881, ascribes the conception of the great Iranian teacher to his mother’s drinking of homa-juice and cow’s milk infused with his guardian spirit and glory.^121.1^ The lark, it is said in Roumania, was a maiden born of Gheorghina, the consort of an emperor named Titus. The imperial pair were childless; but an old woman in a dream directed the emperor that his wife should drink of the brook which watered a certain forest. She did so, and gave birth to a lovely daughter, who fell in love with the sun, but was cursed by his mother and changed into a bird.^121.2^ Two divinities worshipped in a country temple in Annam are thus accounted for. A childless man and wife dwelt in the village. One rainy autumnal night the woman put an earthen vessel to receive the drippings of the roof, and she saw a star fall into the vessel. Astounded at the occurrence, she called her husband and told him what had happened. They resolved to say nothing about it, but to drink the water. The woman became pregnant, and after going three years in that state she was at length delivered of three blue eggs. The storyteller considered it necessary at this point to observe that the husband was very much surprised, and carefully kept {122} the adventure to himself. However, they hatched the eggs, and three serpents crawled out, which followed their father about whithersoever he went. One day he had the ill-luck to cut off the tail of one of them. The wounded serpent forthwith was transformed into a fair youth, who said: “My brothers and I are heavenly genii who committed a sin, and were sent upon earth to succour the kingdom. They will stay, but I reascend to heaven in a tempest which will be a sign of the truth of my words.” The two other serpents remained. Sometimes they were changed into men of extraordinary powers; they rendered signal service against China, and ultimately were deified.^122.1^ According to a Finnish song, the lovely maiden Kasaritar was also three years in a state of pregnancy. An ogress had spat upon the waves, and Kasaritar had swallowed the bubble of froth. When at length she brought forth, it was an evil brood, the lizard.^122.2^ The Kotons are a Mongolian tribe. They say that the daughter of one of their khans went with forty of her maidens to a field to gather djemuis to eat. Becoming thirsty, the girls all went to the water and drank. In the midst of the water was a drop of blood, which was imbibed by the khan’s daughter and caused her to conceive. Her father drove her away; but her son afterwards became khan.^122.3^

We are not told here whether the blood was human. The analogy of some other sagas, and of several märchen, would lead to the supposition that it must be understood to be a man’s blood. Almost any portion of a man may be possessed of fructifying power. One of the märchen already passed in review attributes it to a man’s heart, and another to the ashes of a burnt skull. A story current among the Serbs is parallel to the latter. The emperor, hunting, finds a skull and causes his horse to step on it. The death’s-head cries out: “Why dost thou tread upon me? I am able to injure thee yet.” The emperor, hearing this, picks it up, burns it and collects the ashes in a casket. His daughter opens the casket and discovers the ashes. To ascertain what the contents of the box are, she wets her finger, dips it in the ashes and licks it. A boy is the result, who after a variety of adventures becomes the founder of Constantinople. This saga is found also in Ukrainia attached to the name of a national hero, Paliq.^123.1^ As M. Dragomanov, who has brought these Serbian and Ukrainian legends under the notice of Western students, remarks, the tale is found as a märchen in the Turkish Tuti-Nameh, where it appears under the name of “The story of the skull through which eighty persons lost their lives.” There the man who picked up the skull was a merchant; instead of burning it, he ground it to powder; his daughter’s son had a reputation for wisdom, and was called in to say why a fish laughed when the vizier’s over-modest slave-girl refused to look at it, lest it should be a male. The youth, thus called on, reveals to the vizier the presence in his harem of forty men disguised as women, the lovers of his forty slave-girls; and the slaves and their {124} lovers are all put to death, to the number of eighty.^124.1^ I mentioned in the last chapter a Lithuanian story of a hermit who was burned, all but his heart, which was afterwards eaten by a maiden and caused her to give birth to a son. In a Sicilian legend this holy man is identified with Saint Oniria, or Neria. The maiden’s son is a new birth of the saint, who proves his sanctity when a child of only five years by convincing his grandfather and his mother’s godfather of the salvation of a poor, despised, dead beggar, and the damnation of a wealthy sinner, though borne to his grave upon a costly bier and accompanied by monks with burning tapers, and by revealing the existence of a hoard of gold beneath a dunghill. He is then taken up to heaven, and only appears again to save his grandfather’s life when accused of murder.^124.2^

A Gipsy tradition from Transylvania derives the origin of the Leïla tribe from a king’s daughter who was thrust out by her brother and his wicked wife, because the latter envied her that she was the fairer. In her wanderings she was pitied by three Keshalyi, or Fates; and one of them dropped some of her hairs, which the lovely maiden ate and brought into the world a son. From this child sprang the tribe, and he gave his descendants the name of his mother.^124.3^

But the Supernatural Birth comes about in märchen by other means than eating or drinking. It is the same in sagas. The sense of smell has been known to possess this marvellous virtue. The spirit of the pole-star, if we may credit a Chinese tale, visited a girl and gave her a fragrant herb called Hêng-wei, which caused her to become the mother of Chang, who was appointed about the year 25 of our era to the office of Master of Heaven.^125.1^ The Gurû Gorakhnâth, whom we have already found performing wonders, once gave a queen desirous of offspring two flowers. Two sons were born to her; but because she had deceived him she was doomed to die at their birth.^125.2^ According to a poem written in Old French by a priest at Valenciennes about the middle of the thirteenth century, Abraham planted in his garden the Tree of Knowledge, flung by God out of Paradise after the Fall. His daughter became pregnant by the scent of a blossom broken off from it, and bore Phanuel, from whom the Virgin Mary descended.^125.3^

Or it is enough for the magical article to be placed in the predestined maiden’s bosom. When from the blood of the mutilated Agdestis a pomegranate-tree sprang up, Nana the nymph gathered and laid in her bosom some of the fruit wherewith it was laden, and from hence, in classical belief, Attis was born.^125.4^ In a Latin myth, Cæculus, the son of Vulcan and Præneste, was conceived by means of a spark {126} which leaped into his mother’s bosom. The forty companions of the khan’s daughter, in the Koton legend already cited, were quickened by laying stones on their bosoms; and in this way from them multiplied the Sarabash tribes of the Altai mountains. On the western continent, one of the great Aztec deities, Huitzilopochtli, the brother and rival of Quetzalcoatl, had a similar origin. Coatlicue, the Serpent-skirted, was already the mother of many children. She dwelt on the mountain of the Snake, near the city of Tulla, and, being very devout, she occupied herself in sweeping and cleansing the sacred places of the mountain. One day, while engaged in these duties, a little ball of feathers floated down to her through the air. She caught it and hid it in her bosom; nor was it long before she found herself pregnant. Thereupon her children conspired to put her to death; but Huitzilopochtli, issuing from her womb all armed, like Pallas from the head of Zeus, speedily destroyed his brethren and sister and enriched his mother with their spoils.^126.1^

The Dorahs of New Guinea trace their parentage to a solitary old man, who caught the Morning Star in the act of stealing his palm-wine. As ransom he obtained from the felon a magical wand. This wand possessed the property of making a virgin a mother, by simply touching her bosom. The old man put its virtue to proof at once upon the loveliest girl of his island-home. She gave birth to a son {127} called Konori, who proved his miraculous descent, as these children alone know how to do, by pointing out his father.^127.1^ This calls to mind a well-known passage of the Mabinogion of which Lady Charlotte Guest’s modesty made nonsense. I venture to quote her charming English, with the needful correction. Math, the son of Mathonwy, is taking counsel with Gwydion and Gilvaethwy, the sons of Don, what maiden he shall seek for a wife. “ ‘Lord,’ said Gwydion, the son of Don, ‘it is easy to give thee counsel; seek Arianrod, the daughter of Don, thy niece, thy sister’s daughter.’ And they brought her unto him, and the maiden came in. ‘Ha, damsel,’ said he, ‘art thou a maiden?’ ‘I know not, lord, other than that I am.’ Then he took up his magic wand and bent it. ‘Step over this,’ said he, ‘and I shall know if thou art a maiden.’ Then stepped she over the magic wand, and there appeared forthwith a fine chubby yellow-haired boy. And thereupon some small form was seen; but before any one could get a second glimpse of it Gwydion had taken it and flung a scarf of velvet around it and hidden it. Now the place where he hid it was the bottom of a chest at the foot of his bed.” The yellow-haired boy was baptized by the name of Dylan. “As Gwydion lay one morning on his bed awake, he heard a cry in the chest at his feet; and though it was not loud, it was such that he could hear it. Then he arose in haste, and opened the chest: and when he opened it, he beheld an infant boy stretching out his arms from the folds of the scarf, and casting it aside. And he took up the boy in his arms, and carried him to a place where he knew there was a woman that could nurse him. And he agreed with the woman that she should take charge of the boy. And that {128} year he was nursed. And at the end of the year he seemed by his size as though he were two years old. And the second year he was a big child and able to go to the Court by himself.” This second boy was afterwards named Llew Llaw Gyffes, and the rest of the story deals with his adventures.^128.1^ It is clear that the wand is credited with phallic power. A saga of the Warraus of British Guiana is unambiguous in the ascription of such power to the stump of a tree. This stump was half-submerged in a pool where two Indian women were bathing, when one of them touched it and it promptly made her its wife. To her brothers’ indignation, a child was born; and after it died, a second interview with the stump resulted in a second child. This child, a boy, was slain by his mother’s brothers, who cut his body into small pieces. But from the grave arose a man stronger and fiercer than any Warrau. He was the first Carib; and hence there has always been enmity between the Caribs and the Warraus.^128.2^

We have found several cases, both of märchen and of sagas, where the masculine saliva and other secretions, if swallowed, produced pregnancy. The same consequence is believed to result from the spittle’s being received into the woman’s hand. The twin divinities, Hun Ahpu and {129} Xbalanque, honoured by the Quiché of Central America, were thus begotten. Hunhun Ahpu and Vukub Hun Ahpu having been put to death by the two kings of Xibalba, a mysterious subterranean realm, the head of the former was placed between the withered branches of a calabash-tree of the kind afterwards called Hunhun Ahpu’s head; and immediately the tree became laden with fruit; the head turned into a calabash, and was indistinguishable from the rest. Thereupon the kings tabooed the tree as sacred. Xquiq, the daughter of a prince named Cuchumaquiq, broke the taboo. As she approached to pluck the fruit, Hunhun Ahpu’s head spat into her hand, and she thereby conceived. Her father, perceiving her condition, condemned her to death; but she persuaded the executioners to deceive him, and gave birth in due time to twins of extraordinary power, who avenged themselves on the rulers of Xibalba after the manner of Medea upon Pelias.^129.1^

A similar incident is told in the Far East by the people of Annam concerning an historical personage who was put to death in the year 1443 of our era. He was, according to one account, the parent of the king’s wife. According to another account, this lady was a serpent who had taken the form of a young girl and been adopted by the hero of the legend, and given by him in marriage to the king. At all events, she slew the king by biting off his tongue; and she, with her father (or guardian) and all his family, was put to death. Her father was buried alive with one of his soldiers. The soldier’s wife succeeded in penetrating the grave, but only to find her husband already dead. His chief, however, was still living, and, protesting his innocence, he spat in {130} the woman’s hand, wherefrom she became pregnant and bore a son who founded a new dynasty.^130.1^

Conception has taken place in legend not only by the hand but by the foot, as in some of the märchen reviewed in the preceding chapter. The Shih King relates of Hâu-ki, the ancestor of the kings of Kâu, that Kiang Yüan, his mother, was childless until she trod on a toe-print made by God. The instant she did so she felt moved; she conceived, and at length gave birth to a son.^130.2^

Impregnation, however, by an unusual part of the body is often attended by the inconvenience of birth by other than the natural exit. In the Sanskrit books kings are mentioned as born from hand, or right arm, or from the thigh or the top of the head, just as Bacchus was born from the thigh, and Athene from the head, of Zeus. The divine Parvati herself was conceived by a look and spit forth upon the world. The old French poem already referred to represents Saint Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary, as born from her father Phanuel’s thigh, which he touched with a knife after cutting an apple, and thus caused it to conceive.^130.3^ Buddha, in the form of a white elephant, {131} entered his mother’s right side, and from her right side he was born.^131.1^ Cases like these are frequent in cosmogonic myths which we need not discuss.

But, before we leave the subject of impregnation by an unusual part of the body, it is not unimportant to observe that, during the Middle Ages, a similar idea was current respecting the conception of Jesus Christ. Sometimes painters represented the Holy Ghost as entering his mother at her ear in the shape of a dove. In the Church of the Magdalen at Aix, in Provence, is a picture of the Annunciation attributed to Albert Dürer, wherein waves of glory descend from God the Father, and in the midst of them a microscopic babe floats down upon the Virgin. During the fifteenth century the opinion seems to have been common that Our Lord entered already completely formed into the Virgin’s womb—an opinion which orthodox theologians, in their perfect acquaintance with the divine arrangements, were able summarily to pronounce heretical. But a remarkable parallel to the story of Buddha’s conception is presented by a picture of Fra Filippo Lippi, painted for Cosmo de’ Medici and now in the National Gallery. The Virgin is seated in a chair with her Book of Hours in her hand, and the angel Gabriel bows before her. Above is a right hand surrounded with clouds. A dove, cast from the hand amid circling floods of glory, is making for the Virgin’s navel, which it is about to enter; while she, bending forward, curiously surveys it. The picture is well worth {132} studying, not merely for its exquisite grace, colouring and finish, as one of the masterpieces of Tuscan art in the earlier half of the fifteenth century, but also as an exposition of the ideas which were prevalent at that time under the sanction of the Church, and for the purpose of comparing them with Buddhist legends and other stories of supernatural birth, such as we are now considering. Mohammedan tradition ascribes the miraculous conception by the Virgin to Gabriel’s having opened the bosom of her shift and breathed upon her womb.^132.1^ Parallel with this is a legend concerning Quetzalcoatl. Tradition varied much as to his life. This probably means that his worship and story were ancient and widespread among folk of the Mexican stock. One version, as we know, records his birth from a precious stone swallowed by his mother Chimalma. In a variant the Lord of Existence, Tonacatecutli, appears to Chimalma and her two sisters. The sisters were both struck dead by fright; but he breathed upon Chimalma, and by his breath quickened life within her, so that she bore Quetzalcoatl. Her son cost her her life. Having thus perished on earth, she was translated to heaven, like the Virgin Mary in the traditions of the Church, and was thenceforward honoured under the name of Chalchihuitzli, the Precious Stone of Sacrifice.^132.2^ But there is a world of difference between this apotheosis and that of the Virgin Mary. The latter is true, being guaranteed by the authority of the Church; while the former rested only on the testimony of heathen priests and peoples, deceived of course by the Tempter of Mankind.

It will be remembered that Mughain, before she bore Aedh Sláine, did more than drink of the consecrated water: she washed in it. Stories of conception by bathing have been seriously believed alike in the Old and New Worlds. A Zulu saga represents a king’s daughters as bathing in a pool in the river. The youngest, a mere child, comes out with breasts swollen as large as a woman’s. By the advice of the council of old men she is driven away. After wandering from place to place she gives birth to a boy who grows up a wise doctor. From what is said of his beneficent deeds it has been conjectured that we have here a corrupted account of Our Lord’s birth, derived possibly from the Portuguese.^133.1^ If this be so (which is quite uncertain) it is important to note that the story has coalesced with native tradition as completely as the fiftieth rune of the Kalevala with the adventures of Väinämöinen. The main incident was apparently in harmony with native thought, and therefore easily attracted to itself the details of native life and discarded its own proper details, which would be incomprehensible. In the Hindu mythology Parvati, the spouse of Siva, justified her own irregular entrance upon the world by conception through bathing, without intercourse, and thus brought forth Ganesa.^133.2^ A story is told, in a work attributed to Plutarch, of Bacchus in the shape of the river Tigris carrying away the nymph Alphesiboea and begetting on her a son, Medus. If Aristonymus, who seems to have been originally responsible for it, was reporting a genuine tradition, it must, so far as we can penetrate its Greek disguise, have referred to a similar adventure on the part of Alphesiboea. Medus was the {134} eponym of the Medes.^134.1^ Some of the Algonkins of North America traced the lineage of mankind from two young squaws who, swimming in the sea, were impregnated by the foam and produced a boy and girl.^134.2^ So the black Kirghiz pretended to have for their great foremother a princess who became pregnant by bathing in a foam-covered lake.^134.3^

The ancient Persians held a curious belief anent Saoshyant, the future hero who was to come from the region of the dawn to free the world from death and corruption before the Resurrection. Three drops of the seed of Zoroaster, we are told in the sacred books, fell from him. What was bright and strong in it has been preserved by the agency of angels. At the appointed time a maid, bathing in the lake Kâsava, will come in contact with it, and will conceive by it and bring forth the Saviour. Indeed, the orthodox view appears to be that she will triple the miracle, by thrice conceiving in this way and bringing forth three sons, of whom the two elder will be forerunners of the third. He will come with authority to reduce all peoples under the yoke of the true religion; and the general Resurrection will follow his conquest of the world.^134.4^ The Middle Ages, which believed that Antichrist, in rivalry with Christ, would declare himself born of a virgin,^134.5^ would have seen nothing impossible in the kind of birth foretold for Saoshyant. Averrhoes, in fact, put forward as having actually occurred a case of a woman who became pregnant {135} in a bath, by attracting the semen of a man bathing near. The admirable common sense of Sir Thomas Browne rejected this, with many more absurdities current in his day.^135.1^ But he failed to convince those who stood by tradition. A singular little book, refuting “Doctor Brown’s Vulgar Errors, the Lord Bacon’s Natural History and Doctor Harvey’s Book De Generatione, Comenius and Others,” was published in the year 1652. The writer, conscious no doubt of powers commensurate to the task he had undertaken, too modestly concealed his name, and has left the world baffled at the mystery of his identity. Admitting Averrhoes’ story to be a strange one, he reproves Sir Thomas Browne’s incredulity by saying: “Hee that denyeth a matter of fact, must bring good witnesses to the contrary, or else shew the impossibility of the fact.” This, he declares, had not been done. Then, after arguing in favour of the “fact,” he goes on to uphold the belief in Incubi, “for to deny this, saith Augustine, doth argue impudence;” and moreover it is “to accuse the ancient Doctors of the Church and the Ecclesiastick Histories of falshood,” and “to contradict the common consent of all Nations, and experience.”^135.2^ This is crushing, though assuredly an appeal to “the ancient Doctors of the Church” has always been successful in putting to shame the wisdom of the world; and Bacon, Sir Thomas Browne and the rest will for ever lie under the stigma of impudence, impiety and egregious folly.

Not only water but wind has been deemed sufficient to cause the birth of gods and heroes. The examples most {136} familiar to us are those of Hera, who conceived Hephaistos without male concurrence by simply inhaling the wind, and of the maiden (in Longfellow’s poem, called Wenonah) who was quickened by the west wind and bore Michabo, the Algonkin hero better known as Hiawatha.^136.1^ To these we may add the blind Loujatar, source of all evils, ugliest and most hateful of Mana’s daughters, fructified by the east wind and bearing at a birth nine sons—nine several diseases to decimate mankind. Nor was she the first in the Finnish mythology to conceive in this manner, for Väinämöinen himself was the son of the virgin Ilmatar, who in the beginning, while as yet there was neither earth nor sun, moon nor stars, lay down upon the waters and was fecundated by the east wind. She bore her child for seven hundred years before she could bring him to the birth.^136.2^

Montezuma, the culture-hero of the Pueblos of New Mexico, was the son of a maiden of exquisite beauty, but fastidious and coy. When the drought fell on her people she opened her granaries and fed them out of her abundance. “At last, with rain, fertility returned to the earth; and on the chaste Artemis of the Pueblos its touch fell too. She bore a son to the thick summer shower, and that son was Montezuma.”^136.3^ The Chinese and the Tartars appear {137} able as usual to match all these traditions of parthenogenesis. The historian Ma-twan-lin has recorded that the king of the So-li, or northern barbarians, having been absent on a journey, found one of his concubines pregnant at his return. He would have put her to death, had she not asserted that a vapour about the size of an egg descended on her from the sky and caused her interesting condition. He shut her up, however, and she bore a son, who was thrown by the king’s orders into the pigsty. The pigs warmed the babe with their breath. He was thrown into a stable, and the horses did the same, reminding us of the birth of Marjatta’s child. The king then was persuaded of his slave-girl’s truth. He brought up the boy; but he feared him as he grew and became a skilful archer, and sought therefore to destroy him. The youth fled southward until he reached a certain river. There was no way over; so he struck the water with his bow, and the fishes and turtles, gathering together, formed a compact mass, that served as a bridge for the hero. He crossed dryshod, and, reaching a land to the north of Corea, founded there the nation and kingdom of the Fou-yu.^137.1^

The following seems a Corean variant of this legend. A king held captive in his palace a daughter of the river Ho. She was fertilised by the rays of the sun and laid an {138} enormous egg, which the king caused to be thrown successively to the swine and to the dogs, to the horses and to the cattle. None of these would touch it; and it was flung out into the desert. There the birds of the air flocked to it and covered it with their wings. The king then tried to break it, but failed; and it was restored to the captive maiden. She wrapped it up and warmed it for some time, until it burst and a boy came forth. The people became attached to him; but the king’s ill-will was excited, and, warned by his mother, the youth deemed it prudent to flee. Announcing himself as the sun’s son and the grandson of the river Ho, he was assisted to cross that river by the turtles and fishes as above; and he at length arrived at the town of Ke-ching-ko, which he called Kao-kin-li, and became the founder of the kingdom of that name.^138.1^ As late as the latter years of the sixteenth century, Hideyoshi, the Taiko of Japan, was not too civilised to make similar pretensions. They were, however, veiled, after the manner of the Irish saints we have already mentioned, as a vision. He told the ambassador of the king of Corea: “I am the only remaining scion of a humble stock; but my mother once had a dream in which she saw the sun enter her bosom; after which she gave birth to me. There was then a soothsayer, who said, ‘Wherever the sun shines, there will be no place which shall not be subject to him. It may not be doubted that one day his power will overspread the empire.’ ”^138.2^ A Jesuit father who visited Siam in the seventeenth century reports concerning Sommonocodon, the Siamese deity, that he was born of a virgin who had retired to the depths of a certain forest, there to live in holiness and austerity pending the {139} advent of God, then speedily expected. One day while she prayed she conceived by the prolific rays of the sun. The innocent maiden, ashamed to find herself with child, flew to a solitary desert, in order to hide herself from the eyes of mankind. Upon the banks of a lake, and without any sense of pain, she was miraculously delivered of the most beautiful babe in the world; but having no milk wherewith to suckle him, and being unable to bear the thought of seeing him die, she jumped into the water, where she set him upon the bud of a flower, which blew of itself for his more commodious reception, and afterwards enclosed him as in a cradle.^139.1^ With these instances of sun-pregnancy may be compared the Chinese tale of the Emperor Yao’s mother, who was rendered fruitful by the splendour of a star that flashed upon her during a dream.^139.2^

The Kirghiz Tartar tradition of the birth of the celebrated Genghis Khan is perhaps a refinement of some such legend as these, due to change of religion or other civilising influence. As it has more than one resemblance to that of Danae I venture to give some of the details. A khan named Altyn Bel had an only son. At length his wife became pregnant a second time, and bore a daughter so beautiful that the khan commanded that no man was to see her; and to conceal her from all human eyes she must be brought up hidden beneath the ground. Wherefore her mother gave her in charge to an old woman, who nourished her in the dark. The babe grew to maidenhood; and one {140} day she asked her nurse: “Whither dost thou go from time to time?” The nurse told her in reply that there was a bright world where her father and mother and all sorts of people dwelt; and thither she herself went. The maiden prayed to be shown this bright world; and under promise to tell no one of it the woman took her secretly out into the open air. As soon as the maiden came forth and looked upon the world she staggered and fainted; for at the same moment God’s eye fell upon her, and at His command she became pregnant. When this was known to the khan he ordered her to be put to death; but, being dissuaded from so extreme a course, he allowed his wife to lock the maiden in a golden chest, together with some food, and to fling the chest into the sea, first binding the key on the outside. Two heroes, hunting, see the chest on the water. Agreeing between themselves that the one should take the chest and the other its contents, whatever they were, they capture and drag it ashore. On opening it they find the girl, who tells them her tale, and after her babe’s birth weds one of them. Her son is Genghis. He grew up renowned among the youth for his uprightness and excellence; and when the ruler of the town died childless the people chose Genghis in his place, and swore obedience to him. So Genghis ruled the folk in justice and peace; and theft and lying vanished from among them. But his mother had borne to his stepfather three sons, who envied him and said: “This is a fatherless child; we cannot suffer him as ruler. We have a father; make one of us prince.” When Genghis knew it, he resolved to flee, lest they should put him to death. He told his mother he would go to the source of the waters whereon she had come floating thither; to the place where his father dwelt he {141} would go, and live. “O mother, I will let thee know whether I am alive or dead. I will throw feathers into the water: when you see the feathers floating by, you will know I am well; if the feathers do not float by, I shall be dead.” Then he went upwards along the stream. (It was called the sea just now; but the Tartars are inlanders.) He shot game. Out of the fells of the beasts he made a house; the feathers of the birds floated down to his mother, and she knew that he lived. The people made one of his half-brothers prince. But his rule was corrupt; liars and thieves and all sorts of criminals abounded, and he could not protect his people. Wherefore they resolved to depose him and to seek out Genghis again; and five-and-twenty of their noblest went to find him. They came to the place where he dwelt, and hid themselves, lest he should flee them again. He was absent. When he returned they waited until he had eaten and lain down to rest. Four-and-twenty men then seized him, bowing the head; but he flung them all aside. They spake: “O Prince and Lord, we are thy servants and come to thee as suppliants. Since thou hast left us our yourt has broken up. Come back and take again thy seat as ruler.” He yielded and went back with them. On their return a council was held, and it was determined to submit the claims of Genghis and his three brothers to their mother, who should choose the prince from among them. The mother said to her sons: “You are all my children; do not quarrel, I will decide the affair. Hang all your bows upon this sunbeam: whose bow soever this beam bears, let him be ruler.” All four brought their bows and hung them on the sunbeam. Only Genghis’ bow remained hanging; the bows of the other three brothers fell to the {142} ground. And the woman said to all the folk: “Behold! He became my child by God’s decree; by God’s decree too the sunbeam bears his bow: make him your prince. If these three offer him violence, put them to death. You, O folk, are many: let no harm be done to him.” And again he ruled in peace and justice. He took a noble wife, who bore him three sons and a daughter. So renowned was he that a messenger came from the ruler of the kingdom of Rome and prayed for one of his children to make him ruler of Rome; and he gave one of his sons. From Crim-Tartary came another to ask for another son as ruler; and he gave him his second son. From the Khalif’s people came another on the same errand; and he gave him the third son. Then came an embassy from the Russians and asked for a child. As he had no more sons, he gave the Russians his daughter; and they led her forth to make her their ruler. When he died, as he had sent all his children away to rule other lands, his brothers became forefathers of the evil sultans of his own people.^142.1^

Phallic power is not infrequently exercised in the legends of the Far East by the glances of divine, or quasi-divine, beings. After the latest cyclic cataclysm, which preceded by about eighteen thousand years the coming of Xacca, as the inhabitants of Laos call Buddha, a genius descended from the highest of the sixteen worlds to repeople the earth. With his scimitar he cut asunder a flower he beheld swimming on the water. From the stem a beautiful maiden sprang, and he grew enamoured of her. But such was her bashfulness that she refused to listen to his suit. Accordingly he placed himself at a certain distance from her, but directly opposite, where he could gaze upon her; {143} and with the ardour of his gaze she became a mother without ceasing to be a maiden. For the numerous issue that he had in this way begotten he furnished the earth with mountains and valleys, fruit-trees and animals fitted for the service of mankind, metals and precious stones and every other convenience.^143.1^ The Japanese pretend that the ancestors of the present race which possesses their empire were heroes or demi-gods, who in turn derived their origin from celestial spirits, of whom seven ruled the empire. The first three of these spirits had no wives, and three of the others impregnated their wives merely by their looks.^143.2^ The Marquesan islanders report that Hina, the daughter of the god Taaroa, bore to him a daughter named Apouvaru, who also became wife to her father. Taaroa and Apouvaru looked steadfastly at one another, with the result that Apouvaru became a mother. She brought into the world a son; and the visual intercourse being repeated she brought forth a second son. After repeating it again she brought forth a daughter. This seems to have satisfied these divine beings, for no further experiments are reported.^143.3^ Taaroa, however, according to the Leeward islanders, begot another son by shaking the shadow of a bread-fruit leaf over his daughter-wife, Hina.^143.4^ At Rome the birth of Servius Tullius was by tradition imputed to a look. His mother Ocrisia was a slave of Tanaquil, the wife of Tarquinius Priscus. The likeness of a phallos {144} appeared on the hearth; and she, who was sitting before it, arose pregnant of the future king. The household Lar was deemed his father, in confirmation of which a lambent flame was seen about the child’s head as he lay asleep.^144.1^

We have found a Zulu märchen narrating the birth of a child from a clot of blood placed in a pot and covered down. To similar effect is the Melanesian tradition of Deitari, from Aurora Island. His father Tari went into his garden to work, when he felt something cut him. He put the blood into a bamboo vessel, returned to his house and set it down by the hearth. After many days his wife, going to cook food for him, was surprised to find food already cooked by somebody unknown. When this had recurred several times, the woman told her husband, and he bade her watch. Then she saw Deitari (Tari’s blood) creep out of the bamboo vessel. He was exceeding fair to look upon; and she hid him, and asked her husband what he had put in that bamboo vessel. Tari remembered about his blood, and said: “My blood was in that bamboo.” His wife replied: “I saw him come forth out of that bamboo that you had put there.” And she brought him forth, and her husband rejoiced to see him.^144.2^ The Mexicans attributed the origin of the present race of mankind to a bone of one of the previous races who had perished in a cataclysm. The goddess Omecihuatl, having had many children in heaven, was at length delivered of {145} a knife of flint. This knife was flung by her elder children to the earth, and where it fell there sprang up sixteen hundred heroes from the ground. By the goddess’ direction, one of these heroes, Xolotl, was sent to Hell to fetch a bone of one of the men who had died. The god of Hell, having given it, repented and pursued the messenger, who fortunately escaped, but in his haste stumbled and broke the bone. He gathered up the pieces and brought them to his brethren, who put them into a vessel and sprinkled them with blood drawn from their own bodies. At the end of four days a boy was formed from the bone, and at the end of three more a girl, who became the ancestors of all nations.^145.1^

With these cases we may for the present close our long and monotonous list of Supernatural Births. If anybody shall complain that it is not exhaustive, he must be congratulated on his appetite for these marvellous occurrences. Practically the subject is inexhaustible. I have not attempted to deal with every story, nor with every kind of story. I have limited myself so far as possible to narratives analogous to those in the different forms of the Perseus myth, and to little more than specimens of them. In treating of sagas we have been able to show a range extended beyond that of märchen. The Supernatural Birth, in the forms in which we have studied it, is known throughout Europe, Asia, and America, and in large groups of the Pacific Islands. It is repeated again and again in the Chinese and other Mongolian traditions. We have found it among the Zulus in South Africa; and although there may be some doubt as to the native character of a portion of the story, there {146} can be none as to the mode of impregnation. When we know more about the legends and beliefs of the natives of the interior, we shall probably find the myth as thoroughly at home there as it is in an Italian nursery-tale.^146.1^

Chapter VI. the Supernatural Birth in Practical Superstitions

The result of the inquiries of the last two chapters has been to show that the incident of the Supernatural Birth, in forms identical with, or at least analogous to, those of the Perseus cycle, is found, broadly speaking, over the whole world,—and that, not merely as a tale whereto no serious belief is attached, but, even more widely, as a saga, or record of what are deemed to have been actual events. But if, amid all differences of race and culture, birth has thus been held to have been caused on various occasions in these marvellous ways, it is natural to ask whether it has also been thought possible still to make effectual use of such means to produce pregnancy in barren women. The answer is, that it has been, and still is, thought possible. In other words, the traditions of past miracles are organically connected in the popular mind with practices expressly calculated to produce repetitions of those miracles. It will be observed, however, that parthenogenesis is often spoken of in the stories; whereas, for the most part, the object of the practices I am about to describe is to promote conception by women who are in the habit of having sexual intercourse. The distinction is {148} often immaterial. In the stage of civilisation wherein the stories are told and the practices obtain, medicine and surgery are not as yet separated from magic. We cannot therefore, speak positively as to the meaning and intention of all. But it is clear that a large number of the practices, as well as of the stories, imply, if we are not told in so many words, that the real origin of the child afterwards born is not the semen received in the act of coition, but the drug, or the magical potency of the incantation.

In discussing the practices I shall ask the reader’s pardon if I do not limit myself to such as are precisely analogous to the means found in the stories, nor even to such as are explicable by reasons already known to be accepted in barbaric life. I desire, beyond these, to call the attention of scholars to some of the problems yet to be solved. We have learned to understand much that used to be mysterious in the ways and the thoughts of savages. But much remains unknown or misunderstood. And even if a solitary student cannot explain, he may render some small service to science in inquiring into, that which needs explanation.

The favourite method of supernatural impregnation in stories is perhaps by eating some fruit or herb. Nor is this method by any means neglected in practice. The maxim attributed to the Druids leaps to the mind, namely, that powder of mistletoe makes women fruitful. As held by the Druids this is doubtless to be understood literally, just as among the ancient Medes, Persians and Bactrians the juice of the sacred Soma was prescribed to procure for unproductive women fair children and a pure succession.^148.1^ Thus the birth of Zoroaster himself was, as we have seen, believed {149} to have been caused. Among the rules for the performance of the Vedic domestic ceremonies, given in the Grihya-Sûtras, the householder who does not study the Upanishad treating of the rules for securing conception, the male gender of the child, and so forth, is directed in the third month of his wife’s pregnancy to give her, after she has fasted, in curds from a cow which has a calf of the same colour as the dam, two beans and a barleycorn for each handful of curds. Then he is to ask her: “What dost thou drink?” To which she is to reply: “Generation of a male child.” When the curds and the question and response have been thrice repeated, he is to insert into her right nostril the sap of a herb which is not withered.^149.1^ One can hardly doubt that this is a ceremonial to procure offspring, though not performed, according to the rubric, until after conception has taken place. In the book of medical receipts deemed to be derived from the ancient Physicians of Myddfai, printed in the year 1861 from a Welsh manuscript bearing date in 1801, we find it stated that a decoction of mistletoe causes fruitfulness of body and the getting of children.^149.2^ Here the magical plant seems to have faded into one of merely natural efficacy. On the other hand, something more than the light of common day still glorifies the rosemary. Among other things we are told that to carry a piece of this plant is to keep every evil spirit at a distance, and that rosemary has all the virtues of the stone called jet. It was because it was obnoxious to evil spirits that it was used at funerals. But it was not only used at {150} funerals. There is a story of a widower who wished to be married again on the day of his former wife’s funeral, because the rosemary employed at the funeral could be used for the wedding also. For its use at weddings there was an additional reason, which is given in the Welsh manuscript; to wit, one of its remarkable powers was that “it was sovran against barrenness.”^150.1^ Hindu women eat little balls of rice with intent to obtain children. A woman who wishes for a child, especially a son, observes the fourth lunar day of every dark fortnight as a fast, and breaks her fast only after seeing the moon, generally before nine or ten o’clock in the evening. A dish of twenty-one balls of rice having been prepared, in one of which is put some salt, it is then placed before her; and if she first put her hand on the ball containing salt, she will be blessed with a son. In this case no more is eaten; otherwise she goes on until she takes the salted ball.^150.2^ At the festival of Ráhu, the tribal god of the Dosádhs of Behar and Chota Nagpur, the priest distributes to the crowd tulsi-leaves which heal diseases else incurable, and flowers which have the virtue of causing barren women to conceive;^150.3^ but whether they are to be eaten or only smelt does not appear. The same omission occurs in a report by Mr. Leland that a Tuscan woman who desires offspring goes to a priest, gets a blessed apple {151} and pronounces over it an invocation to Saint Anna.^151.1^ Presumably she then eats it. At all events, in Hungary a Gipsy woman in the like circumstances eats at waxing moon grass from the grave of a pregnant woman.^151.2^ Among the Southern Slavs the woman goes to a pregnant woman’s grave, calls upon her by name, bites some of the grass off the grave, calls upon her again, conjuring her to grant her a child, and then, taking some earth from the grave, binds it in her girdle.^151.3^ In the Spreewald no Wendish woman dares to eat of two plums grown together on one stalk, or she will bear twins.^151.4^ About Mentone it is believed that a woman who finds a double fruit will have twins.^151.5^ The aboriginal inhabitants of Paraguay supposed that a woman who ate a double ear of maize would give birth to twins.^151.6^ In Saxony, Mecklenburg and Voigtland it would appear that only pregnant women are forbidden to eat double fruit; among the Tangalas the prohibition is extended to the husband; in all cases for the same reason.^151.7^ These taboos are inexplicable save on the supposition that the fruit causes pregnancy.

It would seem like a relic of the same thought that in Swabia a woman who is “in an interesting condition” for the first time should eat of a tree which bears for the first time; then both of them will become very fruitful. To this there is one exception: if an apple be grafted on a whitethorn, and some of the fruit be given to a pregnant woman to eat, she cannot bear.^152.1^ In contrast to this is a Bosnian custom in which the childless woman seeks for a plant called apijun, cuts its roots small and steeps them in foam she has caught from a millwheel, afterwards drinking of the liquid. She then winds her wedding-girdle round a newly grafted fruit-tree, when, if the graft prosper, she also will bear. Another curious magical custom in Bosnia, still more instructive, is employed when a woman has been married for upwards of eleven years without having issue. A lady friend who is so fortunate as to be in that state in which “women wish to be who love their lords” must endeavour to find a stone lying in a pear-tree, as sometimes happens when it is thrown at the ripening fruit and caught by one of the branches. She must then shake the tree until the stone fall. This she must catch in her hands ere it reach the ground, carry it in the left skirt of her dress to the brook, put it into a pitcher, fill the pitcher from the brook so far as to cover the stone, and carry it home. {153} Next, she gathers dewy grass (it is not stated what she does with it), and speaks into the pitcher and into the water the conjuring formula: “So-and-so shall conceive.” After that, she brings the pitcher with the water to the barren woman to drink, and, winding the wedding-garment (it does not appear what portion of the dress is meant) of the latter about her own body, wears it for three months, or longer, until the woman for whom the ceremony is performed shall feel that her desire has been accomplished. The friend, however, must neither eat anything in the patient’s house, nor according to one account speak during the ceremony.^153.1^ Now I am not prepared to explain every detail of this performance, though I may revert to some of the items hereafter. The important matter for the moment is the meaning of the stone shaken down from the tree. This can hardly be understood to represent anything but a pear; and inasmuch as the patient cannot eat the stone, its virtues as fruit are transmitted to the water which is given her to drink, the intention being made clear by the utterance of the command, “So-and-so shall conceive.”

In China and Japan a medicine called Kay-tu-sing, made from the leaves of a tree belonging to the class Ternstromaceæ, is given at full moon with cabalistic formulæ. In the Fiji Islands the woman bathes in a stream, and then both husband and wife take a drink made with the grated root of a kind of bread-fruit tree and the nut of a sort of turmeric, immediately before congress. Siberian brides before the marriage-night eat the cooked fruit of the Iris Sibirica. Asparagus seeds and young hop-buds are given {154} as salad to women in Styria against barrenness. The Czech women of Bohemia drink an infusion of juniper to obtain children; and coffee enjoys a high reputation in Franconia. Serb women get a woman already pregnant to put yeast into their girdles; they sleep with it over night, and eat it in the morning at breakfast.^154.1^

Before passing from the eating of fruit and vegetables, let me point out that the mandrakes, or love-apples, for which Rachel bargained with Leah, were believed to be possessed of power to put an end to barrenness; and this, as it appears by the record in Genesis, quite independently of sexual intercourse, for Rachel gave up her husband to her sister in exchange for them. Whether it be from the narcotic properties of the fruit, or from the likeness of the root to the human form, or both, the mandrake has been during all history credited with supernatural powers. In particular, it has been held potent as a cause of pregnancy. Henry Maundrell, travelling in Palestine in the spring of 1697—barely two centuries ago—was informed that it was then customary for women who wanted children to lay mandrakes under the bed.^154.2^ The recipe current during the Middle Ages for gathering mandrakes was very much like that still practised by Danubian Gipsies to obtain a kind of orchid which they call boy-root. The root is half laid bare with a knife never before used, and a black dog is tied by the tail to it. A piece of ass-flesh is then offered to the {155} animal; and when he springs after it he pulls out the plant. The representation of a linga is carved out of the root, wrapped in a piece of hart’s leather, and worn on the naked left arm to promote conception.^155.1^ The Persians are said still to use the mandrake as an amulet for the same purpose, and to call it man’s root or love-root.^155.2^

Animal substances of various kinds have been taken with the like intent. An insect in India, called pillai-púchchi, or son-insect, is swallowed in large numbers by women in the hope of bearing sons.^155.3^ They thus do voluntarily what the mothers of Conchobar and Cuchulainn are reported to have done against their wills. English gallants at one time were said to swallow loaches in wine to become prolific. Farquhar in The Constant Couple, written at the end of the seventeenth century, puts into the mouth of one of his characters the words: “I have toasted your ladyship fifteen bumpers successively, and swallowed Cupids like loaches in every glass.”^155.4^ On every Christmas Eve unfruitful wives among the Transylvanian Saxons eat fish and throw the bones into flowing water, in the hope of bringing children into the world.^155.5^ Hungarian Gipsy-women gather the floating threads of cobweb from the fields in autumn, and in the waxing of the moon they with their husbands eat them, murmuring an incantation to the Keshalyi, or Fate, whose sorrow at this season for her lost mortal husband causes her to tear out her hair. These threads are believed to be the Keshalyi’s hair; and the incantation attributes the hoped-for child to {156} them, and invites the Fate to the baptism.^156.1^ In Kamtchatka, women outdo the Hungarian Gipsies. They eat the spiders themselves to obtain children; and a woman who, on bearing, desires to become pregnant soon again, eats her infant’s navel-string. Among the Southern Slavs the wife places a wooden bowl full of water beneath a beam of the roof where it is worm-eaten and the worm-dust falls. Her husband strikes the beam with something heavy, so as to shake the dust out of the worm-holes; and she drinks the water containing the dust that falls. Many a woman seeks in knots of hazelwood for a worm, and eats it when found. Masur women in the province of West Prussia make use of the water which drips from a stallion’s mouth after he has drunk. Worse is said to be done in Algiers. There, when a woman has already had a child, but has ceased for a long period to conceive, she must drink sheep’s urine, or water wherein wax from a donkey’s ear has been macerated.^156.2^ The ancient Prussian bride and bridegroom, having been put to bed, but before consummating the marriage, were served with a dish of buck’s, bull’s, or bear’s testicles,^156.3^ probably with a view to begetting a boy. The corresponding portion of a hare was prescribed in wine by our Anglo-Saxon forefathers to the woman who desired a son. “In order that a woman may kindle a male child,” a hare’s belly dried and sliced and rubbed with a drink is also recommended in the leechbook to be taken by both husband and wife. If the wife alone drank it, she would produce an hermaphrodite. {157} The hare’s magical reputation is well known, nor are the foregoing the only prescriptions in the same work from its flesh. Four drachms of female hare’s rennet to the woman, and the like quantity of male hare’s to the man, in wine, were to be given; and, after directing that the wife should be dieted on mushrooms and forego her bath, we are told: “Wonderfully she will be pregnant.”^157.1^ We shall not be inclined to dispute the wonder. In Fezzan a woman’s fruitfulness is said to be increased by the plentiful enjoyment of the dried intestines of a young hare which has never been suckled. The flesh of the kangaroo, like the hare a swift animal, is held by the Australian aborigines to cause fertility.^157.2^ A fox’s genital organs dried and rubbed to powder are given to women in the Land beyond the Forest against barrenness.^157.3^

Eggs are naturally supposed to ensure pregnancy. A Gipsy husband will sometimes take an egg and blow the contents into his wife’s mouth, she swallowing them;^157.4^ or in Transylvania she will give him at full moon the egg of a black hen to eat by himself.^157.5^ On the island of Keisar in the East Indies, an infertile woman takes a hen’s first egg to an old man with a reputation for knowledge, and asks him for help. He lays the egg on a nunu-leaf, and with it presses her breast, muttering blessings the while. Then he cooks the egg in a koli-leaf, takes a bit of it, lays it again on the nunu-leaf, and gives it to the woman to eat. After {158} that, he presses the leaf on her nose and breasts, and lightly rubs it upon her shoulders, passing it always downwards, wraps another bit of the egg in the nunu-leaf, and causes it to be preserved in the branches of one of the highest trees in the neighbourhood of her dwelling.^158.1^ On the other hand, in Galicia the last egg laid by a hen is credited with having two yolks. It is said to be no bigger than a pigeon’s egg. A barren woman who swallows its contents will henceforth bear; or it is given to a cow or other animal with a similar object.^158.2^

The Grihya-Sûtra of Gobhila gives minute directions for the sacrifice offered by the ancient Aryans of India. The object of the Anvashtakya ceremony was the propitiation of the ancestral spirits, to whom three Pindas, or lumps of food, consisting of rice and cow-beef mixed with a certain juice, are offered. After the offering, if the sacrificer’s wife wish for a son, she is to eat the middle Pinda, dedicated among the manes especially to her husband’s grandfather, uttering at the same time the verse from the Mantra-Brâhmana: “Give fruit to the womb, O Fathers!”^158.3^ No doubt the virtue of this prescription consists in the food’s having been part of the sacrificial offering. But the cow is so intimately connected with the well-being of all tribes in the Old World who have passed beyond the lower stages of savagery, and has consequently become so well-recognised a symbol of fecundity, that we need not be surprised to find it used in charms to produce offspring. An Old English recipe for a woman who miscarries is to let her take milk of a one-coloured cow in her hand and sup it up {159} into her mouth, and then go to running water and spit out the milk therein. Next, she must ladle up with the same hand a mouthful of the water and swallow it down, uttering certain words. Lastly, she must, without looking about her either in her going or coming, return, but not into the same house whence she came out, and there taste of meat.^159.1^ Among the Kaffirs an amulet to remove the reproach from a childless woman is made by the medicine-man of the clan from the tail-hairs of a heifer. The heifer must be given to the husband by a kinsman for the purpose; and the charm, when made, is hung round the woman’s neck.^159.2^ In Belgium, women desirous of offspring are advised to drink a mixture of the milk of the goat, ass, and sheep.^159.3^

Of mineral substances Russian women take saltpetre; and in Styria a woman will grate her wedding-ring and swallow the filings.^159.4^ It was a classical superstition that mice were impregnated by tasting salt.^159.5^

The drinking of water under certain conditions has been held to be productive of children. In the first instance I am about to mention, however, reliance is not placed wholly on the draught. Beside the Groesbeeck spring at Spa in the Ardennes is a footprint of Saint Remacle. Barren women pay a nine days’ devotional visit to the shrine of the saint at Spa, and drink every morning a glass of the Groesbeeck water. While drinking, one foot must be placed in the holy footprint.^159.6^ Maidens, we know, in more than one of the tales, have proved the efficacy of divine footprints. In other cases it is unmistakably the draught {160} which has the virtue. In Thuringia and Transylvania, women who wished to be healed of unfruitfulness drank consecrated water from the baptismal font.^160.1^ A Transylvanian Gipsy woman is said to drink water wherein her husband has cast hot coals, or, better still, has spit, saying as she does so: “Where I am flame be thou the coals! Where I am rain be thou the water!”^160.2^ A South Slavonic woman holds a wooden bowl of water near the fire on the hearth. Her husband then strikes two firebrands together until the sparks fly. Some of them fall into the bowl, and she then drinks the water.^160.3^ The Tusayan, one of the pueblo tribes of North America, have a legend of one of their women who, being pregnant, was left behind on the Little Colorado in their wanderings. Beneath her dwelling is a spring, and any sterile woman who drinks of it will bear children.^160.4^ For Arab women the third chapter of the Koran (which, among other things, relates the birth of the Virgin Mary) is written out in its whole interminable length with saffron in a copper basin; boiling water is poured upon the writing; and the woman in need drinks a part of the water thus consecrated, and washes her face, breast and womb with the remainder.^160.5^ At Bombay a barren woman would cut off the end of the robe of a woman who has borne at least one child, when hung up to dry; or would steal a new-born infant’s shirt, steep one end of it in water, drink the water and destroy the shirt. The child to which {161} the clothing belonged would then die and be born again from the womb of the woman performing this ceremony.^161.1^ Other women in India wash the loin-cloth of a sanyásí, or devotee, and drink the water.^161.2^ We can only surmise that this filthy practice is followed in the hope of obtaining the benefit experienced by the Princess Chand Ráwati in the Sanskrit romance, or the nymph Adrikâ in the Mahâbhârata, cited above.

Be this how it may, there is a group of practices to which reference must be made, and which almost match the foregoing in nastiness. Unfortunately the dislike of nastiness is an extremely civilised feeling; and when we read of these things we must remember that we ourselves are not very far removed from a date when powder of mummy was one of the least objectionable remedies in our forefathers’ pharmacopœia. We have already found that a Gipsy woman will drink the water wherein her husband has spit. What is the meaning of the expression: “He is the very spit of his father!” current not only in England, but also, according to the learned Liebrecht, in France, Italy, and Portugal, and alluded to by Voltaire and La Fontaine, if it point not back to a similar, perhaps a more repulsive, ceremony formerly practised by the folk all over western Europe? Other Gipsy customs, if Gipsy women are not belied, are quite as bad. A barren woman who succeeds in touching a snake caught in Easter- or Whitsun-week will become fruitful if she spit thrice on it and sprinkle it with her menstruation-blood, repeating the following {162} incantation: “Grow thick, thou snake! that I thereby may get a child. I am lean as thou art now, therefore rest not. Snake, snake, glide hence, and if I become pregnant I will give thee a crest, an old one, that thy tooth may thereby receive much poison!”^162.1^ Among the Gipsies of Roumania and southern Hungary a sterile woman scratches her husband’s left hand between finger and thumb; and he returns the compliment. The blood of both is received in a new vessel, and buried under a tree for nine days. It is then taken up and ass’ milk poured into it; and husband and wife drink the mixture before going to bed, saying an incantation which reminds us of the Zulu story of the blood in the pot; for its earlier lines run thus: “In the dawn three Fates will come. The first seeks our blood; the second finds our blood; the third makes a child thereout.”^162.2^ A Polish woman, to get children, procures a small jar of the blood of another woman at her first child-bearing, and drinks it mixed with brandy.^162.3^ I mentioned just now the practice of the Kamtchatkan women. A Magyar believes he promotes conception by his wife if he mix with his blood white of egg and the white spots in the yolk of a hen’s egg, fill a dead man’s bone with the mixture, and bury it where he is accustomed to make water.^162.4^ Nay, shavings of a dead man’s bone taken in drink will have the same effect; or if taken by a man, they will enhance his {163} potency.^163.1^ It was, as we have seen, a dead man’s bone which, according to the Mexican saga, when sprinkled with blood, produced the father and mother of the present race of mankind.

Portions of corpses are, in fact, as valuable for unfruitful women as the blood and secretions of living persons, at least in the opinion of the Danubian Gipsies. These people are said to make, for protection from witchcraft, little figures of men and brutes out of a sort of dough of grafting wax taken from the trees in a graveyard, mixed with the powdered hair and nails of a dead child or maiden, and with ashes left after burning the clothes of one who has died. The figures are dried in the sun, and, when required for use, ground into powder. Taken in millet-pap in the increase of the moon this powder accelerates conception.^163.2^ Mr. Lane records disgusting practices on the part of barren women at Cairo. Near the place of execution there is a table of stone where the body of every person who is, in accordance with the usual mode of punishment, beheaded is washed before burial. By the table is a trough to receive the water. This trough is never emptied; and its contents are tainted with blood, and fetid. A woman who desires issue silently passes under the stone table with the left foot foremost, and then over it. After repeating this process seven times, she washes her face in the trough, and, giving a trifling sum of money to the old man and his wife who keep the place, {164} goes silently away. Others, with the like intent, step over the decapitated body seven times, also without speaking; and others again dip in the blood a piece of cotton-wool, of which they afterwards make use in a manner which Mr. Lane declines to mention.^164.1^ The stories I have quoted, wherein a skull, reduced to powder and given to a maiden, renders her pregnant, also come from Danubian lands and from the Mohammedan East. The incident of the skull is less horrible than these practices; but what other distinction can be found?

We may illustrate the custom of stepping over the dead body, and at the same time show that in both hemispheres the idea expressed in the stories just referred to is an active principle of conduct. First let me recall the superstition which leads a woman in Bombay to steal another’s child; for that is what the ceremony described a page or two back amounts to. In the same way Algonkin women who sought to become mothers flocked to the couches of those about to die, in hope that the vital principle, as it passed from the dying, would enter their bodies and fertilise their sterile wombs.^164.2^ Among the Hurons in the seventeenth century babes who died under one or two months were not placed, like older persons, in sepulchres of bark raised on stakes, but buried in the road, in order that they might enter secretly into the wombs of passing women and be born again. The Jesuit father who reports this custom quaintly adds: “I doubt that the good Nicodemus would have found much difficulty here, although he doubted only for old men: Quomodo potest homo nasci cum sit senex?”^164.3^ So {165} one of the prescriptions of our Anglo-Saxon forefathers directs a woman who has miscarried to go to the barrow of a deceased man and step thrice over it with certain words conjuring the effects of the miscarriage.^165.1^ We are now in a position to understand why a Gipsy woman eats grass from the grave of a pregnant woman. It is because she expects that the life of the unborn child will enter into her by means of the grass. Evidently the object sought by all these ceremonies connected with the departed is to transfer to the unproductive womb the life which has been snatched away. In the tales of parthenogenesis by means of the powdered skull the identity of the child with the dead man is openly declared; and it is equally unmistakable in the Slavonic story of the girl who was given the hermit’s heart to eat. I shall return to this subject in the next chapter.

The blood would impart its power to the water it putrified, wherein the Cairene women washed. Washing in water endowed with supernatural power is not uncommon elsewhere. Transylvanian Saxon women not only drink of baptismal water: they also wash in it, preferably on Midsummer Day.^165.2^ Among the Galician Jews unfruitful women when they bathe according to their ritual dip themselves nine times under water.^165.3^ Saint Verena, one of the illustrious obscure of mediæval mythology, bathed in the Verenenbad at Baden in the Aargau, and thereby conferred on it such virtue that pregnant women or such as wish for children, if they bathe there, soon attain their desire.^165.4^ The {166} reference to pregnant women must no doubt be understood of those who wish to avoid miscarriage and to be safely delivered. German tales and popular saws used to speak—perchance they still do—of a Kinderbrunnen, or Children’s Well, whence babies were fetched, as in England from the parsley bed. The Bride’s Well, in Aberdeenshire, was at one time the resort of every bride in the neighbourhood on the evening before her marriage. Her maidens bathed her feet and the upper part of her body with water drawn from it; and this bathing, we are told, “ensured a family.”^166.1^ The well into which Pûran, that Panjâbî Joseph, was thrown, is situate on the highroad between Siâlkot and Kalowâl. His residence in it sanctified it to such an extent that the women of those parts believe that if they bathe in it they will become fruitful.^166.2^ Panjâbî women sometimes adopt more questionable means. They wash naked in a boat in a field of sugar-canes, or under a mango-tree. Mangoes, it will be remembered, are favourite phallic fruits in Indian tales. Properly these women ought to burn seven houses. But this is cruelly forbidden by English law; and they have to content themselves with burning secretly at murky midnight on Sunday, and as far as possible at a cross-road, a small quantity of clay from seven dwellings. On this fire they heat the water wherewith to wash. Or, during the night of the feast of Divali—always a night in the moonless half of the month—the husband draws water at seven different wells in an earthen pot, and places in the water leaves plucked from seven trees. He brings the pot to his wife at a crossway where the roads meet roughly at right angles. She must sprinkle herself with the water unseen by anybody. The husband then strips and puts on new {167} clothes. This is indeed a putting-off of the old man. Or else the woman perfectly nude covers a space in the middle of the crossway, and there lays leaves from the five royal trees, the ficus religiosa, ficus indica, acacia speciosa, mango, and butea frondosa. On these she places a little figure of the god Rama, sits on the figure and washes her entire body with water in five vases drawn from five wells, four of which must be situated at the four points of the compass from the town or village, and the fifth to the north-east in the outskirts. She pours the water from the vases into a receptacle whose bottom is pierced by a hole whence the contents may fall on her body. The ceremony must be accomplished in absolute solitude, and all the utensils must be left on the spot.^167.1^

Among the ancient Greeks various streams and springs were deemed of virtue against barrenness. Dr. Ploss cites divers classical writers as recording the claims of the river Elatus in Arcadia, the Thespian spring on the island of Helicon, the spring near the temple of Aphrodite on Hymettos, and the warm springs of Sinuessa. Others might easily be found, if necessary, both ancient and modern. A curious rite is reported among the Serbs. A young, sterile married woman cuts a reed, fills it with wine, and sews it, together with an old knife and a cake, in a linen bag. Holding this bag under her left arm she wades in flowing water, while some one on the brink prays for her: “Fulfil my prayer, O God, O Mother of God,” and so on through the whole gamut of sanctities. During this prayer the wader drops the bag in the stream, and, coming out, sets her feet in two braziers, out of which her husband must lift her and carry her home. Here we have unmistakably a prayer and {168} offerings of food and drink to the water, the latter remaining but little changed while the former puts on a Christian guise. A parallel case is that of the Burmal er Rabba spring at Sidi Mecid, near Constantine, in Algeria, frequented both by Jewesses and Moors for the removal of infecundity. Each of these women slays a black hen before the door of the grotto, offers inside a wax taper and a honey-cake, takes a bath and goes away assured of the speedy accomplishment of her wishes. Inasmuch as sacrifices are foreign to Islam, it is obvious that the ceremony is a survival of an older cult. Curiously enough, the Dyaks of Borneo, who are still frankly heathen, offer domestic fowls to the water-goddess against unfruitfulness. The afflicted person (sometimes it is a man) gives a big feast called Cararamin, and goes to the haunt of the Jata, or goddess, in question in a boat beautifully adorned, taking a domestic and other fowls with gilded beaks as offerings. They are thrown living into the water, or their heads are merely cut off and offered, while the body is consumed by the votary. In many instances, we are told, carved wooden figures of birds are made use of instead of the real article. In the islands of Watabela, Aaru and the Sula Archipelago, barren women and their husbands go to the ancestral graves, or, if Moslems, on Friday to a certain sacred tomb, to pray together with some old women. They bring offerings which include a goat or pig and water. The husband prays for a medicine, and promises, if a child be given him, to offer the goat (or pig, if a heathen), or to give it to the people to eat. It is expected that after this the medicine will be prescribed to both husband and wife in dreams. They both wash with the water they have brought, which is consecrated by standing for a while on the grave, and eat together some of {169} the food, leaving the rest on the grave. They take the goat, or pig, back home, to be sacrificed in accordance with the husband’s vow, only if the wife become pregnant. The Nature-goddess of the Yorubas on the west coast of Africa is represented as a pregnant female; and the water that is consecrated by being kept in her temple is highly esteemed for infertility and difficult labours.^169.1^ And in general we may refer not only to the numerous wells and springs that even yet in Europe have a similar reputation, but also to the rites practised in connection with water by a bride on being brought to her new home. It would be too great a wandering from our present subject to discuss these rites in detail. But one at least of the objects they have in view is the production of offspring. I add a few references at the foot of the page for those who wish to pursue the inquiry.^169.2^ Meantime it will be seen that the practices passed in review throughout this and the preceding paragraph bear a remarkable analogy to the stories wherein we are presented with the Supernatural Birth as caused by bathing; and it will not be forgotten that the mother of the Erse hero Aedh Sláine does not succeed in bearing a human child until she has washed in the consecrated water: drinking of it alone was insufficient. Having regard to the stories {170} of Danae and the Mexican goddess who was fructified by the rain, it is interesting too to note that Hottentot maidens must run about naked in the first thunderstorm after the festival when their maturity is celebrated. The rain, pouring down over the whole body, has the virtue of making fruitful the girl who receives it and rendering her capable of having a large offspring.^170.1^ It is even possible that a similar superstition was once known in Germany. A saying current in many parts points in this direction, namely, that when it rains on St. John’s day the nuts will be wormy and many girls pregnant^170.2^—unless, as a Slav practice already cited may suggest, the pregnancy be the result of their eating the wormy nuts.

A few other usages must be referred to before we leave the subject. Several of the stories I have cited attribute pregnancy to the rays of the sun. The ancient Parsees, as we might have expected, believed that the beams of the rising sun were the most effective means for giving fruitfulness to the newly wedded; and even to-day, in Persia and among the Tartars in Central Asia, the morning after the marriage has been consummated the pair are brought out to be greeted by the rising sun.^170.3^ At old Hindu marriages the bride was made to look towards the sun, or in some other way exposed to its rays. This was expressly called the Impregnation-rite.^170.4^ Among the Chacos, an aboriginal tribe of the southern part of South America, the bride {171} and bridegroom sleep the first night on a skin with their heads towards the west; for, we are told, the marriage is not considered as ratified until the rising sun shines on their feet the succeeding morning.^171.1^ Whether or not it is really their feet on which the sun is expected to shine, the ratification of the marriage by the sun must be intended to obtain the blessing of fertility.

It was customary at Rome to offer goats at the Lupercal; and two youths underwent the pretence of a human offering, doubtless once anything but a sham. A sacrificial meal followed. The Luperci, then, girt with skins of some of the slain animals, cut other skins into strips, and armed with the strips ran up and down the Via Sacra, across the Forum and through the city, striking all whom they met. Women who desired to be made fruitful used, it is said, to place themselves naked in the way and receive the blows upon their palms.^171.2^ Dr. Ploss compares with this the procedure in Voigtland and other parts of Germany at the Easter festival, when the young fellows chase the girls out of their beds with green twigs.^171.3^ Similar is the object of the custom observed from India to the Atlantic Ocean of throwing grain and seeds of one sort or another over a bride, and apparently of the custom of flinging old shoes. The wandering Gipsies of Transylvania are said to throw old shoes and boots on a newly married pair when they enter their tent, expressly to enchance the fertility of the union. In Germany, pieces of cake are thrust against the bride’s body.^171.4^ About Chemnitz a table-cloth seems to acquire prolific virtue by serving at a first christening {172} dinner; and it is sometimes cast over a barren wife.^172.1^ The Asturian ballad already cited in an earlier chapter ascribes to the borage the power to affect any woman treading on it as it affected the unfortunate princess Alexandra.^172.2^ Rolling beneath a solitary apple-tree seems an approved method of obtaining pregnancy among the Kara Kirghiz women.^172.3^

Amulets play a great part in procuring offspring. I have only space for a few examples. A porcupine’s foot is a favourite talisman among the Moorish women of Marocco. The Northern Basuto in the Transvaal lay the fault of childlessness on the husband. He has done to death by witchcraft one of his kin, or committed some other wrong towards the dead man, who is therefore angry. After consulting a wizard, and ascertaining to whom is to be ascribed the evil, he goes to the grave, acknowledges his fault, prays to the dead for forgiveness, and takes back from the tomb a stone, a twig, or some other object, which he carries about, or deposits in his courtyard, as a fetich or a charm. If he duly honour it, it will restore the good understanding between the deceased and himself, and give him the benefit he desires. An Otchi Negress will take a fetich conditionally on its giving her children. If a child be born, it is a fetich-child and is considered to belong to the fetich, just as in many of the tales the child is given by an ogre upon the stipulation that it shall belong to the ogre, and be fetched away, either when he pleases, or at a fixed period. The women of Mecca commonly {173} wear a magical girdle to yield them fertility. In Persia, as we have seen, the mandrake is worn as an amulet.^173.1^ On the Banks’ Islands, women take certain stones to bed with them for the same purpose.^173.2^

In the interior of western Africa, over the border of Angola, on the way from Malange, barren Negresses have been found wearing two little carved ivory figures representing the two sexes in a string round the body.^173.3^ The phalloi worn by Italian women are familiar to every student of folklore; and the images worn by Danubian Gipsies have already been mentioned. The worship of the linga is a favourite one with Hindu women. The representation is sometimes carved and painted red, at other times a mere rough upright stone. Such idols are to be seen everywhere in India; and their pious worshippers may often be observed decking them with flowers, red cloth or gilt paper, like the Madonna in Roman Catholic churches. Siva himself, the third in the modern Hindu Trimurti, is represented under this form; and under this form—softened down by Southey in his finest poem from the grotesque obscenity of the original story—he appeared when

“Brahma and Vishnu wild with rage contended, And Siva in his might their dread contention ended.”

A cannon, old and useless and neglected, belonging to the Dutch Government, lay in a field at Batavia, on the island of Java. It was taken by the native women for a linga. Dressed in their best, and adorned with flowers, they used to worship this piece of senseless iron, presented it with {174} offerings of rice and fruits, miniature sunshades, and coppers, and completed the performance by sitting astride upon it as a certain method of winning children. At length an order arrived from the Government to remove it as lumber; and removed it was, to the great dismay of the priests, who had pocketed the coppers and had manufactured and sold the sunshades—probably also to the dismay of the ladies who depended upon its miraculous power—but at all events, it is satisfactory to know, without injuriously affecting the increase of the population.^174.1^ At Roman weddings one of the ceremonies was the culminating rite so dear to these Batavian women; and its object was that the bride might conceive.^174.2^ At Athens there is a rock near the Callirrhoe, whereon women who wish to be made fruitful rub themselves, calling on the Moirai to be gracious to them. And Bernhard Schmidt, writing on the subject, recalls that not far from that very spot the heavenly Aphrodite was honoured in ancient times as the eldest of the Fates.^174.3^ At the foot of another hill is a seat cut in the rock on the banks of a stream. There the Athenian women were wont to sit and let themselves slip on the back into the brook, calling on Apollo for an easy delivery. The stone is black and polished with the constant repetition of these invocations; for still on a clear moonlit night young women steal silently to the spot to indulge in the same exercise, though we may presume their prayers are nominally addressed to some other divinity.^174.4^ Near Verdun in Luxemburg, Saint {175} Lucia’s arm-chair is also to be seen in the living rock. There childless women sit and pray, afterwards awaiting with confidence the fulfilment of their petitions. A curious rite used until the Reformation to be performed at the shrine of Saint Edmund at Bury St. Edmund’s. A white bull was kept on the fields of the manor of Habyrdon, and never yoked to the plough nor baited at the stake. When a married woman wished for offspring he was “led in procession through the principal streets of the town to the principal gate of the monastery, attended by all the monks singing, and a shouting crowd; the woman walking by him and stroking his milk-white sides and pendent dewlaps. The bull being then dismissed, the woman entered the church, and paid her vows at the altar of Saint Edmund, kissing the stone, and entreating with tears the blessing of a child.”^175.1^ In the Pyrenees near Bourg d’Oueil is a stone figure of a man about five feet in height, on which barren women rub themselves, embracing and kissing it. In Brittany there are several shrines of this worship. Newly-wedded pairs from the neighbourhood of Plouarnel and Saint Renan sometimes go to the menhir of Kervéathon in the lande of Kerloas; and there bride and bridegroom rub simultaneously their abdomens against the two rough sides of the stone. By this the husband hopes to get many sons—the wife hopes to get not merely fecundity but the whip-hand of her husband. Near Rennes the newly married go, the first Sunday of Lent, to jump on a stone called the Bride-stone (Pierre des Épousées), singing the while a special song. Down to the Revolution there stood at {176} Brest a chapel of Saint Guignolet, containing a priapian statue of the holy man. Women who were, or feared to be, sterile, used to go and scrape a little of the phallos, which they put into a glass of water from the well and drank. Another Breton saint called Guerlichon was similarly honoured.^176.1^

There is a miraculous stone on the sacred hill of Nikko in Japan, at which women who want to become mothers throw stones, sure of having their ambition gratified if they succeed in striking it. And in the Uyeno Park at Tokio is a seated statue of Buddha. Whoso succeeds in flinging a stone upon the sacred knees attains the same result. At Whitchurch near Cardiff, in the last century, a woman animated by the wish for children would go on Easter Monday to the parish churchyard, armed with two dozen tennis balls, half of them covered with white leather and the other half with black, and would throw them over the church. The operation was to be repeated every year until her wish was accomplished.^176.2^ I shall return to these practices in a future chapter. In the Tirol there are miraculous images beside which little waxen figures in the shape of toads are hung. The figures are called Muettern. It is believed that every woman has inside her a creature in this form. Many a mother has gone to sleep with her mouth open, and the muetter has crept out and gone to plunge into the nearest water. If she do not close her mouth, the muetter by-and-bye gets back safely, and the woman, previously sick, is restored to health. But if she close her mouth, she dies. Unfruitful women offer these waxen {177} figures to images of the Madonna, or of the Pietà.^177.1^ On the Gold Coast, Bassamese women who are possessed by a demon of barrenness meet at the fetich hut and deposit consecrated vases and figures of clay representing mothers nursing, while they present to the fetich offerings of tobacco and handkerchiefs. The demons are frightened away by the noise of fire-arms, drums and the blowing of horns. The officiating chief makes an offering of gold-dust, and then spirts a mouthful of rum over the belly of every woman who desires issue. An improvised banquet brings the solemnity to a close.^177.2^ The figures in both these cases may be regarded as a symbolic dedication of the mother, or more probably the child, to the supernatural being whose aid, like that of the ogre in the tale, is invoked. The women on the Babar islands in the Malay Archipelago take measures bearing some superficial resemblance to the last, but widely different in meaning. The help of a man who is rich in children is first obtained. The husband then collects fifty or sixty young kalapa fruits, while the wife prepares a doll about twenty inches long in red kattun. On the appointed day the man comes to their hut, puts the husband and wife to sit near together, and sets before them a plate containing sirih-pinang and a young kalapa fruit. The latter is opened, and both husband and wife are sprinkled with the juice. The assistant then takes a fowl, holds its feet against the woman’s head and prays, apparently in her name: “O Upulero, make use of this fowl, let fall a man, let him step down into my hands, I pray thee, I {178} implore thee, let fall a man, let him step down into my hands and on my lap!” He asks the woman: “Is the child come?” She answers: “Yes, it is already sucking.” Then he touches the man’s head with the fowl’s feet and mutters certain formulæ. The fowl is put to death by a blow against the posts of the hut, opened, and the veins about the heart probed. It is laid on a plate and put on the domestic altar. The news is spread in the village that the woman is pregnant, and every one comes and congratulates her. The husband borrows a cradle, in which the doll is placed, and for seven days it is treated as a new-born child.^178.1^ Here it is simulation that plays the important part. In addition to the prayer and sacrifice, which might be found anywhere, the Babar islander pretends that the prayer has been granted, and acts accordingly. Simulation as a form of magic is well known over the whole earth. As applied to cause conception it is not one of the practices to which we have had to direct special attention in this chapter. But it deserves a passing notice as strengthening the general argument that conception is held to be caused by other than natural means. A common form of simulation for the purpose of obtaining children is found in the custom of putting a boy to sit on the bride’s lap at a wedding. The ceremony was usual among the ancient Aryans, and is prescribed in detail in the Âpastamba.^178.2^ It is still followed in the east of Europe and elsewhere. In England, to rock an empty cradle is to rock a new baby into it. The Bechuana, Basuto and Agni women carry dolls, which they treat like children.^178.3^ And in China a barren {179} woman adopts a little girl to produce conception—a practice for which an elaborate reason is assigned. In the invisible world, it is said, every woman is represented by a tree, which bears as many flowers as she is fated to bear children. If she be sterile, her tree will not bear; and then, just as a fruit-tree is grafted to make it bring forth fruit, so by adopting a little girl she will provoke on her tree the germination of flowers, and thus become fruitful.^179.1^

Reviewing the superstitious rites here brought together, it will be seen that no case is found where fecundity has been held to be procured by the sense of smell, or of sight, as in some of the tales. It was, however, an ancient classical belief that partridges were impregnated in some such way; for Pliny tells us that if the female only stood opposite to the male and the wind blew from him towards her, or if he simply flew over her head, or very often if she merely heard his voice, it would be enough.^179.2^ Though we do not find the possibility of obtaining fecundity by a glance, we have in the superstitions of the Evil Eye so widely, well-nigh universally, spread a belief in a power quite as great, though exercised in a different way. In the power of magicians to eat by a look, the Evil Eye performed the converse of impregnation. The authorities on this subject have been laboriously collected by M. Tuchmann, to whose work the reader is referred.^179.3^ Belief in impregnation by the wind only would seem to present difficulties at least as great as any of these. Yet it was a common belief among {180} the ancients, not merely used for a poetical ornament by Vergil, but repeated without question as a literal fact by men of lofty intellect and wide attainments like Pliny and Augustine, that mares were, in Lusitania, as the former asserts, or in Cappadocia, according to the latter, fertilised by wind.^180.1^ And if the inhabitants of the district of Lampong, in the island of Sumatra, be not maligned, they, at the beginning of the present century, believed all the people on the neighbouring island of Engano to be females who were impregnated in the same manner.^180.2^

It cannot of course be asserted that in every instance of magical practices collected in the present chapter, pregnancy is believed to be supernaturally caused by the means prescribed, apart from the natural means, as in the tales. Indeed, the natural means are often expressly to be employed in addition to the magical ceremonies. Yet the line between natural and supernatural is so faint in savage minds that it is difficult to know how much is to be ascribed to the one and how much to the other. And we are justified in believing, not only that the practices tend to render credible the stories, but further that the stories and the practices—as well as superstitions, like those mentioned in the last paragraph, unconnected with practice—are inextricably intermingled, and owe their origin to the same habit of thought. Nor must we forget that the relationship between father and child was in early times imperfectly recognised. The researches of the last five-and-twenty or thirty years have established that among many savage races the father was held to be no relation to his children. Even where he exercised, as among the native Australians, {181} despotic power over wife and children, the latter were held to be his rather as owner than as begetter; and the ownership of both wife and children passed at his death to his brothers, while at the same time the relationships of the children were reckoned exclusively with their mother’s kin. This system of relationships, known scientifically as Mother-right, traces whereof are almost everywhere found, can only have sprung either from a kind of promiscuity wherein the true father could not have been ascertained, or from an imperfect recognition of the great natural fact of fatherhood. Both causes, perhaps, played their part. But at least we may say that the attitude of mind which favours the practices and beliefs we have been discussing is one which would be consistent, and consistent alone, with the imperfect recognition of paternity. And it is unquestionable that the superstitions, once rooted, would be likely to survive long after paternity had become an accepted fact, and, tenacious of their existence, would seek new grounds of justification. This would have the effect of gradually transforming the stories from matter-of-fact statements of no unusual interest into sacred legends, into mere tales told for pleasure, and into wonders believed but unexplained, and the practices into religious rites and rude medical prescriptions.

Chapter VII. Death and Birth as Transformation

In the course of our examination of tales of Supernatural Birth we have more than once found that birth was to the hero merely a new manifestation. He had previously existed in other shapes, and by undergoing birth (preceded sometimes, but not always, by death) he was entering on a new career, he was ascending a new stage of being. The child in the Annamite story of Posthumous Revenge had been an eel, with liberty of metamorphosis into other forms. Marjatta’s child in the half-heathen postscript to the Kalevala had been the creator of the sun and moon. Yehl, the Thlinkit hero-god, repeatedly became the son of ladies, who were beguiled into swallowing a pebble, a blade of grass, or even a drop of water, which was no other than the divinity in disguise. The subject, however, is so important, not merely in the general study of savage ideas, but in relation to the myth of Perseus, especially in its modern forms, that it is necessary to deal with it a little more at length.

The oldest known story wherein transformation of this kind forms an incident is that of The Two Brothers. The manuscript now in the British Museum was written by the scribe Enna, or Ennana, and belonged to the Egyptian {183} monarch Seti II., of the nineteenth dynasty, before he came to the throne. We have the story, therefore, in the shape it bore about the earlier half of the thirteenth century before Christ. It is a long one, and I have only space for a very meagre abstract. There were, thus it runs, two brothers, Anpu and Bata, of whom Anpu, the elder, was married, and Bata served him. Anpu’s wife fell in love with the younger brother, and tempted him as Potiphar’s wife tempted Joseph, and with a similar result. The elder brother, when his wife denounced Bata to him, became like a panther with rage, and lay in wait behind the stable-door to slay his brother when he returned from the field. The oxen, however, warn the youth, who flees and invokes the Sun-god Horus to judge between himself and his brother. With the god’s assistance he escapes; and Chnum, at Horus’ request, makes a wife for him, that he may not dwell alone. His happiness, however, is not lasting. The sea carries one of the woman’s fragrant locks to Egypt, where it is taken to the king, who sends to seek its owner, and makes her his favourite. Now Bata kept his heart in the top of the flower of the Cedar. This was known to the woman; and by her advice the king sent and cut down the Cedar. The flower fell to the ground, and Bata’s heart with it; and he died. When he escaped from his brother, Bata had found means to convince him of his innocence, and had given him a sign, saying that when Anpu should take a jug of beer in his hand and it should turn into froth, then he should know that Bata was dead, and he should come and look for him. Anpu, warned in this way of his brother’s death, sought and found him; and after a long search he discovered his heart lying beneath the Cedar. He picked it up and put it into a cup of cold {184} water. Bata thereupon revived, and having drunk up the water and his heart with it, he became as he had been before. The next day he assumed the form of a great bull with all the sacred marks, which his brother brought and gave to the king. In this form Bata found means to make himself known to his wife. She for her part was by no means pleased to see him; and having wheedled an oath out of the king that he would grant her whatsoever she asked, she demanded the bull’s liver. As he was being slain two drops of his blood fell upon the king’s door-posts, and forthwith grew up two mighty persea-trees. One of these trees spoke to the Favourite, accusing her of her crimes, and declaring: “I am Bata, I am living still, I have transformed myself.” She caused the trees to be cut down; but while she stood by to watch, a splinter flew off, and, entering her mouth, rendered her pregnant. In due time she gave birth to a son, who became prince, and upon the king’s death succeeded to the throne. Then he summoned the nobles and councillors; his wife was brought to him, and he had a reckoning with her.^184.1^

There are many points of exceeding interest in this, one of the oldest fairy-tales on record. For us, however, they centre on Bata’s transformations. He changes first into a sacred bull without undergoing death. He is then slain; and from his blood spring up two persea-trees. These are cut down; and his final metamorphosis is, by the medium of birth, once more into a human being; for there can be no doubt that the child born of the king’s Favourite is regarded as Bata himself. A modern Transylvanian märchen unfolds a similar series of adventures; though {185} it is wanting in the consummate irony of the Egyptian tale, which makes the lady become pregnant of her foe and give him at last the life to avenge himself of her villainies. A king overhears two maidens boasting of what they would do, the one, if she were married to him, the other, if she were his cook. He marries the former, and makes the other his cook. But the latter is jealous; and when the queen bears twins, a boy and a girl with golden hair, she contrives to bury them in the dung-heap, and impose upon the king and court with a cat and dog, which she alleges to be the queen’s offspring. The king therefore buries his queen alive, and marries the cook. Out of the dung-heap grew two golden fir-trees, in whose beauty the king took great pleasure. His new wife, on the contrary, is uneasy, and declares she cannot rest unless on boards made from those very trees. The king reluctantly has them cut down; and now she would be happy, but that in the night she hears the boards beneath the royal bed conversing as brother and sister. Accordingly the next day she causes them to be burnt in the oven; but two sparks fall among some barley, which is given to an ewe. The ewe drops two lambs with golden fleeces. As soon as she sees them, the queen falls sick and craves for their hearts to eat. Once more compliant, her husband allows them to be killed. Their hearts are roasted for the queen; their entrails are thrown into the river. Two pieces are carried by the water and thrown on a distant shore, where the two children with golden hair reappear from them, and so charm the sun with their beauty that he stands to watch them and goes not down for seven whole days. God, wondering why the night so long delayed, went to inquire of the sun, and was shown the twins. By His means they were restored to their father, {186} the wicked queen was punished, and their mother brought back to life.^186.1^

M. Cosquin, commenting on the Egyptian tale, has brought together a number of analogues, chiefly European. I proceed to notice some of these, and a few others containing a similar chain of incidents. In a Roumanian story which follows the main lines of the Transylvanian, an emperor’s son weds the youngest of three daughters. The heroine’s foes, however, are not her sisters, but her husband’s stepmother and her daughter. As she had foredoomed, she bears twin sons with golden hair and a golden star on the forehead. By his stepmother’s treachery her husband is induced to believe that she has given birth to two puppies; and he orders her to be buried in the earth to the breast, that the world might know what was her punishment who would betray the emperor’s son. Then he married his stepsister. The twins had been interred beneath the emperor’s window; and out of their grave grew two fair aspen-trees. In three days they had attained the stature of three years, and the emperor took great pleasure in them. Long did his wife beg for permission to cut them down ere he yielded; but, after all, emperors are but men. So cut down they were, and made by his command, the one into a bedstead for himself and the other for the empress. But the bedsteads talked, as in the Transylvanian tale, and the empress overheard them. The next day she caused them to be burnt, and their ashes thrown {187} to the winds. When the fire was hottest there flew out two sparks and fell into the deep water that flowed through the realm. There they became two fish with golden scales. They were caught by the imperial fishermen, and then changed back into their original form of twin boys with golden hair and golden stars. When they had grown up they made their way to the palace and told their tale, to the confusion and condemnation of their enemies, and the restoration of their mother to her rightful place.^187.1^ According to a Sicilian variant, the heroine, married against the will of the queen, her mother-in-law, bears thirteen children, twelve sons and a daughter. They are thrown into the garden, where they grow up as twelve orange-trees and a lemon-tree. A goat eats them and bears the children anew.^187.2^ In a Bengalee tale the heroine kindly relieves her fellow-wife by accidentally tumbling into a well. A rishi explains to her husband that she was not of royal blood, but had been born a rat, and changed by him at her own wish into a cat, then into a dog, a boar, an elephant and a beautiful girl, successively. He directs the well to be filled up, and causes a poppy-tree to grow up out of her flesh and bones; and that is the origin of opium.^187.3^

A German tale belonging to an entirely different cycle approaches the Egyptian märchen in representing the transformations as incidents of a contest between a man and a woman, wherein the man is ultimately victorious. The hero, having disenchanted a king and all his court, obtains a magical sword and becomes the champion of the unspelled monarch against an aggressive neighbour. The {188} latter has a clever daughter, who entraps the champion by her wiles and makes off with his sword. This results in his total defeat and capture by her father, who all-to hacks him, stuffs the pieces into a bag and sends it to the invaded king with his compliments, and there was his champion. The hero is, however, restored to life by a master-sorcerer, and endowed with the power of assuming what shape he will. He takes that of a magnificent horse, which the invading king is induced to buy. The king’s daughter scents a trick, and the horse’s head is cut off. Three drops of his blood fall into the apron of the king’s cook, and she buries the apron, as the horse has previously directed her, under the eaves. A cherry-tree grows up on the spot; and when the princess cuts it down, the cook throws three chips into the pond, where they change into three golden ducks. The princess kills two, and, capturing the third, takes it into her bedchamber. There it finds the stolen sword and flies off with it. Resuming his proper form, the hero defeats and destroys the aggressive king and his whole family, and marries the compassionate cook.^188.1^ In a Russian story, the hero is betrayed by his wife to the Turks, and killed. Recalled to life, he changes into a marvellous horse with a golden mane, which the sultan buys. But Cleopatra, the hero’s wife, recognises her husband through his magical disguise. When the horse is slain, from his blood arises a bull with golden hair. Cleopatra kills it in turn, and from its head an apple-tree springs with fruit of gold. The apple-tree is cut down; and its first chip is transformed into a golden duck, which overswims the river and on the other side regains its pristine form as the hero.^188.2^ A Breton {189} tale represents the hero as changing himself into a horse. When the horse is put to death, a ball of his curdled blood is put on a stone in the sun and sprinkled with magical water. A cherry-tree grows out of it, laden with fine red cherries. When the cherry-tree is cut down, a cherry is sprinkled, and a beautiful blue bird comes out of it. The treacherous wife is desirous of catching it; and her new husband lays down the hero’s magical sword to enable him to move more freely. The bird then seizes the sword, and, rapidly changing back into the hero, puts his false wife and her second choice to death.^189.1^

In none of the foregoing stories do we find the hero victorious by means of a second birth from a woman. In a White-Russian variant of The Outcast Wife group, the heroine, married to a king, has two sisters, who deceive the king as to her offspring and cause her twin boys to be buried alive. Out of their graves grow two maples, one with a golden, the other with a silver, stem. The king puts away his wife, and marries one of her sisters. She has the maples cut down to make a bed, and afterwards burns the bed and sprinkles the ashes on the road. An ewe swallows some of the ashes, and bears two lambs, marked like the boys, with a moon on the head and a star on the nape of the neck. The new queen orders the lambs to be slaughtered, and their entrails to be thrown out into the street. Her divorced sister having gathered up the entrails, cooks and eats them, and thus becomes once more mother to her sons. When they are grown up they reveal the whole story to the king, and obtain the reinstatement of their mother and the punishment of her guilty sister.^189.2^ {190} A curious tale from Cyprus brings before us a girl who is fated to wed her own father, of whom she is to have a son, and that son she is afterwards to take for husband. In order to defeat the prophecy she contrives her father’s murder. From the ground where the body is buried an apple-tree springs up and produces beautiful apples. The heroine buys some, and, eating them, becomes pregnant. When she learns where the apples grew she determines to kill her child. As soon as it is born, therefore, she stabs it in the breast, nails it up in a coffer, and flings the coffer into the sea. It is picked up by a vessel; and the captain, finding the child still living, adopts it. It grows up to manhood and fulfils the prophecy. From the wound-marks on his breast the mother recognises in her husband her own child; and on hearing his story she understands at last how useless it is to struggle against fate, and puts an end to her own life.^190.1^

Quite another group is reached when we come to a series wherein the heroine first appears in the shape of a fruit. This is opened by the hero, and a maiden comes out. In a märchen from Asia Minor the maiden is, in the hero’s absence, thrown into a well by a black slave, who takes her place. In the well she becomes a golden fish. When the prince catches it the slave gets him to kill it and make broth of it for her. But three drops of its blood fall to the ground and shoot up into a cypress-tree. The tree is cut down and burnt. A chip clings to the dress of an old woman who comes and asks for a light; and this chip changes again into the heroine.^190.2^ In Basile’s version the slave sticks a needle into the lady’s temple and transforms {191} her into a dove. The dove is caught, killed, scalded and plucked, in order to be cooked; and the water and feathers are thrown into the garden. Within three days a citron-tree, like that out of which the heroine originally came, rises, and bears three fine citrons. The king plucks them; and when he has opened them, his true love emerges from the third, and condign punishment is meted out to the slave.^191.1^ A tale from the Deccan presents a maiden, brought up in an eagle’s nest, after sundry adventures happily married to a rajah. She is pitched into the water-tank by her jealous fellow-wife. A sunflower grows up in the tank; and the jealous woman, when she finds her husband becoming fond of it, orders her servants to dig it up and burn it. A mango-tree grows up on the spot where the sunflower has been burnt, bearing one magnificent mango. It is gathered by a milk-woman, and turns into the heroine.^191.2^ A variant, which looks like an earlier form of the story, brings the heroine originally out of a bél-fruit. The sunflower is replaced by a lotus; and when the false wife tears the lotus-flower to pieces a bél-tree grows on the spot, bearing one fruit, which contains the Bél-princess once more.^191.3^ In a Cinderella tale, told by the Tjames, Kajong, persecuted by her foster-sister Halœk, throws herself into a lake and suffers transformation into a golden turtle. The king marries Halœk instead, but cannot forget Kajong. The golden turtle is caught, and in the king’s absence his wife kills and eats it, throwing the shell behind the house. A bamboo springs up from the shell. When Halœk cooks and eats the bamboo-shoot, the husk becomes a bird. She cooks the bird; and the {192} feathers, thrown away, turn into a mœkya-tree, the fruit of which bears a resemblance to the outline of a woman. Out of the fruit the heroine comes again.^192.1^

There is a group of stories very popular in Europe and known to the farthest extremities of Asia and Africa. As usually told, a girl or a boy is killed by an envious brother and buried. Some time after, a bone is picked up and fashioned into a shepherd’s pipe; or a reed growing on the grave is cut and made into a similar instrument. No sooner does the musician put the pipe to his mouth than the voice of the murdered child is heard within it, reciting his death and accusing his murderer. Occasionally, however, the tree, or plant, which grows from the grave sings or speaks of itself, as in the Dahoman version, where a mushroom appears on the grave. The mother of the murdered boy is about to pluck it, when it says to her: “Mother, pluck not. I was with my comrades. They gave me two thousand cowries. They only gave one thousand to my brother. Then he cruelly killed me; my brother killed me!” Sometimes it is a rose which speaks of itself, or when it is put to the mouth; sometimes a flute made from the branch of a tree which has grown on the grave. In one case it is a pomegranate from such a tree: when the fruit is brought to the king it changes into the head of the murdered man. At other times the crime is revealed by a whistle, or pipe, which has belonged to the victim, or has fallen in his blood. Again, a bird will proclaim itself the victim and tell the story, or lead the avenging kindred to the grave. A Chinese drama, believed to be founded on a folktale, represents the body as burnt by the assassin, {193} and the ashes made into a dish. The dish denounces the criminal.^193.1^

The old Scottish ballad of Binnorie belongs to this group, though in all its British variants it has been modernised. Scott’s version, the best known, is only half traditional. The elder sister drowns the younger for the sake of her lover. The body is found by the miller in “the bonny mill-dams of Binnorie.”

“A famous harper passing by The sweet pale face he chanced to spy. . . . . . . “He made a harp of her breast-bone, Whose sounds would melt a heart of stone. “The strings he framed of her yellow hair, Whose notes made sad the listening ear.”

Here the ballad has obviously been manipulated; but a comparison of other versions shows that the sense has been preserved.

“He laid this harp upon a stone, And straight it began to play alone. “ ‘O yonder sits my father, the king, And yonder sits my mother, the queen. “ ‘And yonder stands my brother Hugh, And by him my William, sweet and true!’ “But the last tune that the harp played then, Binnorie, O Binnorie! Was ‘Woe to my sister, false Helen!’ By the bonny mill-dams of Binnorie.”

“According to all complete and uncorrupted forms of the ballad,” says Professor Child, comparing not only British examples, but also a large number from Denmark, Scandinavia, Iceland and the Färoe Islands, “either some part of the body of the drowned girl is taken to furnish a musical instrument, a harp or a viol, or the instrument is wholly made from the body.” And he suggests that the original conception was the simple and beautiful one found in several variants, that the king’s harper, or the girl’s lover, takes three locks of her yellow hair to string his harp with. I venture to think he is wrong. The tradition supplied by the singer of one of the Swedish versions, though lost from the ballad itself, is much nearer the mark in relating that the drowned maiden floated ashore and grew up into a lime-tree, from whose wood the harp was made. As a matter of art it may be that, as Professor Child goes on to remark, “the restoration of the younger sister, like all good endings foisted on tragedies, emasculates the story.” But art is a slow growth, a growth of civilisation, and this tragedy is an ancient, a barbarous tale. Here the good ending has not been foisted on. It is of the very essence and primitive matter of the plot. It is not found in the more modern and cultured versions, but in the ruder and more archaic. It does not occur once in England and Scotland, where the influence of culture has been most decisive.^194.1^

Without tarrying to discuss these ballads any further, let me refer briefly to three variants of an unmistakably antiquated character collected among the Santal aborigines of Bengal. In one of them the maiden is drowned by her seven brothers’ wives. She reappears as a bamboo growing {195} on the embankment of the tank where she had lost her life. Out of the bamboo a fiddle is made which, when played, seems to wail as in bitter anguish, and moves the hearers to tears. It is acquired by a village chief. In the absence of the household the maiden comes out of it and prepares the family meal. The chief’s son watches, discovers and marries her. A second version relates that the maiden was given by her brothers to the water-spirit to obtain water in a tank they had made. Right in the middle of the tank where she was drowned there sprang up an upel-flower, the purple sheen of which filled the beholder with delight. The bridegroom, to whom she had been betrothed previously to her sacrifice, comes to claim his bride, and gathers the flower. Ere the bridal procession reaches the bridegroom’s dwelling on its return, the flower has become the bride. The third version is more striking still. Here the heroine was eaten by a monkey. The monkey died, and from the place where his body decayed a gourd sprang and grew, and bore a fruit. A banjo was made of this gourd, which emitted wonderful music and sang the maiden’s fate. Her sister, the rani, cheated the minstrel out of the instrument and hid it in her own room. There the maiden, coming out, was discovered by the rajah, her sister’s husband; and matters were arranged more happily than in the Scottish ballad, by the two sisters’ sharing one spouse.^195.1^

In most of the cases we have dealt with, the metamorphoses {196} undergone by the hero or heroine are, as in the Egyptian tale, stages of a contest. A curious example, where the contest is between a mbulu, or supernatural female, and a woman, is given in a Zulu tale. The mbulu was found out and put to death. From the spot where she was buried a pumpkin came up and tried to kill the child of the woman who had married the mbulu’s husband. But the people chopped the pumpkin into pieces, burned them and threw the ashes into the river, so that nothing more could come of that mbulu.^196.1^ In the Russian story of The Fiend, the struggle is with a supernatural being over whose personality Christianity has thrown a deeper tint of horror. The heroine, having fallen under the Fiend’s power, dies. By her directions and her wise old grandmother’s advice, her body is not carried out through the doorway, but (according to an old custom, the object of which was to prevent the dead from finding the way back) by a hole dug under the threshold, and is buried at a crossway. A wondrous flower arises from the spot. Taken home by a young lord and placed in a flower-pot, the blossom falls at night from its stem and turns into a lovely maiden, whom of course the nobleman weds.^196.2^

The stories cited in previous chapters of the hermit burnt to death and then born anew from a girl who eats, or smells, his heart, or some other portion of his body, are unconnected with a contest. So is the Eskimo tale of the young woman who was caught by a whale. After living with him some time she fled and lived with the seals in the form of a seal. In that shape she was harpooned by a man and cut to pieces. Her head was taken home and thrown beneath the bench, whence she slipped into the womb of {197} the man’s wife and was born anew. The name she received in this fresh birth was her old and euphonious name of Avigiatsiak.^197.1^ A Tjame tale speaks of a youth who dies of hopeless love of a princess. Before his death he begs his mother, as soon as he has yielded up the ghost, to take out his liver, dry it and preserve it in a box. The king is attacked with a disease of the eyes, and is advised by his astrologers to steep the dried liver of a man in water and bathe his eyes with it. The lover’s is the only one to be procured. In bathing his eyes with the water the king observes a little babe playing in the basin. He calls his daughters to look at it; and it draws the youngest of them, the object of the dead man’s love, into the basin, where she disappears. Recourse is had again to the astrologers, who on consulting the lots discover the history of the dead lover and the cause of the princess’ disappearance. In the end, as the astrologers predict, the king’s wife bears a boy, who is no other than the lover born again, and his first mother bears a girl. When they grow up the king marries them; and on his death the boy becomes king.^197.2^ Numerous Chinese tales are founded on the same superstition. In one, a man on dying contrives to avoid drinking the oblivious potion to which all the dead are condemned, and thus remembers his transformations. For his crimes he is next born as a horse, then as a puppy, afterwards as a snake, and lastly as a human being once more.^197.3^ In another, the son of the Thunder-god takes a man for a trip among the clouds. In the course of his adventures he manages to steal a small star, which he brings back with him to the earth. By day it looked an ordinary, dull stone, but at {198} night it became brilliant and lighted up the house. One evening it began to flit about like a fire-fly, and finally entered his wife’s mouth and went down her throat. That night the husband dreamed that an old friend long dead appeared to him, and said: “I am the Shao-wei star. Your friendship is still cherished by me, and now you have brought me back from the sky. Truly our destinies are knitted together, and I will repay your kindness by becoming your son.” His wife afterwards bore him a boy.^198.1^

A favourite theme in Western folk-song, a theme also known as far away as China, is that of the lovers, brought, like Tristram and Isolte, to a tragic end, from whose graves two trees grow and intertwine their branches, as if they joined in a lasting embrace. It is obvious that the trees are merely the lovers transformed. Some of the variants in ballad or märchen make this clear. Such is the ballad of Count Nello of Portugal. The hero there falls in love with the Infanta. But her father opposes the match, and cuts off the lover’s head. The Infanta then dies, and is buried before the altar, while her lover is laid near the church-porch. On the one grave sprouts a cypress, on the other an orange-tree; and their branches unite. The king orders them to be cut down. Blood flows from the cuts; and from the one tree flies forth a dove and from the other a wood-pigeon.^198.2^ So in the Highland story of Deirdre the lovers are buried on either side of a loch. A fir-shoot grows out of either grave, and they unite in a knot above the loch. Twice the king orders them to be cut down, and twice they grow again. The third time they are allowed to shoot forth and unite in peace.^198.3^

But this theme is found not only in märchen and ballad. It is not less frequent in saga. In Kurdestan were shown the graves of two lovers, renowned in Kurdish story, which were, in the sixteenth century, if we may believe the native writer Ahmed Khain of Bayazid, a place of pilgrimage. On each of the graves grew a rose-tree, whose branches entwined themselves together in token, as we are told, of love.^199.1^ In Germany many tales are told of white lilies growing in sign of innocence and purity out of graves. Zingerle cites, among others, the case of William of Montpellier, from whose mouth sprang a lily wherein the words Ave Maria were to be read. From the grave of Saint Andrew of Rinn in the Tirol a snow-white lily also appeared, on whose leaves, as they opened, letters were seen. It was plucked by a boy before the letters could be read; and the deed cost his family dear, for few of them there were who did not come to a violent or a premature end.^199.2^ In Pomerania, a lad who learned with difficulty, and only succeeded in remembering the words “Our Father who art in heaven,” died unconfirmed. The commune would not permit his burial in consecrated earth, so he was laid outside the churchyard, close to the fence. Out of his tomb arose a beautiful white lily, bearing plainly to be read the words “Our Father who art in heaven.” On digging, it was found to be rooted in his heart. Near Wollin, on the road to Poblotz, is a spot covered with dog-roses, where, years {200} ago, a woman was burnt as a witch and her remains buried. Before the end came to her sufferings she said: “If I be a witch, thorns will grow on my grave; if not, then roses.”^200.1^ Space does not admit of our following the tale in this shape through all the countries of Europe; and it is needless. We may turn instead to note a few analogous superstitions elsewhere. Among the Kirghiz every one on whose grave a tree spontaneously grows is deemed a saint; while among the Gallas of Abyssinia wood that has been burning a little is placed upon the grave after the funeral, and if it grow it is taken as a sign that the dead man is happy.^200.2^ The Santals believe that good men enter into fruit-bearing trees.^200.3^ In the Molucca Islands there is a tree which bears during the night, from sunset to sunrise, a rapid succession of fragrant white flowers. To account for this phenomenon the inhabitants of Ternate have a tradition that there was once a beautiful woman who was beloved by the sun, and who, being deserted by her fickle lover, slew herself. Her body was, in accordance with the custom of the country, burnt; and from her ashes arose the tree, called by the early Portuguese voyagers the Tree of Sorrow.^200.4^ The legend current among the inhabitants of Nias, an island off the coast of Sumatra, to account for the origin of the cocoa-nut-tree, relates that Halu hada, a supernatural being, one {201} day sneezed so violently that he sneezed his head off. It fell to earth, and, being covered up, the precious tree, indispensable to man, sprang from the spot.^201.1^ A German practice is manifestly a relic of a belief similar to that recorded in these tales and superstitions. If a farmer have several times a foal or calf die, he buries one of them in the garden, planting a young willow in its mouth. When the tree grows up it is never polled or lopped, but is allowed to grow its own way, and is believed to guard the farm from future casualties of the same kind.^201.2^

But though the identity of the tree with the dead man, or as in the last-cited custom with the animal, is clear in all these traditions, it is not precisely affirmed as would seem to be the case with the story of the pomegranate referred to a few pages back, or with an Arab märchen from Tunis, in which a vine grows up from the very place where the blood of a murdered man had flowed. The murderer finds one enormous bunch of grapes upon it, although the season of grapes is not yet. Struck with its beauty, as well as with the uncommon occurrence, he takes the bunch to the sultan. On opening the basket the sultan found no grapes, but a man’s head freshly cut off, dropping with blood. The murderer, horror-stricken, confessed his crime, and was summarily executed.^201.3^ Thus too in Ojibway legends, reproduced by Longfellow, that mysterious being

“… the young Mondamin, With his soft and shining tresses, With his garments green and yellow, With his long and glossy plumage,”

came and wrestled thrice with one of their heroes. The {202} third time the Ojibway was victorious. His antagonist was overthrown, killed and buried. The victor watched the grave,

“Kept the dark mould soft above it, Kept it clean from weeds and insects, Drove away with scoffs and shoutings Kahgahgee, the king of ravens. Till at length a small green feather From the earth shot slowly upward, Then another and another, And before the summer ended Stood the maize in all its beauty, With its shining robes about it, And its long, soft, yellow tresses; And in rapture Hiawatha Cried aloud: ‘It is Mondamin! Yes, the friend of man, Mondamin!’ ”

The Brazilians have a parallel tradition about the manioc. It was a maiden who died, and, being buried in her mother’s house, grew up as a plant, flourished and bore fruit.^202.1^ Among some tribes of Kaffirs, when twins are born they are examined, and the one appearing the more delicate is suffocated by placing a clod of earth in its mouth. When dead, it is buried near the doorway of the hut, and a dwarf aloe is planted over the grave. “The aloe is regarded in some way as the living representative of the dead infant; its spirit or shade is supposed to be in it, or to be hovering about it. When it is planted, its spines are carefully cut away that the survivor may play about it, and drag himself up by it, and make himself strong, as he would have done with his fellow-twin had he been permitted to live.”^202.2^ It {203} would be difficult to find a practice which would better explain that of the German farmer with his dead calf.

In classical legends we meet everywhere cases of transformation, either before or after death, of men and women into trees or plants, or into some of the lower animals. The most famous case, and one which has recently been submitted to careful examination by two distinguished living anthropologists, is that of Attis, who was changed into a pine-tree and in that form worshipped. It would be impertinent in me, after the acute and exhaustive discussions by Mr. Frazer and Mr. Grant Allen, to occupy any space with the consideration either of the legend or the cult. I only refer to them in this place as an illustration of ancient belief in metamorphosis, and for the purpose of recalling the reader’s attention to its identity with the superstitions of savage tribes, as well as those preserved in modern folklore, which we are now reviewing. The cult of Attis may not have been based, as Mr. Grant Allen thinks, on the worship of a dead man. “The tree-spirit and the corn-spirit, like most other deities,” may not “originate in the ghost of the deified ancestor.”^203.1^ We need not go the length of Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Euhemerism; on the contrary, we may regard it as a child (one among many) of his passion for explaining everything quite clearly, for stopping up all gaps and stubbing up all difficulties in his synthesis, rather than an all-sufficient account of the beginnings of religion. It is certain, however, that the legend as we have it, the worship as it is recorded for us, implied a belief in metamorphosis as a possible and actual occurrence consequent upon death. This belief had descended to {204} classic times from savagery, for to the savage mind death very often is merely metamorphosis. Nor, as we have seen, is the metamorphosis confined to vegetable forms. The pious Æneas beheld his father Anchises in a snake that crept from his tomb. The Zulu, not less pious, beholds his father in a snake lurking about his kraal.^204.1^ The ancient Egyptians held that the souls of the departed could assume animal forms.^204.2^ The Yorubas think the souls of the dead are sometimes born again in animals, or, though more rarely, in plants.^204.3^ In the East Indies, a Dyak who dies by accident, as by drowning, is not buried, but carried into the forest and simply laid down there. It is believed that his soul enters a tree, a fish, or some other brute. Accordingly certain kinds of fish are not eaten, and certain kinds of wood are not used, because they willingly harbour souls. On the other hand, the soul of a man over whom all proper funeral rites have been performed enters the City of Souls. But it cannot abide there for ever. After a life seven times as long as on the earth it dies and returns to this world, where it enters a mushroom, a fruit or a leaf, in the hope that it may be eaten by a human being or one of the lower animals. In such case the deceased is born again in the next offspring of the living creature which has eaten it; otherwise he comes to an end.^204.4^ The inhabitants of Nias believe that the soul at death divides into three parts. One of them goes to the village of the dead, and there often takes brute-form. Thus murderers become grasshoppers, those who die without male issue become {205} night-flying moths, old men become hogs, and young children earthworms. Another part, called the ehèha, must be received in his mouth by the son of the dying person from the mouth of the latter, else it turns into a small animal and lingers about the body until search be made for it. When found, it is safely conveyed into a statuette representing the deceased.^205.1^ The natives of Ugi, in the Solomon Islands, believe that the souls of the dead pass into fireflies.^205.2^ The Moquis of North America maintained that death was nothing but a process of transmutation, and that the body was changed into animals, plants, and inanimate objects.^205.3^ The medicine men and women of the Sioux, it was believed, might be changed after death into wild beasts.^205.4^ Among the Gallinomero of California bad men were thought to return in the shape of coyotes, just as the Buddhist population of Ladak hold that a malicious person is reincarnated as a marmot.^205.5^ A Tirolese tale exhibits the shapes even yet believed over a wide extent of Christendom to be assumed by guilty and by innocent souls. For many years, it is said, a large toad haunted the steps of a vaulted grave at Meran. Flung away it was, and killed it was; but the next Ember Day there it would be sitting again upon the steps. At last a pious woman guessed that it was a poor soul, and spoke to it, asking what were the conditions of its deliverance. They were hard, but she fulfilled them; and as soon as atonement was made the toad changed into a dove, white as a stainless flower, and {206} flew up before its deliverer’s eyes into heaven.^206.1^ The numerous British legends of ghost-laying, in which the dead unquiet soul appears as a bull, a black dog, a toad, a fly, or what not, recur to the mind in this connection. The beast that is, after a struggle, imprisoned by the parson, or some other conjurer, in a boot, a snuff-box, or a bottle, or bricked up in the haunted chamber, is only the changed form of a once living man or woman. But the superstition as thus presented has been so often and so well commented on, that it is needless to illustrate it further.

We can now understand the Bulgarian ballad cited in Chapter IV., containing the pathetic narrative of the hyacinths growing out of the dead man’s grave and causing his mother to give birth to another son. The flowers were a new manifestation of the youth who had been untimely slain; and by them he entered again into his mother’s womb and was born. This and others of the tales referred to in the same chapter and that which follows it are parallel with the tale of The Two Brothers in the transformations they present. And both they and many of the practices detailed in the last chapter point very clearly to the belief that a dead person can be born again, if only the right means be taken for that end.

All our illustrations of the doctrine of Transformation have been drawn from cases where the hero is conceived as having begun his career in human shape, whether as man or deity, save in the one instance of the Annamite story of Posthumous Revenge. There his pristine figure was an eel. But if the power of metamorphosis be such that human beings can be changed by means of death {207} and a fresh birth into brute and vegetable form, brutes and vegetables may equally be changed by the same agency into human beings. The märchen of The King of the Fishes displays this power. In the light of the transmutations we have passed in review, it is abundantly evident that the fisherman’s sons, their horses, dogs and life-tokens, are nothing more nor less than the ancestor-fish in a new mould. In previous chapters we have examined cases in which men and women deceased have been held to reappear as human babes without undergoing any intermediate change into lower forms; and we have others yet to examine. What is expressly affirmed in tales where pregnancy is caused by tasting the ashes of a corpse, what is implicit in the disgusting superstitions which lead women to swallow portions of dead bodies, must also be understood in the parallel cases where fishes and fruit are eaten and result in the production of children. Here then we have the real meaning of the tales and superstitions considered in the last three chapters. At their root lies the belief in Transformation. Flowers, fruit, and other vegetables, eggs, fishes, spiders, worms, and even stones, are all capable of becoming human beings. They only await absorption in the shape of food, or in some other appropriate manner, into the body of a woman, to enable the metamorphosis to be accomplished. In some cases, as where drugs and other compounds are used, or where water or sunbeams are the fructifying power, this meaning has been forgotten. The virtue of such means is usually imputed to magical or divine power. But this does not appear to be the original belief. The original belief is intimately bound up with the savage theory of the universe. In that theory no strict line of cleavage runs across Nature. All things may change their {208} shape, some at will, others on the fulfilment of certain conditions, whereof death, as applying to all animal and vegetable life, is perhaps the most usual. Most of the instances of death and new birth we have yet to deal with have little apparent relation to this point. But, so far as they add to the general evidence as to the reappearance of the dead in fresh births, even the least relevant of them are not without value.

According to the classical mythology, when Orion’s two daughters sacrificed themselves for Thebes, two young men sprang from their ashes. Ovid describes the goblet presented by Anius, the priest-king of Delos, to Æneas, as carved with a representation of the scene:

“Out of their maiden embers, lo! twin youths, Lest the race fail, arise, Coronæ named, And lead the funeral pomp.”^208.1^

Although the poet speaks of the devoted virgins as their mothers, we shall probably not be far wrong in conjecturing that the youths were originally regarded as new and worthier manifestations of the maidens whose virile courage had not hesitated at self-inflicted death, in pursuance of the oracle, to save their devoted city from the plague. However this may be, elsewhere we frequently find stories of men who have died and been born again. The Mogul emperor Akbar is said to have declared that he had formerly been a Brumhuchari, named Mukundu. Worldly desires were excited in his mind by cow’s hairs in some milk which he had drunk; and he began to long for wisdom and greatness. The pipul-tree under which he was sitting had the power of granting any wish. Therefore, laying hold of it, he {209} renounced life in Gunga, and reappeared as Akbar.^209.1^ A Mongolian tale relates that Shêduir Van, a Khotogait prince, having been guilty of plotting insurrection against the emperor of China, was caught and condemned to execution. Before being beheaded, he said: “I am to be executed; but that is no misfortune; my soul shall enter the womb of the emperor’s wife.” The empress accordingly gave birth to a son, who had a cicatrice on the neck. The wise men advised the emperor that the soul of Shêduir Van had entered her womb. The child was therefore destroyed. The empress conceived once more, and bore a son with a scar. The emperor, again advised by his wise men that this was the soul of Shêduir Van, ordered the babe to be thrown into the fire; but the charcoal went out and changed into water. After this, we are told that the soul of Shêduir Van did not again enter the empress’ womb, but revealed itself as a hairless bay mare, whose hide is preserved to the present day.^209.2^

Like the story of the great monarch Akbar, that of Shêduir Van has probably been influenced by Buddhistic thought. But in both cases the influence would be that of Buddhistic thought only as popularly understood. The common people of India, we may safely assume—still less the tribes of Tibet and the practical Chinese—never absorbed into their minds the abstract doctrines of Karma and the Skandhas. It is, indeed, more than doubtful whether these philosophical speculations have ever penetrated the intellects of the greatest doctors of the Northern Church. The current belief is illustrated in the Chinese tales I have quoted. Even more strikingly is it exemplified {210} in the successive incarnations which provide a perpetual succession of Grand Lamas at Lhasa, and of skooshoks for minor monasteries. While as to the Southern Church, we are not dependent for our assumption upon the folklore and the general culture of the Cingalese and the peoples of Further India. In the Játakas, or parables attributed to Gautama, we have irrefragable witness of the teaching current from a very early period in Buddhist history. They are apologues, most of them probably of much older date, which have acquired sacredness by being fitted to alleged events in the ministry of the Buddha. The Master is represented as taking occasion, from some remark made by his disciples upon a passing occurrence, to declare that in a former birth the same things had happened to them; and in illustration of his statement he tells the tale. The following may stand for a typical conclusion or application. It is that of the parable of the cruel crane outwitted by the crab: “When the Teacher had finished this discourse showing that ‘Not now only, O mendicants, has this man been outwitted by the country robe-maker, long ago he was outwitted in the same way,’ he established the connection, and summed up the Játaka, by saying, ‘At that time he [the crane] was the Jetavana robe-maker, the crab was the country robe-maker, but the Genius of the Tree was I myself.’ ” To the personages of the tale is thus ascribed complete identity with the Buddha and his contemporaries. Transmigration, in short, as conceived in popular Buddhism, was no product of the subtleties of Hindu metaphysics. It was no refined philosophical doctrine. It is undiscoverable in the Rig-Veda, the earliest sacred book of the Sanskrit-speaking conquerors of India. Its ethical value, even, if we may judge from the Játakas, was of the smallest. Such as it was, Transmigration {211} was a direct evolution of the more savage belief in Transformation, as we have seen that belief exemplified in the present chapter, and hardly distinguishable from it, either in its terms or in its consequences.

Far in the west the Celts are reported to have held the dogma of Transmigration. This report, coming to us from writers imbued with Greco-Roman philosophy, and interpreting, according to the custom of classical antiquity, the religions of barbarous races in the terms of their own, has been understood to imply an elaborate philosophical system such as those of Pythagoras and Buddha. That the Celts had imbibed Buddhist theories we cannot suppose. The doctrines of Pythagoras may, indeed, have penetrated into Gaul by commercial routes or by contact with Greek colonies. Yet, if they did, it is strange that no other vestige of the Pythagorean philosophy is imputed to the Celts, and that the Druidical religion, whereof we are told the dogma in question was part, blossomed, as it is said to have done, most perfectly in Britain, where it was furthest removed from all foreign influences. We know directly little concerning Druidism. Our knowledge, as far as it goes, leads us to think the religion of the ancient Britons and Gauls was of the same general character as other barbarous cults. Arising thus from the common ground of savagery, there is no reason why Celtic opinion may not have begun to develop in the same direction as popular Buddhism. Neither Celtic mythology, however, as known to us, nor Celtic folklore, as reported by mediæval and modern writers, affords ground for supposing that metempsychosis in any philosophical sense was part of the ancient Celtic creed. In touching, a few pages back, on Barguests, as ghosts in animal mould are technically called, we disposed {212} of the most salient point of modern Celtic folklore, for we found it to be an expression, in no way divergent from that of other uncultivated peoples, of the universal doctrine of Transformation. We shall now briefly discuss the examples to be found in what remains to us of the ancient mythology.

The story of Taliessin, though only found in a manuscript of the seventeenth century, comes, it is generally conceded, within this category; for its coincidences with the older Celtic traditions are too striking to allow of any other explanation. Ceridwen, the wife of Tegid the Bald, had, among other children, a son of such extreme ugliness that she thought he was not likely to be admitted amongst men of noble birth unless he had some exalted merits or knowledge. So she undertook, with the aid of the books of Fferyll—that is to say, Vergil the Magician, a character which Vergil the poet is made to sustain in mediæval tradition—to boil a caldron of Inspiration and Science for his benefit. Now, this caldron required to be boiled for a year and a day; at the end of which time three precious drops would be obtained, the rest of its contents being poisonous, and indeed highly explosive. The caldron was placed in charge of Gwion the Little and a blind man named Mordav, while Ceridwen herself went to gather herbs of virtue. But before the expiration of the year and a day the three precious drops flew out of the caldron and fell upon Gwion’s finger, which he instinctively put to his mouth to allay the scalding. He at once became possessed of all knowledge, and foresaw his danger from Ceridwen’s rage when she found her preparations had been in vain. He, therefore, fled, hotly pursued by the witch. To elude her he changed into a hare, whereupon she took the shape {213} of a greyhound. He ran towards the river, and became a fish, to chase which she assumed the form of an otter. Gwion then flew up as a bird. He soon found himself followed by a hawk, which was no other than his enemy; and just as she was about to stoop upon him he dropped among a heap of winnowed wheat on the floor of a barn, and turned himself into one of the grains. From a hawk to a black hen the transformation was easy; and Ceridwen thus pecked up the grain in question and swallowed it. She became by this means pregnant, and gave birth to a beautiful boy—a new manifestation of Gwion the Little; and when he was born she wrapped him up in a hide and cast him into the sea, by which he was ultimately thrown upon the weir of Gwyddno. From thence he was rescued to become the king of the bards, Taliessin.^213.1^ Two poems attributed to Taliessin enumerate many more metamorphoses than are mentioned in the tale. The exact date of these poems is, in the present state of Welsh scholarship, unascertainable; but they are certainly not later than the fourteenth century. One of them speaks of the poet’s original country as the region of the summer stars, and identifies him with Merlin and other sages and bards. Confining our attention, however, to the narrative, we may lay aside the earlier changes as links of a chain of incidents common in fairy-tales, and known technically as the Transformation-fight. An example of it familiar to every reader is the contest between the princess and the Jinn in the story of the Second Calender in the Arabian Nights. These changes are not effected by death and birth as are the ones we are considering now. In the final {214} change, on the other hand, Gwion is devoured by the witch and reproduced as her son, just as Bata is swallowed in the shape of a splinter of the persea-tree by the king’s Favourite, and born again of her, to become her destruction.

So far the Welsh mythology: a parallel instance is afforded by the Erse. Both have suffered from the Euhemerism of the Middle Ages that has preserved them for us; but the true lines of the tales are not too far obliterated for our present purpose. The story of Tuan mac Cairill, then, as we find it embalmed in the Irish chronicles, makes him the sole survivor of the band of Partholon, who first colonised the island after the Deluge. Fallen into decrepitude after many years, he saw a new immigration led by Nemed, flying from which he fasted three days, lay down to sleep and was changed into a stag. Again he fell into old age, fasted, and was metamorphosed into a wild boar. Meanwhile, the descendants of Nemed had all died out. Semion, then, the ancestor of the three tribes of the Fir Domnann, the Fir Bolg and the Galiûin, established himself in the land. After a time the process was repeated, and Tuan became a great sea-eagle. Beothach, from whom descended the Tuatha De Danann, seized the island, and afterwards the sons of Mile, whose descendants are the living race. The sea-eagle found himself in the hole of a tree on the bank of a river. There he fasted nine days, and, sleeping, awoke as a salmon in the stream. For a long time he escaped the fishermen’s nets; at last he was caught and carried to the wife of Carell, king of that district. She saw the fish, longed for it, cooked it, and ate it up. But this was far from being the end of Tuan. From her he was born again, {215} wise man and prophet, and was called Tuan, son of Carell. He lived not only to be baptized at the coming of Saint Patrick, but to converse with Saint Columba, and to narrate the whole history of Ireland, as he remembered it during his various transformations, to Saint Finnen in the middle of the sixth century. All the ancient history, all the old genealogies rest upon his authority.^215.1^

Etain, another mythological figure of Ireland, had a somewhat similar adventure. She was one of the two wives of Mider, who belonged to the Tuatha De Danann. Oengus, son of the Dagde, and foster-son of Mider, carried her off, and she became his wife. Her first husband, however, had not ceased to remember her, and he sought if by any means he might recover her. His other wife, bent on frustrating him, and watching her opportunity, sent a wind that blew Etain out of the bower built for her by Oengus, and deposited her on the roof of a house where the lords of Ulster and their wives were engaged in a drinking-bout. Upon the table beneath stood a golden cup of beer beside one of the ladies. From the roof, by the opening which did duty for a chimney, Etain fell into the cup. The lady swallowed her unperceived in the next draught, and gave birth to her again after nine months. Thus Etain began a new life. She became the loveliest of Irish maidens, and wedded the supreme king Eochaid Airem, who reigned at Tara. But Mider had not yet ceased to love her. Disguised as a warrior, he sought the king and challenged him to a game of chess. When the board was set: “Play,” said he to the king. “I do not play without stakes,” replied the monarch. Mider, on his side, bet fifty {216} brown horses, large-breasted, with limbs slender and agile. “For my part,” said the king, sure of success, “if I lose, I will pay what you like.” They played; the king lost, and Mider demanded his wife. The king objected that he was entitled to his revenge; and his adversary, with a bad grace, yielded. A year passed, during which the king saw nothing of Mider; though he often appeared to Etain and wooed her, but without success; for she proved faithful to her husband. At the end of the year Mider came and claimed the second game. They played; again Eochaid lost, and Mider demanded to put his arms around Etain and give her a kiss. “Come back in a month,” replied the king, “and it shall be granted you.” When the fatal day arrived, his rival found Eochaid surrounded by his warriors, the fortress closed and guarded on every side. The day passed, and no antagonist presented himself. But at night Mider stood all at once in the midst of the hall, the beautiful Mider, more beautiful than ever. No one had seen him enter. The lady blushed when he boldly named his errand. “Do not blush,” quoth Mider; “thou hast no reason to reproach thyself. For a whole year I have not ceased to woo thee with jewels and wealth—thee, the fairest of the women of Ireland; and thou hast refused to listen to me so long as thy husband gave thee no permission.” “I have told thee,” replied she, “that I will not follow thee, unless my husband yield me. I will only be taken if Eochaid give me to thee.” “I will not give thee,” cried the king. “I only consent that he put his arms around thee here in this hall, as has been agreed.” “It shall be done,” said Mider. Laying his lance in his left hand, he seized Etain with his right; and, rising in the air, he disappeared with her through the smoke-hole in {217} the palace-roof. The warriors that surrounded the king, ashamed at their own impotence, rushed from the hall to pursue the fugitives. They only saw, high above Tara, two swans whose long white necks were encircled and bound together by a yoke of gold. The story adds that afterwards, by the magical might of his Druids, Eochaid forced an entrance to the mysterious subterranean palace of Mider and took possession once more of his wife, so lovely, so beloved. But Mider’s hate was one day revenged on the posterity of Eochaid and Etain by the tragic death of Conaire, their grandson.^217.1^ The Druidical doctrine of metempsychosis would appear, alike from these ancient mythological tales and from modern folklore, to have been nothing more than Transformation as we find it among savages in all parts of the world.

Before turning to rites and superstitious beliefs, we may notice the legend of Oankoitupeh, son of the Red Cloud, the hero of the North American Maidus. A maiden sees a beautiful red cloud, and hears sweet music. The next day, while picking grass-seed pinole, she finds an arrow trimmed with yellow-hammer feathers; and suddenly a man is standing beside her, who is none other than the red cloud she had seen the day before. The bright and resplendent stranger declares his love; and the maiden replies: “If you love me, take and eat this basket of grass-seed pinole.” He touches the basket, and its contents vanish. Thereupon the girl swoons. When she returns to consciousness, behold! she has given birth to a son. The Red Cloud tells her: “You love me now; that is my boy, but he is not of this world.… He shall be greater than {218} all men; he shall have power over all, and not fear any that live. Therefore shall his name be Oan-koi-tu-peh (the Invincible). Whenever you see him, think of me. This boy has no life apart from me; he is myself.”^218.1^ Compare with this the statement concerning Cuchulainn, one of the epic heroes of Ireland. It will be recollected that he was a new birth of the god Lug. The great epic cycles took final shape after the wars with the Danes in the eleventh century. One of the manuscripts of that period relates that the men of Ulster took counsel about Cuchulainn, because they were troubled and afraid that he would perish early, “so for that reason they wished to give him a wife that he might leave an heir; for they knew that his re-birth would be of himself.”^218.2^

These passages, though related of more than common men, point to a belief shared by the ancient Irish with the ancient Californians, that the son is in some sense identical with his father—a new birth, a new manifestation of the same person. This curious belief finds categorical expression in the great Brahman compilation known as the Laws of Manu. There we are told: “The husband, after conception by his wife, becomes an embryo and is born again of her; for that is the wifehood of a wife, that he is born again by her.”^218.3^ Corresponding with this declaration, the ritual prescribes, among other ceremonies when a boy is born, that the husband should address the babe thus: “From limb by limb thou art produced; and of the heart thou art born. Thou indeed art the self (atman) called son; so live a hundred autumns.” In the {219} same words he addresses the boy every time he himself returns from a journey, embracing his head and kissing him thrice.^219.1^

Traces of the notion that a child is neither more nor less than the reappearance of an ancestor are found almost all over the world. It seems to be a general opinion among the Negroes of the western coasts of Africa that the ghostly self of a dead man enters the body of a newborn babe belonging to the same family. In Guinea, and among the Wanika, the resemblance, physical or mental, borne by a child to its father is attributed to this cause. The Yorubas inquire of their family god which of the deceased ancestors has returned, in order to name the child accordingly; and they greet its birth with the words “Thou art come!” as if addressing some one who has returned.^219.2^ On the Gold Coast, parents who have lost several children sometimes cast into the bush the body of the infant who has last died. They believe the next born to be the same child returned; and if it have any congenital deformity or defect, that is attributed to injuries received from wild beasts or other evil influences in the jungle.^219.3^ Caution, however, is required {220} in dealing with some of these cases, for the subtlety of savage metaphysics is marvellous. An acute observer points out that among the Tshi-speaking peoples of the Gold Coast and the Ewe-speaking tribes of the Slave Coast, a distinction is drawn between the ghostly self that continues the man’s existence after death in the spirit-world, and his kra or ñoli, which is capable of being born again in a new human body. In the eastern Ewe districts and in Dahome the soul is, by either an inconsistency or a subtlety, believed to remain in the land of the dead and to animate some new child of the family at one and the same time; but it never animates an embryo in a strange family.^220.1^ Not very different seems to be the opinion of the Khonds of Orissa. Anthropologists have often quoted Macpherson’s description of the divination for determining a child’s name. The priest drops grains of rice into a cup of water, naming with each grain a deceased ancestor. From the movements of the seed in the fluid, and from observations made on the infant’s person, he pronounces which of the progenitors has reappeared in it; and the babe is usually named accordingly. Khond psychology endows every one with four souls. Out of such a company there is no difficulty in arranging that one of them shall be attached to some tribe and perpetually born again into it. This, in fact, is what is believed to happen.^220.2^

In New Zealand the priest, after certain ceremonies, first recited to the child the following stave:

“Wait till I pronounce your name. What is your name? Listen to your name, This is your name——”

Then followed strings of ancestral names, until the babe sneezed. The name being uttered at the moment of the sneeze was the one chosen.^221.1^ We are not expressly told that the object of this rite was to identify the child with one of his forefathers. But, as Dr. Tylor remarks, we may always suspect it in such a case; and the verses seem to point to some such purpose. It was difficult to distinguish between gods and ancestors among the Maori,^221.2^ as, in truth, it often is, if we may not use a stronger expression, among savage peoples. The worship of the kindred inhabitants of Samoa was totemistic. During the mother’s labour, first the family god of the father, and then that of the mother was invoked. The god being invoked at the instant of birth was looked upon as the child’s special aitu (Maori, atua) or god; and during infancy the child was called and actually named “merda of Tongo” or “of Satiā,” or whatever other deity it might be.^221.3^ This would seem to go a step beyond the Maori creed, and to indicate that at one time the child was identified with the totem-god. In the island of Aurora, New Hebrides, where the people are Melanesians, women often speak of a child as the nunu, or echo, of some dead person. Dr. Codrington says: “It is not a notion of metempsychosis, as if the soul of the dead person returned in the newborn child; but it is thought that there is so close a connection that the infant takes the place of the {222} deceased.”^222.1^ We may set this explanation beside the statement quoted by Dr. Tylor from Charlevoix that “some North American Indians were observed to set the child in place of the last owner of its name, so that a man would treat as his grandfather a child who might have been his grandson.”^222.2^ Whatever may be the fact as regards the Melanesians, it is certain that North American tribes, like the Mengwe and the Thlinkits, believed in the new birth of the dead. Among the latter, if a pregnant woman dreamed of a dead man, it was said that the ghost had taken up its abode in her body; and if a newborn child had the least resemblance to a deceased relative, the latter was believed to have returned, and the child was called by his name.^222.3^ Even in Norway, if a pregnant woman dream of one who is dead, the child must be named after him. If the dream be of a man, and a girl be born, the man’s name must be feminised, and vice versâ. If she dream of more than one person, the names of all must be given.^222.4^ The last practice perhaps resulted from the uncertainty as to which of the dead who appeared was to be identified with the coming stranger. Returning to America, we find that the Tacullies and Sicamies, tribes allied to the Thlinkits, inquire of the dead if they will return to life or not. The shaman inspects the naked breast of the body, and if satisfied on the point he blows the soul into the air, that it may seek a new body or puts his hands on the head of one of the mourners, thereby conveying the spirit into him, to be embodied in his next offspring. The relation thus favoured, we are {223} told, added the name of the deceased to his own.^223.1^ It is said that the Dakotas believed that their medicine-men and women ran their career four times in human shape.^223.2^ In the Amazons Valley the Ticunas, and yet further to the south the Bakaïrí and their allied tribes, name a child from one of its forefathers. In Southern India the same practice is followed by the Yenadies;^223.3^ and, indeed, it may be said, whatever be its motive, to be a common practice in many parts of the globe. An Esthonian babe is baptized by the name of one of its grandfathers.^223.4^ In the Romagna it is usual to give the names of grandfathers, uncles and other relatives, to children, but not the names of relatives who are living, lest their death be accelerated—a vague reminiscence probably of the real reason.^223.5^ Elsewhere in Italy the superstition that a baby is a dead relative returned {224} appears to be extant.^224.1^ Among the Andaman islanders, “if a woman who has lost a baby be about to become a mother, the name borne by the deceased is bestowed on the fœtus, in the expectation that it will prove to be the same child born again. Should the infant at birth prove to be of the same sex as the one who had died, the identity would be considered sufficiently established.”^224.2^ The same belief was current among the people of Old Calabar.^224.3^ Huron philosophy posited the existence of two souls in a man. One was changed into a turtle-dove, or went to the village of souls. The other remained attached to the body, never to leave it “unless some one gave birth to it again.” The Hurons, moreover, as we have seen, buried in the road their little children who died, in order that they might secretly enter into the wombs of passing women, and be born again.^224.4^ As to the beliefs of the Eskimo there seems a little question. As to their practice of naming children after deceased persons (either relatives or intimate friends) there is no doubt. Dr. Tylor cites from Crantz the assertion that a helpless widow would seek to persuade some father that the soul of a dead child of his had passed into a living child of hers, or vice versâ, thus gaining to herself a new relative and protector. Dr. Rink, on the other hand, considers that the deceased person whose name a child {225} bore was only looked upon as a kind of guardian spirit. His statement, however, that the child when grown up was bound to brave the influences that had caused his namesake’s death—for instance, if the namesake had perished at sea, his successor had all the greater inducement to become a skilful kayaker—points to identity; and so do the stories I have cited from Rink’s collection in previous pages.^225.1^ It may be suggested that the discrepancy is to be accounted for by the gradual change in Eskimo ideas under contact with civilised travellers and missionaries.

We have now reviewed a large number of märchen wherein the hero or heroine is said to have suffered by death and new birth transfiguration into a variety of forms, both brute and human. We have, moreover, found the same plot in sagas in both hemispheres. And, advancing to savage theory and its correlative customs, I hope I have made it plain that stories of metamorphosis, whether märchen or sagas, have been founded upon the belief that at death men are not annihilated, but pass into fresh forms, sometimes appearing as plants and trees, sometimes as animals of the lower creation, and sometimes as men and women born again into their own kindred or among strangers. This is a creed held so widely that—though subject, perhaps, to varying stress, according to the degree and direction of the evolving civilisation, or, possibly yet more, to the different capacities and opportunities of travellers who report the characteristics of savage life and thought often far removed from their own—it may yet be regarded as practically universal. I have not attempted to distinguish {226} between Transformation and Transmigration. When a man, either without passing through death and birth, or passing through death only, changes into a wolf or an ant, it is no more than Transformation. But if the metamorphosis be effected by death and growth into a tree, or a fresh birth from brute or human mother, it is obvious that there is more difficulty in affirming identity between the new substance and the old. In some cases, if we may trust our authorities, and if we rightly interpret the tales and ritual and beliefs they report, the savage sets this difficulty at defiance: the proofs of identity overcome it. Oftener, it may be, the identity established is of an inner and more elusive self. For want of a better word we call this kernel of a man his soul, or spirit, both of which words connote to us an immaterial object, with none of the attributes of physical existence. To the savage, however, as to our own forefathers, and to the folk of all civilised countries still, the idea of an incorporeal soul is incomprehensible. He may not be able to see it at all times; he may not be able to handle it when he will: but this kernel, this inner self, of friend or foe, comes to him in dreams; he beholds it in the snake or the toad, the insect or the dove, that haunts the tomb of one who was dear to him, or in the rose-bush or the lily growing upon the grave; or he fetches it back in the shape of a white stone to his beloved child, who has sickened at its absence, and is like to die. Thus it is everywhere in the lower culture conceived as material, though capable of changing its form and appearance without losing its identity. And this identity is the real identity of the man, suffusing and transfusing his entire being. Hence the dividing line between Transformation and Transmigration {227} is frequently so thin and faint. Transmigration as popularly understood (for I am not speaking of the speculations of philosophers, whether Indian or Greek) is a natural and imperceptible development of Transformation. As regards the popular Buddhistic belief of ancient Hindustan I have already shown this from the Játakas; and what is true of that holds good of other popular forms of belief, at all events where Judaism and its daughter-faiths, Christianity and Mohammedanism, have not too deeply penetrated.

Some races, as we have seen, divide the soul into two or more entities, whereof one alone may be capable of re-manifestation. To discuss the reason for this would lead us away from our subject. It will be enough to suggest that it is an attempt to escape from the dilemma imposed by the meeting of two or more lines of speculation as to the future life. A reconciliation must be attained between the reasoning which would lead to the belief in a place of the dead elsewhere than here, and that which inclines to the opinion that the deceased remains among his friends, or amid his decaying dust, ready and eager to appear again. The divisibility of the inner self succeeds in this object; and if we meet with such a device less frequently than we might expect, it is no doubt because the savage mind, unaccustomed to consecutive and abstract thought, is slow in realising a contradiction, and unwilling to solve the difficulty, unless where circumstances have compelled the attention and the necessary effort.

The study of the belief in the re-incorporation of the soul in a human body has no direct bearing on the legend of Perseus, but some account of it was required to {228} complete our view of savage thought upon the subject of Transformation by means of death and birth—a subject necessary to be understood in approaching the incident of the Life-token. To that incident we have next to address ourselves.

[End of vol. I]

List of Some of the Works Referred To

Note.—In the notes Roman numerals placed before the name of a work or author indicate the volume, placed after the name indicate the book or chapter, cited; Arabic numerals generally indicate the page or verse.

Allen, Grant, Attis. The Attis of Caius Valerius Catullus Translated into English Verse, with Dissertations on the Myth of Attis, on the Origin of Tree-Worship, and on the Galliambic Metre by Grant Allen, B.A. London, 1892.

Am Urquell. Am Urquell. Monatsschrift für Volkskunde. Herausgegeben von Friedrich S. Krauss. 4 vols. Wien, 1890-3. [Still proceeding.]

Anthropologie. L’Anthropologie paraissant tous les deux mois sous la direction de MM. Cartailhac, Hamy, Topinard. 4 vols. Paris, 1890-93. [Still proceeding.]

Antiquary. The Antiquary: a Magazine devoted to the Study of the Past. 29 vols. London, 1880-94. [Still proceeding.]

Archivio. Archivio per lo Studio delle Tradizioni Popolari. Rivista trimestrale diritta da G. Pitrè e S. Salamone-Marino. 12 vols. Palermo, 1882-93. [Still proceeding.]

Arch. Rev. The Archæological Review. 4 vols. London, 1888-90.

Asbjörnsen. Norwegische Volksmärchen, gesammelt von P. Asbjörnsen und Jörgen Moe. Deutsch von Friederich Bresemann. 2 vols. Berlin, 1847.

Aubrey, Miscellanies. Miscellanies upon Various Subjects. By John Aubrey, F.R.S. London, 1857.

Auning. Ueber den lettischen Drachen-Mythus (Puhkis). Ein Beitrag zur lettischen Mythologie von Robert Auning. Mitan, 1892.

Bahar-Danush. Bahar-Danush; or Garden of Knowledge. An Oriental Romance. Translated from the Persic of Einiaut Oollah. By Jonathan Scott. 3 vols. Shrewsbury, 1799.

Bancroft. The Native Races of the Pacific States of North America. By Hubert Howe Bancroft. 5 vols. London, 1875-6.

Basile. Lo Cunto de li Cunti (Il Pentamerone) di Giambattista Basile. Testo conforme alla prima stampa del 1634-6 con introduzione e note di Benedetto Croce. Vol. I. Napoli, 1891. [Only one volume yet published.]

Bent, Cyclades. The Cyclades or Life among the Insular Greeks by J. Theodore Bent, B.A. London, 1885.

Bérenger-Féraud. Traditions et Réminiscences Populaires de la Provence (Coutumes, Légendes, Superstitions, etc.). Par Bérenger-Féraud. Paris, 1886.

Bladé, Agenais. Contes Populaires recueillis en Agenais par M. Jean-François Bladé. Paris, 1874.

—— Contes Pop. Gasc. Contes Populaires de la Gascogne, par M. Jean-François Bladé. 3 vols. Paris, 1886.

Blätt. f. Pomm. Volksk. Blätter für Pommersche Volkskunde. Monatsschrift für Sage und Märchen [etc.]. Herausgegeben von O. Knoop und Dr. A. Haas. vols. Stettin. 1892—.

Bötticher. Der Baumkultus der Hellenen nach den gottesdienstlichen Gebräuchen und den überlieferten Bildwerken dargestellt von Carl Boetticher. Berlin, 1856.

Braga, Contos. Theophilo Braga. Contos Tradicionaes do Povo Portuguez. 2 vols. Porto, N.D.

Brinton, Amer. Hero-Myths. American Hero-Myths. A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent. By Daniel G. Brinton, M.D. Philadelphia, 1882.

Brinton, Lenâpé. The Lenâpé and their Legends; with the complete text and symbols of the Walam Olum, a new translation, and an inquiry into its authenticity. By Daniel G. Brinton, A.M., M.D. Philadelphia, 1885.

—— Myths. The Myths of the New World. A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America by Daniel G. Brinton, A.M., M.D. New York, 1868.

Browne, Vulgar Errors. Pseudodoxia Epidemica: or Enquiries into very many received Tenents and commonly presumed Truths. By Thomas Browne, Doctor of Physick. London, 1646.

Bull. de F.L. Bulletin de Folklore Organe de la Société du Folklore Wallon. 2 vols. London, 1892-3. [Still proceeding.]

Burton, Gelele. A Mission to Gelele, King of Dahome by Richard F. Burton. 2 vols. London, 1864.

—— Nights. A plain and literal translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments, now entituled The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, with introduction, explanatory notes [etc.], by Richard F. Burton. 10 vols. Privately printed, 1885.

—— Suppl. Nights. Supplemental Nights to The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night with notes anthropological and explanatory by Richard F. Burton. 6 vols. Privately printed, 1886-88.

—— Wanderings. Wanderings in West Africa from Liverpool to Fernando Po. By A F.R.G.S. 2 vols. London, 1863.

—— Wit and Wisd. Wit and Wisdom from West Africa, compiled by Richard F. Burton. London, 1865.

Busk, Sagas from the Far East. Sagas from the Far East; or Kalmouk and Mongolian Traditionary Tales. With historical preface and explanatory notes. By the Author of “Patrañas,” etc. London, 1873.

Callaway, Rel. Syst. The Religious System of the Amazulu. Isinyanga Zokubula; or Divination, as existing among the Amazulu, in their own words, with a translation into English, and notes. By the Rev. Canon Callaway, M.D. Natal, 1870.

—— Tales. Nursery Tales, Traditions, and Histories of the Zulus, in their own words, with a translation into English, and notes. By the Rev. Canon Callaway, M.D. Vol. I. London, 1868. [Only one vol. published.]

Campbell. Popular Tales of the West Highlands orally collected with a translation by J. F. Campbell. 4 vols. Edinburgh, 1860-62.

Campbell, Santal F.T. Santal Folk Tales. Translated from the Santali by A. Campbell. Pokhuria, 1891.

Carnoy. Contes Français recueillis par E. Henry Carnoy. Paris, 1885.

Casalis. Les Bassoutos ou vingt-trois années de séjour et d’observations au sud de l’Afrique par E. Casalis. Paris, 1859.

Cavallius. Schwedische Volkssagen und Märchen. Nach mündlicher Ueberlieferung gesammelt und herausgegeben von Gunnar Olof Hyltén Cavallius und George Stephens. Deutsch von Carl Oberleitner. Wien, 1848.

Chambers, Pop. Rhymes. Popular Rhymes of Scotland. Robert Chambers. London, 1870.

Child. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads edited by Francis James Child. 8 parts. Boston, N.D. [1882-92, still proceeding.]

Codrington. The Melanesians. Studies in their Anthropology and Folklore by R. H. Codrington, D.D. Oxford, 1891.

Coelho. Contos Populares Portuguezes colligidos por F. Adolpho Coelho. Lisbon, 1879.

Comparetti. Novelline Popolari Italiane pubblicate ed illustrate da Domenico Comparetti. Vol. I. Torino, 1875. [Only one volume yet published.]

Compte-Rendu du Congrès. Congrès International des Traditions Populaires. Première Session. Paris, 1889. Compte-Rendu des Séances. Paris, 1891.

Congress Report. The International Folklore Congress, 1891. Papers and Transactions. Edited by Joseph Jacobs and Alfred Nutt. London, 1892.

Cosquin. Emmanuel Cosquin. Contes Populaires de la Lorraine. 2 vols. Paris, N.D. [Preface dated Août 1886.]

County F.L., Suffolk. County Folklore. Printed Extracts. No. 2: Suffolk. Collected and edited by the Lady Eveline Camilla Gurdon. London, 1893. [Folklore Society.]

Cox, Miss, Cinderella. Cinderella. Three hundred and forty-five variants of Cinderella, Catskin, and Cap o’ Rushes, abstracted and tabulated, with a discussion of mediæval analogues, and notes, by Marian Roalfe Cox. London, 1893.

Crane. Italian Popular Tales by Thomas Frederick Crane, A.M. London, 1885.

Crantz. The History of Greenland: containing a Description of the Country and its Inhabitants. By David Crantz. Translated from the High Dutch. 2 vols. London, 1767.

Curtin, Russians. Myths and Folktales of the Russians, Western Slavs and Magyars by Jeremiah Curtin. London, 1890.

Cymmrodor. See Y Cymmrodor.

Dalton. Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal, by Edward Tuite Dalton, C.S.I.Col. Calcutta, 1872.

D’Arbois de Jubainville, Cycle Myth. Le Cycle Mythologique Irlandais et la Mythologie Celtique, par H. D’Arbois de Jubainville. Paris, 1884.

—— Épopée Celtique. L’Épopée Celtique en Irlande, par H. D’Arbois de Jubainville. Vol. I. Paris, 1892. [One volume only yet published.]

Dasent. Popular Tales from the Norse by Sir George Webbe Dasent, D.C.L. Edinburgh, 1888.

Davids. See Rhys Davids.

Day. Folktales of Bengal by the Rev. Lal Behari Day. London, 1883.

De Charencey, Le Fils de la Vierge. Le Fils de la Vierge par H. de Charencey. Havre, 1879.

—— Trad. rel. Les Traditions relatives au Fils de la Vierge par H. de Charencey. Paris, 1881.

De Gubernatis. Le Novelline di Santo Stefano raccolte da Angelo de Gubernatis. Torino, 1869.

—— Zool. Myth. Zoological Mythology or The Legends of Animals by Angelo de Gubernatis. London, 1872.

De Gubernatis, Trad. Pop. Le Tradizioni Popolari di S. Stefano di Calcinaia raccolte da Alessandro de Gubernatis. Roma, 1894. [Includes a new edition of the Novelline.]

De Nino. Usi e Costumi Abruzzesi descritti da Antonio de Nino. 5 vols. Firenze, 1879-91. [The first volume bears only the title Usi Abruzzesi.]

Dennys. The Folklore of China, and its Affinities with that of the Aryan and Semitic Races. By N. B. Dennys, Ph.D., F.R.G.S. London, 1876.

De Rochemonteix. Quelques Contes Nubiens par Maxence de Rochemonteix. Cairo, 1888.

Dorman. The Origin of Primitive Superstitions and their Development into the Worship of Spirits and the Doctrine of Spiritual Agency among the Aborigines of America. By Rushton M. Dorman. Philadelphia, 1881.

Early Trav. Early Travels in Palestine, comprising the narratives of Arculf, Willibald [etc.]. Edited with notes by Thomas Wright, Esq., M.A., F.S.A. London, 1848.

Elliot, N. W. Prov. Memoirs on the History, Folklore, and Distribution of the Races of the North Western Provinces of India; being an amplified edition of the original Supplemental Glossary of Indian Terms by the late Sir Henry M. Elliot, K.C.B. Edited, revised, and rearranged by John Beames, M.R.A.S. 2 vols. London, 1869.

Ellis, Polyn. Res. Polynesian Researches, during a residence of nearly eight years in the Society and Sandwich Islands. By William Ellis. 4 vols. London, 1831.

—— Ewe-speaking Peoples. The Ewe-speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa. Their Religion, Manners, Customs, Laws, Languages, etc. By A. B. Ellis. London, 1890.

—— Tshi-speaking Peoples. The Tshi-speaking Peoples of the Gold Coast of West Africa. Their Religion, Manners, Customs, Laws, Language, etc. By A. B. Ellis. London, 1887.

—— Yoruba. The Yoruba-speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa. Their Religion, Manners, Customs, Laws, Language, etc. By A. B. Ellis. London, 1894.

Featherman. Social History of the Races of Mankind. By A. Featherman. 7 vols., not numbered, but distinguished as follows:—1st Division: Nigritians. 2nd Division: Papuo- and Malayo-Melanesians. 2nd Division: Oceano-Melanesians. 3rd Division: Aoneo-Maranonians. 3rd Division: Chiapo- and Guarano-Maranonians. 4th Division: Dravido-Turanians, Turco-Tatar-Turanians, Ugrio-Turanians. 5th Division: Aramæans. London, 1881-91.

Finamore. Tradizioni Popolari Abruzzesi raccolte da Gennaro Finamore. 2 vols. [Vol. I. in 2 parts, separately paged.] Lanciano, 1882-86.

—— Trad. Pop. Abr. Tradizioni Popolari Abruzzesi raccolte da Gennaro Finamore. Torino, 1894. [A separate work from, but apparently a continuation of, the above.]

F.L. Journ. The Folk-lore Journal. 7 vols. London, 1883-89. [Organ of the Folklore Society.]

F.L. Record. The Folk-lore Record. 5 vols. London, 1878-82. [Organ of the Folklore Society.]

Folklore. Folk-Lore, a Quarterly Review of Myth, Tradition, Institution, and Custom. 4 vols. London, 1890-93. [Organ of the Folklore Society, still proceeding.]

Frazer, Golden Bough. The Golden Bough A Study in Comparative Religion by J. G. Frazer, M.A. 2 vols. London, 1890.

Frere. Old Deccan Days; or Hindoo Fairy Legends current in Southern India. Collected from Oral Tradition by M. Frere. London, 1870.

Friend. Flowers and Flower Lore. By the Rev. Hilderic Friend, F.L.S. 2 vols., paged continuously. London, 1884.

Garnett, Women. The Women of Turkey and their Folk-lore by Lucy M. J. Garnett. 2 vols. London, 1890-91.

Gerv. Tilb. Des Gervasius von Tilbury Otia Imperialia. In einer Auswahl neu herausgegeben und mit Anmerkungen begleitet von Felix Liebrecht. Hannover, 1856.

Gibb. The History of the Forty Vezirs or The Story of the Forty Morns and Eves written in Turkish by Sheykh-Zāda done into English by E. J. W. Gibb, M.R.A.S. London, 1886.

Giles. Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio. Translated and annotated by Herbert A. Giles. 2 vols. London, 1880.

Gonzenbach. Sicilianische Märchen. Aus dem Volksmund gesammelt von Laura Gonzenbach. 2 vols. Leipzig, 1870.

Grimm, Tales. Grimm’s Household Tales. With the Author’s Notes Translated from the German and edited by Margaret Hunt. 2 vols. London, 1884.

—— Teut. Myth. Teutonic Mythology by Jacob Grimm Translated from the Fourth Edition with Notes and Appendix by James Steven Stallybrass. 4 vols., paged continuously. London, 1880-88.

Grinnell, Blackfoot L.T. Blackfoot Lodge Tales. The Story of a Prairie People by George Bird Grinnell. London, 1893.

Grundtvig. Dänische Volksmärchen. Nach bisher ungedruckten Quellen erzählt von Svend Grundtvig. Uebersetzt von Willibald Leo. 2 vols. Leipzig, 1885.

Guppy. The Solomon Islands and their Natives, By H. B. Guppy, M.B., F.G.S. London, 1887.

Hahn, Tsuni-ǁgoam. Tsuni-ǁgoam the Supreme Being of the Khoi-Khoi by Theophilus Hahn, Ph.D. London, 1881.

Haltrich. Deutsche Volksmärchen aus dem Sachsenlande in Siebenbürgen. Gesammelt von Josef Haltrich. Wien, 1885.

Hanway. An Historical Account of the British Trade over the Caspian Sea: with a Journal of Travels through Russia into Persia and back again through Russia Germany and Holland. By Jonas Hanway, Merchant. 4 vols. London, 1753.

Hodgetts. Tales and Legends from the Land of the Tzar. A Collection of Russian Stories. Translated from the original Russian by Edith M. S. Hodgetts. London, 1890.

Hunter, Rural Bengal. The Annals of Rural Bengal. By W. W. Hunter, C.I.E., LL.D. London, 1883.

Imbriani. La Novellaja Fiorentina Fiabe e Novelline Stenografate in Firenze dal dettato popolare da Vittorio Imbriani. Ristampa accresciuta di molte novelle inedite, [etc.,] nelle quale è accolta integralmente La Novellaja Milanese dello stesso raccoglitore. Livorno, 1877.

Im Thurn. Among the Indians of Guiana being Sketches chiefly anthropologic from the Interior of British Guiana by Everard F. im Thurn, M.A. London, 1883.

Internat. Archiv. Internationales Archiv für Ethnographie. 6 vols. Leiden, 1888-93. [Still proceeding.]

Jacobs, Celtic F.T. Celtic Fairy Tales selected and edited by Joseph Jacobs. London, 1892.

—— Indian F.T. Indian Fairy Tales selected and edited by Joseph Jacobs. London, 1892.

James, The Long White Mountain. The Long White Mountain. A Journey in Manchuria with some Account of the History, People, Administration and Religion of that Country. By H. E. M. James. London, 1888.

Jeremias, Izdubar-Nimrod. Izdubar-Nimrod. Eine altbabylonische Heldensage. Nach den Keilschriftfragmenten dargestellt von Dr. Alfred Jeremias. Leipzig, 1891.

Jevons, Plutarch’s Romane Questions. Plutarch’s Romane Questions. Translated A.D. 1603 by Philemon Holland, M.A., Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Now again edited by Frank Byron Jevons, M.A. With Dissertations on Italian Cults [etc.]. London, 1892.

Journ. Am. F.L. The Journal of American Folklore. 6 vols. Boston, 1888-93. [Organ of the American Folklore Society, still proceeding.]

Journ. Anthrop. Inst. The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. 23 vols. London, 1872-94. [Still proceeding.]

Journ. Anthr. Soc. Journal of the Anthropological Society of London. 8 vols. London, 1863-70.

Journ. Ethnol. Soc., N.S. Journal of the Ethnological Society of London. Published quarterly. 2 vols. London, 1869-70.

Kathá. The Kathá-sarit-Ságara or Ocean of the Streams of Story translated from the original Sanskrit by C. H. Tawney, M.A. 2 vols. Calcutta, 1880-84.

Kaindl. Die Huzulen. Ihr Leben ihre Sitten und ihre Volksüberlieferung geschildert von Dr. Raimund Friedrich Kaindl. Wien, 1894.

Kalevala. Kalewala, das National-Epos der Finnen, nach der zweiten Ausgabe ins Deutsche übertragen von Anton Schiefner. Helsingfors, 1852.

Klunzinger. Upper Egypt: its People and its Products. A Descriptive Account of the Manners, Customs, Superstitions and Occupations of the People of the Nile Valley [etc.]. By C. B. Klunzinger, M.D. London, 1878.

Knight. Where Three Empires Meet. A Narrative of recent Travel in Kashmir, Western Tibet, Gilgit and the adjoining Countries by E. F. Knight. London, 1893.

Knoop. Volkssagen, Erzählungen Aberglauben, Gebräuche und Märchen aus dem östlichen Hinterpommern. Gesammelt von Otto Knoop. Posen, 1885.

Knowles. Folktales of Kashmir. By the Rev. J. Hinton Knowles, F.R.G.S., M.R.A.S. London, 1888.

Kohlrusch. Schweizerisches Sagenbuch. Nach mündlichen Ueberlieferungen, Chroniken und andern gedruckten und handschriftlichen Quellen herausgegeben von C. Kohlrusch. Leipzig, 1854-56. [Only one volume and a portion of a second published.]

Kolbe. Hessische Volks-Sitten und Gebräuche im Lichte der heidnische Vorzeit. Von Wilhelm Kolbe. Marburg, 1888.

Krauss, Sagen. Sagen und Märchen der Südslaven. Zum grossen Teil aus ungedruckten Quellen von Dr. Friedrich S. Krauss. 2 vols. Leipzig, 1883-84.

—— Sitte und Brauch. Sitte und Brauch der Südslaven. Nach heimischen gedruckten und ungedruckten Quellen von Dr. Friedrich S. Krauss. Wien, 1885.

Kremnitz. Rumänische Märchen übersetzt von Mite Kremnitz. Leipzig, 1882.

Kreutzwald. Ehstnische Märchen aufgezeichnet von Friedrich Kreutzwald. Aus dem Ehstnischen übersetzt von F. Löwe. Halle, 1869.

Kuhn und Schwartz. Norddeutsche Sagen, Märchen und Gebräuche aus dem Munde des Volkes gesammelt und herausgegeben von A. Kuhn und W. Schwartz. Leipzig, 1848.

Landes, Annamites. Contes et Légendes Annamites par A. Landes. Saigon, 1886.

—— Tjames. Contes Tjames traduits et annotés par A. Landes. Saigon, 1887.

Lane. An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, written in Egypt during the years 1833, -34, and -35, partly from notes made during a former visit [etc.]. By Edward William Lane. 2 vols. London, 1842.

Le Braz. La Légende de la Mort en Basse Bretagne. Croyances, Traditions et Usages des Bretons Armoricains par A. Le Braz. Paris, 1893.

Leg. Panjâb. The Legends of the Panjâb. By Captain R. C. Temple. 2 vols. Bombay, N.D.

Legrand. Recueil des Contes Populaires Grecs traduits sur les textes originaux par Émile Legrand. Paris, 1881.

Leland, Gip. Sorc. Gipsy Sorcery and Fortune-telling, illustrated by numerous incantations, specimens of medical magic, anecdotes and tales by Charles Godfrey Leland. London, 1891.

Leskien. Litauische Volkslieder und Märchen aus dem Preussischen und dem Russischen Litauen, gesammelt von A. Leskien und K. Brugman. Strassburg, 1882.

Liebrecht. Zur Volkskunde. Alte und Neue Aufsätze von Felix Liebrecht. Heilbronn, 1879.

Llyvyr Coch. See Mabinogion.

Luzel, Contes Bretons. Contes Bretons par F. M. Luzel. Quimperlé, 1870.

—— Contes Pop. Contes Populaires de la Basse Bretagne par F. M. Luzel. 3 vols. Paris, 1887.

Mabinogion. The Mabinogion. From the Welsh of the Llyfr Coch o Hergest (The Red Book of Hergest) in the Library of Jesus College, Oxford. Translated, with notes, by Lady Charlotte Guest. London, 1877.

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Meddygon Myddfai. The Physicians of Myddvai; Meddygon Myddfai, or the Medical Practice of the celebrated Rhiwallon and his sons, of Myddvai, in Carmarthenshire, Physicians to Rhys Gryg, Lord of Dynevor and Ystrad Towy, about the middle of the thirteenth century. From ancient MSS. in the Libraries of Jesus College, Oxford, Llanover, and Tonn; with an English translation; and the legend of the Lady of Llynn y Van. Translated by John Pughe, Esq., F.R.C.S., and edited by the Rev. John Williams ab Ithel, M.A. Llandovery, 1861.

Meier, Märchen. Deutsche Volksmärchen aus Schwaben. Aus dem Munde des Volkes gesammelt und herausgegeben von Dr. Ernst Meier. Stuttgart, N.D. [3rd edition.]

—— Sagen. Deutsche Sagen, Sitten und Gebräuche aus Schwaben, gesammelt von Ernst Meier. 2 vols., paged continuously. Stuttgart, 1852.

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—— Nov. Pop. Toscane. Novelle Popolari Toscane illustrate da Giuseppe Pitrè. Firenze, 1885.

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—— Weib. Das Weib in der Natur- und Völkerkunde. Anthropologische Studien von Dr. H. Ploss. Nach dem Tode des Verfassers bearbeitet und herausgegeben von Dr. Max Bartels. 2 vols. Leipzig, 1891.

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—— Songs. The Songs of the Russian People, as illustrative of Slavonic Mythology and Russian Social Life. By W. R. S. Ralston, M.A. London, 1872.

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Rodd. The Customs and Lore of Modern Greece by Rennell Rodd. London, 1892.

Rydberg. Teutonic Mythology by Viktor Rydberg, Ph.D. Authorised translation from the Swedish by Rasmus B. Anderson, LL.D. London, 1889.

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Sâstrî, Folklore in South. Ind. Folklore in Southern India. By Pandit S. M. Natêsa Sâstrî. 3 parts. Bombay, 1884-86-88.

Sax. Leechd. Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England. Being a Collection of Documents, for the most part never before printed. Collected and edited by the Rev. Oswald Cockayne, M.A. 3 vols. London, 1864-66.

Saxo. Saxonis Grammatici Gesta Danorum herausgegeben von Alfred Holder. Strassburg, 1886.

Saxo (Elton’s version). The First Nine Books of the Danish History of Saxo Grammaticus translated by Oliver Elton, B.A. London, 1894.

Science of Fairy Tales. The Science of Fairy Tales. An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology. By Edwin Sidney Hartland, F.S.A. London, 1891.

Schneller. Märchen und Sagen aus Wälschtirol. Gesammelt von Christian Schneller. Innsbruck, 1867.

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Schröder. Die Hochzeitsbräuche der Esten und einiger anderer Finnisch-ugrischer Völkerschaften in Vergleichung mit dessen der Indogermanischen Völker. Ein Beitrag [etc.], von Dr. Leopold von Schroeder. Berlin, 1888.

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—— Trad, et Sup. Traditions et Superstitions de la Haute Bretagne par Paul Sébillot. 2 vols. Paris, 1882.

Second Voyage du Père Tachard. See Voyage de Siam.

Silva Gad. Silva Gadelica (I.-XXXI.) A Collection of Tales in Irish, with extracts illustrating persons and places edited from MSS. and translated by Standish H. O’Grady. 2 vols. London, 1892.

Smith, Chaldean Account of Genesis. The Chaldean Account of Genesis by George Smith. London, 1876.

Southey, Commonplace Bk. Southey’s Commonplace Book. Edited by his son-in-law John Wood Warter, B.D. 4 vols. London, 1850.

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Stokes. Indian Fairy Tales collected and translated by Maive Stokes. London, 1880.

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—— Rájá Rasálu. The Adventures of the Panjáb Hero, Rájá Rasálu, and other Folktales of the Panjáb. Collected and compiled from original sources. By the Rev. Charles Swynnerton. Calcutta, 1884.

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Thorpe, Yule-tide Stories. Yule-tide Stories. A Collection of Scandinavian and North German Popular Tales and Traditions, from the Swedish Danish and German. Edited by Benjamin Thorpe. London, 1853.

Trans. Ethnol. Soc., N.S. Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London. New Series. 7 vols. London, 1862-9.

Turner, Polynesia. Nineteen Years in Polynesia: Missionary Life, Travels, and Researches in the Islands of the Pacific. By the Rev. George Turner. London, 1861.

—— Samoa. Samoa a Hundred Years ago and long before. Together with notes on the cults and customs of twenty-three other islands in the Pacific. By George Turner, LL.D. London, 1884.

Tuti-Nameh. Tuti-Nameh. Das Papagaienbuch. Eine Sammlung orientalischer Erzählungen. Nach der türkischen Bearbeitung zum ersten Male übersetzt von Georg Rosen. 2 vols. Leipzig, 1858.

Tylor, E. Hist. Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilisation. By Edward B. Tylor, D.C.L., LL.D., F.R.S. London, 1878.

—— Prim. Cult. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom. By Edward B. Tylor. 2 vols. London, 1871.

Vasconcellos. Tradições Populares de Portugal colligidas e annotadas por J. Leite de Vasconcellos. Porto, 1882.

Visentini. Fiabe Mantovane raccolte da Isaia Visentini. Torino, 1879.

Von den Steinen. Unter den Naturvölkern Zentral-Brasiliens. Reiseschilderung und Ergebnisse der Zweiten Schingú-Expedition 1887-1888 von Karl von den Steinen, Prof. Dr. Berlin, 1894.

Von Hahn. Griechische und Albanesische Märchen. Gesammelt, übersetzt und erläutert von J. G. v. Hahn. 2 vols. Leipzig, 1864.

Von Schulenburg. Wendische Volkssagen und Gebräuche aus dem Spreewald. Von Willibald von Schulenburg. Leipzig, 1880.

Von Wlislocki, Bukowinaer. Märchen und Sagen der Bukowinaer und Siebenbürger Armenier. Aus eigenen und fremden Sammlungen übersetzt von Dr. Heinrich von Wlislocki. Hamburg, 1892.

—— Märchen. Märchen und Sagen der Transsilvanischen Zigeuner. Gesammelt und aus unedirten Originaltexten übersetzt von Dr. Heinrich von Wlislocki. Berlin, 1886.

—— Volksdicht. Volksdichtungen der siebenbürgischen und südungarischen Zigeuner. Gesammelt und aus unedirten Originaltexten übersetzt von Dr. Heinrich von Wlislocki. Wien, 1890.

—— Volksgl. Mag. Volksglaube und religiöser Brauch der Magyaren. Dargestellt von Dr. Heinrich von Wlislocki. Münster-i-W., 1893.

Von Wlislocki, Volksgl. Siebenb. Sachs. Volksglaube und Volksbrauch der Siebenbürger Sachsen. Von Dr. Heinrich von Wlislocki. Berlin, 1893.

—— Volksgl. Zig. Volksglaube und religiöser Brauch der Zigeuner. Vorwiegend nach eigenen Ermittlungen von Dr. Heinrich von Wlislocki. Münster-i-W., 1891.

—— Volksleb. Mag. Aus dem Volksleben der Magyaren. Ethnologische Mitteilungen von Dr. Heinrich von Wlislocki. München, 1893.

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Winternitz, Altind. Hochz. Das Altindische Hochzeitsrituell nach dem Āpastambīya-Grihyasūtra und einigen anderen verwandten Werken. Mit Vergleichung der Hochzeitsgebräuche bei den übrigen indogermanischen Völkern. Von Dr. M. Winternitz. Wien, 1892.

Witzschel. Kleine Beiträge zur deutschen Mythologie, Sitten- und Heimatskunde in Sagen und Gebräuchen aus Thuringen. Gesammelt und herausgegeben von Dr. August Witzschel. 2 vols. Wien, 1866-78.

Wolf, Deutsche Hausm. Deutsche Hausmärchen. Herausgegeben von J. W. Wolf. Göttingen, 1851.

—— Niederl. Sag. Niederländische Sagen. Gesammelt und mit Anmerkungen begleitet herausgegeben von Johann Wilhelm Wolf. Leipzig, 1843.

Wratislaw. Sixty Folktales from exclusively Slavonic Sources. Translated by A. H. Wratislaw, M.A. London, 1889.

Y Cymmrodor. Y Cymmrodor, embodying the Transactions of the Cymmrodorion Society of London [etc.]. 10 vols. London, 1877-90. [Still proceeding.]

Y Llyvyr Coch o Hergest. See Mabinogion.

Zeits. f. Volksk. Zeitschrift für Volkskunde, herausgegeben von Dr. Edmund Veckenstedt. Organ der deutschen Gesellschaft für Volkskunde. 4 vols. Leipzig, 1889-92.

Zingerle, Kinder- und Hausm. Tiroler Kinder- und Hausmärchen. Innsbruck, 1852.

—— Kinder- und Hausm. aus Süddeutsch. Kinder- und Hausmärchen aus Süddeutschland. Gesammelt und herausgegeben durch die Brüder Ignaz und Joseph Zingerle. Regensburg, 1854.

—— Sagen. Sagen, Märchen und Gebräuche aus Tirol. Gesammelt und herausgegeben von Ignaz Vincenz Zingerler Innsbruck, 1859.

—— Sitten. Sitten, Bräuche und Meinungen des Tirole. Volkes. Gesammelt und herausgegeben von Ignaz V. Zingerle. Innsbruck, 1871.

Endnotes

Chapter I Notes

^3.1^ Ovid, Metam., iv. 604; Strabo, x. 5; Pausanias, ii. 16; Lucian, Sea-gods, xiv.

^4.1^ Pausanias, ii. 18; Bent, The Cyclades, 2.

^4.2^ Pausanias, ii. 16; Plutarch, Rivers and Mountains, xviii., Inachus. An inscription was discovered not very long ago at Mykene, testifying to the worship of Perseus there. xxvi. The Antiquary, 192, citing an article by Dr. Tsoundas in the Ephemeris Archæologike.

^5.1^ Pausanias, ii. 21, 23.

^5.2^ Vergil, Æneid, vii. 371. See also Preller, ii. Röm. Myth., 330.

^5.3^ Pausanias, iv. 35.

^5.4^ Josephus, Wars, iii. 9; Pliny, Nat. Hist., v. 14; ix. 4; Maundeville, c. 4.

^6.1^ Herod. vi. 53, 54 (I quote Rawlinson’s translation); vii. 61, 150.

^7.1^ Ælian, De Nat. Anim., xii. 21; Jeremias, Izdubar-Nimrod, passim; Smith, Chaldean Account of Genesis, passim.

^8.1^ Tylor, i. Prim. Cult., 306, citing Tzetzes ap. Lycophron’s Cassandra; Diodorus Sic., iv.

^8.2^ Herod. ii. 91, 15. If we may trust Diodorus Siculus (i.), the Egyptians claimed that Perseus was born in Egypt.

^9.1^ Ælian, De Nat. Anim., iii. 28, 37; xiii. 26.

^13.1^ Pitrè, Nov. Pop. Toscane, 1.

^14.1^ ii. Von Hahn, 114, 310. For particulars of the story-teller, see ib. 308.

^17.1^ O’Donovan, i. Four Masters, 18, note. The story was taken down by O’Donovan from the dictation of Shane O’Dugan in 1835.

^19.1^ Grimm, i. Tales, 419.

^20.1^ Grimm, i. Tales, 420.

^21.1^ Cavallius, 78.

^23.1^ Leskien, 544, 548, citing Antoni Nowosielski, Lud Ukrainski.

Chapter II Notes

^26.1^ Sébillot, i. Contes Pop., 124 (Story No. 18).

^29.1^ i. Cosquin, 60.

^30.1^ Schneller, 186.

^31.1^ Bladé, Agenais, 9 (Story No. 2); i. Contes Pop. Gasc., 277.

^31.2^ Cavallius, 348.

^33.1^ i. Asbjörnsen, 159 (Story No. 24); Thorpe, Yuletide Stories, 300.

^34.1^ i. Grundtvig, 277.

^35.1^ Legrand, 161. The story is taken from La Grèce Continentale et la Morée, by J. A. Buchon (Paris, 1843).

^38.1^ i. Campbell, 71.

^40.1^ Kuhn und Schwartz, 337 (Märchen, No. 10).

^41.1^ i. Basile, 113; i. Pentamerone, 122.

^41.2^ Comparetti, 199 (Story No. 46).

^42.1^ Comparetti, 126 (Story No. 32); Crane, 30.

^42.2^ De Gubernatis, 41 (Story No. 18).

^43.1^ Auning, 79 (Story No. 132).

^43.2^ Von Wlislocki, Volksdicht., 316 (Story No. 54).

^44.1^ Leskien, 544, 547, citing Erlenvein.

^46.1^ i. Kathá, 381.

Chapter III Notes

^48.1^ i. Campbell, 93. Compare the variant told by a woman of the island of Berneray, ibid. 98.

^50.1^ i. Zeits. f. Volksk., 230. This tale has a suspicious air. Whether the reminiscences it contains of classic stories are of purely oral transmission I cannot determine.

^50.2^ i. Gonzenbach, 269 (Story No. 39).

^50.3^ Grimm, i. Tales, 331 (Story No. 85).

^51.1^ ii. Rev. Trad. Pop., 359, from a Flemish collection, then unpublished, by M. Pol de Mont. This story was obtained at Ypres.

^52.1^ Visentini, 104 (Story No. 19).

^53.1^ Luzel, Contes Bretons, 63.

^53.2^ Leskien, 543, citing Bosanski Prijatelj.

^53.3^ Braga, i. Contos, 117 (Story No. 48).

^54.1^ Burton, iv. Suppl. Nights, 244.

^54.2^ Zingerle, Kinder- und Hausm. aus Süddeutsch., 124.

^55.1^ Carnoy, 135 (Story No. 19).

^55.2^ Imbriani, 387.

^56.1^ Chambers, Pop. Rhymes, 89.

^57.1^ Zingerle, Kinder- und Hausm. aus. Süddeutsch., 260. Cf. Ibid., Kinder- und Hausm., 178 (Story No. 35); Grimm, i. Tales, 244, 419.

^57.2^ Pröhle, Kinder- und Volksm., 20 (Story No. 5).

^58.1^ Auning, 87 (Story No. 133).

^59.1^ Leskien, 542.

^59.2^ Leskien, 389. Stories of the Faithless Sister (sometimes it is the hero’s mother who plays the traitor’s part) are numerous in the East of Europe. I have studied some of them in a paper on The Forbidden Chamber, iii. Folklore Journ., 214.

^60.1^ Cavallius, 356.

^60.2^ i. Gonzenbach, 272 (Story No. 40).

^61.1^ Notwithstanding they had been eaten! Rivière, 193.

^62.1^ i. Basile, 87; i. Pentamerone, 90.

^63.1^ De Gubernatis, 40 (Story No. 17).

^63.2^ vii. Pitrè, 296; i. Gonzenbach, 269 (Story No. 39).

^65.1^ ii. Macdonald, 341.

^65.2^ iii. De Nino, 321 (Story No. 65).

^67.1^ Meier, Märchen, 101 (Story No. 29). See also 306.

^67.2^ Ibid., 204 (Story, No. 58). The connection ought not to pass unnoticed between these Swabian tales and four Greek märchen obtained by Von Hahn on the island of Syra and elsewhere. The hero of one of the tales from Syra is Strong Jack, who overcomes three ogres, and weds the king’s daughter held in captivity by one of them. Another ogre fights and kills him, and takes the lady to wife. The hero, restored by means of the Water of Life, learns that the ogre is to be slain only by getting possession of his External Soul, and destroying it. This he succeeds in doing, and thus recovers his wife. ii. Von Hahn, 14. More obvious is the connection of one of the other tales, wherein Strong Jack slays an ogre (drakos) to whom the king’s daughter had been given to eat. Ibid., 259. I shall have to refer to this in a future chapter.

^68.1^ Coelho, 120 (Story No. 52).

^69.1^ ii. Cosquin, 56 (Story No. 37).

^70.1^ i. Cosquin, 64 (variant of Story No. 5).

Chapter IV Notes

^74.1^ Leskien, 546; De Gubernatis, ii. Zool. Myth., 29. Köhler in his notes to Gonzenbach (ii. 229) refers to several other stories.

^74.2^ Milenowsky, 1.

^74.3^ Knoop, 204.

^75.1^ ii. Powell and Magnusson, 435. The story is given with some trifling differences, Maurer, 284.

^75.2^ Rink, 443.

^75.3^ Landes, Annamites, 160.

^76.1^ Landes, op. cit., 150. Cf. ibid., 174.

^76.2^ i. Kathá, 565.

^76.3^ Ibid., 172, 189.

^77.1^ Knowles, 415.

^77.2^ Stokes, 41. Cf. Steel, 290, and i. Cosquin, 149.

^77.3^ Frere, 250. Mangoes appear also in Sâstrî, Drav. Nights, 54; Sâstrî, Folklore in South. Ind., 140; Knowles, 130; Day, 117. In a variant of the last, the fakir simply tells the king that his prayers are heard, and his seven queens shall each bear a son. Steele, 98.

^77.4^ Stokes, 91.

^77.5^ Steele, 47.

^78.1^ i. Cosquin, 69, citing Benfey.

^78.2^ Campbell, Santal F. T., 25.

^78.3^ i. Radloff, 204.

^78.4^ i. Folklore, 49.

^79.1^ Capt. R. C. Temple, in iv. F.L. Journal, 282.

^79.2^ Burton, iii. Suppl. Nights, 270.

^79.3^ Ibid. iv. 298.

^79.4^ Gibb, 163.

^80.1^ iii. Bahar Danush, 80.

^80.2^ Rivière, 231, 225.

^80.3^ iv. Folklore, 285.

^81.1^ Braga, i. Contos, 42. Two instances in Europe where the magical food is to be eaten by the husband occur in Gipsy tales. In one from southern Hungary, a woman who wished for a daughter gave her husband at full moon the egg of a black hen to eat, with the best result. Von Wlislocki, Volksdicht. 314. This is in accordance with a practice referred to in Chapter VI., infra. In the other tale, which is from Transylvania, the wife goes out at midnight and collects herbs and bones. She cooks them at home, gives her husband to eat, and thereupon, becoming pregnant, she bears a son in the form of a kid. Von Wlislocki, Märchen, 119.

^81.2^ i. Finamore, pt. i., 88.

^81.3^ ii. Von Hahn, 33, 197.

^82.1^ i. Von Hahn, 90; Garnett, i. Women, 178.

^82.2^ Legrand, 191, xvi.

^82.3^ Prof. Fortier, in ii. Journ. Am. F.L., 39.

^82.4^ Curtin, Russians, 130.

^83.1^ Wratislaw, 133; Ralston, Songs, 177.

^83.2^ Day, 1.

^83.3^ Ralston, Tibetan Tales, 21.

^84.1^ Day, 187. Cf. a Baluchi tale in Jacobs, Indian F. T., 179.

^84.2^ Prato in xii. Archivio, 40, citing Minayeff, Indiiska skazki y legendy.

^84.3^ Steere, 381. In an Arab story from Egypt a Mogrebin gives a king, upon the same bargain, two bonbons, one for himself, the other for his wife. Three sons are born, of whom the Mogrebin claims the eldest. Here the Mohammedan influence prevails. Spitta Bey, 1.

^84.4^ Theal, 54.

^85.1^ Swynnerton, Indian Nights, 137.

^85.2^ Burton, vii. Nights, 320.

^86.1^ i. Finamore, pt. ii., 13.

^86.2^ i. Archivio, 524. In a Breton tale a sorceress gives a cake to the stepmother, which causes the heroine to bring forth a cat. Luzel, iii. Contes Pop. 126. In a variant, the sorceress advises that a black cat be dished up for the maiden. Ibid., 139. In both cases the cat-offspring being ripped up, a prince emerges.

^87.1^ Krauss, i. Sagen, 195.

^87.2^ De Charencey, Le Fils de la Vierge, 20, citing Friez and Léger, La Bohème historique, pittoresque et littéraire, 341, 345. I have not seen this work, and do not know what value is to be attached to the story; but it has the appearance of being genuine. As to Blanik and its Sleeping Host, see The Science of Fairy Tales, 184, 219, where I have collected and discussed a number of legends relating to this mountain, in connection with the Seven Sleepers, King Arthur, etc.

^87.3^ Leskien, 490.

^88.1^ Maspero, 26; ii. Records of the Past, 137; De Charencey, Trad., rel., 11; Le Page Renouf in xi. Proc. Soc. Bibl. Arch., 184. The scribe, who wrote the MS. we have, flourished under Rameses II. and his two successors. How many times the story had been written down before, of course we do not know.

^89.1^ i. Grundtvig, 150.

^89.2^ Dasent, 345.

^90.1^ Landes, Annam., 245.

^90.2^ i. Basile, 249; i. Pentamerone, 238. The Italian fairies are always rather μοῖραι than what we understand by fairies.

^90.3^ De Gubernatis, Trad. Pop., 187.

^90.4^ iii. Journ. Am. F.L., 273.

^91.1^ Quoted by De Charencey, Le Fils de la Vierge, 25, from De Puymaigre, ii. Les Vieux Auteurs Castillans, 355.

^92.1^ Landes, op. cit., 174.

^92.2^ De Rochemonteix, 18.

^92.3^ Landes, Tjames, 9. The Tjames are a mongrel race descended from aborigines of Annam who intermarried with Malay invaders. See ii. L’Anthropologie, 186.

^93.1^ Schott, 262.

^93.2^ Von Wlislocki, Volksgl. Zig., 36; Volksdicht., 245. Cf. Ibid., 194, where milk is to be poured into the gourd.

^94.1^ Dragomanov, in xii. Archivio, 275, quoting Valjavec.

^94.2^ Capt. R. C. Temple, in iv. F.L. Journ., 304.

^94.3^ Von Wlislocki, Volksdicht., 213, 336.

^95.1^ De Charencey, Le Fils de la Vierge, 26, 27.

^95.2^ Mango, 101.

^96.1^ Compte Rendu du Congrès, 47. The personification of holy days is not uncommon in folktales, especially in the east of Europe.

^97.1^ Rink, 437.

^97.2^ Von Wlislocki, Bukowinaer, 72. As to the power of saliva on a bird’s tongue, see ibid., Volksdicht., 384.

^98.1^ Callaway, Tales, 66, 72. In another variant the blood is drawn from the woman’s knees, placed in two jars, and becomes a boy and a girl. Theal, 139. A Blackfoot story ascribes the origin of Kutoyis, or Clot of Blood, a hero of great prowess, to a clot of buffalo-blood brought home by a hunter and put in the kettle on the fire. Grinnell, Blackfoot L.T., 30; Maclean, in vi. Journ. Am. F.L., 167. The Rabbit in Siouan mythology makes the Young Rabbit from a clot of buffalo’s blood. J. Owen Dorsey, in v. Journ. Am. F.L., 295. In an Esthonian märchen a childless queen receives from an old woman an egg to be brooded in her bosom for three months. At the end of that time a living female embryo is hatched, which grows to the size of an unborn child. When that size is reached the queen also gives birth to a son; and the two are treated as twin brother and sister. Kreutzwald, 341. Stories of children hatched from eggs are by no means infrequent: Hodgetts, 194; Day, 93; i. Folklore, 49 (already cited), for example. They are perhaps more usual in sacred sagas: see a Fijian saga, i. Mem. Anthr. Soc., 203; and the classical and other legends mentioned by Liebrecht in a note to Gerv. Tilb., 73.

^99.1^ i. Gonzenbach, 177. Versions are given from Sulmona in the Abruzzi, iii. De Nino, 1; from Pisa, Comparetti, 195; from Rufina in Tuscany, Pitrè, Toscane, 8. The circumstances of the conception differ very slightly in all these. Two or three years ago the same story was discovered in the island of Möe, belonging to Denmark. It is stated to follow Fräulein Gonzenbach’s tale point by point; and M. Feilberg is bold enough to declare that it had passed from her collection into the mouths of the Danish folk in that island. iii. Am Urquell, 331.

^99.2^ i. Von Hahn, 245.

^100.1^ Imbriani, 397.

^100.2^ i. Gonzenbach, 167.

^100.3^ Braga, i. Contos, 104. Cf. iii. De Nino, 263.

^101.1^ Köhler in The Academy, 21st March 1891, citing Buber’s edition of Midrasch Tanchumar.

^101.2^ Von Wlislocki, Volksdicht., 360.

^102.1^ i. Basile, 47; i. Pentamerone, 43.

Chapter V Notes

^105.1^ Featherman, Chiapo-Mar., 351. Owing to this writer’s method of heaping his authorities together at the end of each section, a practice as mysterious as any recorded of savages, I have been unable to discover on what authority this statement is made by him, or what are the details of the story.

^105.2^ Aubrey, Miscellanies, 58.

^106.1^ i. Leg. Punjâb, 1; Steele, 247. Cf. Swynnerton, Rájá Rasálu, 3, where the rice is omitted.

^106.2^ Elliot, i. N. W. Prov., 256, note. Other accounts assert that the two barleycorns, or cocoa-nuts, were given to Gogá’s mother. Other examples in iii. N. Ind. N. and Q., 205, 243.

^107.1^ James, The Long White Mountain, 31, note, citing a Chinese chronicle; Charencey, Le Fils de la Vierge, 15, citing Köppen, Die Religion des Buddha; ibid., 8, citing Ambassade mémorable à l’Empereur du Japon.

^108.1^ Charencey, Le Fils, 14, citing Barrow’s Voyage to China. Cf. Maury, Légendes Pieuses, part 1, for numerous mediæval examples of miracles in competition with the Bible.

^108.2^ Rydberg, 156, citing the Volsungasaga.

^111.1^ ii. Silva Gad., 19, translating a MS. of the sixteenth century in the British Museum. Stories of dreams of this kind are found everywhere. Compare, for example, Ragnhild’s dream of her son Harold Fairhair (i. Morris and Magnússon’s Heimskringla, 83) and the well-known stories of Athelstan’s mother and Cyrus’ mother. So Gorm, king of Denmark, dreamed of the sons, Knut and Harald, who were to be born of his wife Thyra, daughter of Ethelred, king of England. Saxo, 319 (Elton’s version, 387). According to a writer quoted by Southey (iii. Commonplace Bk., 753) Joan of Arc’s mother dreamed she gave birth to a thunderbolt.

^112.1^ iii. Bancroft, 99, apparently quoting Holmberg, Ethn. Skizz.; Ensign Niblack, in Nat. Mus. Rep., 1888, 379. The allied people, the Koniagas of the southern shores of Alaska, have a similar tradition concerning Elkh, the founder of their race. The Thlinkit and Koniagan traditions seem in fact to be one and the same. Featherman, Aoneo-Mar., 458. The Lenâpe tradition of Nanabozho, as reported by Lindstrom about 1650, seems to attribute that hero’s birth to his mother’s drinking out of a creek. Brinton, Lenâpe, 131.

^113.1^ Capt. Bourke, in ix. Rep. Bur. Ethn., 590, quoting Mendieta.

^113.2^ Hahn, Tsuni-ǁgoam, 69, 68.

^113.3^ Busk, Sagas from the Far East, 267. Unhappily Miss Busk’s translations in this work cannot be trusted; but it contains the only English version of the Ardshi-Bordshi with which I am acquainted. i. Cosquin, 69. Another version of the story, as told by an illiterate Buddhist monk of Zain Shaben in north-western Mongolia, is given iii. F.L. Journ., 321.

^114.1^ Voyage de Siam des Pères Jesuites, 296. In one of the Magic Songs of the Finns, Louhiatar swallows iron hail, the siftings of Tuoni’s mortar, and after thirty summers is disburdened of a progeny which “become all sorts of sicknesses, a thousand causes of injury.” Hon. J. Abercromby, in iv. Folklore, 40. Probably this too is a cosmological myth.

^115.1^ iii. Sacred Books, 307.

^115.2^ De Charencey, Le Fils, 13.

^115.3^ iv. F.L. Record, 23.

^115.4^ Liebrecht in a note to Gerv. Tilb., 72, quoting d’Herbelot. Cf. De Charencey, Le Fils, 13, where a similar Chinese tale is mentioned.

^116.1^ ii. Silva Gad., 1, translating a MS. written in 1780-82, which in its turn is a transcript of a translation from a Latin life of this somewhat doubtful saint, printed in the Acta Sanctorum Hiberniæ at Louvain, 1645. The MS. in question is in the British Museum.

^116.2^ vi. Rev. Celt., 179; D’Arbois de Jubainville, Épopée Celtique, 16; both translating MSS. of the fourteenth century now in the library of the Royal Irish Academy at Dublin.

^117.1^ D’Arbois de Jubainville, Épopée Celtique, 37, translating Leabhar na hUidhre (Book of the Dun Cow), MS. dating back to about the year 1100. See another translation, ix. Rev. Celt., 12. For Balor’s story as given in modern folklore, see ante, p. 15.

^117.2^ ii. Silva Gad., 23.

^118.1^ ii. Silva Gad., 89, translating Leabhar na hUidhre.

^118.2^ Prof. Whitley Stokes, in ii. Rev. Celt., 199, translating the Leabhar breac, a MS. written shortly before 1411, now in the Royal Irish Academy.

^119.1^ Francisco de Avila’s Narrative, translated by Markham, Rites and Laws, 125. It is needless to point out the analogy of part of this tale to modern folktales like Basile’s tale of Pervonto, cited in the last chapter.

^120.1^ De Gubernatis, ii. Zool. Myth., 331. The ancient nations of the Mediterranean basin believed that the mouth was the ordinary way of impregnation for fishes. Herod. ii. 93; Ælian, Nat. Anim., ix. 63. I have found a similar belief among the peasantry of Gloucestershire, where I am writing, as regards the pea-hen.

^120.2^ Von Wlislocki, Volksdicht., 300.

^121.1^ v. Sacred Bks., 187. Unfortunately Mr. West, the translator, has not given that part of the Selections which relates to Zoroaster’s life—only a summary of its contents.

^121.2^ viii. Rev. Trad. Pop., 601, translating S. H. Marian.

^122.1^ Landes, Annam., 12. There is a Japanese tale of a lady who, having been barren for many years, at length, as the result of much prayer to the gods, bore five hundred eggs. They were thrown into the water in a box, but rescued by a fisherman, incubated in an oven, and all happily hatched. Five hundred heroes were thus produced, whom their mother was afterwards glad to recognise and receive back. This is the legend of Bunsio, the goddess of fruitfulness and riches. Ploss, i. Weib, 441, quoting Horst.

^122.2^ Hon. J. Abercromby, in i. Folklore, 331.

^122.3^ iv. F.L. Journ., 21.

^123.1^ M. Dragomanov in Compte Rendu du Congrès, 46.

^124.1^ ii. Tuti-Nameh, 85. With these stories may be compared a Transylvanian Gipsy saga concerning the origin of the Ashani tribe. Ashani, the eponymous mother of the tribe, was the child of a man to whom a supernatural being appeared in a dream riding on the man’s own cow, and commanded him to slay the cow, burn its flesh and let his wife eat of the ashes. He was then to sleep with her upon the cowhide. Compliance with this command was followed by Ashani’s birth. Von Wlislocki, Volksdicht., 184.

^124.2^ ii. Gonzenbach, 165; Crane, 208.

^124.3^ Von Wlislocki, Volksdicht., 183. See also his Volksgl. Zig., 14. On the Keshalyi’s hair, see post, p. 155.

^125.1^ Dennys, 135, citing the China Review.

^125.2^ i. Leg. Panjâb, 139, 142.

^125.3^ Liebrecht in a note to Gerv. Tilb., 69. Jonas Hanway refers to a Mohammedan belief that the Virgin Mary conceived Our Lord by the smell of a rose. i. Hanway, 179. I have not been successful in tracing his authority.

^125.4^ Arnobius, Adv. Gentes, v. 5; Pausanias, vii. 17.

^126.1^ iii. Bancroft, 296, quoting Torquemada; Müller, Amer. Urrel., 601. The account given by Dr. Brinton makes Coatlicue a virgin and the ball of feathers merely “some white plumes.” Amer. Hero-Myths, 77. It does not appear on what authority this account rests. I feel sure, however, that it has not been given without reason. The round shield borne by the god in his usual representations was studded with white pellets of feathers. Zelia Nuttall, in v. Internat. Archiv., 39.

^127.1^ Featherman, Papuo-Mel., 43.

^128.1^ Mabinogion, 421; i. Y Llyvyr Coch, 68. Note the singular resemblance of the production of Llew Llaw Gyffes to that of the children in the Zulu and Kaffir tales mentioned on p. 98. Compare also the Thlinkit cosmogonic saga of the child born from a cockle-shell. Rep. Nat. Mus. (1888), 378.

^128.2^ Im Thurn, 378. Cf. the tradition of the first khan of the Diurbiuts, a Mongolian tribe. It was revealed to ten men in a dream that of the tree Urun and the bird of the same name was born a divine son; he became the khan: iv. F.L. Journ., 20. See also a curious tale from New Guinea on the origin of death: xix. Journ. Anthrop. Inst., 465.

^129.1^ Popol Vuh, 89.

^130.1^ Landes, Annam., 63. See also a curious myth of the aborigines of Hayti, one of the few descended to us, which represents a male personage as becoming pregnant by the spittle of another. Having been cut open, he brought forth a woman, by means of whom the island was subsequently peopled. Liebrecht, in a note to Gerv. Tilb., 71, quoting indirectly Peter Martyr.

^130.2^ iii. Sacred Bks., 396; De Charencey, Le Fils, 9.

^130.3^ Grimm, Teut. Myth., 1449. In a modern Indian märchen from Salsette the heroine is born in an extraordinary manner. A woman pours into a mendicant’s hands some rice boiling hot from the caldron, raising a big blister on his thumb. When his wife breaks the blister a little girl comes out. Miss Cox, Cinderella, 260, abstracting a story in xx. Indian Antiquary, 142.

^131.1^ xix. Sacred Bks., 2; Rhys Davids, Buddhism, 183. The father and the mother of Parákrama 1., the restorer of the native kingdom of Ceylon, dreamed the same night that a beautiful elephant entered her chamber; and this was interpreted to foretell the birth of a hero. Buddhism Primitive and Present in Magadha and in Ceylon, by Reginald Stephen Copleston (London, 1892), 378.

^132.1^ Sale, Koran, note on ch. xxix., citing Arab authors.

^132.2^ Brinton, Amer. Hero-Myths, 90; iii. Bancroft, 271; both citing the Mexican Codex in the Vatican and the Codex Telleriano-Remensis.

^133.1^ Callaway, Tales, 335.

^133.2^ Ploss, i. Weib, 436.

^134.1^ Plutarch, Names of Rivers and Mountains, xxiv.

^134.2^ Featherman, Aoneo-Mar., 80.

^134.3^ De Charencey, Le Fils, 16.

^134.4^ iv. Sacred Bks., lxxix.; v. 143 note, 144; xxiii. 195, 226, 307; De Charencey, Traditions, 31, quoting Tavernier; Rev. Dr. Mills, in Nineteenth Century, Jan. 1894, 51.

^134.5^ Gerv. Tilb. (Decision i. c. 17), 6, 68.

^135.1^ Browne, Vulgar Errors (l. vii. c. 16), 371.

^135.2^ Arcana Microcosmi: or, The hid Secrets of Man’s Body discovered, etc. By A. R. (London, 1652), 132.

^136.1^ Brinton, Amer. Hero-Myths, 47, citing Schoolcraft, who must, however, be generally accepted with caution.

^136.2^ Kalevala, runes xlv. and i. I have already referred to another legend of the fertilisation of Loujatar, p. 114, note. The Magic Songs of the Finns are full of these stories. See Hon. J. Abercromby, in iv. Folklore, 35, 37, 47. The Magyars tell of a wind-begotten supernatural steed. Von Wlislocki, Volksgl. Mag., 10. Sir Walter Scott refers somewhere to a border ballad of a maiden impregnated by the night-wind; but I have mislaid the reference.

^136.3^ iii. Bancroft, 175, note. Cf. Dr. A. W. Bell, in i. Journ. Ethnol. Soc., N.S., 250, where “a dewdrop from the Great Spirit” is said to have fallen upon the maiden’s bosom, entered her blood and caused her to conceive. This comes to the same thing; but Bancroft’s version seems more primitive.

^137.1^ De Charencey, Traditions, 34, citing the Marquis d’Hervey-Saint-Denis. According to an Irish tradition, related in America by a woman from Roscommon, the ass and cow are accounted sacred, because these animals breathed upon the infant Jesus in the manger, and thus kept him warm. vi. Journ. Amer. F.L., 264.

^138.1^ De Charencey, Traditions, 35.

^138.2^ i. Reed, 201.

^139.1^ Second Voyage du Père Tachard, 247. Sommonocodon is obviously Buddha. Both this story and one previously given (on p. 114) have been filtered through the minds of Jesuit fathers anxious to discover identifications with Christian teaching.

^139.2^ De Charencey, Le Fils, 13.

^142.1^ iii. Radloff, 82.

^143.1^ De Charencey, Traditions, 38, quoting Father Giov. Phil. Marini; Southey, iv. Commonplace Bk., 41, quoting Picart.

^143.2^ De Charencey, Traditions, 36.

^143.3^ Ellis, i. Polyn. Res., 262. Cf. the account of creation in the Windward Isles, ibid., 324.

^143.4^ Ibid., 326.

^144.1^ Pliny, Nat. Hist., xxxvi. 70; Ovid (Fasti, vi. 629) and Arnobius (Adv. Gen., v. 18) regard Ocrisia as not quite so innocent. According to the former, Vulcan it was who was the father. Livy (i. 39) rationalises the tale.

^144.2^ Codrington, 406.

^145.1^ Southey, iv. Commonplace Bk., 142; Featherman, Chiapo-Mar., 136.

^146.1^ While these sheets were passing through the press, Comte H. de Charencey, of whose studies I have availed myself in the foregoing pages, republished the substance of his articles on the Virgin’s Son, with additions, in a work entitled Les Folklore dans les deux mondes (Paris, Klincksieck, 1894). He seeks there to show that the New World borrowed many of its legends from the Old, and among them that of the Supernatural Birth. If I understand him aright, he follows M. Angrand in attributing Mexican civilisation to an Asiatic origin, and declares that while traditions of a powerful hero born without a father are found among the tribes whose culture was drawn from this source, they are not found among other peoples, like the Mayas and the Peruvians, whose civilisation is to be ascribed to an easterly provenience. It is always dangerous to assert a negative. We have already seen (ante, p. 118) that the Peruvians had a tradition of the Supernatural Birth, although the offspring did not turn out a hero. But Hiawatha was a hero exactly of the kind referred to; and the foremother of the Bakaïrí of Central Brazil gave birth to the twin culture-heroes and parents of the race from swallowing two finger-bones. Von den Steinen, 373. The myth is far too widely spread, and far too deeply rooted in the savage beliefs of both hemispheres, to be simply accounted for by borrowing.

Chapter VI Notes

^148.1^ Ploss, i. Weib, 431, citing Duncker.

^149.1^ xxix. Sacred Books, 180; cf. 395.

^149.2^ Meddygon Myddfai, 269. Concerning this work see my article on “Old Welsh Folk-Medicine” in ix. Y Cymmrodor, 227. Both MSS. comprised in the book badly want careful reprinting and proper editing.

^150.1^ Ibid., 262, 263; Friend, 115, 124, 581. Rosemary with grains of mastic was given by physicians in the seventeenth century to cure barrenness. Ploss, i. Weib, 434. A Gipsy charm quoted by Leland from Dr. von Wlislocki prescribed oats to be given to a mare out of an apron or gourd, with an incantation expressly bidding her “Eat, fill thy belly with young!” Gip. Sorc., 84.

^150.2^ W. A. Clouston, in Burton, iii. Suppl. Nights, 576, quoting Indian N. and Q.

^150.3^ i. Risley, 256.

^151.1^ Leland, Gip. Sorc., 101.

^151.2^ Ploss, i. Weib, 439, citing von Wlislocki.

^151.3^ Ibid., citing Krauss.

^151.4^ Von Schulenburg, 232.

^151.5^ J. B. Andrews, in ix. Rev. Trad. Pop., 111.

^151.6^ Featherman, Chiapo-Mar., 444.

^151.7^ Ploss, i. Kind, 30, 32; H. Ling Roth, in xxii. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 209. In the island of Aurora a woman sometimes takes it into her head “that the origin, or beginning, of one of her children is a cocoa-nut, or bread-fruit, or something of that kind;” and this gives rise to a prohibition of the object for food, just as in the case of a totem. Rev. Dr. Codrington, in xviii. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 310; ii. Rep. Austr. Ass., 612. I hardly know how to account for this notion except by the suggestion that such a woman may have eaten the fruit in question about the time her pregnancy commenced, and thence have been led to believe that the pregnancy was in some way due to it. Dr. Codrington, however, upon inquiry, informs me that he never heard of any belief of the kind. It is perhaps worth noting as a coincidence, if nothing more, that on Lepers’ Island the two intermarrying divisions are called branches of fruit, “as if,” says Dr. Codrington, “all the members hang on the same stalk.” Codrington, Melanesians, 26.

^152.1^ Meier, Sagen, 476, 474. It is a saying at Pforzheim: To make a nut-tree bear, let a pregnant woman pick the first nuts. Grimm, Teut. Myth., 1802.

^153.1^ Dr. Krauss, in iii. Am Urquell, 276. In Silesia stones are put on the trees on Christmas Eve to make them bear the more. Grimm Teut. Myth., 1825.

^154.1^ Ploss, i. Weib, 431, 432, 434, 445, citing various authorities. Compare Queen Isolte’s lily, referred to ante, page 91. What is the meaning of the attribution, widely spread in Europe, of children to trees or vegetables? See, for examples, iv. Am Urquell, 224 et seqq.; Zingerle, Sagen, 110; Finamore, Trad. Pop. Abr., 56. In England children are said to come out of the parsley-bed.

^154.2^ Gen. xxx. 14. Early Trav., 434.

^155.1^ Von Wlislocki, Volksgl. Zig., 90.

^155.2^ Ploss, i. Weib, 439.

^155.3^ Clouston, in Burton, iii. Suppl. Nights, 576, citing Pandit Natésa Sástri in Indian N. and Q.

^155.4^ Southey, iii. Commonplace Bk., 20, 75.

^155.5^ Von Wlislocki, Volksgl. Siebenb. Sachs., 54.

^156.1^ Von Wlislocki, Volksgl. Zig., 13. Compare the story given in the last chapter, ante p. 124.

^156.2^ Krauss, Sitte und Brauch, 531; Ploss, i. Weib, 432, 440, 441, 443, 431, citing various authorities.

^156.3^ Schröder, 171, citing Hartknoch; Ploss, i. Weib, 445.

^157.1^ Sextus Placitus, i. Sax. Leechd., 345.

^157.2^ Ploss, i. Weib, 431, 432, citing Nachtigall and Junk.

^157.3^ Von Wlislocki, Volksgl. Siebenb. Sachs., 103. In Transylvania hare’s flesh, especially the testicles, is also esteemed a specific against impotence and childlessness. Ibid., 169.

^157.4^ Leland, Gip. Sorc., 101.

^157.5^ Von Wlislocki, Volksdicht., 314.

^158.1^ Ploss, i. Weib, 442.

^158.2^ J. Spinner of Lemberg, in iv. Am Urquell, 125.

^158.3^ xxx. Sacred Bks., 110.

^159.1^ iii. Sax. Leechd., 69.

^159.2^ Theal, 201.

^159.3^ Eug. Polain, in ii. Bull de F.L., 82.

^159.4^ Ploss, i. Weib, 434, 443.

^159.5^ Pliny, Nat. Hist., x. 85.

^159.6^ Wolf, Niederl. Sag., 227; ii. Bull de F.L., 82.

^160.1^ ii. Witzschel, 244; Von Wlislocki, Volksgl. Siebenb. Sachs., 152.

^160.2^ Ploss, i. Weib, 443, citing von Wlislocki in general terms. The statement is repeated (as usual without giving his authority) by Leland, Gip. Sorc., 101.

^160.3^ Krauss, Sitte und Brauch, 531.

^160.4^ Victor Mindeleff, in viii. Rep. Bur. Ethn., 32.

^160.5^ Ploss, i. Weib, 435, citing Sandreczki.

^161.1^ Tuchmann, in vi. Mélusine, 109, quoting Rehatsek, Journ. Anthrop. Soc. Bombay.

^161.2^ Clouston, in Burton, iii. Suppl. Nights, 576 note, quoting Pandit Natésa Sástri, Indian N. and Q.

^162.1^ Von Wlislocki, Volksgl. Zig., 66. Wherever this work is cited, it must be understood, unless otherwise expressed, to deal with the Gipsies of the Danubian countries, where alone, the author says, they are unsophisticated.

^162.2^ Von Wlislocki, in iii. Am Urquell, 7.

^162.3^ B. W. Schiffer, in iii. Am Urquell, 147.

^162.4^ A. F. Dörfler, in iii. Am Urquell, 269.

^163.1^ Von Wlislocki, Volksleb. Mag., 77. According to the same author, the afterbirth of a boy or girl placed under the bed will ensure the procreation of a child of the same sex; but the husband must be careful which side he gets into bed—on the right for a boy, on the left for a girl. Ibid., 80.

^163.2^ Von Wlislocki, Volksgl. Zig., 103.

^164.1^ i. Lane, 393, 394.

^164.2^ Brinton, Myths, 253.

^164.3^ v. Rep. Bur. Ethn., 111, translating Relations des Jesuites (1636). In the Banks’ Islands are certain spirits called Nopitu. It is believed that a woman sometimes hears one of them say: “Mother, I am coming to you,” and feels it entering into her; and it is afterwards born as an ordinary child. Codrington, 154. This does not appear to be a case of migration.

^165.1^ iii. Sax. Leechd., 66.

^165.2^ Von Wlislocki, Volksgl. Siebenb. Sachs., 75, 152.

^165.3^ Schiffer, in iv. Am Urquell, 187.

^165.4^ Kohlrusch, 324.

^166.1^ Rev. W. Gregor, in iii. Folklore, 68.

^166.2^ i. Leg. Panj., 2.

^167.1^ vi. Mélusine, 111, quoting Panjab N. and Q., and Indian N. and Q.

^169.1^ Ploss, i. Weib, 436, 437, 438, 439, referring to various authorities. The Kich Negresses about Adaël, west of the White Nile, in Equatorial Africa, however, think it necessary to wash in liquids much less innocent than water, unless they want to be sterile. Kara Kirghiz women spend a night beside a holy well. v. Radloff, 2. The ceremonies they practise are not mentioned.

^169.2^ Jevons, Plutarch’s Roman Questions, ci.; iii. L’Anthropologie, 548, 558; Congress (1891) Report, 345; Kolbe, 163; Rodd, 94; Dalton, passim; Ploss, i. Weib, 445, citing Böder; Winternitz, Altind. Hochz., 47, 101.

^170.1^ Hahn, Tsuni-ǁgoam, 87.

^170.2^ Ploss, i. Weib, 443, citing Wuttke. In Hainaut a profusion of fruit on the nut-trees prognosticates many bastards during the year. Harou, 28.

^170.3^ Ploss, i. Weib, 446.

^170.4^ Frazer, ii. Golden Bough, 238, note, quoting Monier-Williams, Religious Life and Thought in India.

^171.1^ T. J. Hutchinson, in iii. Trans. Ethnol. Soc., N.S., 327.

^171.2^ i. Preller, 389; Ovid, Fasti, ii. 425.

^171.3^ Ploss, i. Weib, 435.

^171.4^ Ploss, i. Weib, 445; Grimm, Teut. Myth., 1794.

^172.1^ Grimm, Teut. Myth., 1795.

^172.2^ De Charencey, Le Fils, 26.

^172.3^ v. Radloff, 2. Among the Southern Slavs the bride is unveiled beneath an apple-tree and the veil is sometimes hung on the tree. Krauss, Sitte und Brauch, 450.

^173.1^ Ploss, i. Weib, 437, 439. For other amulets, see ibid., 441; Klunzinger, 399.

^173.2^ Codrington, 184.

^173.3^ Ploss, i. Weib, 439.

^174.1^ A. H. Kiehl, in vi. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 359.

^174.2^ Augustine, Civ. Dei, vi. 9; Ploss, i. Weib, 435, quoting Thomas Bartholinus.

^174.3^ Ploss, i. Weib, 436.

^174.4^ Bérenger-Féraud, 201, quoting Yéménier.

^175.1^ County F.L., Suffolk, 124, quoting Corolla Varia by Rev. W. Hawkins (1634), and deeds of the monastery relating to the property and the bull. The rite had evidently been mutilated.

^176.1^ Ploss, i. Weib, 444; Bérenger-Féraud, 200. Other Breton cases are referred to by Sébillot, i. Trad. et Sup., 51.

^176.2^ vi. Mélusine, 154, quoting the Temps; 258, quoting Byegones.

^177.1^ Zingerle, Sitten, 26. Ploss, i. Weib, 444, reproduces a photograph of one of these votive figures bought by the author in a wax-chandler’s shop at Salzburg as recently as 1890.

^177.2^ Featherman, Nigritians, 139, quoting Hecquard.

^178.1^ Ploss, i. Weib, 442, quoting Riedel.

^178.2^ Winternitz, 23, 75; Schroeder, 123.

^178.3^ Casalis, 265; Tylor, E. Hist., 109; M. Delafosse, in iv. L’Anthropologie, 444.

^179.1^ vi. Mélusine, 231, quoting Doolittle.

^179.2^ Pliny, Nat. Hist., x. 51. See also Ælian, Nat. Anim., xvii. 15. As to the power of flowers to imprint themselves by their smell on the fœtus, see Vasconcellos, 201.

^179.3^ v. Mélusine, 248.

^180.1^ Pliny, Nat. Hist., viii. 67; Aug. Civ. Dei, xxi. 5.

^180.2^ Marsden, 297.

Chapter VII Notes

^184.1^ ii. Records of the Past, 137; Maspero, 3.

^186.1^ Haltrich, 1 (Story No. 1). In a Wallachian variant the trees are apple-trees, the mother is only expelled, and the tremendous Deus ex machinâ of the Transylvanian story is not brought upon the scene. Schott, 121 (Story No. 8). This is a later stage in the history of the tale. See also another variant, Schott, 332.

^187.1^ Kremnitz, 30 (Story No. 3), from Slavici.

^187.2^ iv. Pitrè, 328 (variant of Story No. 36).

^187.3^ Day, 145 (Story No. 9).

^188.1^ Wolf, Deutsche Hausm., 390.

^188.2^ Maspero, xvi., quoting Rambaud, La Russie Épique.

^189.1^ Luzel, iii. Contes Pop., 262.

^189.2^ Wratislaw, 138 (Story No. 23), from Afanasief.

^190.1^ Legrand, 107, from Sakellarios.

^190.2^ i. Von Hahn, 268.

^191.1^ ii. Pentamerone, 231 (Story No. 59).

^191.2^ Frere, 79 (Story No. 6).

^191.3^ Stokes, 138 (Story No. 21).

^192.1^ Landes, Tjames, 79 (Story No. 10). It is abstracted in Miss Cox’s Cinderella, 299.

^193.1^ A large number of these stories has been abstracted and commented on by M. Eugène Monseur, i. Bulletin de F.L., 89, to whose accurate and scholarly paper the reader is referred. See also Grimm, ii. Tales, 538; Countess Martinengo-Cesaresco, 9; Ellis, Yoruba, 134.

^194.1^ i. Child, 118.

^195.1^ Campbell, Santal F.T., 52, 106, 102. In a Basuto tale a mother, irritated by her daughter, commits a deadly assault upon her, and beats her body to dust. The wind of the desert carries the dust away to a lake, where a crocodile makes of it a woman to live with him in the lake. From time to time she comes up to the surface and calls to her sister, chanting the story of her wrongs. Casalis, 360.

^196.1^ Theal, 138.

^196.2^ Ralston, Russian F.T., 10, from Afanasief.

^197.1^ Rink, 450.

^197.2^ Landes, Tjames, 77.

^197.3^ ii. Giles, 207. See also ibid., 119, 267, 279.

^198.1^ i. Giles, 413.

^198.2^ Countess Martinengo-Cesaresco, 24.

^198.3^ Jacobs, Celtic F.T., 82, from xiii. Celtic Mag., 69. An Irish form of this story, manifestly later in its present form, derives the interlacing trees from stakes of yew passed through the bodies of the lovers when they were buried. Gaidoz, in iv. Mélusine, 12, citing Transactions of the Gaelic Soc., 1808.

^199.1^ W. Spottiswoode, in ii. Trans. Ethnol. Soc., N.S., 248. See for other examples iv. and v. Mélusine, passim.

^199.2^ Zingerle, Sagen, 136.

^200.1^ i. Blätt. f. Pomm. Volksk., 17. Other instances are cited there. Among the peasantry of the Riviera, thorns or nettles growing on a grave are a sign of the damnation of the dead; if other plants grow, he is happy; if a mixture, he is in purgatory. J. B. Andrews, in ix. Rev. Trad. Pop., 117.

^200.2^ Featherman, Tur., 269; i. Macdonald, 229, citing Krapf.

^200.3^ Hunter, Rural Bengal, 210.

^200.4^ ix. Rev. Trad. Pop., 75, quoting Argensola, Histoire de la Conquête des Isles Moluques (Amsterdam, 1706).

^201.1^ Modigliani, 618.

^201.2^ Grimm, Teut. Myth., 1811.

^201.3^ viii. Rev. Trad. Pop., 279.

^202.1^ Dorman, 293, citing Smith’s Brazil; Von den Steinen, 369.

^202.2^ Callaway, in iv. Journ. Anthr. Soc., cxxxviii.

^203.1^ Grant Allen, Attis, 33, and passim. See also Frazer, Golden Bough, passim; Bötticher, 254 seqq.

^204.1^ Callaway, Rel. Syst., 140.

^204.2^ Le Page Renouf, in xvi. Proc. Soc. Bibl. Arch., 100.

^204.3^ Ellis, Yoruba, 133, 134.

^204.4^ Grabowsky, in ii. Internat. Archiv., 181, 187.

^205.1^ Modigliani, 292, 277, 290, 293, 479. Is it too much to say that the Greek custom whereby the nearest relative received the dying breath in a kiss probably originated in a similar belief?

^205.2^ Guppy, 54.

^205.3^ Featherman, Aoneo-Mar., 236.

^205.4^ Bourke, in ix. Rep. Bur. Ethn., 470, quoting Schultze, in Smithsonian Report for 1867.

^205.5^ Powers, 182; Knight, 109.

^206.1^ Zingerle, Sagen, 137. Other examples on the following pages. Breton examples may be found in Le Braz, 122, 132, 270, 272, 417.

^208.1^ Ovid, Metam., xiii. 697.

^209.1^ Southey, ii. Commonplace Bk., 435, quoting Ward, i. Hindoos, 54.

^209.2^ Gardner, in iv. F.L. Journ., 30.

^213.1^ Mabinogion, 471. Cf. Prof. Rhys’ exposition of the story, Hibbert Lectures, 543.

^215.1^ D’Arbois de Jubainville, Cycle Myth., 47, citing the Leabhar na hUidhre and two other MSS.

^217.1^ Ibid., 312. Finn mac Cumhail too had previously lived as Mongan. Ibid., 337.

^218.1^ Powers, Tribes of California, iii. Contrib. N. Amer. Ethn., 299.

^218.2^ The Wooing of Emer, translated by Prof. Kuno Meyer, i. Arch. Rev., 70.

^218.3^ xxv. Sacred Bks., 329.

^219.1^ Grihya-Sûtra of Hiranyakesin, xxx. Sacred Bks., 211. Grihya-Sûtra of Âsvalâyana, xxix. Sacred Bks., 183. Chinese ritual, in its insistence on the necessity of personation of the dead at solemn sacrifices by his grandson, or some one else of the same surname, points to the same doctrine. See especially The Lî-Kî, xxvii. Sacred Bks., 337; xxviii. 243.

^219.2^ Featherman, Nigritians, 447; Tylor, ii. Prim. Cul., 4; Winwood Reade, 539; Ploss, i. Kind, 259, citing Bastian. Ellis, Yoruba, 128, says the inquiry is made of a priest of Ifa, the god of divination. It is believed by one of the Ewe tribes, neighbours of the Yoruba, that the lower jaw is the only part of the body which a child derives from its mother, all the rest being from the ancestral luwoo or kra. The father furnishes nothing. Ibid. 131 note.

^219.3^ Burton, ii. Wanderings, 174.

^220.1^ Ellis, Tshi-speaking Peoples, 149; Ewe-speaking Peoples, 114; Burton, ii. Gelele, 158; ii. Wanderings, 173.

^220.2^ Macpherson, Memorials, 72, 92, 134. But see as to the Kols, who perform a similar ceremony without the same ancestral reference, Dalton, 295.

^221.1^ Tylor, 184.

^221.2^ Ibid., 36.

^221.3^ Turner, Samoa, 16, 77, 78; Polynesia, 174, 178, 238.

^222.1^ xviii. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 311.

^222.2^ Tylor, ii. Prim. Cul., 4.

^222.3^ Featherman, Aoneo-Mar., 31, 392; iii. Bancroft, 517. See also Tylor, ii. Prim. Cul., 3; Niblack, in Rep. Nat. Mus. (1888), 369.

^222.4^ Liebrecht, 311.

^223.1^ iii. Bancroft, 517. Did Bancroft read his authority aright? Tylor, citing Waitz, states that it was the child who bore not only the name but the rank of the deceased. I have preferred to cite Bancroft both because the statement is second-hand, instead of third-hand (I have no access to the original), and because it tells somewhat less strongly in favour of the argument.

^223.2^ Bourke, in ix. Rep. Bur. Ethn., 470, quoting Schultze, Fetichism (New York, 1885).

^223.3^ iii. Trans. Ethnol. Soc., N.S., 188, 375; Von den Steinen, 334, 434.

^223.4^ Featherman, Dravidians, 491.

^223.5^ Placucci, 78, 23. The reason, however, may be derived from the belief that to bestow the name is to bestow a part of the life of the original owner of the name, who would thus lose it. The same ambiguity attaches to a superstition in the province of Posen (Polish Prussia), where, if a child die and the next year another child be born, it must not receive the name of the dead child lest it also die. iii. Zeits. f. Volksk., 233. This would seem to amount to complete identity, or else to some evil influence in the name, or perhaps to a mistake as to the identity on the part of some malicious spirit who had a spite against the dead child. At Chemnitz, if the first children take their parents’ names they die before the parents. Grimm, Teut. Myth., 1778. These cases want further inquiry. As to the renewal of family names by giving them to children, see Tylor, ii. Prim. Cul., 4; Kaindl, 6; Finamore, Trad. Pop. Abr., 74.

^224.1^ Pigorini-Beri, 83.

^224.2^ E. H. Man, in xii. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 155.

^224.3^ Burton, Wit and Wisdom, 376.

^224.4^ Relations des Jésuites (1636), translated by Miss Nora Thomas, v. Rep. Bur. Ethn., 114, 111.

^225.1^ Tylor, ii. Prim. Cul., 3; i. Crantz, 161, 200; Rink, 44, 54, 64, 434; vi. Rep. Bur. Ethn., 612. Ante, pp. 75, 196.

Errata

[Copied from volume III in the series]

p. 57, note 1, for 217 read 178

p. 61, last line but one, for fisherman read merchant

Volume II — The Life-Token

Note

The discussion of the Life-token has proved so important, going down to the very foundations of the savage philosophy of life, that I have found it impossible to bring to a close this study of the Legend of Perseus within the compass of two volumes. A third, however, will complete the task, and will also include a supplementary Bibliographical List and an Index.

I desire to add to the names of friends who have so kindly extended to me their assistance in various ways, those of Mr. Edward Clodd, now president of the Folklore Society, the Rev. W. Gregor, LL.D., Mrs. Fanny D. Bergen, M. J. D. E. Schmeltz, the learned Curator of the Ethnographical Museum at Leiden, and editor of the Internationales Archiv, and Mr. W. R. Paton. To Mr. W. H. D. Rouse I have had occasion to refer so frequently for assistance of various kinds, constantly and ungrudgingly rendered, that I hardly know how to thank him.

Highgarth, Gloucester,
May 1895.

Chapter VIII. the Life-token in Tale and Custom

The life-tokens we have met with in previous chapters may be divided into two classes, namely, such as have some original connection with the hero, and such as are merely arbitrary. Of the first, the most widespread and important is the tree that grows up from some portion of the magical fish. In The King of the Fishes and in the corresponding Norman tale the tree is a rose-tree growing, in the one case from the buried scales, in the other from the buried bones. In one of the stories from Lorraine it will be remembered that some of the fish’s bones were buried under a rose-tree, and there the babes are subsequently found. Their life-tokens are not the tree, but three roses growing upon it. In one of Grimm’s German tales we find two golden lilies growing from two pieces of the fish. Two cypresses arise from the fish’s tail in the Greek story. In the Hungarian Gipsy tale, where the mother becomes pregnant by drinking from an urme’s breast, the urme drops of her milk into two holes in the ground, whence the life-tokens, two oak-trees, spring. The mermaid, in a Highland märchen, gives twelve grains, of which three are for the fisher’s wife and produce three boys, and three are to be planted and produce trees of a kind unspecified. Equally, {4} doomed to death at the hands of a Rakshasi, her fellow-wife, gives her son in a golden vessel a small quantity of her own breast-milk, which will become red if his father be killed, and more deeply red if she herself be slain.^4.1^

In both these cases there has been originally an organic connection between the token and the person whose condition is indicated. Such a connection is not common outside the Perseus cycle. Usually there is no more connection traceable between the hero and his life-token than that subsisting between an owner and his property, sometimes not so much. At most it is founded in the planting by him, or at the time of his birth, of the tree that serves as the token. A remnant of organic connection, however, appears in the Panjâbi story about Prince Lionheart. This personage was born in consequence of his mother’s eating some barleycorns given her by a fakir. When the prince bids farewell to his retainer, the knife-grinder, on whom he has bestowed a kingdom and a bride, he gives him a barley-plant as a life-token. He afterwards gives, in similar circumstances, a barley-plant each to his other retainers, the blacksmith and the carpenter. His instructions are that these plants be carefully tended and watered, for so long as they flourish he will be alive and well; but if they droop, misfortune will be at hand. The prince’s life is dependent on his sword. When the sword is thrown into the fire, a burning fever comes over him: when the hilt {5} comes off, his head rolls off; and at the same moment every one of the barley-plants snaps, so that the ears fall to the ground.^5.1^ In a Bengali tale, and in the first of the tales in the Siddhi-Kür, each of the heroes plants a “life-tree.”^5.2^ In a Karen tale the hero sets two plants, and directs his comrades, if the plants wither, to come and seek for him.^5.3^ Ibonia, a Malagasy hero, plants arums and plantain-trees, saying to his parents: “If these grow withered, then I am ill; and if they die, that is a sign that I also am dead.”^5.4^ The princess in a Russian tale, when her husband leaves her, gives him a sackful of seeds, telling him to throw them on either side of the road he travels: “Wherever they fall, that moment trees will spring up; on the trees precious fruit will be hanging in beauty, various birds will sing songs, and tom-cats from over the sea will tell tales.” When he is drugged, the tree-tops begin to wither; and the princess sets out after him.^5.5^ An Indian story shows us the lame prince, on undertaking an adventure, giving his mother a plant as his life-token.^5.6^ Apparently the plant is a growing one, but it does not appear whether the prince had himself set it. A curious example is found in a variant of Cinderella, collected by M. Cosquin in Lorraine. Florine was a king’s only daughter. Her mother in dying had commended above all things to her {6} daughter’s care a little white lamb. This lamb gives her magical food. When her stepmother discovers this, she feigns to be sick and persuades the king to kill the lamb that she may eat of it. Ere it dies the lamb directs Florine to gather its bones and put them on the pear-tree, whose branches will thenceforward be adorned with pretty little golden bells, ringing ceaseless chimes: if these bells be ever silent, it will be a sign of misfortune. By her command over this magical tree Florine is enabled to pluck and give to a certain king some of the bells, which her stepsister cannot do. The king, therefore, marries her. In his absence her stepmother throws the bride into the river and puts her own daughter in her place. Forthwith the golden bells cease to chime. Now, their sound could be heard two hundred leagues around. The king, remarking that they have stopped, hastens home, and arrives just in time to save the drowning heroine.^6.1^ There is little doubt that the tale in its more archaic shape exhibited both the lamb and the pear-tree as transformations of the heroine’s mother, and in this way connected with the heroine by a tie of blood.

It is not uncommon for the plants to be set by natural or adoptive parents. The young Klepht in a modern Greek folksong begs his mother:

“Do thou plant a rose-tree, and plant a dusky clove, And water them with sugar, and water them with musk. So long they blossom, mother, so long they put forth flowers, This son of thine will not be dead, but meet the Turks in battle. But if the day of sorrow, the bitter day should come, If the two trees fade together, and if their flowers fall, Then I, too, shall be smitten, and thou shalt wear the black.”^6.2^

A Negro story from Angola represents one of the heroes, immediately on his birth, as directing his parents to plant his kilembe, or life-tree, at the back of the house.^7.1^

The Smyrnæan tale I have already mentioned in Chapter IV. brings before us a childless queen, who is gifted by a dervish with three apples. These she must eat, and she will then give birth to three boys. At the birth of each a pumpkin is to be planted in the garden: it will bring forth one fruit, wherein the child’s strength will reside. Afterwards, when one of the pumpkins is cut and carried away, the corresponding youth falls ill, until it is recovered.^7.2^ Here the pumpkin is rather the life itself than the life-token; but the distinction, as we shall hereafter see, is not very important. A Tirolese variant of The Two Sisters who envied their Cadette describes the gardener who rescues the children as planting a gilliflower for each of the two boys, and a rose for the girl. Apparently this is done at the time he finds and adopts the babe. The boys grow up and go away successively to seek the Three Beauties of the World; and their flowers wither when they themselves are changed into marble by the Medusa-witch.^7.3^

Often, however, the original planting is not mentioned. The twins, in a Melanesian story from the island of Aurora, simply set a taboo upon a banana belonging to them, and said to their uncle Qatu: “If you go into the garden and see our bunch of bananas beginning to ripen at the top and ripening downwards to the end, Taso has killed us; but if you see that it has begun to ripen at the end and is ripening upwards, we shall have killed him.”^7.4^ A banana {8} growing by the hero’s hut is also his life-token, in a Malagasy story.^8.1^

There is a large number of cases which need not detain us now, where on departure the hero gives a flower that will continue fresh and flourishing so long as he is hale and prosperous, but will fade on misfortune or death happening to him. This is a markedly oriental form of the Life-token, occurring repeatedly in India and among the Arabs of modern Egypt.^8.2^ In the Sinhasana Dwatrinsatika, or Thirty-two Stories of the Speaking Statues, a Sanskrit work, Siva gives to Vikram a lotus-flower, saying: “When this flower withers, then you will know that you must die in six months, and prepare accordingly.”^8.3^ Here the ideas of the Life-token, the life itself, and a prophetic message are all mixed up.

The knife stuck into a tree, to drip with blood, or to rust, if the owner die, is a commonplace of Slavonic stories.^8.4^ In a Serbian tale the knife falls out when the hero is overpowered by the witch.^8.5^ When three brothers part on the search for a magical pelican, in a Hungarian märchen, they mark a finger-post at the cross-roads. Blood will ooze out of it, on the return of any of them, if the absent one be in misery or captivity; but milk will flow if he be well.^8.6^ A German tale represents the brothers as each cutting a tree. The cut becomes blood-red if either {9} of them be dead or in need.^9.1^ In the Arabian Nights Bahman gives his hunting-knife to Perizadah: it will become blood-stained on his death. The same incident is found in Spain, in Iceland, and in Italy.^9.2^ Elsewhere other weapons are named. So long as a poniard can be drawn from its sheath, in a tale obtained by M. Luzel at Plouaret in Lower Brittany, no ill has happened to its owner; but if it stick, he is dead.^9.3^ Sikulume, in a Kaffir story, sticks his assagai in the ground before he ventures among some cannibals, saying: “If it stands still, you will know I am safe; if it shakes, you will know I am running; if it falls down, you will know I am dead.”^9.4^ An Epirote story makes one of the twins say, when they part: “If the sword of either of us become bloody, that will be a sign that the other one lies dying.”^9.5^

Among other articles of property, a rosary, or a ring, is the favourite. Parwez, in the Arabian Nights, gives his sister a string of one hundred pearls: while they run loose on the string, he is living. The rosary also appears in a modern Arab folktale from Egypt (already cited), in Catalonia, in Brittany, and in tales obtained at Troyes in Champagne and at Mantua.^9.6^ In Arab tales the ring tightens round the finger when the giver of the ring suffers mishap.^9.7^ In a Vlach ballad it rusts.^9.8^ More usually the {10} stone it contains changes colour. This is the case in the old French romance of Flores et Blanchefleur; and it reappears among the Basques, in Italy, and, though rarely, in Russia.^10.1^ In Sicily the ring is originally the gift of a fairy, or rather a Fate, at the birth of the three children borne by the heroine of a variant of The Two Sisters who envied their Cadette.^10.2^ The virtues ascribed of old to precious stones were many; and we should have had cause for surprise if we had not found gems in the list of life-tokens.

A handkerchief is a frequent gift. It becomes black, or more usually besmirched with blood.^10.3^ In a Vlach ballad just referred to, the lady delivers to her husband her veil, adorned with a border of golden broidery. “When the gold shall melt,” she says, “know thou that I am dead.” In a modern Greek tale from the island of Syra, two brothers, starting to seek for the magical bird Dikjeretto, leave their shirts with their sister. If misfortune meet them, the shirts will turn black.^10.4^ Each of three brothers in a Lithuanian story sets up at the crossway, ere they part, a blue banner, which will be stained with red—in other words, with blood—in the event of his death.^10.5^ In a story from Southern Russia, Ivan Popyaloff, going to fight the snake that withheld the daylight, hung up his gloves, desiring his brothers to hasten to his help if blood dropped from them.^10.6^ In {11} another Russian story the hero thoughtfully puts a plate beneath, to catch the blood.^11.1^ Lemminkäinen, in the Kalevala, having brushed his beautiful hair, flings the brush upon the oven-posts, and declares that on harm’s happening to him it will shed blood. Accordingly, when he is done to death in the Underworld, his wife is made aware of the fact by the bristles dripping with gore.^11.2^ Mats made from the skins of beasts he has slain, and a pipe, are left behind with his foster-mother by a young Micmac brave, who goes to make war on the savage Culloos: she will see blood on them if he be killed.^11.3^ Strong Hans, in a tale from Syra, cannot be got to do anything but play his cither. When he sallies forth to fight the ogre, who has ravished away the king’s daughter, he tells his mother: “If you see that the strings of my cither are broken, then up and seek me!”^11.4^ In an obscure passage of the Popol Vuh, the sacred book of the Quiché, the heroes Hunhun-Ahpu and Vukub-Hunahpu appear to leave as their life-token with their mother the india-rubber ball with which they loved to play.^11.5^ One of the Torres Straits islanders told Professor Haddon a tale wherein a mother, while at work, breaks her digging-stick, and at once concludes that something has happened to her baby-boy. Sure enough it has; for a gust of wind had blown down his basket-cradle, and a man and his wife passing by have found the child in the grass and taken him away.^11.6^ Here the instrument neither belongs to, nor {12} is it indicated by, the person affected. So in an Iroquois legend, when the hero starts in search of the daughter of a neighbouring chief, his uncle, under whose tutelage he is, brings out “a curious thing made of coloured string and elk-hair of deep red, about a foot long. ‘I shall keep this by me,’ said he, ‘and so long as you are doing well it will hang as it is; but if you are in danger it will come down itself almost to the ground, and if it does reach the ground you will die.’ ”^12.1^

According to a märchen told by the Transylvanian Armenians, a maiden presses a gold coin into her lover’s hand and tells him that when it is rusty she will be dead.^12.2^ In the Russian tale of Marya Morevna, the hero leaves successively his silver spoon, fork and snuff-box with his three Animal Brothers-in-law, when he goes on the perilous adventure of rescuing his fair wife from Koshchei the Deathless. When he is killed and chopped into pieces by the ogre, all the silver turns black.^12.3^ The hero of a Tirolese tale and his sister kindle two lights; and he declares that if one of them go out, she must take it as a sign that something has happened to him and he will nevermore return.^12.4^ A candle is combined with the handkerchief which becomes bloody in a Russian story. The youngest brother going away in a Sicilian märchen touches a vase of cloves and utters the warning that the drying up of the cloves will be a signal of his having been {13} turned to marble by the Medusa-witch.^13.1^ In Russian tales the hero’s horse stands in blood up to his knees, or even up to his neck, or up to his ankles in tears, when his master is dead.^13.2^ In another Russian tale a glass of water becomes tinged with blood.^13.3^ And in a Servian tale the eldest brother, on going out with the second, directs the youngest to put a kettle on the fire to boil, and to keep stirring the fire beneath it. If the water turn to blood, he is to let a little dog out of the cellar, and bid it follow the way the two elder brothers have taken.^13.4^ Similarly in a Georgian story the prince fills a cup with water and puts it near the fire. So long as it remains pure he will be alive; but on its changing to blood he will be dead.^13.5^ In the Egyptian manuscript the elder brother is warned of his younger’s fate by the beer he is about to drink turning into froth. Here again, it will be noted, there is no apparent connection with the hero, save that he has previously appointed this sign.

One of the magical objects most famous in tradition and in romantic literature is the mirror wherein the beholder can see any object at will. It became prominent in the dreams of science during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when it is said to have figured among the properties of astrologers. In English literature the Enchanted Mirror is best remembered from the Squire’s Tale of Cambuscan Bold, and by the admirable use of it in one of the Ingoldsby Legends. I do not propose to discuss it here further than is necessary to show its relations with the Life-token. The first time we meet with it in literature is in Lucian’s True History. It is found in the {14} moon, of enormous dimensions, lying over a well. Anybody, we are told, who enters the well hears whatever is said upon the earth; and anybody looking into the mirror sees as in a panorama all the cities and nations of the world. The Greek Munchausen declares that he saw his family and his entire fatherland; and whoever does not believe him can go there and look for himself! A singular parallel is found among the Dyaks of Borneo. According to their traditions, one of the ancient fathers of the race climbed upon a gigantic tree to the Pleiades, where he was hospitably entertained by a friendly being, who introduced him to rice—a food until then unknown on earth. Being left alone for a short time, the visitor peeped into a big jar, and there, to his astonishment, saw, as in a mirror, his father’s house, with the whole family party gathered in animated discussion. His spirits fell, for he feared he should never return home from that immense distance. But his host cheered him up; and after giving him a good dinner, and some rice to plant, with full instructions as to its cultivation and other hints on husbandry, he let him down by a rope to the earth again. The adventurer, having thus got back in safety, taught his people the lessons he had learned in the Pleiades; and he is still venerated as the father of agriculture.^14.1^ In the far west the Ynca Yupanqui, if we may trust the Peruvian legend reported by Molina, once went to visit his father Viracocha Ynca. Coming to a certain fountain, he saw a piece of crystal fall into it; and within the crystal he beheld the figure of a man dressed like an Ynca. From the back of his head issued three brilliant rays like those of the sun. The royal fringe was upon his head, and {15} ear-pieces, like those of the Yncas, adorned his ears. Serpents twined around his arms and shoulders. Upon his shoulders there was a lion, while the head of another lion appeared between his legs. Yupanqui fled; but from within the fountain the apparition called him by name. “Come hither,” it said, “my son, and fear not, for I am the Sun, thy father. Thou shalt conquer many nations: therefore be careful to pay great reverence to me, and remember me in thy sacrifices.” Saying this, the apparition vanished; but the crystal remained. The Ynca took care of it, and we are told that thenceforth he saw in it everything he wanted.^15.1^

Mr. Clouston, in his notes to John Lane’s feeble continuation of the Squire’s Tale, has brought together a large number of instances of magical mirrors, beginning with Vergil the Magician and coming down to the practices recorded by Mr. E. W. Lane and others in modern Egypt and India.^15.2^ A boy is ordinarily the agent in the last-mentioned practices, and a spot of ink in the hollow of his hand the mirror. The same practices were employed in classical antiquity, and were not unknown during the Middle Ages. A German saga relates that a jewel of crystal was by a mysterious stranger left as a gift with a burgess of Nuremberg who had shown him hospitality for three days. If a chaste boy looked into the crystal he would see a little man, who would show him everything it was desired to know. So great was the reputation of the {16} glass, that people used to threaten one another: “Speak the truth, or I’ll go to the little man.”^16.1^ In a Gipsy story from Transylvania a king’s daughter possesses a mirror wherein she can see everything in the world.^16.2^ Another mirror with somewhat more limited capacity was the gift of a mountain spirit in a German tale; but it had other powers that resulted at last in a curse.^16.3^ When Vasco da Gama was sailing towards India, some of the Indian wizards are said to have shown the people at Calicut in basins of water his three ships.^16.4^ The Egyptian and modern Indian practices are ordinarily used for discovering thefts; and this was often the purpose in Europe. In Tahiti and Hawaii the priest was sent for on similar occasions. After some prayers he caused a hole to be dug in the floor of the house, and filled with water. He continued his incantations with a young plantain in his hand until he observed the image of the thief in the water.^16.5^ In the Isle of Man a notorious witch is reported to have made use of a bowl of {17} water in order to divine as to the safety of a herring-fleet.^17.1^ The Otando fetish-man of Equatorial Africa also uses a vessel of water; the Mpongwe fetish-man uses a mirror.^17.2^ In Borneo the manang, or medicine-man, is frequently provided with a magical stone into which he can look and see what is ailing a sick man, and prescribe for him accordingly.^17.3^ The Cakchiquels of Central America had a sacred obsidian stone, which was their national oracle, and was mysteriously connected with the origin of mankind. A stone, apparently identified with this, is preserved in the church of Tecpan, Guatemala. It was shown to Mr. Stephens, who describes it as “a piece of common slate, fourteen inches by ten, and about as thick as those used by boys at school, without characters of any kind upon it.”^17.4^ No doubt the eye of faith was required to see anything in it. Crystals are used by the medicine-men of the Apaches for divining.^17.5^ The Urim and Thummim of Hebrew antiquity seem to have been objects of the same kind of superstition. The “Mirror of Light” is not unknown even in these days, and has been honoured with the attention of the Society for Psychical Research.^17.6^

Lucian, in placing the mirror in a well, was probably {18} satirising the belief in sacred wells which had properties like those he attributed to the mirror. Such wells and pools are still to be found, both in stories and in fact. A fairy in an Italian tale points out to the hero a fountain which will be a mirror for him, into which he can look, and to which he can give commands, and they will be obeyed.^18.1^ It was formerly believed at York that he who flung, on May morning before the Minster clock struck one, five white stones into a certain part of the Ouse near the city, would see in the water, as in a mirror, whatever he might desire, whether past, present, or future.^18.2^ On the promontory of Tænarum, now Cape Matapan, Pausanias tells us, was a famous fountain. In his day there was nothing remarkable to be seen in it; but anciently those who pried into its depths might see views of ports and ships. In the Cyaneæ, hard by Lycia, too, there was a spring, into which whoso descended saw whatever he wished to behold.^18.3^ And there is a wonderful well in Samoa, wherein a variety of scenes may be perceived by those who will undertake the risk of being enticed into its stony depths.^18.4^

So far we have found no Life-token in mirror or well. A mirror or well, however, which reveals to the inquirer only the health of one in whom he has an interest, is obviously nothing more than a special variety of the mirror {19} or well revealing anything or everything. This is the variety mentioned in a Roman variant of Beauty and the Beast, where Beauty, on taking leave of the Beast for a short time, is given a mirror, into which she can look and see how he is.^19.1^ In a Swedish märchen already cited, on the two comrades parting at a crossway, one of them dips his knife into the fountain adjacent, and says to the other: “It shall be to thee a sign that I am living so long as the water of this spring is clear; but if it be red and turbid, then I shall be dead, and I certainly expect that thou wilt avenge my death.”^19.2^

This convenient way of obtaining news of absent friends is said to be still in use. The Eskimo of Greenland, when a man has not returned in due time from an expedition in his kayak, hold the head of his nearest relation over a tub of water, and judge from the reflection beneath whether the absent person has been upset, or is still sitting in the boat, rowing.^19.3^ In the island of Tahiti, if one, looking at the water of certain springs, chance to see it tinged with blood, it is a sign that one of the beholder’s friends is about to die.^19.4^ Nor is it different in our own country. Gulval Well, in Cornwall, answers inquiries put with the proper formula. If the person asked after be alive and well, the quiet water will instantly boil and bubble clear and pure; if he be sick, the water becomes foul and puddled; if he be dead, it remains calm and lifeless.^19.5^ The legends accounting for these phenomena in Tahiti and Cornwall are unrecorded. In the parish of Kirkmichael, in the county of Banff, there {20} is a fountain dedicated to St. Michael, and famous for its healing virtues. The guardian of the well appears in the shape of a fly which, it is believed, never dies. “To the eye of ignorance,” we are told, “he might sometimes appear dead; but agreeably to the Druidic system, it was only a Transmigration into a similar form, which made little alteration on the real identity.” He was, in former days at all events, constantly on duty. “If the sober matron wished to know the issue of her husband’s ailment, or the love-sick Nymph that of her languishing Swain, they visited the Well of St. Michael. Every movement of the sympathetic Fly was regarded in silent awe; and as he appeared cheerful or dejected, the anxious votaries drew their presages; their breasts vibrated with correspondent emotions.”^20.1^ Brand and Ellis quote from an old writer a passage concerning fountains which prognosticate plenty or famine. The writer concludes by saying: “Myselfe know some Gentlemen that confesse, if a certaine Fountaine (being otherwise very cleane and cleare) be suddenly troubled by meanes of a Worme unknowne, that the same is a personall Summons for some of them to depart out of the world.”^20.2^ These superstitions frequently degenerated into mere divination. Dalyell records that auguries as to the fate of {21} any one were drawn from the finding of a dead or a living worm in a well in the parish of Strathdon, and also in the well at Ardnacloich in Appin, Argyllshire.^21.1^ Sir John Lubbock quotes a striking instance from Dr. Anderson’s account of the expedition to Western Yunnan. Three men having gone to the Kakhyen hills, a report reached their families that one of them had died. To ascertain which of them it was, the old women were divining by means of needles and cotton-wool. Each needle representing one of the absent men, threaded with a piece of cotton-wool to act as a float, was let down gently into the water. As the floats got thoroughly wetted, the needles would sink one after another; and the man whose needle sank first would be the dead one.^21.2^ The water there was probably contained in a vessel; but the principle, as we see from several instances already cited, is the same. Before the temple of Demeter at Patras there was a spring that was consulted on the issue of any disease. The method (and here, perhaps, we touch the object of Lucian’s satire) was to let down a mirror suspended by a cord so as just to allow the water lightly to touch its edges, but not its face. After praying and clearing the air with incense, the performers (probably priests) looked down into the mirror, and thence perceived whether the patient would live or die.^21.3^ On the isle of Andros it is still the practice for Greek maidens to hold a mirror over a well and to look in it for the face of their future husbands reflected from the well below.^21.4^ In Brittany there are certain wells wherein children’s shirts are dipped. If a shirt sink to the bottom, it is a sign of the child’s death within a year. Contrariwise, {22} if the shirt swim, the child will live; and to ensure its living and to preserve it from every kind of evil the wet garment is immediately put on.^22.1^ After that, nobody would deny the child’s continued health to be a miracle. The superstition was not by any means confined to Brittany; but it will suffice to give one more example of it here. “Between the towns of Alten and Newton,” says one of the Cottonian Manuscripts, “near the foot of Rosberrye Toppinge, there is a Well dedicated to St. Oswald. The neighbours have an opinion that a Shirt or Shift taken off a sick person and thrown into that Well, will show whether the person will recover or die: for, if it floated, it denoted the recovery of the party; if it sank, there remained no hope of their life; and to reward the Saint for his intelligence, they tear off a Rag of the Shirt, and leave it hanging on the Briars thereabout; where I have seen such numbers as might have made a fayre Rheme in a Paper Myll.”^22.2^

For divination of this kind no special connection would be necessary between the life and the pool or fountain, such as is hinted at in the quotation concerning the “Worme unknown.” This is not always so. At Brereton, in Cheshire, is a lake whereon floating logs betokened the death of the head of the family of Brereton.^22.3^ Leonard Vair in his book on charms and sortileges mentions a very curious case communicated to him by Cardinal Granvelle. {23} At the monastery of Saint Maurice on the borders of Burgundy, near to the Rhone, was a fish-pond which was kept stocked with as many fish as there were monks. When any of the monks fell sick (we are bound to believe it on the authority of a bishop and cardinal), one of the fish floated on the surface of the water, half dead; and if the monk were going to die, the fish would die three or four days before him.^23.1^ In like manner, on a mountain in Franconia a fountain issues near the cradle (Stammhaus) of an ancient noble family. The clear stream gushes forth incessantly the whole year round; and it was believed to fail only when one of the family was about to die.^23.2^ It is reported of the holy spring of Szörény that its water becomes blood-red as often as a King of Hungary dies.^23.3^ There is a crater-lake in Madagascar, about eighty miles south-south-west of Antanánarívo, called Tritriva. It is of a deep green colour, almost black. The natives hold that there is an intimate and secret relation between the lake and the members of a neighbouring tribe, the Zanatsara. When a tribesman is taken ill, the waters of the lake are at once examined. If they are troubled and become of a brown colour, it is a presage of death: if they remain clear, {24} the patient will have a chance of life.^24.1^ In these cases we have precisely the conditions of the Life-token; and we may be allowed to conjecture that other cases of inquiry after absent friends, or divination for the sick, were originally limited to persons believed to stand in some special relation with the fountain consulted. Further, the stories and superstitions regarding mirrors have evidently been transferred from pools and springs, to which they must have originally attached. And in the Eskimo practice, and the divination at Patras, and elsewhere, in the performances of Indian and Egyptian conjurers and of the fetish-men and priests of Equatorial Africa and the Pacific Islands, we may perhaps trace some of the intermediate stages.

These pools and mirrors have led me to anticipate somewhat. And before returning to Life-tokens a few words must be spent upon the cognate subject of Tokens of Fidelity. The extension of the idea of a life-token to a faith-token is obvious where the persons parted are lovers or spouses. In such cases it would not be enough for one to know that the other was living: constant assurance of the absent one’s fidelity would be as necessary to the other’s happiness as his life. There is another magical object, familiar in certain stages of civilisation, with which the Faith-token may easily be confounded. I mean the Test of Chastity, like the mirror in the beautiful tale of Zayn al-Asnam, or Florimel’s girdle in the Faerie Queene. With this test of chastity in a general sense we have not here to do; nor is it necessary to discuss the Faith-token itself at any length.

In Eastern tales the Faith-token ordinarily assumes the {25} form of a flower. In the Tutinameh, a soldier’s wife gives her husband on his departure a rose which will remain fresh while she preserves her purity.^25.1^ In the Kathá-sarit-Ságara, the god Siva appears in a dream to Guhasena and his wife Devasmitá when they are about to part, and gives them a red lotus apiece, saying: “Take each of you one of these lotuses in your hand. And if either of you shall be unfaithful during your separation, the lotus in the hand of the other shall fade, but not otherwise.” When they awoke, each beheld in the other’s hand a red lotus, “and it seemed as if they had got one another’s hearts.”^25.2^ In a modern folktale obtained in the Panjáb the kind of flower is not specified, but the incident is the same.^25.3^ The token appears also as a flower or a garland in several of the European romances of chivalry; and in a Hungarian märchen a king, going to war, gives to his two daughters two wreaths which will wither if they lose their maidenhood.^25.4^ In a modern folksong of one of the Greek islands, an apple-tree, questioned why it withers, replies:

“They plighted a youth and maiden beneath my shelter; They swore by my branches that they would cling together, And now, because I know they part, my leaves are turning yellow.”^25.5^

These stories have their counterpart in practice. Siva, the Hindu god who is the agent in one of the stories just quoted, is a phallic deity. Among the Mech of Bengal, a Mongoloid tribe just now in a transitional state of religion between animism and the Hinduism which is macadamising the innumerable aboriginal cults of India, a sij plant {26} (Euphorbia Indica) grows in the courtyard of every house. This plant is carefully tended as the abode of Siva and the emblem of conjugal fidelity. If its leaves wither, something is wrong with one of the women of the household.^26.1^ A curious superstition of an analogous kind was commonly practised among our own countrymen within the memory of men only a few years dead. Lovers who desired to know how they should succeed in their suit carried flowers called bachelors’ buttons in their pockets, and judged of their good or bad success by the flowers’ growing or not growing there.^26.2^ So it is noted among the superstitions prevalent in France two hundred years ago, that, in order to know which of three or four persons loved one the best, a corresponding number of thistles should be taken, the buds cut off, and to each plant should be imputed the name of one of the persons concerning whom it was intended to inquire. The thistles were then to be placed under the head of the inquirer’s bed; and the one representing the person who had most affection would put forth new buds.^26.3^ At Siena a maiden who wished to know how her love progressed kept and tended a plant of rue. While it flourished all went well; but if it withered it was a sign that the love she desired had failed her.^26.4^

In the ballad of Hind Horn the king’s daughter gives the hero a jewelled ring. As long as the stone keeps its {27} colour, he may know that she is faithful; but if it change its hue, he may ken she loves another man. Professor Child, commenting on the ballad, adduces not merely several variants and romances on the same subject, but also a Roumanian ballad wherein a prince going to war gives his wife a ring which will rust if he be dead, and a Silesian story and another British ballad where the ring breaks in twain.^27.1^ In these ballads and stories we probably have the real meaning of plighting the troth in the marriage service with a ring. Bacon, somewhere discussing the superstition, gravely suggests that a trial should be made by two persons of the effect of compact and agreement; that a ring should be put on for each other’s sake, to try whether, if one should break his promise, the other would have any feeling of it in his absence. The hero of a North German tale receives from his bride the day after marriage a snow-white shirt, which will turn black if she die, and become stained and spotted if she be untrue.^27.2^ A Hungarian tradition speaks of a carbuncle which lighted up the neighbourhood of a lake in the Carpathians while the consort of the king of the water-fays was true to him; but when she fell in love with a mortal prince it lost its splendour, and the king with his golden palace and all his treasures sank into the black depths of the lake.^27.3^ The Faith-token is a piece of machinery too suggestive to be {28} overlooked by poets and dramatists of more refined art than the mediæval romancers. Davenant mentions an emerald, not set like the Carpathian carbuncle on a palace tower, but worn by a lady, and growing pale when her husband is unfaithful. Massinger’s play of The Picture turns upon a portrait of his wife given to the parting knight, Mathias, by “a great scholar,” or magician, with these instructions:

“Carry it still about you, and as oft As you desire to know how she’s affected, With curious eyes peruse it: while it keeps The figure it now has, entire and perfect, She is not only innocent in fact, But unattempted; but if once it vary From the true form, and what’s now white and red Incline to yellow, rest most confident She’s with all violence courted, but unconquer’d; But if it all turn black, ’tis an assurance The fort by composition or surprise Is forced or with her free consent surrender’d.”

I do not propose, however, to trace the Faith-token through literature. If a gift of doubtful benefit to a jealous lover, many a literary artist in search of a plot has found it useful. Our business is with the Life-token, to which we may now return. Tales of life-tokens credited as facts are not very numerous. Perhaps one or two of the stories already mentioned may be included in that category. The rest may be treated together with superstitions and customs.

In many variants of the Perseus cycle, as well as in many of the märchen cited in the present chapter, we have found the life-token to be a tree planted before or at the time of the hero’s birth, or sometimes planted by himself or merely indicated by him. In the Smyrnæan tale, it will be {29} remembered, the queen plants a pumpkin on the birth of each of her sons. The pumpkin brings forth one fruit, wherein the strength of the boy resides; and when it is cut the boy falls ill. As I have already pointed out, the pumpkin would seem here to be the life itself, and not merely the life-token. A distinction between the life and the life-token is generally observed in märchen. On the one hand, we have the story of Punchkin with his hidden soul, in which the magician, or demoniacal enemy of the hero, cannot be slain by any evil inflicted on his own body. His soul, or life, must be sought out in a distant spot where, enveloped in various coverings and protected by numerous defences, is a parrot, or an egg, to destroy which is to kill the magician. On the other hand, we have in the variants of The King of the Fishes and other types the mysterious token left at home while its owner sallies forth in search of adventures. If he fall, or suffer reverses, the token at home, if a tree or a flower, withers; if a knife, or a phial of liquid, or some other article, it drops blood, or rusts, or changes colour, or indicates in some other manner its sympathy with the hero’s fortunes.

This broad distinction is natural in a story the plot of which is made to depend upon it. It is easy to understand, however, that the distinction could not be maintained in any corresponding practical superstition. To assume, for instance—what is quite possible—that the lives of the monks of Saint Maurice were actually believed to be bound up with those of the fishes in the fishpond of the monastery, how could it be determined whether a fish’s death caused the death of one of the brethren or only betokened it? In the course of the following pages we shall meet with many cases of sympathy between a child {30} and a tree or other object. The child’s death and the withering of the tree, or some other corresponding change, are believed to be coincident. Experience will very soon show that sometimes the injury may happen to the child, sometimes to the life-token. If the superstition survive, it can only do so by supposing that both alike are vulnerable, and that the consequences of an injury to either are mysteriously transmitted to the other.^30.1^ Even in a story, however, the distinction between the Life-token and the “External Soul,” as Mr. Frazer calls it, is not always maintained. In the tale of Prince Lionheart, referred to at the beginning of this chapter, the hero derives his origin from a barleycorn. His life-token, multiplied in a lavish oriental manner by three, consists of three barley-plants. It is noteworthy that he directs that every one of them shall be carefully tended, for so long as they flourished he would be alive and well, and, on the contrary, if they drooped, misfortune would be at hand: implying that his life and prosperity were dependent upon them. His external soul proper is a sword. When its hilt comes off, his head falls, and at the same instant the ear of each of the barley-plants snaps. Other stories may easily be recalled where a plant as the hero’s life-token is commended to the special care of the friend or kinsman left behind, as if injury to the plant would affect its absent owner. We shall, accordingly, be justified in treating the Life-token and the External Soul as almost always one and the same thing in belief and custom.

In the Popol Vuh, the twin divinities, Hun Ahpu and Xbalanque, whose birth I have already described in Chapter v., on starting for the realm of Xibalba to avenge their {31} father’s death, plant each a cane in the midst of their grandmother’s dwelling, that she may know by its flourishing or fading whether they are alive or dead.^31.1^ According to a tradition of the province of Berri, in central France, a local saint, Honoré de Buzançais, who flourished at the end of the thirteenth century, in setting forth on a journey told his mother that, by means of a certain laurel which had been planted the day he was born, she would at any time be able to learn how he fared. The tree would languish if he were ill, and wither if he died. He was murdered, and the laurel withered at the same instant.^31.2^ On the island of Tahiti, a sacred tree, resembling the banian of India, was said to have shot forth a new tendril at the birth of one of the kings whose inauguration is described by Ellis; and this branch reached the ground when the inauguration took place.^31.3^ So Suetonius tells us that thrice when the mother of the Emperor Vespasian gave birth to a boy a certain ancient oak-tree belonging to the Flavian gens and sacred to Mars put forth a new shoot; and when the Emperor himself was born the shoot was of such vitality that it grew to the size of the old trunk itself.^31.4^

These are legends. In actual life, among the Maori, when the navel-string came off a newborn child, the child was carried to a priest. The cord was buried in a sacred place; and over it a young sapling was planted, which was expressly regarded as the babe’s “Sign of Life,” or life-token.^31.5^ Another account states that the placenta was buried and a tree planted over the spot. “Instances have been known of territorial right being claimed in consequence {32} of the placenta and umbilical cord having been buried in the vicinity, the tree being pointed to as evidence.” Elsewhere in New Zealand the cord was buried by the mother at the foot of some out-of-the-way tree or bush, with certain mystic words. If the tree or bush decayed or died, the child would not be expected to live long.^32.1^ In Southern Celebes a cocoa-nut is planted at the child’s birth, and watered with the water in which the cord and after-birth have been washed. The tree, as it grows up, is called the “contemporary” of the child.^32.2^ In Old Calabar a palm-tree is planted, so as to grow with the child, and the after-birth is buried beside it.^32.3^ The superstition is not confined to these distant lands. In Pomerania the after-birth is buried at the foot of a young tree; in Mecklenburg it is merely cast there; in either case the child will grow with the tree, and thrive as it thrives.^32.4^

It is obvious that in all these cases there is a connection established between the child and the tree by means of the placenta. The reasons for planting a tree are probably twofold. Not only is it difficult to preserve the after-birth itself; it is also desired to bring to bear upon the child all the gracious influences of Nature, to aid in his growth and development. This is done by the intervention of the young tree, which thus becomes more than a mere index of his fortunes. The placenta is, in fact, a portion of the child incorporated in the tree. A caul, which is as much a portion of the child as the placenta, and which, unlike the latter, is easy of preservation, was formerly regarded in this country as an index of the health of the person who was so lucky as to be born with it. While he remained alive and well, it was firm and crisp; if he sickened or died, it became flaccid and relaxed.^33.1^ Any fragment of a human being may, indeed, become his life-token. A pathetic instance is on record of a boy in Grafton County, New Hampshire, who, early in the present century, was badly scalded, so that a piece of his skin, fully one inch in diameter, sloughed off, and was carefully treasured by his mother. When the boy came of age he left home, and was never heard of after; but his mother used from time to time to examine the skin, persuaded that so long as it was sound her son was alive and well, and that it would not begin to decay until his death. She died about 1843; and thenceforth her daughters kept the skin for their brother’s sake as she had done, and with the same notions about its preservation and decay.^33.2^ In these examples we do not find the idea of the External Soul. {34} The object, whether caul or skin, is kept merely to obtain tidings of the absent. It is not united for his benefit to any living organism like a tree; nor does it seem to be necessary to his life to preserve it from harm.

Sometimes, however, the belief connected with the rite of planting at a birth is more obscure, whether from the fault of those who have recorded it, or because it has faded out of the memory of those who perform it. The Fiji islanders bury the navel-string with a cocoa-nut, which is intended to germinate and grow. The tree produced is considered the property of the child.^34.1^ Among the tribes of Guatemala, and also of Virginia, the cord was cut upon an ear of maize, and the grains thus besprent with blood were sown in the infant’s name.^34.2^ The umbilical cord of an Aztec boy was buried with mimic weapons in a place where a battle might be expected to take place on a future day. A girl’s cord, with domestic implements proper to her sex, was buried under a metate, or stone whereon the maize was crushed.^34.3^ The interpretation of none of these presents any difficulty, save that of the Aztec boy. But if we regard the cord as his external soul, we may suppose that it was either put into a safe place, or was expected to strengthen and encourage its owner on the day of battle. The Badouj husband, in Java, buries the placenta in the forest. We are told nothing as to {35} the situation in which it is buried; if not at the foot of a tree, it is probably intended to be hidden securely away.^35.1^

In other cases there appears no physical contact with the infant, or with the accompaniments of its birth, though the intention is plain. On the island of Bali, in the East Indies, a cocoa-palm is simply planted. It is called the child’s “Life-plant,” and is believed to grow up equally with him. When twins are born, in some Zulu tribes, the father plants two euphorbia-trees near the door of the hut. Among the Mbengas of Western Africa, when two babes are born on the same day, two trees of the same kind are planted, and the people dance round them. “The life of each of the children is believed to be bound up with the life of one of the trees; and if the tree dies, or is thrown down, they are sure that the child will die soon.” The life of a newborn child is united by some of the Papuans with that of the tree by driving a pebble into the bark. “This is supposed to give them complete mastery over the child’s life; if the tree is cut down, the child will die.”^35.2^ Among the Sakalava of Madagascar, a tree called Hàzomànitra (Fragrant Wood) is planted at the birth of a first child. This is said to be a witness that the father acknowledges it as his own.^35.3^ But had he not acknowledged it, the child must presumably have been put to death, so that this can hardly be the real reason. According to the Babylonian Talmud it was a Hebrew practice to plant a cedar at the birth of a boy, and {36} a pine at the birth of a girl.^36.1^ On the New Marquesas Islands a breadfruit-tree is set apart for the use of every infant at its birth; or, if the parents be too poor to do this, a sapling is immediately planted. The fruit of the tree is taboo to every one save the child; even the parents dare not touch it.^36.2^ Among several European nations it is, or has been up to recent times, the custom to plant a tree at the birth of a child. When the poet Vergil was born, his parents are said to have planted a poplar, in the hope that, as that tree overtopped all the rest, their son’s greatness would outstrip all others’. Poplars are still set in the neighbourhood of Turin when a girl is born; and they become in after-years the maiden’s dower. In Switzerland an apple-tree is set for a boy, a pear or a nut for a girl; and it is believed that as the young tree flourishes, so will the child. In Aargau, in particular, it was the custom, not many years back, to plant a fruit-tree on the land of the commune for every infant that was born; and if a father were enraged with a son who was at a distance, and therefore out of his reach, he would go to the field and cut down the tree planted at his son’s birth.^36.3^ In England we still hear sometimes of trees being planted at a birth. Count de Gubernatis, I know not on what authority, asserts that there are families in Russia, Germany, England, France, and Italy, whose practice it is to plant at the birth of a {37} child a fruit-tree, which is loved and tended with special care as the symbol of the child and of the child’s fate.^37.1^ Only thirty years ago it was the custom of the good folk of Liége to plant a tree in the garden when a child was born: a custom which, it seems, is still continued in some parts of Belgium.^37.2^ In the province of Canton, in China, although we are not informed that trees are planted on the like occasions, we seem to have a relic of some such practice in the superstition requiring a child’s fortune to be told, in order to ascertain the particular idol or tree to which he belongs. It is thought that a tree is planted in the spirit-world to represent the life in this world, “and that the child is as much the fruit of the tree as it is that of the womb.”^37.3^ It is difficult to see how such a thought could have originated, unless it were connected with the planting of a tree in this world when the babe was born.

Nor is it only at a birth that the life-token is planted. Among the English-speaking population on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake, when one of a family leaves home, a bit of live-for-ever is stuck in the ground to indicate the fortune of the absent one. It will flourish if he prosper; otherwise it will wither or die.^37.4^ An Italian {38} work falsely attributed to Cornelius Agrippa gives the following prescription for divining the health of a person far distant: Gather onions on the Eve of Christmas, and put them on an altar, and under every onion write the name of one of the persons as to whom information is desired. When planted, the onion that sprouts the first will clearly announce that the person whose name it bears is well.^38.1^ In the north-east of Scotland, when potatoes were dug for the first time in the season a stem was put for each member of the family, the father first, the mother next, and the rest in order of age. Omens of the prosperity of the year were drawn from the number and size of the potatoes growing from each stem.^38.2^ Every Roman emperor solemnly planted on the Capitol a laurel, which was said to wither when he was about to die. It was the custom, too, of a successful general at his triumph to plant in a shrubbery set by Livia a laurel which was believed to fade after his death.^38.3^ Marco Polo records that the Great Khan planted the highways through his realm with rows of trees, for the purpose of marking the roads; and that he did it all the more readily because his astrologers and diviners told him that he who planted trees lived long.^38.4^ Why, unless his life were bound up with the trees he planted? In British Guiana, when young children are betrothed, as is the custom among the aborigines, trees are planted by the respective parties in witness of the contract. {39} If either tree happen to fade, the child it belongs to will die.^39.1^ The custom exists also in Germany. At Hochheim, Einzingen, and other places in the neighbourhood of Gotha, a bridal pair plants at the wedding, or shortly after, two young trees on the land of the commune. If either of the trees perish, the spouse who planted it will shortly die.^39.2^ “On certain occasions the Dyaks of Borneo,” says Mr. Frazer, quoting Professor Wilken, “plant a palm-tree, which is believed to be a complete index of their fate. If it flourishes they reckon on good fortune, but if it withers or dies they expect misfortune.”^39.3^ What else than this can be the true meaning of the ceremony practised by some of the Australian blacks when a boy attains puberty? His two upper front teeth are knocked out, and his mother carefully inserts them in the fork of the topmost branches of a young gum-tree, which thereupon becomes taboo.^39.4^ {40} The tree is not, indeed, newly planted, but, as in the Papuan practice cited just now, the boy’s fate is united with it. If a gipsy babe do not thrive in Transylvania, the mother drops a little of her own blood in its mouth, and rubs its saliva in the hole of a tree, repeating a rhyming formula adjuring the child to grow like that tree.^40.1^ When a child has been passed, for hernia or some other disease, through a young tree split for the purpose, the tree is forthwith bound up and plastered with mud or clay so that it may grow together again; and according as this treatment is successful on the tree, the child is expected to recover. This, I need hardly remind the reader, is a superstition very widely spread in Europe. In Mecklenburg, and most likely elsewhere, it is believed that if the tree be felled the child will die.^40.2^ So, too, among the Buryats of Siberia, a shaman on the eve of his first dedication cuts a magical stick from a growing birch. It must be of some size, since a horse’s head is required to be carved at the top, and a horse’s knee and hoof at the lower end. It must be so cut that the birch will not wither from the excision, for that would be an ill omen for the shaman.^40.3^ His life, or at least his professional success, is thus bound up with the life of the tree.

Of other species of life-tokens we may note the following. A tradition of the Mojave Indians of Arizona relates that two twin brothers, in starting to hunt, hung a quiver up by the lodge fire, and each tied a long hair (no doubt one of his own) across the doorway. “If you see that quiver fall,” they said to their wives, “that is a sign we are dead; and {41} if the hairs break, we die.” The brothers are treacherously murdered; the quiver falls and the hairs are broken.^41.1^ In this case we have the hairs originally part of the heroes’ bodies, and the quiver was their property. Thus the reason why these objects could be made life-tokens was the sympathy they retained from their erewhile close connection with the brothers. This is, however, by no means a necessity: the mere superscription of the name is sufficient, as in the onion-charm cited a page or two back, to establish the requisite sympathy. Tiglath-Uras, an Assyrian king, caused a seal of crystal to be engraven with his name and title, and with the words: “Whosoever buries my writing and my name, may Assur and Rimmon destroy his name and his land! Whoever makes the seal legible ensures the preservation of my life.”^41.2^ Here the seal, with its inscription, bears the aspect of the king’s external soul; and it must be remembered in this connection that archaic belief regards the name as a part of its owner. A similar character attaches, in the opinion of many savages, to a portrait. This is the foundation of the belief in witchcraft by means of a puppet or picture.^41.3^ But if the writing of a name or the accuracy of a likeness were {42} important, it is clear that the superstition could not be traced far back into the lower culture, and witchcraft could only be practised by accomplished artists. Accordingly, it is enough to attribute the name of the man to the object whereby it is proposed to represent him. In Thuringia, if it be desired to know whether absent children or other kinsmen be still living, all that is necessary is to stick a loaf of bread with ears of corn before putting it into the oven to bake. Each of the ears is designated by the name of one of the absent concerning whom inquiry is made. If any of the ears be scorched in the process of baking, the person symbolised is assuredly dead; if not, he is living.^42.1^ Either some such divination, or that lively presentation which is but a step short of it, was recorded by Mr. Backhouse, who, in visiting Tasmania, noticed one day a native woman arranging some flat oval stones, about two inches wide and marked with black and red lines. He learned that these represented absent friends, and one larger than the rest stood for a fat native woman on Flinders Island, known by the name of Mother Brown.^42.2^

As in the märchen we have reviewed, so in sagas and in practical superstition, mere ownership or the wearing of an object sets up a connection with it, which remains even after parting with its possession, and will render it an efficient life-token. This has been already illustrated in the quiver of the Mojave saga. In a legendary history of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, Duke Lewis, her husband, when setting out for the Crusade, sent her a ring, the stone of {43} which would break when misfortune happened to him. It is curious that in fact, if the Count de Montalembert’s investigations may be trusted, the duke told his wife that if he sent her his ring it would be a token that some misfortune had occurred.^43.1^ In Italy it is believed that if a woman take off her wedding-ring, her husband will run some serious risk.^43.2^ A Hungarian superstition declares that a garnet remains of a beautiful red colour when its wearer is well, but turns pale if he be sick or ailing.^43.3^ But here the line between the Life-token, or the External Soul, and the Fetish becomes very narrow. So a Shawnee prophet tried to persuade Tanner that the fire in his lodge was intimately connected with his life. At all seasons and in all weathers it was to remain alight; for if he suffered it to be extinguished, his life would be at an end.^43.4^ Of a similar character is the Negro luck-ball, so graphically described, with the making thereof, by Miss Owen, and of which a specimen was obtained by her for Mr. Leland. We will not here inquire into the composition of this nasty but magical article; we will rest satisfied with knowing that it receives the name of the person for whom it is intended, and contains his soul. It is usually carried about by its owner; and the agonies of a Negress who thought she had lost her ball are set forth in Miss Owen’s book with humour. “No ball could be found. Then Aunt Mymee went wild. Her morning duties were forgotten, she ran hither and thither looking in all possible and impossible places of concealment, and obstinately refusing to state what she had lost. Finally, with a groan of despair, she flung herself down on her cabin floor in a {44} cowering heap and quavered out that she would be better off in her grave, for an enemy had stolen her luck-ball, and her soul as well as her luck was in it.”^44.1^ The North American Indians and many other savages carry such objects; and of the same kind would appear to have been that wonderful stone in the Chinese story, which contained ninety-two grottoes representing the allotted years of its owner’s life.^44.2^

Mr. Frazer, in the remarkable work to which I have been indebted for numerous illustrations in the course of this chapter, refers to the belief on the part of many peoples in the lower culture that the lives of individual men and women are bound up with those of various animals. In Rome the animals in question were snakes; and the superstition was so widely spread that, according to Pliny, they multiplied to an extent which would have rendered it impossible to make head against their fecundity, if their numbers had not been kept down by occasional conflagrations. The snake was, in fact, the genius of a man—his external soul, and therefore was carefully guarded from all harm.^44.3^ The Zulus also believe in an ihlozi, or mysterious serpent, belonging to every man. It is usually invisible, underground; but it may be killed, and then the man must die. In other parts of the {45} world there is no such monopoly: all sorts of animals are looked upon by different members of the same clan as their second selves. Mr. Frazer frames from this a theory of totemism which it is foreign to my present purpose to examine. Whatever may be thought of the theory, it is clear that some aspects of the Totem, the External Soul, and the Fetish approach one another very nearly, and require a closer study than they have yet received from any scientific anthropologist, with the exception of the distinguished author of The Golden Bough.

Coming back to the Life-token proper, it would seem that it is sometimes connected, not with the individual concerned, but with the relative or friend left behind. When a Zulu warrior goes on a hostile expedition his wife hangs up her own sleeping-mat against the door or wall of the hut. If the shadow be cast sharp and clear, her husband is well; if otherwise, “he will never look upon the sun again.”^45.1^ The Coptic Christian legends contain the same plentiful supply of miracles which the accounts of other saints furnish. The life of the Coptic saint Shnudi, by his disciple Visa, relates that another saint, Mar Thomas, foretold to Shnudi that the latter should be informed of Mar Thomas’s death by the breaking in two of the stone whereon Shnudi used to sit and meditate.^45.2^ In this case {46} Mar Thomas appoints the life-token; and he displays a lofty recklessness about the condition of furniture which does not belong to him. But the appointment by the person whose life is the subject of inquiry is not usual, where the token is in no way connected with him. The friend left behind can generally manage a life-token without his assistance. Frequently, however, the aid of a sorcerer is called in. Among the western islanders of Torres Straits the sorcerer on these occasions goes through some jugglery with a crocodile’s tooth, which he pretends to swallow and bring out again through his hand. After this he sends it on a journey in the direction where the man is supposed to be, and divines his life or death by the condition of the tooth when it returns.^46.1^ In Brittany a sailor’s wife who has been long without tidings of her husband makes a pilgrimage to one of the shrines innumerable in that country, and lights before the saints a taper wherewith she has provided herself. If her husband be yet alive and well, it burns with a clear, steady flame; otherwise the flame will be poor and intermittent, and will go out.^46.2^ John Banks, a dramatist of the Restoration, refers to one form of the superstition still, or very lately, living in Scotland, as well as in other parts of Europe. The passage runs as follows:—

“Douglas. Last night, no sooner was I laid to rest, But just three drops of blood fell from my nose And stain’d my pillow, which I found this morning, And wondered at. Queen Mary. That rather does betoken Some mischief to thyself. {47} Douglas. Perhaps to cowards, Who prize their own base lives; but to the brave, ’Tis always fatal to the friend they love.”^47.1^

Strictly speaking, this only announces the deaths of near relations: it would be too dreadful if a man’s whole acquaintance made known their deaths by bleeding him, or, as it is believed in Denmark, by pinching him and thereby causing blue spots on his body.^47.2^ Second sight, however, also well known in Scotland, was not confined to kindred; but it is of a ghostly nature, not dependent on material objects.

Closely connected with the Life-token, as we have already seen, is divination concerning the prospects of life of persons who are not absent. This is a wide subject; and here we can only select a few examples among those whose form is similar to those of the Life-token. The Thuringian practice of divining as to absent members of the family seems to be one of several Teutonic methods of divination by the baking of bread. The decrees of Burchard of Worms, issued probably early in the eleventh century, refer to the omen drawn on the first of January by baking a loaf of bread in the name of any one and noting how it rises and whether it becomes compact and light. Another practice is described, of sweeping the hearth and placing grains of barley on the heated place: if the grains popped, they indicated danger; otherwise, if they remained quiet.^47.3^ {48} At Rauen, in the north of Germany, if a newly baked loaf have a crack, one of the family will die.^48.1^ In Suffolk, to overturn a loaf in the oven is to have a death in the house.^48.2^ In Saxony on the Bohemian border the same augury is obtained by making as many little cakes as there are persons in the house, giving to each cake the name of one of the persons, and punching a hole in it with your finger. He whose hole closes up in baking will die.^48.3^ In Hungary on Saint Lucien’s Day a feather is stuck in each cake, and the death-augury is drawn if the feather be burnt in baking. On Christmas Eve in many places every one eats a nut and fills the shell with water. If the shell be dry by the next morning he must die during the year.^48.4^

Divination from the burning of candles is well known. On Twelfth Night, in some parts of Ireland, as for example in Leitrim and Roscommon, rushes were gathered and made into rushlights, each of the length of six inches. They were stuck into a cake of cow-dung and named from the members of the family. Then they were all lighted, and the family knelt around them, telling their beads. The taper that burnt out first indicated who should die soonest.^48.5^ So Meleager’s life, according to the classical story, departed when the brand expired whereon it depended. In Thuringia, if an altar-light go out of itself, one of the priests will die; but it does not appear whether the candle must be entirely consumed.^48.6^ In some towns of {49} North Germany it is a common practice on a child’s birthday to give him a cake with a “Life-light” placed on it. The light must not be blown out, but suffered to burn to the end.^49.1^ This is contrary to the general rule at Chemnitz, and elsewhere, which declares that when a candle goes out of itself, some one in the house will die—a superstition especially regarded on Christmas Eve.^49.2^ In Iceland, if a man let a light die out slowly, he will have a long death-struggle.^49.3^ On the other hand, the Romans, if we may trust Plutarch, never extinguished a lamp, but suffered it to burn out.^49.4^ Omens of this kind are frequently drawn at weddings. Two candles represent the bride and bridegroom: the one whose candle first expires will die first. Such is the belief in Thuringia and Esthonia, as well as in Italy. Among the Southern Slavs and among the Bretons the altar-candle opposite either of the spouses during the ceremony is the one whose conduct in this respect is regarded. At Chemnitz it was customary to allow the light to burn clean out in the bride-chamber, perhaps for the same reason.^49.5^

In Denmark, Saint John’s-wort (hypericum) is gathered on Saint John’s Day, and the plants are set between the beams under the roof. If one of them grow upwards toward the roof, he whom it represents will have a long life; if downward, sickness and death are betokened.^50.1^ The Saxons of Transylvania, and the Hungarians, are said to place as many billets of wood as there are members of the family present on Saint Sylvester’s Night (New Year’s Eve) in the open air on or against a wall or a tree, giving each billet the name of a person. Any of them falling before the morning forecasts the death of him whose billet falls. Or a rag is thrown on a tree, and if it be there in the morning the thrower expects luck in the coming year. On Saint John’s Day wreaths are made of marsh-marigolds and thrown singly thrice on the roof. If anybody’s wreath remain up, he will die before the next summer.^50.2^ The same principle is embodied in the Maori custom of divining by means of sticks. Before they go to war they put up two sticks, or two rows of sticks, with certain ceremonies. From the way in which the wind blows the sticks or the manner in which they fall, if thrown, omens are drawn as to the success of the war, or the fate of the inquirer.^50.3^ The Gipsies of the Danubian countries divine as to the fate of their relatives by putting flowers—apparently willow flowers—in a sieve on Saint George’s Eve, one for each {51} member of the family. He whose flower is found withered the next morning will die first.^51.1^ In the Isle of Man, at Hollantide, “as well as on the last night of the year, ivy-leaves marked with the name of the family were put into water, and if one of the leaves withered it was supposed that the person whose name was on it would die before the end of the year.”^51.2^

The tales and superstitions we have examined in this chapter are conclusive as to the wide range of a belief in the mysterious connection of a man’s life and health with some object external to himself. And they point with equal certainty to the belief that this connection originates in some relationship, either natal or established subsequently to birth by possession or ownership, or by appointment of the person concerned. In other words, the external object is believed to be, or to contain, a part of the man himself, or the man and the external object are regarded as two parts of a greater whole. This is the reason why, in märchen belonging to The King of the Fishes and other types, the tree growing in the garden at home is an index of the adventurer’s fate in the palace of the Medusa-witch. Both the tree and the hero are sprung from the magical fish; both are of his substance; and hence their sympathy. So, among the Maories and in Pomerania, when the navel-string or after-birth is buried and a tree planted over it, the latter would be conceived to absorb the substance of the object at its root—that is to say, of something which is already part of the child himself—and in that way become connected with him. Our evidence, though extending from Polynesia and Melanesia {52} to the East Indies, though good for Germany and for portions of the American continent, does not directly establish the practice of such burials as universal. But such a custom is a fair inference wherever we find the planting of a tree at birth, especially where, as in the majority of cases, the tree is looked upon as betokening the child’s fate. Yet the custom could not have been one of the most archaic. It must have been unknown so long as mankind were wanderers having no settled places of abode or defined territory. Earlier than this, therefore, must have been the belief that some other relic such as hair, weapons, ornaments or clothes, which had been in contact with their owner’s body, or even some more arbitrary thing appointed by him, acquired the mysterious connection of which I am speaking. By constant use, or by habitual wear, things not originally part of a man would become inseparably associated with him in the minds of all his acquaintance, impregnated with his personality, identified with his corporeal presence. After a while mere ownership would be enough to warrant the ascription of this quality, at least to any portable object. The Maori claims of territorial right, based upon the burial of the claimant’s after-birth and navel-string, are instances of the subtle bond in native thought between ownership and a personal substance like that which was supposed to penetrate the trees whose existence was appealed to as evidence. True, these claims could only be made by members of a settled community, or of one whose limits of wandering were fixed. But the state of thought they disclose is thoroughly archaic, rooted in a still ruder past.

Not only, however, is a man’s property credited with the mysterious sympathy which enables it to become his life-token. {53} It is not even necessary for him to appoint a life-token for himself, whether part of his property or not. Both in the stories and in actual life, and that very low down in savagery, a kinsman is represented as able to appoint a life-token, or at all events to divine, by the condition of a perfectly arbitrary object, what is the fate of an absent person. This power is with one exception limited to a kinsman. In the last resort it is possible to obtain tidings of a distant friend through a sorcerer. Here other beliefs are brought into play. Setting this exceptional case aside, we may class all the others together under the heads of Life-tokens—

1. By original corporeal connection with the absent person. 2. By virtue of his ownership. 3. By his appointment. 4. By corporeal connection with a kinsman of the absent person. 5. By virtue of a kinsman’s ownership. 6. By a kinsman’s appointment.

The appointment of a life-token not belonging to the person concerned, or his kinsman, was, we may assume, at first by a magical formula, as in the instance of the taboo set upon the banana by the twins in the Melanesian story. In this way a consecration to the speaker, an ἀνάθεμα, was performed, which would have the effect of ownership. In course of time, and of the changes wrought by advancing civilisation, the taboo would be forgotten; and a simple declaration of the intention to make the object his life-token would remain. The cases of appointment thus resolve themselves into ownership; and ownership, as we have seen, is nothing but an extension of the idea of {54} corporeal connection. The reason why the corporeal connection with a kinsman, or his ownership of the life-token, is equivalent to that of the absent hero, is because the kinsman, being of the same stock as the hero, is deemed to have an original corporeal bond with him like that of the tree in the märchen growing from the bones or scales of the fish from whose flesh the hero is sprung. They are both of the same substance, two parts of a greater whole. This will be brought out more clearly as we proceed. We are then face to face with the question why separated portions of the same substance should remain in such sympathy with one another that the condition of the one will betoken the condition of the other. To explain this we must enter upon a wider survey of savage customs and superstitions.

Chapter IX. Witchcraft: Sympathetic Magic

There are certain common folktale incidents we must first of all notice, though it is unnecessary to do so at any great length. One of them is found in a group of tales which I have elsewhere ventured to classify under the name of The Teacher and his Scholar. A Greek variant of these, from the island of Syra, referred to in an earlier chapter, runs thus: A disguised demon promises children to a childless king on condition of his repaying him with the eldest. The demon thereupon gives the king an apple, to be eaten, one half by himself and the other half by the queen. Three sons are born; and the eldest is, notwithstanding all precautions, carried off by the demon. After some time he finds means to escape from his master’s clutches, accompanied by a princess whom the demon has held captive. During his term of service he has learned how to transform himself at will; and on parting for a while from the princess he takes lodgings with an old woman. To make money, he changes into a mule, which his hostess offers for sale; but he charges her to retain the halter. Afterwards he changes into a bath-house, whereof she is to keep the key. By this precaution he is able to return to his own form. Finally he changes into a pomegranate, {56} which his father plucks; but the demon by a trick nearly succeeds in getting possession of it. It falls in pieces, and the seeds are scattered. The demon then takes the shape of a hen and chickens; whereupon the hero becomes a fox and kills the hen and chickens, but loses his eyes, for the hen has eaten two of the seeds. He afterwards recovers his sight and marries the princess.^56.1^

The incident, here found, of the Transformation-fight occurs all over Europe, and as far to the east as India. Its best-known variant is embodied in the story of the Second Calender in the Arabian Nights; but the Siddhi-Kür contains one far more ancient, if we have regard to the time when it was written down, though more modern in form than many of the most recently collected folktales. Welsh tradition, as we have seen, identifies the incident with the name of Taliessin. Ovid describes metamorphoses undergone by Metra, daughter of Erisichthon, in her flight from the successive masters to whom her ravenous father sold her in order to procure himself food.^56.2^ But all these tales ignore the point which is important for our present inquiry, namely, the divisibility of the hero’s person. It comes out, however, quite clearly in the story just quoted, {57} and is exhibited in a twofold manner. There is, first, the halter, or bridle, which must be retained by the vendor, else the horse, or mule, will not be able to escape and return to human form. Here the halter is probably the external soul. So long as it is free its owner cannot be held within the purchaser’s power. Secondly, there is the pomegranate, which falls into a thousand pieces. In northern and western Europe, where the pomegranate grows not, a heap of grain takes its place.^57.1^ In Cashmere it becomes a rose. In the Turkish romance of The Forty Vezirs, the rose, in falling, changes to millet.^57.2^ The pomegranate bursts, and its seeds are scattered; the petals of the rose drop in a shower; the grains of corn or millet are shed abroad. But the hero is still in existence although divided thus. He cannot be destroyed until every seed, every petal, every grain has been devoured. So long as a single seed, petal, or grain escapes he can be restored to his pristine form. In the same way in a North American tale the hero in the shape of an eagle is killed, and repeatedly restored from a single feather. The power of self-reconstitution from a fragment is frequently attributed to wizards, not merely in tales but in living superstitions, and in both tales and superstitions affords a reason for the entire destruction of a magical foe.^57.3^ For this cause, too, the hero of the Greek story kills the hen and all the chickens into which the demon transforms himself—a third example in the same tale of personal divisibility.

The Helpful Beasts, to whom so many adventurers are indebted in our Nursery Tales, furnish another incident illustrative of the same faculty. In the Transformation-fight it is not necessary to manifest the continued sympathy of the divided personality; but it is different when a Helpful Beast offers one of its own limbs as the summons for aid. Thus an ant will give one of its legs, a bird will give a feather, or a lion one of its hairs, to be burnt, or fumigated, or simply rubbed. On this being done the owner forthwith appears and performs the necessary services.^58.1^ In a Tirolese tale the power is extended to a human being. A merchant’s daughter having fallen in love with a golden-haired prince, is advised by a great sorceress to procure three hairs from his head and beard, lay them in a jar with warm ashes, and boil the contents a little. The prince would then change into a dove, and fly hurriedly through the window into her room, where she must have a basin of water ready for him. In this he would dip himself and return to his proper form. The spell is successful; but we need not follow the lady’s further fortunes.^58.2^

Nor is the incident restricted to märchen. A Pomeranian saga records that a supernatural boar which haunted a pool in the forest of Kehrberg once fell into a wolf-pit and could not get out. A courageous man, hearing its grunting, approached; and the monster begged for help. When it was released it tore three bristles from its hide, and, giving them to its deliverer, said: “When thou art in deadly peril, rub these three bristles between thy fingers, and I will be with thee forthwith and save thee.” The man was the lord of a manor. He might have been an Irish landlord for harshness; and this promise made him worse than ever. Many of his serfs in desperation joined the robber-bands that infested the forest; and one day they caught him in an ambush. Nor would he have escaped the punishment of his misdeeds, had he not quickly rubbed the bristles between his fingers. The boar was at his side in an instant, and not one of his enemies escaped. I wish I could add that the adventure made him repent of his evil ways. His godless, frantic life continued to the end; and after death he naturally found no rest in the grave. Wherefore, ever since, in company with his friend the boar, he dwells in the pool and ranges the forest, to the no small terror and danger of wayfarers.^59.1^

A belief of the kind of which these are the remains is put to a practical use by the natives of Borneo, where it is said that the gift of a tiger’s tooth to a chief of the Kinah tribe will make him a friend for life. He will not dare to {60} fail the giver, or to turn false to him, for fear of being devoured by the beast.^60.1^ Here, and in the stories, the portion of the animal’s body given away is still linked by sympathy with the rest. What happens to it is felt by the bulk. The apparent severance is continuous and real union.

A third incident found in European folktales endows the heroine’s saliva with consciousness like her own. In a Danish tale, when Maiden Misery is about to elope with Prince Wanderer from the Kobold who has them both in his power, she heats the oven and puts two pieces of wood to stand, one on either side. Then she spits on each of them and whispers something to it. After she and the prince have started, the Kobold wakes up and inquires: “Is the oven hot, Maiden Misery?” “No, not yet,” answers one of the pieces of wood, but it sounded as if it were she who answered. The Kobold turned over and went to sleep again. After a while he awoke again and repeated the question. He got the same answer and went to sleep once more. When he called out again there was no reply. He got up and found the oven quite cold; but Maiden Misery and Prince Wanderer had vanished, and so had the Kobold’s wonderful steed.^60.2^ The same device for delaying pursuit appears in the Polish märchen of Prince Unexpected. There the maiden spits on one of the window-panes, and her spittle freezes. Then she {61} locks up the room and escapes with the prince. When they are well on their way King Bony awakes, and sends his servants for the prince. The spittle answers in his voice: “Anon.” They are thus put off twice before the door is broken open, and the spittle on the window splits with laughter at the disappointed messengers.^61.1^ In another story from Poland, a brother desires to wed his sister, and makes her various presents of robes, and a magical car. She shuts herself in her room, puts on the dresses, and mounts the car. She spits on the ground and commands the saliva to answer with the voice of her maid, whom she has secretly sent away. The earth then opens at her request and swallows her up. When the brother sends to know if she be ready, the saliva replies: “She has just drawn one stocking on.” The next time it answers: “She has just put her dress on: she will be quite ready directly.” When the impatient brother himself comes, the spittle taunts him in the most intelligent way:—

“Thy sister is far beneath; This message did she bequeath: Earth, open wide! When a sister is bride To her brother, ’tis sin.”^61.2^

In a story from Hesse, Hänsel and Grethel are in a witch’s power. They run away, but before going Grethel spits in front of the hearth. So when the sleepy witch cries out to ask whether the water will soon be hot, to cook Hänsel in, the saliva replies: “I am just fetching it”; and to subsequent inquiries: “It’s boiling now,” {62} and “I am just bringing it.” At last the spittle is dried up; and, receiving no further answer, the witch gets out of bed, discovers the real state of the case, and follows the children.^62.1^ Among the Kaffirs, an equivalent incident represents the misleading agent as tufts of hair. The hero, rescuing his sister and her child from a band of cannibals, directed her to pluck the hair from her head and scatter it about in different directions. When the cannibals, coming to look for her, called out, the tufts of hair answered; and the fugitives gained time while the seekers were thus confused. Another Kaffir tale represents a single feather of a certain magical bird as endowed with the entire power of the bird after the latter has been swallowed by the heroine.^62.2^ The Cegihas of North America, a branch of the Sioux, have a legend of a rabbit who overcame the black bears. He visited their lodge; and at night on departing he left his fœces all round the door, with instructions to give the scalp-yell as soon as it was day. The fœces accordingly yelled as if a large number of persons were attacking the lodge. The black bear rushed out and was killed by the rabbit.^62.3^

In this case, too, we are fortunate in being able to produce evidence that the belief on which the tale is grounded is still living. When a Hungarian Gipsy is pursued as a thief, he scratches his left hand as he runs, and smearing the spurting blood on any convenient object, {63} exclaims: “Speak for me!” In this way he hopes to escape; and the more scars a Gipsy has upon his left hand from this cause the more he is honoured for his dexterity in stealing and evading pursuit.^63.1^

In Grimm’s tale of The Goose-girl, which belongs to the cycle of The Substituted Bride, the maiden’s mother, on parting with her, cuts her own finger, and, letting three drops of blood fall upon a handkerchief, hands it to her daughter as a protection. The drops of blood speak to her from time to time on the way, though it must be owned their observations are not very helpful. When she loses them she becomes powerless, and her waiting-maid ousts her from her place as the bride.^63.2^ It is impossible to misapprehend the meaning of the three drops of blood. So long as the maiden keeps them she retains her mother’s presence and protection, of which they are more than a symbol.

The folktales I have just cited present in an ascending series, first, the divisibility of a person, secondly, the continued sympathy of the severed portions with the bulk, and thirdly, the endowment of each of the severed portions with speech and power—in other words, with consciousness and reason. The identification of the severed portions with the whole is thus complete in the stories. Nor are we without illustrations in practical superstition of this belief. The two examples already given afford a striking exhibition of the truth which I may perhaps be pardoned for insisting on with wearisome iteration, that, namely, of the dependence of folktales on custom and belief. It is, however, in the practices of witchcraft that we find the severed portions of a person most frequently and completely {64} identified with the whole. To some of these practices we will accordingly now turn our attention.

Witchcraft is usually wrought in one or more of three ways—by incantations or curses, by symbolic actions, or (and it is this only with which we are now concerned) by acts done upon objects identified with the person intended to be affected. Among these objects severed portions of his body take the first rank.

In the old trials for witchcraft in this country we have full accounts of the proceedings then regarded as effectual in causing injury by witches. It is quite likely that some at least of the means mentioned in the confessions of the accused were at times actually adopted. But whether actually adopted or not, they are equally valuable for our present purpose, since their efficacy was undoubted. On the 11th March, 1618-9, two women named Margaret and Philippa Flower were burnt alive at Lincoln for sorcery. They had been, with Joan Flower, their mother, confidential servants of the Earl and Countess of Rutland, at Belvoir Castle. If we might credit their own confession under torture, they had become dissatisfied with their employers, and had employed the Black Art in order to gratify their spite. The mother had a familiar spirit in the form of a cat, named Rutterkin. Their procedure was to procure a lock of the hair of a member of the Earl’s family, or to steal one of his gloves. The hair they burnt; the glove was thrown by Joan Flower into boiling water, then repeatedly pricked with a knife, and afterwards rubbed on the cat. These performances were accompanied with words, bidding Rutterkin go and do some hurt to the owner of the glove. Finally, the glove was burnt, and its owner fell sick and died. Joan Flower vehemently protested her innocence, {65} and asked for bread. Taking a piece, the unfortunate woman wished that if she were guilty it might choke her. Immediately, so says the tale, she fell stark dead. Other women were associated in the accusation, and their confessions confirmed those of the sisters Margaret and Philippa.^65.1^

The results of the practices of which these poor girls were convicted were terrible enough to them, if not to their supposed victim. Yet if their depositions exhausted their knowledge of the modes of witchcraft they cannot have penetrated far into its mysteries. A jealous Italian woman or a mischievous Gipsy, a North American Indian or an Australian savage, could have given them points.

A Sienese or Tuscan maiden, for example, deserted by her lover, will take some of his hair and put it into a toad’s mouth, or round a toad’s legs. The animal is then imprisoned in a covered pot, or else it is placed under a potsherd and bound to a tree. While the creature lives in this torment, the faithless lover will pine away; and when it dies, he will die also.^65.2^ Wherefore a lock of hair is the most precious gift, the mark of the highest confidence, a lover or friend can bestow. In the province of Lucca, {66} indeed, it is almost always refused; for even an imprecation uttered over it would render bald the head whereon it had grown; and the women, when they comb their hair, never throw the combings out of window, lest they be bewitched by some one passing by.^66.1^ Nor is less care taken elsewhere in Italy—not to say throughout Europe—to burn the combings of the hair oneself or to put them in a place of safety. Dr. Pitrè remembers a woman at Palermo, who, when she was lying sick, having seen a man pick up one of her hairs—as she thought, with malicious intent—jumped out of bed and followed him in her shift, weeping and begging him to give it back to her and not to do her any harm.^66.2^ In Tuscany the hair is occasionally boiled with a peppercorn and some other substance, the operator repeating an incantation consigning the foe to death and the society of witches. In Friuli the hair and blood of the victim are boiled with nails, needles, knives and other pieces of iron.^66.3^ Even in some parts of England a girl forsaken by her lover is advised to get a lock of his hair and boil it. Whilst it is simmering in the pot he will have no rest.^66.4^ In Belgium, as also about Mentone, it is {67} possible to bewitch an enemy by putting one of his hairs into an egg, and leaving it there to rot; so that one must burn any hairs that fall out or are cut off, or at least spit or blow upon them as a protection against witchcraft before throwing them away.^67.1^ In certain parts of Germany and Transylvania the clippings of the hair or nails, as well as broken pieces of the teeth, are buried beneath the elder tree which grows in the courtyard, or are burnt, or carefully hidden, for fear of witches.^67.2^ In Poland it is thought possible to blind an enemy by threading one of his hairs in a needle which has sewed three shrouds, and then passing it through a toad’s eyes, and letting the poor brute go.^67.3^ In Livonia, if you desire to bewitch a girl to the extent of preventing her marriage, all that need be done is to get hold of one of the pins with which her shift is fastened over her breast, wind round it three hairs torn by the roots from her head, and stick the pin in a corner in a northerly direction, or on the first paling of the house, saying: “As long as this sticks here the girl shall have no suitor.”^67.4^ In Hungary and Transylvania continual strife between a married pair can be secured by laying a hair from each of their heads on the head of a corpse. They will have no peace until {68} the hairs have decayed away.^68.1^ On the other hand, if a Magyar suspect another of an intention to injure him secretly, he will possess himself of some hairs belonging to the suspected person, and hang them in the chimney until they disappear in the smoke: the enemy will then have abandoned his evil purpose.^68.2^ So likewise among the Pennsylvanian Germans a witch can be disabled by securing a hair of her head, wrapping it in a piece of paper, and firing a silver bullet into it.^68.3^

We pay European peoples the compliment of calling them civilised: among savages the same methods are adopted. It was the belief of the Clal-lum, a tribe of British Columbia, that if they could procure the hair of an enemy and confine it with a frog in a hole, the head whence it came would suffer the torments of the frog.^68.4^ And a lock of hair in the hands of certain women of the Chilcotin tribe would give them power over the person from whose head the lock was severed.^68.5^ Any part of the body answers the same purpose among the Greenlanders.^68.6^ At the opposite extremity of the American continent the Patagonians burn the hairs brushed out from their heads, and all the parings of their nails, for they believe that spells may be wrought upon them by any one who can obtain a {69} piece of either.^69.1^ In Central Brazil the Bakaïrí of one village fear the medicine-men of another, holding that if they can get any portion of their hair or blood, they will put it into a poison-calabash and so cause illness to the original owner.^69.2^ What the inhabitants of the isle of Chiloe fear is that a foe will fasten a lock in the seaweed where the tide flows: hence they often keep their hair very short.^69.3^ In the South Sea Islands it was necessary to the success of any sorcery to secure something connected with the body of the victim, such as the parings of his nails, a lock of his hair, saliva or other secretions, or else a portion of his food. Accordingly, a spittoon was always carried by the confidential servant of a chief of the Sandwich Islands to receive his expectorations, which were carefully buried every morning. And the Tahitians used to burn or bury the hair they cut off; and every individual among them had his distinct basket for food.^69.4^ Among the Maoris “the usual way of obtaining power over another was to obtain (European fashion) some of the nail-parings, hair, etc., anything of a personal nature to act as a medium between the bewitched person and the demon. Spells would be muttered over these relics, then they were buried, and as they decayed the victim perished.”^69.5^ In the Banks’ Islands “there are three principal kinds of charms by which evil was believed to be inflicted through the power of ghosts.” One of these called garata operated through fragments of food, bits of hair or nail, “or anything closely connected {70} with the person to be injured. For this reason great care was used to hide or safely dispose of all such things.”^70.1^ Similar beliefs and practices obtain in the New Hebrides and the New Marquesas.^70.2^ At Matuku in Fiji, the priest of the god Tokalau, the wind, “promises the destruction of any hated person in four days, if those who wish his death bring a portion of his hair, dress or food which he has left.” Happily the doom can be averted by bathing before the fourth day. Most natives take the precaution of hiding the hair they cut off in the thatch of their own huts.^70.3^ Some of the Papuan inhabitants of Timor-laut were delighted to make use of Mr. Forbes’ scissors to cut their hair; but they declined to allow the traveller to retain any specimens, for they said they would die; and they gathered up every scrap they could find.^70.4^ Among the Australian aborigines of Western Victoria an unsuccessful lover who can get a lock of the lady’s hair covers it with fat and red clay and carries it about with him for a year. The knowledge of this so depresses her that she pines away and often actually dies. When a husband has, or imagines, a grievance against his wife he cuts a lock of her hair while she sleeps, and tying it to the bone hook of his spear-thrower he covers it with a coating of gum. Then he goes away to a neighbouring tribe and stays with them. At the first great meeting of the tribes he gives the spear-thrower to a friend, who sticks it upright before the camp-fire every night, and when it falls over, the husband considers it a sign that his wife is dead. This process, and the taunts to which the {71} deserted wife is subjected, seldom fail to bring her to a sense of her duty of going to seek her husband, apologising for her conduct and bringing him home. The natives are very careful to burn their superfluous hair; and locks are only exchanged by friends as a mark of affection. If a lock thus obtained be lost it is a very serious matter. The loser of the lock will die; and so strong is the belief, that he sometimes does die, unless the person who holds the lock of his hair given in exchange be willing to return it, and so undo the exchange.^71.1^ Other tribes have the like superstitions. Mr. Howitt records it as a general practice among the natives of the south-east of Australia, and particularly of the Wotjobaluk tribe, to procure a piece of the victim’s hair, “some of his fæces, a bone picked by him and dropped, a shred of his opossum rug, or at the present time of his clothes,” for the purpose of injuring him. “If nothing else can be got, he may be watched until he is seen to spit, when his saliva is carefully picked up with a piece of wood and made use of for his destruction.” And the writer, a keen observer, adds: “There is evidently a belief that doing an act to something which is part of a person, or which even only belongs to him, is in fact doing it to him. This is very clearly brought out by the remark of one of the Wirajuri, who said to me: ‘You see, when a black-fellow doctor gets hold of something belonging to a man and roasts it with things, and sings over it, the fire catches hold of the smell of the man, and that settles the poor fellow.’ ” Indeed, all over Australia sorcery by means of hair is practised, or at least feared; and the same is asserted of the now exterminated Tasmanians.^71.2^ In Sumatra {72} Mr. Forbes once noted a man carefully burying the scraps after paring his finger-nails.^72.1^ The approved method of killing a foe at Amboyna is to take some of his hair or clothing, his quid of betel chewed and ejected, or the measure of his footprint, and put it into three bamboo cylinders, one of which is laid beneath a coffin, another buried under the steps of the house, and the third flung into the sea. To injure him it is apparently sufficient to put some of his hair into a coffin, or a grave, or to bind it to the tail of a living fish and return the creature to the water, or to stuff it into a cranny in a house or boat.^72.2^ In the Panjáb some wizards are reputed to have the power of killing a woman by cutting off a lock of her hair, and afterwards bringing her to life again even though she had been buried.^72.3^ And in Sindh no woman will give a lock of her hair, even to her husband, for fear of the power he would thus obtain.^72.4^ Arab women are very careful to bury the parings of their nails for fear of witchcraft.^72.5^ The Rautiás, a caste of Chota Nagpur in Bengal, partly Aryan and partly Dravidian, on the other hand, while convinced that witches can act upon their victims through bits of cut hair or nails, are guilty of the suicidal conduct of neglecting to preserve or destroy such articles.^72.6^ They seem, however, exceptional in this respect among races in the lower culture. On the Slave Coast of Africa, “anything that has belonged {73} to a man, especially anything that has formed part of, or has come out of, his body, such as hair-clippings, nail-parings, saliva, or the fæces, can be used” to his detriment. “Hence it is usual for pieces of hair and nails to be carefully buried or burned, in order that they may not fall into the hands of sorcerers”; and the saliva of a chief is gathered up and hidden or buried.^73.1^ The Makololo used to burn or bury their hair, lest, in the hands of a witch, it should be used as a charm to afflict the owner with headache.^73.2^ Among the Basuto hairs or nail-parings of the person aimed at, or drops of his blood which he had not taken the precaution of effacing with his foot where they fell, were used by sorcerers in the manufacture of their charms. And without prolonging the list it may safely be said that this superstition is rife all over the continent.^73.3^ Naturally the Negro has carried it to America. A lady writing half a century ago relates an incident which happened on the island of Antigua. A Negro boy had been drowned; and one of his kinswomen contrived to cut off some hair from the head of an acquaintance with whom she had a quarrel. This hair she placed in the dead boy’s hand just before his coffin was screwed down, at the same time pronouncing the word “Remember.” The ghastly result was thus described by the Negro who told the tale: “De pic’nee jumby trouble he [namely, the lady who had lost her hair] so dat he no know war for do, till at last he go out of he head, an’ he neber been no good since.”^73.4^ Among the Negroes of the {74} United States the recipe for driving an enemy mad is to get one of his hairs and slip it inside the bark of a tree. When the bark grows over it his intellect is gone for ever. But in fact everything “that pertains to the body, such as nails, teeth, hair, saliva, tears, perspiration, dandruff, scabs of sores even, and garments worn next the person,” is employed in charms. A powerful conjurer told Miss Owen: “I could save or ruin you if I could get hold of so much as one eye-winker or the peeling of one freckle.”^74.1^

Prominent in the magical superstitions of some nations is blood. All Europe holds that the pact with the devil must be signed with one’s own blood. It is by handing over a portion of his blood that the unhappy mortal puts himself in the power of the Father of Evil. Without this gage his covenant would be voidable. A popular allegation against the Freemasons in some places is that the candidate for initiation is required to paint his own figure on the wall of the lodge with blood taken from his finger. If thereafter he betray the secrets he has sworn to keep, he can be slain by stabbing the portrait thus made.^74.2^ A German saying advises that blood let out of a vein should always be thrown into running water.^74.3^ There, of course, it will always be free, it will speedily be lost, and no witchcraft can be wrought upon it. The Transylvanian Saxons declare that if any blood, saliva, or suchlike of a living person be put into a coffin with the dead, the former will slowly languish and die.^74.4^ The blood or saliva, corrupting and decaying with the corpse, reacts upon the living body {75} whence it has been derived. Similar is a Magyar prescription for causing barrenness in a woman, namely, by rubbing a dead man’s organ with her menses. In Hungary, too, if you wish to render a bridegroom indifferent to his bride, take some of his blood, or saliva, and with it smear the soles of the bride’s shoes before the wedding, or write his name in his blood on a pigeon’s egg and contrive that she shall tread unawares upon it. In either of these ways she will tread out her husband’s love.^75.1^ In Ireland, when a child is vaccinated, the medical man is not allowed to take lymph from its arm without giving some present, however trifling, in return; and Dr. C. R. Browne records that when he was vaccinated in county Tipperary, his arm, as the nurse reported, was kept inflamed because the doctor did not put silver in his hand when taking the lymph.^75.2^ The ground of the superstition appears to be the belief in witchcraft. Payment is always held to neutralise a witch’s power over a person through something received from him, probably because what she gives in exchange would confer a like power over her, and hence becomes a hostage for her good faith.^75.3^

When a shaman among the Cherokees wishes to destroy a man, he hides, and follows his victim about until the latter spits upon the ground. Then he collects on the end of a stick a little of the dust moistened with the saliva. “The possession of the man’s spittle gives him power over the life of the man himself.” He puts it into a tube consisting of a joint of the wild parsnip, “a poisonous plant {76} of considerable importance in life-conjuring ceremonies,” together with seven earthworms beaten into a paste, and some splinters from a tree struck by lightning. With the tube thus prepared he goes to a tree which has been lightning-struck. At its base he digs a hole, in the bottom of which he lays a large yellow stone slab. Upon this he places the tube and seven yellow pebbles. Then, filling up the hole with earth, he builds a fire over it. The fire, we are told, is for the purpose of destroying all trace of his work; but it may well be done with another object. The yellow stones are said to represent trouble, and to be substitutes for black stones, not so easily found, which represent death. The shaman and his employer fast until after the ceremony. The victim is expected to feel the effects at once: “his soul begins to shrivel up and dwindle, and within seven days he is dead.”^76.1^ A traveller in Oregon relates how some Kwakiutl who were exasperated against him took up his saliva when he spat, intending, as they subsequently told him, to give it to the medicine-man, who would charm his life away.^76.2^ The custom, everywhere practised, of obliterating all trace of the saliva after spitting, doubtless originated in the desire to prevent such use of it.^76.3^

Sweat has been mentioned as one of the means of witchcraft among the American Negroes. The Melanesians hold a leaf wherewith a man has wiped the perspiration from his face an effective instrument for doing him mischief.^76.4^ The {77} fouler excreta are quite as potent; and this belief has been one of the most beneficial of superstitions. To it is due the extreme cleanliness in the disposal of fæcal matter which is almost universally a characteristic of savages. I shall content myself with throwing into a footnote references to a few passages of various authorities bearing on this means of witchcraft.^77.1^

Sorcery may be wrought upon a foe through any of his teeth which have been extracted. Wherefore the aborigines of Australia, among whom the loss of a front tooth is the sign of admission to the privileges of manhood, are very careful of the teeth which are knocked out. About the river Darling in New South Wales, “the youth’s companions take the tooth when it is extracted, and return it to him later with a present of weapons, rugs, nets, and suchlike. The youth places the tooth under the bark of a tree, near a creek, water-hole, or river: if the bark grows over it, or it falls into the water, all is well; but should it be exposed, and the ants run over it, it is believed that the youth will suffer from a disease in the mouth.”^77.2^ Of other tribes in south-eastern Australia it is recorded that the extracted tooth is taken care of by one of the old men. It {78} is passed from one head-man to another, until it has made the complete circuit of the community. It then returns to the youth’s father, and finally to himself. He carries it always about with him; but it must on no account be placed in his bag of magical substances, else great danger will accrue to him.^78.1^ In England and elsewhere children are commonly told to burn their milk-teeth when taken out. In Belgium about Liége the reason assigned is to obtain a tooth of gold. In fact, the fear is that a witch may find it if thrown away, and injure the child by its means, or that a dog, a cat or a wolf may swallow it, in which event the new tooth growing in its place will be that of the animal.^78.2^ This particular form of the superstition is also found in Sussex and Suffolk, and probably in other parts of England.^78.3^

Earth from a man’s footprints, on account of its close contact with the person—and closer still it must have been before mankind was shod—has acquired the virtues of a portion of his body. Out of a number of illustrations of its use in witchcraft I select the following from all quarters of the globe. Widely spread in Germany is the belief that if a sod whereon a man has trodden—all the better, if with naked foot—be taken up and dried behind the hearth or oven he will parch up with it and languish, or his foot will be withered. He will be lamed, or even killed, by sticking his footprint with nails—coffin-nails are the best—or broken glass. Burchard of Worms in the Middle Ages forbade the former practice; in still earlier times and another country Pythagoras had forbidden the latter.^78.4^ They are still, {79} however, particularly recommended in various parts of Germany and adjacent lands for punishing a thief, though it is equally effectual to put tinder in his footprint, for he will thus be burnt, or to fill a pouch with some of the earth he has trodden and beat it twice a day with a stick until fire (!) come out of it: he will feel the blows and die without fail if he bring not back the stolen goods. According to Bezzenberger a Lithuanian, who finds a thief’s footmark, takes it to the graveyard and selects a grave, wherefrom he draws out the cross, thrusts the earth of the footprint into the hole and rams down the cross upon it again. The thief then falls ill, and thus is revealed.^79.1^ In Italy and Russia one may be bewitched by similar means to those used in Germany.^79.2^ In Hungary, when a woman has a child of unwedded love and desires to bind its father’s affections to it, she digs up one of his footprints, drops {80} some of her own milk into it and carefully puts it back, reversing its position toe to heel.^80.1^

The use of the footprint survives in the British Islands, I think, solely as a means of defence against witches. A correspondent of Mr. Train, the historian of the Isle of Man, writing about half a century ago, relates a story in which a colt was taken ill and there was reason to fear the Evil Eye. A friend of the owner gathered the dust of the road out of the footsteps of the suspected person, and rubbed the animal with it. Thereupon it once more partook of food and rapidly recovered.^80.2^ Quite recently a parallel case has been reported, the beast bewitched having been a calf.^80.3^ Mr. Hollingsworth, in his History of Stowmarket, published in 1844, says of a reputed witch that, if any one followed her as she walked, and drove a nail or a knife well into the ground through one of her footprints, she was deprived of power to move another step until it was extracted.^80.4^ In Grafton County, New Hampshire, in the year 1852, a woman was seen to stick a knitting-needle in the footmarks of another who was regarded as a witch, under the belief that the steel had power to fasten a witch in her tracks, so that she could not move. On this occasion the device was ineffectual. There is always a reason for want of success in such performances. The performer was satisfied that she had broken the needle’s power by speaking. Elsewhere in New England and in Canada an awl is prescribed for the purpose.^80.5^ Further south, the mixed white population of the Alleghanies recommend a nail from the coffin wherein a corpse has {81} decayed to be driven with three blows into a thief’s track; it will produce the same effect as if it entered the robber’s foot. But you are cautioned to tie a string round the nail’s head, so that it can be drawn out when requisite; else the man will die.^81.1^

Savages, on the other hand, are more frequently reported as using the footmark as a means of offence. The Karens of Burmah use the earth of a man’s footprints for the purpose of making a magical image of him.^81.2^ The Pakoos strike an enemy’s footsteps with certain stones, with the intention of causing his death.^81.3^ On the Slave Coast of Africa a magical powder thrown on a foe’s track renders him mad.^81.4^ The Kurnai and other Australian aborigines bury sharp fragments of quartz, glass, bone or charcoal in the footmarks or in the place where the victim has lain, under the belief that the substances will thus be caused to enter his body.^81.5^ In the west of Victoria—probably elsewhere—the black-fellow possessed of supernatural powers, who in hot weather comes upon the spoor of a kangaroo, follows it up, putting live embers on it. He will follow it thus for two days, unless he track it to a water-hole and spear it sooner.^81.6^ This superstition, to which a special name is given, and of which Mr. Dawson, a most competent inquirer, failed to get any explanation, is analogous to the practice of the North American Indians. A compound, called “hunter’s medicine,” the preparation {82} whereof is taught to the neophyte in the initiation ceremony of the Ojibways, is dropped on the track of the animal pursued, to compel it to halt wherever it may be at that moment.^82.1^ The Zuñi hunter follows the trail until he finds a place where the creature has lain down. He then deposits with certain offerings a spider-knot, tied of set purpose awkwardly, of four strands of yucca-leaves on the spot over which he supposes the victim’s heart to have rested or passed. Immediately in front of it he sticks a forked twig of cedar obliquely into the ground, leaning in the direction opposite to that taken by the animal. Other ceremonies follow, meant to have the effect of impeding and overcoming the prey.^82.2^

With the foregoing may be compared some ceremonies practised in Europe, the design of which, though not hostile, is to attach the animal to one place and prevent it from straying. A German huntsman, for example, sticks a coffin-nail into the trail of the game he desires to retain in his preserve.^82.3^ When a calf is born, a Transylvanian Saxon farmer will take a peg of birch and drive it over the head into the spot on which the calf has fallen.^82.4^ So an ancient English charm for the recovery of stolen cattle directed three candles to be lighted and the wax dripped thrice into the hoof-track, and the following invocation to be sung: “Peter, Paul, Patrick, Philip, Mary, Bridget, Felicitas; in the name of God and the Church: he who seeketh findeth.”^82.5^ It seems to have required a perfect {83} army of saints to stop one thief; but peradventure some of them were talking, or in a journey, or sleeping, and could not attend to the business.

Among the various instruments of witchcraft I have mentioned the refuse of food. In the South Sea Islands this has been noted over and over again by missionaries and travellers. In New Britain a native, seized with fever, complained to Mr. Powell that one of his enemies had bewitched him by obtaining the skins of some bananas he had eaten, “making magic” over them and then burning them. For fear of this, Mr. Powell explains, the natives are very careful to burn or hide the refuse of anything they have been eating.^83.1^ In the New Hebrides a bit of a certain stone, taken with a prayer, is pounded up with a fragment of food of the person to whom mischief is to be wrought; or the refuse of his food, such as a banana-skin or a piece of sugar-cane he has chewed, is simply burnt. An amphibious sea-snake called mae is credited with supernatural power. It will do harm to men by taking away morsels of their food into a sacred place, whereupon their lips will swell and their bodies break out with ulcers.^83.2^ In one of the Solomon Islands there is a sacred pool haunted by a Tindalo, or disembodied spirit, much resorted to for a similar purpose by persons who know the place and the spirit. If the scraps of food thrown into the pool are quickly devoured by a fish or a snake the thrower’s object is accomplished: the man whose food has been pilfered for the purpose will die. If otherwise, the Tindalo is unwilling {84} to do the mischief desired of him.^84.1^ Without pausing to enumerate any other cases it may be said in general terms that the superstition which is the subject of this paragraph is found everywhere in Australasia, Polynesia and Melanesia.^84.2^

Nor is it confined to the Southern Ocean. Among the Ainu double fruits are liable to be the means of bewitching any one who is bold enough to eat of them, unless he eat both.^84.3^ In Europe, the Magyars carefully throw into the fire the remains of food partaken of at the Christmas feast; else the witches will make all sorts of evil charms of them. In many places they are kneaded together into a sort of paste in human form, and, with the words: “Eat fair ladies!” put into the oven, where they are burnt up in the next baking. The bones are frequently thrown into the open fire; and from their colour, and the way they crack and split in the heat, prognostications of future fortunes are drawn. Sometimes the bride buries close to the house the bread-crumbs, bones and other relics of her wedding-feast, in order “to strengthen the building.”^84.4^ In both cases the anxiety to secure the food from harm, once extended to food in general, seems to have become restricted to special occasions. The reason alleged in the case of a wedding is probably no more the real reason than that stated in the {85} Mark of Brandenburg for not giving away a slice of bread which has been bitten, lest, we are told, one quarrel with the recipient.^85.1^ People in Posen are counselled not to eat in the presence of a stranger for fear of being bewitched through the remains of their food, nor to take drink from a strange hand without saying as a counterspell: “God bless it!”^85.2^ About Chemnitz one is advised on rising from a meal to leave no bread behind, lest somebody throw it over the gallows, in which event hanging would be the doom awaiting the person who had left it. In the neighbourhood of Ansbach he would get off more lightly, since only toothache is threatened.^85.3^ In Belgium, things like milk or bread are never given to any one capable of bewitching the giver, save in exchange for a centime or some other trifle: the sale appears to destroy the evil power, a belief we have already found elsewhere. Children are also forbidden to receive from a woman whom they do not know cakes or sweetmeats, or if they do they must throw them over their shoulders, as in fairy tales the drink presented by supernatural beings is poured away by mortals; and a similar caution is enjoined in Italy.^85.4^

Before dismissing the dangers which may arise from the remains of food being tampered with, it may be well to mention a curious ordeal in use among the Tunguses of Siberia. A fire is made and a scaffold erected near the hut of the accused. A dog’s throat is then cut and the {86} blood received in a vessel. The body is put on the wood of the fire, but in such a position that it does not burn. The accused passes over the fire, and drinks two mouthfuls of the blood, the rest whereof is thrown into the fire; and the body of the dog is placed on the scaffold. Then the accused says: “As the dog’s blood burns in the fire, so may what I have drunk burn in my body; and as the dog put on the scaffold will be consumed, so may I be consumed at the same time if I be guilty.”^86.1^ The effect intended to be produced on a guilty man is obviously the operation of the sympathy between the blood united with his body by drinking and the remainder of the blood and the carcase of the dog as they are consumed, the one in the fire, and the other by putrefaction or birds of carrion.

Clothes, from their intimate association with the person, have naturally attained a prominent place among the instruments of witchcraft. Among the Transylvanian Saxons, to put on an article of clothing belonging to another is to put on his luck, provided it be done undesignedly.^86.2^ The German population of Pennsylvania cherishes the belief that witches “acquire influence over any one by becoming possessed of anything belonging to the intended victim, such as a hair, a piece of apparel, or a pin. The influence acquired by the witch is greater if such an article be voluntarily or unconsciously handed to her by the person asked for it.”^86.3^ For a similar reason, the Votjaks hesitate even to sell any article of clothing they have worn.^86.4^ A pin from the maiden’s dress, it will be remembered, was a necessary {87} part of the Livonian charm cited a few pages back; one of the victim’s gloves appears in the confessions of the unfortunate Margaret and Philippa Flower; and a parallel practice has been recently recorded in Sicily.^87.1^ At Mentone the witch with a piece of her victim’s garment can render him sick.^87.2^ An elaborate Tuscan charm given by Mr. Leland prescribes the use of the hairs of the victim, “or else the stockings, and those not clean, for there must be in them his or her perspiration.”^87.3^ As elsewhere, among the Greco-Walachian population of Macedonia a newly born babe and its mother are held to be specially subject to injury by supernatural beings. To prevent this their clothes must not remain out of doors all night; and the water in which they or the clothes have been washed must be poured through pipes into the depths of the ground.^87.4^ In Germany, in Spain, in Asia Minor and in many other places a portion of the witch’s dress is burnt to destroy her spells and restore the object of her conjurations to health.^87.5^ A Gipsy prescription to recover a stolen horse is to bury the harness which may be left, to kindle a fire over the spot and sing {88} an imprecation on the thief and an invocation to the steed to return safe and sound.^88.1^ Our Anglo-Saxon forefathers thought it enough to sing over the foot-shackles or the bridle the powerful invocation I mentioned just now.

The Segoo conjurer on the Upper Niger uses a piece of cloth belonging to the victim, or a little dirt that has been touched by his foot. These he sticks by means of hen’s blood to a fetish charm prepared, according to price, to kill or only to produce various degrees of damage to his client’s foe.^88.2^ In a Hottentot story a fugitive throws off his mantle, and it immediately runs in another direction so as to deceive and baffle his pursuers.^88.3^ Here the garment is represented as endowed with life and sympathy for its owner; but it does not appear that when it was caught the pursuers thought it worth while to destroy it with intent to slay the owner. As already mentioned, a piece of an Australian native’s opossum rug, or any other portion of his scanty dress, is sufficient to enable an enemy to bewitch him.^88.4^ The Maories and the Fiji islanders are equally superstitious. It is related of the latter that if they have reason to suspect others of plotting against them, they not only avoid eating in their presence, or leaving any fragments of their food behind, but they also dispose their clothing so that no part of it can be removed.^88.5^ On the island of Tanna, in the New Hebrides, a yolnuruk, or wizard, can bewitch any one by means of a portion of his food, the {89} unused part of a stick of tobacco, his belt or garment, a stick he has had in his hand, the scrapings of a stone on which he has sat, or in fact anything that has once touched his body.^89.1^ To a Tonga islander it was fatal to hide a portion of his clothing in the family tomb of one of his relations of higher rank than himself.^89.2^

Everywhere, indeed, it is dangerous to leave an article of a living person’s dress in the possession of the dead. An old woman who went to pray in the old church, now ruined, of Saint Martin at Bonn was surprised by finding herself in a congregation of the departed. A spectral Mass was, in fact, being celebrated by spectral priests, and she was the only living being in the assembly. Her dead husband was there; and, warned by him, she fled. But the door, in swinging-to as she passed out, caught her cloak; and she had to leave it behind. She sickened and died; and “the neighbours said it must be because a piece of her clothes had remained in the possession of the dead.”^89.3^ In Germany and Denmark no portion of a survivor’s clothing must on any account be put upon a corpse, else the owner will languish away as it moulders in the grave; and the superstition has been carried by Saxon settlers into the Land beyond the Forest.^89.4^ Among the Poles, to lay a maiden’s garland on the head of a dead body covers the maiden herself with scabs; and the Masurs declare that if a bystander at an open grave drop anything in, or if any article {90} belonging to a living person be laid in it, he will die soon.^90.1^ Conversely the greatest caution is necessary in taking anything belonging to the dead. Legends are common in Northern and Central Europe of persons who have wittingly or unwittingly stolen shrouds. The thief always comes to a bad end, or at least escapes only by the skin of his teeth. These catastrophes are attributed to ghostly action; but a similar power is ascribed to mere sympathy. To appropriate pieces of a coffin, or flowers from a grave, to say nothing of bones or other parts of a corpse, is, among the Saxons of the Seven Cities, to appropriate ill-luck for the rest of one’s life. To hang rags from the clothing of a dead man upon a vine is to render it barren. Even in taking his gear in the most legitimate manner, pious formulæ and ceremonies must be used; and then it will not last you long. In former times it was charitably given to the poor.^90.2^ To stick a nail from a coffin in a living man’s shoe is, in Thuringia, to cause his death.^90.3^ In the New World the Caribs held that they could injure an enemy by wrapping up some trifling object belonging to, or habitually used by, him with the bones of one of their deceased friends, which were preserved for that and other magical purposes.^90.4^ The Aleutian Eskimo think that the tools and garments of the dead remain in sympathy with him; “hence their touch chills, and the sight of them inspires sadness.”^90.5^

Probably it is only a different interpretation of the same belief which alike in Christian, in Mohammedan, and in {91} Buddhist lands has led to the ascription of marvellous powers to the clothes and other relics of departed saints. The divine power which was immanent in these personages during life attaches not merely to every portion of their bodies but to every shred of their apparel. The Ursuline nuns of Quintin keep one of the principal schools in Brittany. When a girl who has been their pupil marries and finds herself “in blessed circumstances,” the pious nuns send her a white ribbon painted in blue (the Virgin’s colour) with the words: “Notre Dame de Délivrance, protégez nous.” Before despatching it, they touch with it the reliquary of the parish church, which contains a fragment of the Virgin Mary’s zone. The recipient hastens to put the ribbon around her waist, and does not cease to wear it until her baby is born.^91.1^ For the Virgin’s zone, having been in contact with her divinity, though that contact has ceased to outward appearance, is still in some subtle connection with the goddess, and can, with the power it has thus acquired, leaven its reliquary and everything that touches the reliquary. Father De Acosta bears unconscious testimony to the real character of this belief. Speaking of the Mexican idol Tezcatlipuca, he relates that upon the even of his feast the god was furnished by the nobles with a new robe. When it was put on, the old robe was taken off “and kept with as much or more reverence {92} than we doe our ornaments.” Ecclesiastical ornaments, of course, are meant; and the writer goes on to say that “there were in the coffers of the idoll many ornaments, iewelles, eareings, and other riches, as bracelets and pretious feathers, which served to no other vse but to be there, and was [sic] worshipped as their god it selfe.”^92.1^ Not to multiply instances which might be adduced from the Arctic Ocean to the Southern Sea, I will refer only to the sacred girdle worn by Tahitian kings. The red feathers which adorned this girdle were taken from the images of the gods. It “thus became sacred, even as the person of the gods, the feathers being supposed to retain all the dreadful attributes of power and vengeance which the idols possessed, and with which it was designed to endow the king.” So potent indeed was it that Mr. Ellis says it “not only raised him to the highest earthly station, but identified him with their gods.”^92.2^

Nor is it merely to clothes and personal ornaments that this intimate and sympathetic connection with their owner’s life is ascribed. It might be supposed that the constant visible and tangible association of these things with the man himself might render it difficult to disintegrate the image thus formed in the slowly working mind of a savage, and that this might be the reason for their identification (for it amounts to nothing less) with his personality. Or it might be argued that, as is distinctly suggested in certain cases, they have become saturated with his sweat by repeated use, and thereby become an {93} outlying portion of his body. The identification, however, is extended to things we should suppose more easily dissociated from him, to things but rarely coming beneath his touch. The Wanyoro of Central Africa imagine that straws from the thatch of a dwelling may be so charmed as to bring calamity upon its owner.^93.1^ When Captain Speke was in Unyoro, the king, Kamrasi, sent some one to steal some grass from the thatch of a Chopi chief, “in order that he might spread a charm on the Chopi people, and gain such an influence over them that their spears could not prevail against the Wanyoro.”^93.2^ In the Isle of Man, one fisherman can rob another of his luck by plucking a straw from the latter’s cottage as he passes it on his way to fishing.^93.3^ A woman of Kirk Lonan in the same island confessed, on the 31st of July 1712, to a charge of having taken up some earth from under a neighbour’s door and burnt it to ashes, which she had given to her cattle, “with an intention, as she owns, to make them give more milk”—in other words, to a charge of stealing by magical means the milk from her neighbour’s cows.^93.4^ In Denmark, to steal fishing-tackle is to rob the fisher of his luck. For a similar reason, no Esthonian farmer is willing to give earth from his cornfields.^93.5^ In southern Bohemia the sweepings must not be allowed to lie before the house-door, else the witches will be enabled by its means to lame the inhabitants, as well as to ascertain what is going on in the house.^93.6^ In the Tirol an enemy can be ruined by cutting a turf from one’s own ground and {94} throwing it on his roof; while a Fijian can bewitch his foe by burying certain leaves in the foe’s garden or hiding them in his thatch.^94.1^ The Annamites are said by Dr. Bartels, I know not on what authority, to effect a spell of injury by driving a nail into a plank of the victim’s ship or one of the posts of his house.^94.2^ As long as the men are away from a Dyak village on a warlike expedition their fires are lighted on their hearths as if they were at home. “The mats are spread and the fires kept up till late in the evening, and lighted again before dawn, so that the men may not be cold. The roofing of the house is opened before dawn, so that the men may not lie too long and so fall into the hands of the enemy.”^94.3^ The belief in the inseparable connection of a person and his property seems to have limited to some slight extent the indiscriminate almsgiving practised in many European, especially Roman Catholic, countries. It is deemed prudent always to refuse persons suspected of witchcraft; and at certain times, as on the occasion of a birth or death, or even when a cow has calved, every one must be refused. To give fire on these occasions, or on various days of the year, is highly dangerous, and it is by no means safe at any time. Mr. Frederick Starr, the Curator of the Natural History Museum at New York, records a case of witchcraft that came under his own notice among the German population of Pennsylvania, where the trouble was traced to the giving of a match to the sorceress to {95} light her pipe.^95.1^ Nor is the superstition unknown to the American aborigines, as witness the attempt mentioned in the last chapter of the Shawnee prophet to persuade John Tanner that his life was dependent on his lodge fire. And the Moravian missionaries found it in Greenland, where one of the things a pregnant woman may not permit is the lighting of a match at her lamp.^95.2^

In the Mahábhárata an ascetic who is enraged with king Dhritaráshtra accepts from the king the carcases of some cattle which had died. Then he lighted a sacrificial fire and cut up the animals; and “observant of rigid vows the great Dálvya-vaka poured Dhritaráshtra’s kingdom as a libation on the fire with the aid of those pieces of meat. Upon the commencement of that fierce sacrifice, according to due rites, the kingdom of Dhritaráshtra began to waste away, even as a large forest begins to disappear when men proceed to cut it down.” The monarch, it need hardly be added, was soon reduced to submission.^95.3^ Here the foe is affected by rites performed upon his cattle; and perhaps the same belief is the origin of the resentment felt by a Samoan when he finds marks of a knife or hatchet inflicted by another upon anything belonging to him, such as his canoe, his breadfruit-tree, or even on a few taro-plants. We are told that “he considers it is like cutting himself, and rages like a bear to find out who has done it.”^95.4^ The close connection held in cases like these to subsist between {96} property and its owner is further exemplified by the practice of the Pipiles of Central America, who had special regulations for indulgence in marital embraces at the moment of sowing.^96.1^ So also when the Ynca Mayta Capac ordered certain prisoners in one of the provinces he had conquered to be burnt alive, the zealous people not only carried out the command but included in the punishment all that the criminals had in their houses, destroying the houses and strewing their sites with stones as accursed places. “They also destroyed their flocks, and even pulled up the trees they had planted. It was ordered that their land should never be given to any one, but that it should remain desolate, that no man might inherit with it the evil deeds of its former owners.”^96.2^ Among the Alfours of Posso in Celebes, when a man dies he is solemnly tried, and every one is entitled to express an opinion upon his life. If the decision be unfavourable he is buried without ceremony, provided his debts be paid, and his goods are destroyed, for nobody can, and nobody wishes to, inherit from him.^96.3^ The spirit and intention evinced in this destruction of a great offender’s property dictated the extermination (or at least the story of the extermination) of Achan, the son of Zerah, with the goods he had appropriated at the sack of Jericho, his sons, and his daughters, “his oxen, and his asses, and his sheep, and his tent, and all that he had.” It was only when they had been burnt and covered with a great heap of stones, as in the case of the Peruvian prisoners, that “the Lord turned from the fierceness of his anger.”^96.4^ {97} Hardly an extension is it of the belief here indicated which leads the Chinese to identify the produce of labour with the labourer himself. In the Middle Kingdom grave-clothes are procured long beforehand and kept in store for years. Professor De Groot says: “Old age being a benefit the Chinese prefer above all things, most people have the clothes in question cut out and sewed by an unmarried girl or a very young woman, wisely calculating that, whereas such a person is likely to live still a great number of years, a part of her capacity to live still long must surely pass into the clothes, and thus put off for many years the moment when they shall be required for use.”^97.1^ Traces of the same thought are found in the German requirement that in making vinegar, to make it good, one must look sour and be savage, and in the high value placed upon yarn spun by a girl under seven years of age.^97.2^

But superstition stops not with a man’s property and the produce of his labour any more than with portions of his body or his garments and ornaments. Things arbitrarily associated with him, if the proper ceremonies be observed, and the proper incantations muttered or sung, may be made effectual instruments of injury as if they were parts of himself. His name, it may be argued, is something peculiarly his own; and a portrait, if any resemblance be traceable to the person represented, may bear identification with him. But, as I have already pointed out, likeness is by no means necessary. If it be enough, in order to constitute a life-token, merely to attribute connection at the will of the person inquiring concerning the absent, it must {98} be enough also for the purpose of bewitching him. What is valid in the one case must be valid in the other. So much has been written on the aspects of savage thought concerning personal names and personal portraits, and on the images made for the purposes of witchcraft, that I need not do more than point out that the profane use of images for witchcraft is exactly parallel to the sacred use of images of gods and saints. If by sticking a pin into a waxen figure, or melting it in the fire, I can torture and do to death the person whom the figure represents, the converse process of honouring and feeding and pacifying with incense and adoration will have its effect upon the deity whose image is thus treated. Wherever he may be, he is present by means of the sympathy between the picture or the statue and himself, a sympathy thus indistinguishable from identity. Practically of course this involves omnipresence. The difficulty is not felt by the savage. If the theologian feel it, he can explain it away in a crowd of unctuous phrases, or smother his common sense with the authority of the Church. The scientific investigator can do neither. The only theory of the superstition he can present is that which is educed from a comparison of analogous cases, namely, that just as hair and other portions of the body, when severed in outward appearance, yet maintain an essential connection with it, so images bearing the name of, or intended to represent, an absent man or a deity are an extension of his person, bound to it by an invisible and indivisible link. That a ceremony should be required to perfect the bond, to complete the connection, is only to be expected; and naturally this ceremony is fully developed in solemn and formal worship and the higher sorcery. But the ritual of consecration depends upon another principle—that {99} of the power of certain forms of words when uttered in a prescribed manner to bring about the fulfilment of a wish—the discussion whereof is foreign to this inquiry.

A few illustrations of the identity imputed for magical purposes to arbitrary objects other than effigies may perhaps be interesting as showing how far the imputation may be carried, and on how slender a connection of thought in many cases it rests. On the Slave Coast, Major Ellis reports that an enemy’s death may be compassed by wrapping a tree-stump with palm-leaves and strips of calico, and hanging a string of cowries on it, and then hammering the top with a stone while pronouncing the victim’s name.^99.1^ In the Congo region, an approved method of bewitching mortally is to put a certain herb or plant into a hole in the ground. As it decays, so the vigour and spirits of the person aimed at will fail and decay.^99.2^ In Fiji, a cocoa-nut is buried beneath the temple hearth, with the eye upwards. A fire is kept constantly burning on the hearth; and as it destroys the life of the nut, so the health of the person represented by the nut fails, and he ultimately dies.^99.3^ In the Hervey Islands, the expanded flower of a gardenia was stuck upright—no easy feat—in a cocoa-nut-shell cup of water. The sorcerer would then offer a prayer for the death of the person intended; and if the flower fell his prayer would be successful.^99.4^ In some districts of Sicily on Christmas Eve, at the moment of the elevation of the host at midnight mass, an orange or a lemon, previously charmed for the {100} purpose by a witch, must be taken from the pocket, a piece of the rind torn off, and the fruit stuck with pins. It is necessary to accompany the act with an imprecation of as many pains and misfortunes on the unhappy victim as the pins in the fruit. At Palermo an egg is used, a ribbon is attached to one of the pins, and the egg is then hidden somewhere in the house of the person to be injured.^100.1^ In Bosnia, a maiden may be detached from her lover by burying an egg before and another behind her dwelling, saying the while: “It is not eggs I bury; I bury rather her luck; her luck shall be turned to stone.” But the effect of the charm may be dissipated by the maiden’s finding the eggs, throwing them out of the farmyard, and retiring without looking round.^100.2^

In each of the foregoing cases the association with the victim appears to be formed by the utterance of his name, though in the two last there is further the introduction of the bespelled object into his dwelling or its immediate vicinity. This effects a kind of contact with him. It was the same in a spell cast over a maiden to whose aid Saint Hilarion was once called. She had rejected the advances of a young magician, who in return laid a copper plate engraved with certain characters under the door of her dwelling. The effect was, as we know from Saint Jerome, that she became possessed by a devil, who boasted that he would not leave her until the copper plate was taken away. But in Hilarion, who was so full of the Holy Spirit that he could tell one devil from another by the smell, the tormentor had met his match. The saint forbade the removal {101} of the plate; nor would he bandy words with the demon, but delivered the girl by the sheer strength of his prayers.^101.1^ At Vate, one of the New Hebrides, if a man were angry with another, he buried certain leaves by night close to his foe’s house, so that the latter in coming forth in the morning might step over them and be taken ill.^101.2^ More direct contact is set up with the person condemned to undergo the poison ordeal at Blantyre, in Central Africa, when the ordeal is to be inflicted, as frequently is the case, by proxy on a dog or a fowl, or some other animal. The proxy is then tied by a string to the accused.^101.3^ The same result is obtained in the neighbourhood of Hermannstadt in Transylvania on the occasion of a robbery, if restitution be desired, by procuring a consecrated wafer and putting it upon any portion remaining of the stolen property. The operator then sticks a needle into the wafer, saying: “Thief, I stick thy brains; thou shalt lose thy reason!” Again he sticks the needle in, saying: “Thief, I stick thy hands to change thee to goodness!” A third time he sticks it in, saying: “Thief, I stick thy feet to lame thee!” After this, if the thief would avoid death, he must bring the stolen goods back.^101.4^ If, at the time of a death among the Poles, anything have been stolen, a similar article or a piece of the same material is laid in the coffin with the dead, and as it corrupts the thief withers away and ultimately dies.^101.5^ The concurrence of a theft with a death, however, does not always happen so {102} conveniently. The Masurs, therefore, reckon it sufficient to bury the article in the churchyard.^102.1^ In the Fiji Islands, Macdonald records that, certain roots having been stolen, the sorcerers who were called in placed the remains of the roots in contact with a poisonous plant. As soon as this was known, two persons fell sick with a disease that proved mortal; and before dying they confessed to the robbery.^102.2^

The principle applied in these instances appears to be a logical extension of that which identifies a man with his property. The thief is identified with the articles he has possessed himself of, and is affected by means of a portion of the bulk to which they belong, and whence he has severed them. In this country the identification is usually arbitrary, no contact being attempted. The heart of some animal, as a sheep, a hare, or a pigeon, is procured and stuck full of pins; and a form of words is pronounced similar to those in the Transylvanian example. In a case mentioned by Mr. Henderson as occurring no longer ago than the year 1861, a live pigeon was thus tortured and pierced to the heart, and then roasted, the object being to punish and discover a witch who was believed to have killed some horses by means of the Evil Eye. This kind of incantation is perhaps more usual in philtres, or where the girl betrayed seeks to avenge herself upon her lover. Mr. Henderson quotes the following directions from The Universal Fortune Teller: “Let any unmarried woman take the blade-bone of a shoulder of lamb, and borrowing a penknife (without saying for what purpose) she must, on going to bed, stick the knife once through the bone every night for nine nights {103} in succession in different places, repeating every night while so doing these words:

’Tis not this bone I mean to stick, But my lover’s heart I mean to prick; Wishing him neither rest nor sleep Till he comes to me to speak.

Accordingly at the end of the nine days, or shortly after, he will come and ask for something to put to a wound inflicted during the time you were charming him.”^103.1^ Reginald Scot gives a charm “to spoile a theefe, a witch, or anie other enemie, and to be delivered from the evill,” by cutting a hazel-wand on Sunday morning before sunrise, saying: “I cut thee, O bough of this summer’s growth, in the name of him whom I mean to beat or maim.” The table is then to be covered, using thrice the formula, “In nomine Patris, etc.,” and struck with the wand, the performer repeating some apparently meaningless jargon and a prayer to the Trinity to punish the object of vengeance.^103.2^ It would be easy, but tedious, to multiply examples. Let it suffice to say that the spell here described is known in one form or other all over Europe. Generally the substance practised upon is a part of some animal, a puppet-figure, or else a candle or brand. In the last chapter we have seen the candle or brand as Life-token. It is immaterial whether the identification of the brand with a human being be for the purpose of divination or of witchcraft. If the brand indicate by its condition the condition of the person about whom I am inquiring, then I can, by affecting the condition of the brand, affect also that of the person in question. {104} The Bishop of Evreux in his statutes of the year 1664 condemns, among other practices, the purchase of a fagot to burn with incense and white alum at an uneven hour of the day or night with a long and horrible imprecation against an enemy by name. Mingled wine and salt were, we learn, poured over the burning fagot in the course of the proceedings. As an alternative the statutes mention the burning of nine, eleven, thirteen or fifteen candles. And apparently the same ill effects were to be produced by simply cursing the foe while putting out the lights in the dwelling, and then rolling on the ground reciting the one hundred-and-eighth psalm.^104.1^

This is a superstition familiar to us in the classic tale of Meleager. When Althæa gave birth to him she was visited by the three Fates, who placed a billet of wood on the fire and bespelled her child to live until it was consumed. She snatched the brand from the flames, extinguished them with water and kept it safely until the day she beheld her two brothers brought home from the hunting of the Calydonian boar, both dead by Meleager’s hand. In the madness of her anger she fetched it forth, and after a struggle between her love as a mother and her love as a sister she cast it on the fire. Meleager absent and unwitting felt his entrails burning, and died in torture when the brand was consumed. The writer of a work, ascribed to Plutarch, on Parallels between the Romans and the Greeks, quotes in a fragmentary way from Menyllus a story of one Mamercus, a son of Mars by Sylvia the wife of {105} Septimius Marcellus. Mamercus’ life was by his divine father bound up with a spear, which was burnt by his mother under somewhat similar provocation to that of Althæa. The tale is yet current in Epirus, in the Vosges, and among the Germans both in Germany and Transylvania; and a few years ago I heard from the lips of a collier on the wild upland between the vale of Neath and the vale of Swansea a legend of a man named John Gethin, who had been overcome with fright on raising the Devil and so put himself into the enemy’s power. A fight ensued between the conjurer who accompanied him and the Devil for Gethin’s body. The conjurer pulled and the Devil pulled, until the unfortunate man was nearly torn in two. The conjurer at length obtained from his adversary permission to keep him so long as a candle which was part of his conjuring apparatus lasted. The candle was instantly blown out, but though it was kept in a cool place it wasted away, and with it John Gethin’s life, so that when he died the candle was found to be entirely consumed. His body vanished; and the coffin buried in the parish churchyard at Ystradgynlais, on the borders of Brecknockshire and Glamorganshire, contained nothing but clay.^105.1^ In the province of Posen it is said that every man has a burning taper which is set up in a certain grove; and when it goes out, the life of the man to whom it belongs goes out too.^105.2^ This is the foundation of an incident in a folktale known in many parts of Europe, wherein Death takes a man down into his own abode and shows him an array of candles {106} which are the lives of men, some long, some short, and some on the point of extinction.

The superstitions we have discussed in the present chapter disclose a parallel range to those of the Life-token. First we find witchcraft exercised upon detached portions of the victim’s body, identified with himself by the same process of thought as that analysed in the last chapter. The remains of his food are equally liable to hostile practices, because they are a portion of something which he has incorporated into his own substance. Clothing and the dust or mud of naked footprints would also be likely to retain sweat, hairs and specks of skin available for the sorcerer’s purpose; and it may well be believed that this was the original reason for treating other articles of property in the like manner. But with the accumulation of property of all kinds the real reason for the use of such things would fade, and the procedure would degenerate into mere simulation. The process would be facilitated by the superstition of regarding a man’s name as a part of himself. Any one who knew another’s real name, by imputing it to some convenient object, could identify that object with his enemy, and work his will upon it, and upon his enemy through it. There is, however, a wide tract of borderland where the underlying reason for the practices is vague, and it is consequently difficult, or impossible, to determine whether the injuries are believed to be inflicted on something essentially part of the victim, or are no more than symbolic. But here as elsewhere symbolism is the offspring of an earlier practice; it is the form which remains when the real practice can no longer be repeated. It points unmistakably to injuries originally inflicted on something regarded as actually part of, and so united with, the {107} victim, though in appearance detached, that he will suffer all that it receives.

One of the most curious applications of the doctrine we have been considering deserves a few illustrations before passing on. The imputation of identity of a man’s property with himself would lead us to expect that wherever the instrument of witchcraft could be found, its destruction would be attended with injury and even destruction to the sorcerer, as when in Silesia cattle are bewitched. In such a case, any object found under the crib, or under the threshold, is put into a bag and hung up in the chimney. The witch will then come and ask for something. If she be refused, the cattle are saved and she herself suffers.^107.1^ A Danish tradition of a bewitched household relates that under a large stone outside the dwelling was found a silken purse, filled with claws of cocks and eagles, human hair and nails. When it was burnt, the suspected witch died, and all sorcery was at an end.^107.2^ So too in the Isle of Man, Professor Rhys was told, by the man who did it, of the burning of a reputed witch’s broomstick. She died; and the man firmly believed that the burning of the broomstick had caused her death.^107.3^ On the Slave Coast, any one who wishes to be revenged upon another prays to certain gods to send the owl, their messenger, to eat out the heart of the offending person by night. “The only mode of escape,” we are assured, “is to catch the bird and break its legs and wings, which has the effect of breaking the legs and arms of the person who sent it.”^107.4^ A gruesome tale, {108} current among the descendants of Scottish Highlanders settled in Ontario, speaks of a large blue butterfly that frequented a certain farm, where the churns were bewitched and the butter was of an inferior quality. When the creature was persistently followed and killed the charm was destroyed, and so was a neighbour, a lonely old woman who was wicked enough not to go to church, and was on ill terms with the community.^108.1^ Tales of this kind are current in Germany and the Netherlands, especially in connection with nightmare stories.^108.2^ The Gipsies of the Austrian empire believe that women become witches by holding sexual intercourse with demons. From this a demon-spirit passes over into the woman. She can send it at her will out of her own body in the form of an animal to injure and slay her neighbours. This it does by creeping while they sleep into their bodies, generally through their mouths: whence Gipsies are very careful not to sleep with the mouth open. Meantime the witch’s body lies as dead, and only revives when the sleeper awakes and the spirit returns to its owner, leaving its spittle behind in the victim’s intestines, to cause sickness and even death. The antidote consists of certain incantations, accompanied by the symbolic crushing of an egg and the burning of portions of the witch’s hair, nails, clothing or the like. The victim leaps nine times over the fire, calling out the witch’s name, and then spits and makes water into the flames.^108.3^ Here nothing is said about catching the mischievous animal, as in the {109} West African and some of the European examples; while in all alike the close connection, amounting to an imputation of identity, between the witch and the animal is related very nearly to the belief in the witch’s power of self-transformation so commonly believed in western Europe.

The Gipsy prescription, however, goes further. When the victim leaps over the flames he symbolises an immolation that actually takes, or used within recent times to take, place when cattle are bewitched. In the earlier half of the last century a witch was believed to have been burned to death at Ipswich by the process of burning alive a sheep she had bewitched. “It was curious,” says Mr. Zincke, “but it was as convincing as curious, that the hands and feet of the witch were the only parts of her that had not been incinerated. This was satisfactorily explained by the fact that the four feet of the sheep, by which it had been suspended over the fire, had not been destroyed in the flames that consumed its body.” The same writer knew a woman at Wherstead, in Suffolk, who had once baked alive a duck, one of a brood believed by her to be under a spell.^109.1^ In 1833 a man at Woodhurst, in Huntingdonshire, was persuaded by his neighbours to roast alive a pig belonging to a litter recently farrowed, all of which with the sow were bewitched. The sorceress was expected to appear during the ceremony, and doubtless to suffer with the tortured beast.^109.2^ More lately still, if a correspondent of the Diss Express can be trusted, an old woman at South Lopham burnt one of her hens on a Sunday {110} at noon, about the year 1892, to put an end to a spell laid upon her fowls by a neighbour.^110.1^ Unhappily England does not enjoy a monopoly of this cruel prescription. It was certainly known in Germany. One of the directions in some folklore collected at Gernsbach, near Spire, in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, is: “If your hens, ducks, pigs, etc., die fast, light a fire in the oven, and throw one of each kind in; the witch will perish with them.” While it is included by implication in the more general precept obtained at Pforzheim: “If a thing is bewitched, and you burn it, the witch is sure to come, wanting to borrow something; give it, and she is free; deny it, and she too must burn.”^110.2^ The same prescription is reported from Franconia.^110.3^ At the present day it is usual to wait until the bewitched animal be dead, and then its heart is taken and stuck with pins, and frequently burnt, cooked, or suspended in the chimney. Variants of the prescription deal in a similar manner with other portions of the body. All over the west of Europe this is the course taken; and immigrants from the Old World practise it in Pennsylvania and the Alleghanies. In some countries the ceremony is very elaborate, and great precautions are taken to prevent the witch from entering the house while it is proceeding, or from borrowing anything, lest the efficacy of the counter-spell be destroyed.^110.4^ Reginald Scot quotes a {111} direction for grilling the intestines of a beast slain by witchcraft. They are to be trailed unto the house, and not taken in at the door but drawn under the threshold. “As they wax hot” on the gridiron, “so shall the witches entrailes be molested with extreame heat and paine.” The doors must be made fast; for if she can succeed in taking away a coal of the fire, her torments will cease. To this end she will make extraordinary efforts, darkening the house and troubling the air “with such horrible noise and earthquakes, that,” writes an eye-witness, “except the doore had been opened, we had thought the house would have fallen on our heads.”^111.1^ Sometimes the animal bewitched is shot, or it is deemed enough to beat it, or to fumigate it with herbs, or, among the Poles, with the ashes of a young snake caught on the festival of the Annunciation.^111.2^ In Germany, when a cow’s milk has been taken away by a witch, the animal’s nostrils are burnt with a hot iron and its name is changed.^111.3^ The milk or urine of a bewitched animal is beaten, pricked with a fork, cooked in a pot with pins and needles, or nails, or poured on the dunghill.^111.4^ When the milk only is affected, so that butter cannot be made, it is common to beat it, or thrust a red-hot poker into the churn, or to beat the churn. A farmer in the State of Vermont, who had churned nearly all day without making butter, “loaded his musket and fired the whole charge into the churn,” saying that “the {112} witches had got into it.” The result was satisfactory, for shortly afterwards the butter came; but what was the effect of the shot upon the witches we are not told.^112.1^

A bewitched person is treated in precisely similar ways. The Abipones pulled out the heart and tongue of a dead man, boiled them, and gave them to a dog to devour, so that the author of his death might die too.^112.2^ Among the Masurs it is believed that if a person killed by witchcraft be buried with the feet up, the guilty witch will be discovered; for she cannot endure it, and must come to put the bier in the proper position.^112.3^ As an example of simulated destruction, like that in the Gipsy counter-spell above quoted, we may cite the treatment of a “heart-grown” child at Stamfordham, in Northumberland, given by Mr. Henderson. The puny patient is brought before sunrise “to a blacksmith of the seventh generation, and laid naked on the anvil. The smith raises his hammer as if he were about to strike hot iron, but brings it down gently on the child’s body.” This is done thrice, and the child, though overlooked or otherwise bewitched, is sure to thrive from that day.^112.4^ In Suffolk, blood, hair and nails from the victim were simmered, or fried. The witch was expected to come and knock at the door, which in all such cases is fast shut, and ask to borrow something. If denied, she would die.^112.5^ Anne Baker, one of the confederates of the sisters Flower, being examined concerning a child of Anne Stammidge whom she was suspected of having bewitched to death, gave most damnatory evidence against herself. She was {113} charged “that upon the burning of the haire and the paring of the nailes of the said childe, the said Anne Baker came in and set her downe, and for one houre’s space coulde speake nothing”; and she confessed “shee came into the house of the said Anne Stammidge in great paine, but did not know of the burning of the haire and nailes of the said childe, but saith she was so sick that she did not know whither she went.”^113.1^ A French writer a few years before this case recorded the means taken by a Fleming who suffered from sorcery. He cut his nails of hands and feet, threw them into a pot of fresh water, and at night before he went to bed he put the pot on the fire and cast in four large needles. When the water began to boil, the witch could not resist coming to his house, for the needles pricked her like spurs. She threw herself on his bed, but he threatened her with sword and dagger; and other persons rushing in to his help she fled in the form of a cat.^113.2^ A mother and child at Spickendorf, in Prussia, who were bewitched, were fumigated with nine kinds of wood, and the straw was taken out of the cradle and thrust into the kitchen-furnace, where no fire had been lighted for four weeks. A clear flame immediately burst forth and burnt the straw. The witch came to the house and tried to get in; but as the door was fastened she tried in vain. The end of this tale ought to be the witch’s death and the recovery of her victims. Unfortunately, however, it was the child who died; and everybody said that the wise man who directed the ceremony was called in too late for the fumigation to be effectual.^113.3^

Not merely the blood, hair and nails are dealt with: the remedy often lies in the exuviæ of the person bewitched. Preservation of the urine in a closed vessel was prescribed when the patient was afflicted by a witch in the shape of a nightmare. This was sure to bring the sorceress to the house, for she would be unable to make water until the vessel was opened. The prescription was, and still is, a favourite in the Low Countries, and that not merely for nightmares. Sometimes, there and elsewhere, it is considered necessary to boil the contents of the vessel, or at least to hang it in the chimney, a course which adds greatly to the witch’s torments. An old English recipe directs the urine to be baked with meal into a cake.^114.1^ On the island of Lesbos a portion of the sufferer’s dress, or of the threshold of the house where he dwells, is burnt to free him from the spell.^114.2^ In Italy it is usual to boil the clothes of a bewitched child, sometimes taking the precaution of sticking a long fork into them now and again during the process. The child will recover and the witch will die. At Venice it is believed that the witch will present herself and ask for salt; if it be given, the counter-charm is destroyed.^114.3^ It is generally believed, indeed, that sooner or later she will be compelled to come to the house on some pretext. At Milan, in the spring of 1891, a child was ill with some unknown and obstinate disorder—therefore bewitched. By the advice of a woman who pretended to know something of {115} medicine the parents boiled its clothes. A neighbour’s wife happening to call at that moment out of kindness to inquire after the little one, she was at once attacked by the parents. A raging crowd assembled and pursued her to the church of Santa Maria del Naviglio. There, before the altar itself, she was savagely beaten; her hair was torn out; and, despite the interference of the parish priest, she was finally dragged back to the house of the sick child, and with blows and curses was ordered to disenchant her victim. Her protests of innocence only called forth repeated howls, curses and blows. The whole suburb of the Porta Ticinese was in an uproar; nor was it without much trouble that the military police at length succeeded in rescuing her more dead than alive, and in dispersing the mob. The women who had torn her hair from her head went home and burnt it, running afterwards to see if the child were not cured. They declared they found it somewhat better, and exclaimed: “See now if it is not true that she is a witch!”^115.1^

These cases all seem explicable by the supposition that the witch has united herself in some way with the object of her spells, and thus injury inflicted upon it, by any other hand than hers, will reach and injure her. This is clearly so, for instance, where she bewitches cattle to draw away their milk. There she may be punished by vindictive action upon the milk, or upon the kine producing it. It is hardly less clear where she has, in the shape of a nightmare, appropriated an unfortunate man or animal as her steed; and the same reasoning applies to all the rest. {116} Perhaps it may not be considered an unwarrantable stretch of barbarous logic to regard the casting of a spell as an act of appropriation parallel to theft. Theft, however, like any other act of appropriation, sets up union between the person appropriating, and the article appropriated. Ownership, by the process of thought I have endeavoured already to trace, is in fact union; and injury inflicted upon a man’s property is in a literal sense inflicted on himself.

CHAPTER X. WITCHCRAFT: PHILTRES—PREVENTIVE AND REMEDIAL LEECHCRAFT

In the last chapter we dealt with that branch of witchcraft which has been called Sympathetic Magic. There is another branch that will repay a little attention, namely, the composition and administration of philtres. Many philtres are of course potions compounded of herbs and other substances known to ancient pharmacopœia. They are believed to have an effect partly inherent, partly conferred by spells. It is probable, indeed, that all medicine has arisen out of witchcraft, in the same way as chemistry, the true science, has emerged from alchemy, the false, and astronomy from astrology. Witchcraft, alchemy and astrology are all related by very close ties. They are the practical application of early beliefs and speculations growing out of one and the same theory of the universe. So far as I know, the history of the evolution of medicine from witchcraft has not received the attention which the corresponding evolution of chemistry and astronomy has had; but it is not less interesting, and in some respects it is even more surprising. Among love-potions made of herbs or of portions of the lower animals it is often difficult, or impossible, to estimate how far the virtue of the dose is conceived to be inherent in the {118} ingredients, and how far it is conferred by spells or other observances with which it is concocted. Sometimes the inherent virtue seems to preponderate; at other times the spell. In extreme cases on the one hand the spells are absent, or are reduced to the simple direction to cull the materials at a certain time, as in the case of the Gipsy philtre consisting of the bones of a green frog powdered and mixed with cantharides and a well-sweetened dough, and baked into a cake. Here the frog must be caught on Saint John’s day, put into a pot having holes in the sides, and sunk into an ant-hill until the ants have picked the bones clean.^118.1^ On the other hand, the ingredients are almost disregarded, and the spell it is that is relied on. So a philtre reported by M. Laisnel de la Salle consists, like the other, of a little cake, of whose substance we are told nothing. Its power is obtained by being placed under the altar-cloth, so that the priest unwittingly says mass and sheds his benediction over it.^118.2^

Our present business, however, is not with philtres like these, but rather with such as operate in a manner similar to the charms described in the previous chapter, founded, as I am endeavouring to show, upon the belief that portions of the body, though outwardly severed, are still in some secret physical connection with one another. In the Mark of Brandenburg a maiden causes the object of her affections to fall in love with her if she give him one of her hairs in his food, or a third person can compel a youth and maiden to love by laying a hair of each together between two stones in such a manner that the wind can play with them.^118.3^ According {119} to Gipsy belief, love can be awakened by mixing one’s sweat, blood or hairs with the food of the person desired; and on the other hand it can be destroyed by burning these substances.^119.1^ Another Gipsy charm, and one not unknown among the Russians, is made by a maiden who burns some of her hair to ashes and mingles them with the drink of the man she loves.^119.2^ A Bohemian, or a Wendish maiden, is said to take some hairs from her arm and bake them in a cake for him.^119.3^ Hairs are not such enticing food as to be readily eaten: hence charms made of them are likely to fail if this be necessary. It is, therefore, enough to convey them into the clothes of the beloved. A Transylvanian Saxon maid can kindle love if she can contrive this; and if the hairs remain there until New Year’s morning the youth cannot forsake her that year.^119.4^ Formerly at all events a similar belief seems to have prevailed in Germany.^119.5^ A Gipsy wife endeavours to bind her husband to her by binding some of her own hair among his; but, to be effectual, it must be done thrice at the full moon. For this cause, apparently, a widower on marrying again cuts off on the wedding day his beard and hair and burns it. Spells cast by the dead wife are thus destroyed. If {120} a man wish to bind a maiden to him, he obtains some of her hairs, spits thereon, and hides them secretly in the coffin of a dead man.^120.1^ The writer who reports this charm also tells us that a Hungarian lover will secure the maiden by burying some of her hair at a cross-road. The cross-road is everywhere a place only one degree less dreadful than the churchyard; and burial there is doubtless a substitute for burial in the churchyard and committing the hair as a pledge to the keeping of the dead. A traveller in Ireland in the early part of the last century declares that a love-sick Irish youth will thread a needle with the hair of the damsel he covets and run it through the fleshy part of the arm or leg of a corpse, “and the charm has that virtue in it to make her run mad for him whom she so lately slighted.” Some light is perhaps thrown on these practices by the corresponding charm said to be practised by Magyar girls. She who desires to be loved steals some of the youth’s hair and, throwing it towards the moon, utters a prayer for his love and for marriage, “if that can be.”^120.2^ The hair is thus given to the moon, both as an act of worship, and that it may be the means whereby the object of worship may, in accordance with the belief discussed in the last chapter, constrain the original owner to compliance with the votary’s wishes. Another Magyar practice confirms this interpretation. The first egg laid by a black hen is carefully blown and laid on the hearth to dry. Hairs, nail-parings, and some drops of blood of the person whose love is desired are then introduced into it, and it is buried {121} in the grave-mound of an unbaptized child. After three days it is dug up; and if any moisture be found inside the egg-shell success is assured.^121.1^ Here the moisture seems to be the work of the dead child, and, brought thus into contact with portions of the body of the beloved, it will have its effect upon him. More direct and more in accordance with the cases cited in the earlier part of this paragraph is the superstition (also Hungarian) that a woman who can, after reciting a certain spell, strip quite naked and in this condition steal a lock of hair from a sleeping man, and binding it afterwards wear it in a bag or ring, will obtain absolute mastery over his affections.^121.2^ The same result is attained by a Wendish youth who can cut hair thrice from the back of the neck of a sleeping maiden and keep it in his waistcoat pocket.^121.3^ Among the charms carried by German settlers to Pennsylvania was one which prescribed as a means of rendering a girl crazy for a certain man, that he should without her knowledge get a piece of her hair and sew it in his coat.^121.4^ And the witch in Apuleius’ immortal tale bade her servant bring away for some such purpose the clippings of the hair of the Bœotian youth of whom she was enamoured.^121.5^ In Bohemia it is enough to {122} hide the hair under one’s threshold or in the doorposts.^122.1^ Farther south the Slavonic youth (the practice may also be followed by a maiden) obtains a few hairs or a shred from the smock of the beloved, and wrapping his prize up in a rag wears it upon his heart. If he wish for her society, all he has to do is to throw it into the fire at new moon, and let it burn: the beloved will certainly come.^122.2^ This is the very charm given by the Helpful Beasts in the märchen. An amusing tale is told in Corsica of a youth who loved a girl, from whom he could get no encouragement. So he begged her to give him at least one of her hairs. She sent him a long camel’s hair drawn out of a sieve which hung on a nail in the kitchen. Towards midnight the sieve tumbled down with a great noise and began to roll about the floor. At last it found its way out of doors and rolled straight to the lover’s house, where he was impatiently expecting quite a different visitor.^122.3^ A Prussian prescription for securing a maiden’s love is to stick three of her hairs in a split tree, so that they must be grown over as the tree heals.^122.4^ In some of the central Brazilian tribes, when a husband sets out on an expedition, the wife takes and keeps portions of his nails or hair, that he may not forget to return; and a woman who desires to win or preserve a man’s love puts some of her nail-parings or hair in his cigar.^122.5^ To prevent a dog in Germany from straying, three of his hairs are taken out and {123} laid in the kitchen under the leg of the table; or he is made to eat in a cake hairs from his master’s armpit. To keep a newly purchased cow a handful of hair is cut from between her ears and buried before the stable door.^123.1^

A cake, an apple or a sweetmeat impregnated with the sweat of the giver is a powerful philtre throughout the greater part of northern and central Europe from Cairn Gorm to the Carpathians. Sugar in the same condition is sometimes given in drink.^123.2^ Nor can I suggest any better reason for the Hungarian recommendation to a lass to steal meal and honey at Christmas, bake a cake thereout and take it to bed with her for one night, afterwards giving it to the lad of her choice to eat.^123.3^ When a spell has been cast upon a Finnish woman to wean her affections from her husband, they may be recalled by drinking of a running stream out of his shoe and throwing the shoe upside down over her shoulder.^123.4^ Here too the chief motive seems the same. Among the Pennsylvanian Germans an instance was known by Dr. Hoffmann of a widow who sent a cake, one of the ingredients whereof was a small quantity of cuticle scraped from her knee, to a man whose love she desired.^123.5^ The bread mentioned by Burchard of Worms, as made by women and given to their husbands to inflame their conjugal passion, appears to have owed its efficacy to the absorption of their perspiration or particles of skin; and the interpretation is confirmed by the confessors’ manuals formerly, if not still, in use in the Greek Church, where {124} women are accused of the practice of rubbing dough on their bodies, and giving to eat to men in whom they wished to arouse satanic love.^124.1^ It is a Negro-Indian, as well as a Belgian, superstition that if you give a dog some bread soaked in your sweat, he will have to follow you to the ends of the earth: he is yours.^124.2^ He has eaten and absorbed into his own substance a part of you, and has thus become united with you.

One’s blood is of course a powerful potion. In Denmark the prescription is three drops introduced into an apple or dropped into a cup of coffee, and so consumed by the person intended.^124.3^ In Transylvania a girl puts a drop from her left hand in a cake to be eaten by the lad on New Year’s Eve.^124.4^ An old recipe in the Netherlands—and one current, with variations, in other parts of Europe—is to take a wafer not yet consecrated, write some words on it with blood from the ring-finger, and let the priest say five masses over it. Then divide it into two equal parts and give one to the person whose love is to be won, retaining the other half oneself. Many a chaste maiden has been fordone by this means.^124.5^ Blood, as well as hair and sweat, is an approved philtre among the Danubian Gipsies both for inward and outward application. A bride and bridegroom of the northern stock, before setting out for their wedding, smear the soles of their left feet with one another’s blood. And a bride of the southern stock, or a bride of the Serbian {125} Gipsies, will seek on her wedding night to smear unobserved a drop of blood from her left hand in her husband’s hair, in order that he may be true to her. Gipsies also give their blood to their cattle and dogs to prevent them from being stolen, or perhaps from straying.^125.1^ Among the Magyars, if a girl can smear the warm blood of the little finger of her left hand in a lad’s hair, he must always be thinking of her; and a man who can induce his wife unwittingly to eat his name written in his blood can thus assure her fidelity.^125.2^ A maiden who can get some of a youth’s blood unknown to him and rub it on the soles of a corpse binds him to her for ever.^125.3^ But, alike in Esthonia, in Denmark, in Germany and in Italy, in Scotland, in the valley of the Danube, and, if we may trust the confessors’ manuals just cited, in the Balkan peninsula, a woman regards her menstruous blood as the most effective: an opinion rife, too, among the mixed population of central Brazil.^125.4^ Conversely, the other sex has its peculiar product, which is equally esteemed;^125.5^ while the impurer issues of the body {126} common to both sexes are also made use of.^126.1^ Students are referred to the authorities below-cited for details.

Saliva is also a favourite fluid. I have already mentioned some applications of it. In Hungary it often supplies the place of blood.^126.2^ Gipsy girls in the valley of the Danube steal some of the hair of their beloved, boil it down to a pap with quince-kernels and a few drops of their own blood taken from the little finger of the left hand. They chew this pap, repeating a charm, and then smear it on the raiment of the youth, in order that he may find no rest, unless with the maid who has thus bespelled him.^126.3^ Or a blade of grass gathered on Saint George’s Day before sunrise is held in the mouth while a spell is muttered; and it is then placed in the food of the person whose affection is sought.^126.4^ In the early part of this century rustic lovers in France were said to seal their troth by spitting into one another’s mouths.^126.5^ Signor Gigli reports a curious custom {127} at Taranto, the origin and significance whereof are not clear to him, but perhaps may be explained by the practices we are now considering. A young man announces his love by prowling about under the windows of the fair one. She easily understands what he means, and, if averse to the match, withdraws inside the house. On the other hand, if desirous of encouraging her suitor, she leans out and spits on his happy head.^127.1^ Among the Cherokees a young and jealous bridegroom watches his bride until she sleeps, when he begins to chant:

“Listen! O now you have drawn near to hearken— Your spittle I take it, I eat it.”

Repeating this four times (four is a sacred number among the American aborigines), he moistens his fingers with saliva and rubs it on her breast. The ceremony is reiterated, with variations in the song, the three following nights, and is wound up on each occasion with a prayer addressed to the “Ancient One;” after which no husband need have any fears about his wife.^127.2^ In Silesia and in certain parts of Italy bread whereon one has spit is given to a dog to attach him to the giver.^127.3^ In other parts of Italy, in Corsica and in the Gironde the direction is to spit into his mouth.^127.4^ About Chemnitz a goose is passed between the legs thrice and given three mouthfuls of chewed bread; and she will always come home.^127.5^

Many of the philtres I have mentioned are put into food. {128} Food-philtres are not always equally objectionable in character. It is a Scandinavian saying that if a girl and boy eat of one morsel, they grow fond of each other.^128.1^ In many parts of the East Indies the custom of chewing betel-nut is universal, and the quid has become a symbol of love. It is employed as a love charm; it is given as a pledge of love; and the chewing by both parties of one quid is an essential—indeed, the essential—part of the wedding ceremony.^128.2^ The idea embodied in food-philtres underlies also other usages. A familiar example is that of drinking at the Fountain of Trevi by visitors to Rome before they leave, as a charm to draw them back.

Many of the philtres, too, as we have seen, are deemed sufficient if brought into contact with the beloved object by being placed upon, or fastened into, his or her clothes. A few examples may be added. Magyar peasants make a sort of fetish which bears the name of czolonk. It is fashioned at Christmas of aspen-wood, is an efficient protection not only against witches and devils, but also against bullets and swords, and accordingly is worn next to the skin in all perilous enterprises. Every year the old one is burnt, and the ashes mixed with milk are scattered in the cattle-stalls. But a love-spell may be framed by sprinkling the czolonk with one’s own blood before burning it, and strewing the ashes on the garments of the person to be love-witched.^128.3^ A Gipsy girl will drop warm blood from her left foot secretly in the shoes or stockings of her beloved, so to bind his footsteps night and day to herself.^128.4^ In Hesse it seems to be even {129} enough to steal a shoe or boot from the object of desire, carry it about for eight days, and then restore it.^129.1^ Lucian, writing in the second century, makes mention of a different mode of dealing with a man’s belongings. The witch takes some portion of his clothing, or a few hairs, or something else of his, and hanging them on a nail she fumigates them with incense, and sprinkling salt in the fire she pronounces the name of the woman, with it coupling the man’s name. Further spells are muttered to the twirling of a spindle; and the charm is complete. If we may believe one of the interlocutors in the Dialogue, the spell is most effective, for she had herself tested its power.^129.2^ It can hardly be more effective than the boiling of a sock on Saint Thomas’ night, said to be practised in the Land beyond the Forest, which has given rise to the proverbial expression, for one who is restless, that some one has boiled his stockings.^129.3^ Theocritus, in his second idyll, presents Simaetha casting into the magical flame some fringe from the cloak of Delphis, whom she loves, as part of a similar charm to that mentioned by Lucian. Any youth on whose raiment a maiden of the Seven Cities has bound a thread spun by herself on Saint Andrew’s Day (30th November) will be inflamed with love for her.^129.4^ Albanian wives (as provident as the wives in Brazil) are in the habit of sewing in their husbands’ gear {130} when the latter are going from home little objects which they themselves have worn as talismans, to bring them safely back.^130.1^ In Eastern Africa no Taveta woman will part with her loin-cloth to a man for any consideration after she has once worn it, for “she would be under some sexual subjection to him”; he could bewitch her by means of it, and take her away from her husband and friends.^130.2^

The speaker in the Dialogue I have cited from Lucian goes on to tell her friend of an easy and efficient method of destroying a rival’s influence over the beloved. It is to watch the unhappy rival as she walks and to efface her footprint, immediately it is made, with her own, taking care to put her right foot in her rival’s left footmark, and vice versâ, and repeating the while: “Now I am over thee, and thou art under me.” This is not exactly a philtre: it rather belongs to the practices dealt with in the last chapter. Among the Danubian peoples, however, love-charms are made from footprints. A Gipsy girl, for instance, digs up the youth’s footprint made upon Saint George’s Day, and buries it under a willow (willows are favourite trees in Gipsy sorcery), saying:

“Earth pairs with the Earth; He too whom I love shall become mine! Grow, willow, grow, Take away my heart’s woe! He the axe and I the haft, I the hen and he the cock— That is my aim.”^130.3^

In Transylvania a Saxon maid will dig up her lover’s footmark, made on St. John’s Day, and burn it, to secure his fidelity; or she may obtain equally good results any other day by burying his footmark in the churchyard.^131.1^ A Magyar lass on Christmas night will dig up her own footprint and fling it unseen into the courtyard of the lad’s dwelling: he can never leave her after.^131.2^ Among the Southern Slavs the lady fills a flowerpot with the earth of her swain’s footstep, and plants in it a common marigold. This flower is said not to wither; and in German lands it is planted upon graves and called the flower of the dead. As it grows and blooms and does not fade away, so will the youth’s love grow and blossom and never fade.^131.3^

The sacramental character of all these philtres is obvious. We saw in the last chapter that injuries inflicted on detached portions of a man’s body are felt by the bulk. In the same way, when the detached portions become incorporated into another body, or are simply brought into contact with it, by means of the philtres we have been discussing, the two bodies are united; and their union manifests itself in sympathy and sexual desire. The greater number of the foregoing examples have been drawn from the backward classes of the more civilised peoples, concerning which our information is in many cases remarkably full. When, however, we come to consider nuptial rites we shall find the sacramental conception entering into the idea of sexual union over a much wider area. Meanwhile we proceed to examine some of its manifestations in other beliefs and practices.

We will begin by dealing with some of the dangers, apart from witchcraft, that beset the body by carelessness over its severed parts.

A belief not uncommon is that great care must be taken in the disposal of an amputated limb, lest evil consequences to the trunk ensue. Quite recently in New England a serious consultation was held by the friends of a man who had had his foot amputated as the result of crushing it in a railway accident; and it was decided to burn it, “in order that the stump should not always continue to be painful, and the man troubled by disagreeable sensations, as would surely follow if the foot were put into the ground.”^132.1^ Similar dangers threaten the man who clips his hair or cuts his nails. In Sussex the peasantry allow no portion of their hair to be carelessly thrown away, lest a bird find it and carry it off to work into its nest; for, until it had finished, the true owner of the hair would suffer from headache. Or if a toad get hold of a maiden’s long back hairs, she will have a cold in her head for so long as the animal keeps the hair in its mouth.^132.2^ In Germany also the action of birds is dreaded—especially theft by a starling, for then cataract will ensue. Hair is therefore burnt, or thrown into running water.^132.3^ Headache is the result of throwing away hairs in the Tirol. Wherefore they are burnt, or in the Unterinnthal, if thrown away, are first spit upon.^132.4^ In Norway the consequences are even worse: there the owner of a hair {133} obtained by a toad will lose his reason.^133.1^ In the Atlantic States of North America the combings of the hair must not be thrown away, but burned, for the same reason as in Sussex, or because the birds might carry them to Hell, and so render it necessary for the owner to go thither to recover them.^133.2^ Among the Danubian Gipsies, hair which has fallen, or been cut off, is a source of anxiety. Headache will be caused by the birds working it into their nests, and can only be relieved by a complicated counter-charm. If a snake be guilty of carrying hair into its hole, the man from whose head it has come will continue to lose more, until that in the snake’s hole has decayed away.^133.3^ The Undups of Borneo will not burn their refuse hair, nor throw it into the water, for fear of headache. But it may be flung to the winds, or cast on the ground: it is better still to bury it. On the other hand, the tribes about Lake Nyassa burn their hair; but they bury the parings of their nails.^133.4^ At the other side of the African continent, among the Bodo, the nails are buried;^133.5^ while the Wayova of the Upper Congo, when they become old or sick, tie the clippings of their hair and nails with amulets in a string which they wear wrapped around them.^133.6^ In Mashonaland the hair is not cut until it is long and tangled, and too full of life to be endured any longer. It is then shaved entirely off and hung to a tree.^133.7^ The practices of the Western world {134} are similar. The natives of the Youkon river in Alaska hang what they cut from their hair and nails in packages on the trees.^134.1^ The Gauchos of the Pampas of South America deem it of the utmost imprudence to throw away their hairs, wherefore they roll them up in a ball and hide them in the walls of the house.^134.2^ In the Cuyabá valley of central Brazil it is believed that to tread on hair-clippings is to render insane the man from whose head they came.^134.3^ The Maoris attached great importance to the cutting of the hair. It was always performed with much ceremony and many spells. In one place the most sacred day of the year was appointed for it: the people assembled from all the neighbourhood, often more than a thousand in number. Some of the hair was cast into the fire. Elsewhere the hair was laid upon the altar in the sacred grove, and there left.^134.4^ Algerian Jews and Arabs and Orthodox Polish Jews carefully bury or burn their nail-parings.^134.5^ A Galician Jew will not throw away the cuttings of his hair, lest he suffer from headache.^134.6^ It seems, indeed, a general opinion among Jews, if we may trust an American Jew, that “he who trims his nails and buries the parings is a pious man; he who burns them is a righteous man; but he who throws them away is a wicked man, for mischance might follow should a female step over them.”^134.7^ Contact with menstrual {135} blood, and consequent ceremonial defilement, is evidently what is dreaded, just as if the blood had touched the man himself. For some such reason, perhaps, the Flamen Dialis was required, among the Romans, when he cut his hair or his nails, to bury the severed portions beneath a lucky tree.^135.1^ Ahura Mazda is gravely represented in the Vendîdâd as telling Zoroaster that when a man drops his refuse hair or nails in a hole or crack, and observes not the lawful rites, lice are produced, which destroy the corn in the field and the clothes in the wardrobe. The prophet is commanded, therefore, to take these portions of the body, whenever they are detached, ten paces from the faithful, twenty from the fire, thirty from the water and fifty from the consecrated bundles of baresma, and there to dig a hole, drawing three, six or nine furrows around it with a metal knife, and chanting the Ahuna-Vairya a corresponding number of times. In the hole he is to bury the hair or nails, saying aloud the fiend-smiting (though slightly irrelevant) words, in the case of hair: “Out of him by his piety Mazda made the plants grow up”; or in the case of nails: “The words that are heard from the pious in holiness and good thought”; and the nails are to be dedicated to the Ashô-zusta bird, which is believed to be the owl, as weapons for him against the Daêvas.^135.2^ This elaborate ritual and the belief it embodies are, of course, comparatively late in civilisation; but they are an adaptation to Zoroaster’s lofty religion of pre-existing superstitions. In the Grihya-Sûtra, one of the ancient books of the Hindus, it is enjoined as a religious rite to gather the hair and nails which have been cut off, mix them with bull’s dung {136} (the bull was a sacred animal) and bury the whole in a cow-stable, or near an Udumbara-tree, or in a clump of Darbha-grass. And when a boy received the tonsure, in the third year of his age, the barber threw the locks upon the same savoury substance, which was then buried in the forest. The hair left on the head was arranged according to the custom of his gotra and of his family.^136.1^ The ritual first shaving now takes place in India at the shrine of some goddess; and the locks are safely deposited in a place where they are not liable to be trodden on.^136.2^ In Japan, when a boy, at or after the age of fifteen, receives his permanent name, and is admitted to the privileges of manhood, his forelock is ceremonially cut. It is taken by the sponsor to the youth’s guardians, who wrap it in paper and offer it at the shrine of the family gods; or else it is kept with care in the house until its owner dies, and then put into the coffin with him.^136.3^ Throughout the East Indian islands much importance is attached to the first hair-cutting. On Timor it takes place three months after birth, at new moon. The child’s eldest uncle cuts a lock from four places on the head with a bamboo knife, and wrapping each of the locks in a flake of cotton he blows it away from the palm of his hand into the air. More usually it is carefully preserved. In North Celebes the rite is performed by a priest. The clippings are put into a young cocoa-nut and hung up under the thatch of the house. Another tribe {137} of the same island puts the hair, moistened with sweet-scented oil, into a young kalapa-fruit, and hangs it before the house above the ladder until it fall in course of time. The Ambonese bury the clippings under a sago-palm, or lay them in a silver box with an amulet against sickness and hang it about the child’s neck. The Aru Islanders hide them in a pisang- or banana-tree. The inhabitants of Roti lay them first with water in a cocoa-nut-shell; afterwards the father stuffs them into a little bag of plaited leaves, which he fastens in the top of a loutar-palm.^137.1^ The Bambaras, a tribe of the Upper Niger, celebrate the birth of a child by the sacrifice of a bull or sheep at the door of the mother’s hut. The infant’s head is then shaved, and the hair is placed in a calabash containing dega, a composition of millet and milk prepared for the occasion. The friends invited to the feast then place each one his right hand on the calabash, while the griot, or medicine-man, pronounces blessings on the babe. The hairs are afterwards given to the mother, who carefully preserves them.^137.2^ Among the Ictasanda gens of the Omahas of North America, when a child had reached four years his hair had to be cut in the customary shape. The proper person to cut the first lock was the keeper of the sacred pipes. It was done with certain ceremonies; and the lock was put with those of other children cut at the same time into a sacred buffalo hide.^137.3^ There may have been more reasons than one for {138} placing hair ceremonially cut on occasions like these in a sacred receptacle. This is a subject to which I shall return. But it is clear that one object at all events was safe custody. The locks thus shorn from the head must be guarded with care, lest any evil come to them, and through them to the person of whose body they once formed part.

For many of the practices we are considering no reason is assigned by the travellers and others who report them. Sometimes fantastic reasons are given, even by the people who practise them. It is for fear of ancestral spirits, we are told, that the natives of the lake regions of Nyassa and Tanganyika bury their hair and nails. The Esthonians are said to take care of their nails, else the devil will make of them a visor to his head-gear; and their national poem, the Kalevipoeg, mentions a wishing-hat of the same materials. The dread of the Samogitians is that the devil will make a hat of their nail-parings.^138.1^ A Basque tale attributes to the same personage the equally remarkable feat of making a chalice for himself out of the nails cut by Christians on Sundays.^138.2^ Among the ancient Scandinavians it was a point of religion to die with pared nails, for of the unpared nails would be constructed the ship Naglfari, to float, steered by the giant Hrym, over the waters to the combat with the Anses on the Day of Doom. A modern Icelandic superstition accounts for the custom of cutting each nail-paring into three pieces, by explaining that it is to render it useless to the devil, who would else use it in building the ship of the dead.^138.3^ Reasons like these, though genuine, are only secondary. They are mythological reasons, more or less remote from the direct interest of the individual, {139} invented when the original reasons have passed out of memory, or been dropped from some other cause, as in the case of the practices adopted into the Zoroastrian religion.

Similar superstitions apply to milk. In Transylvania it is reckoned dangerous to a woman who has recently been delivered for another suckling woman even to visit her, lest she take her milk away. To prevent this the visitor must let a drop or two of her own milk fall upon the bed where her friend lies.^139.1^ At Friuli a woman was accused before the Holy Inquisition of drying up another by merely entering her house and kissing her child in the cradle.^139.2^ Among the causes enumerated in Italy for a woman’s milk diminishing or drying up are—that the placenta has been eaten by some female animal; that another suckling woman has drunk out of her cup; that the remains of her food have been thrown to a suckling cat, sow, or bitch. If either of these contingencies happen, the milk will be transferred to the other woman or animal. No less disastrous is it to the supply if any drops fall by chance on the ground and be sucked up by ants.^139.3^ A woman who is suckling must beware of letting a drop of her milk fall into the fire, for then her breasts would dry up.^139.4^ Contrariwise, if a Magyar mother desire a rich, nourishing milk, she is advised to drop a little of it at waxing moon upon the blazing hearth. If she drop some into cow’s milk, the cow will dry up: apparently the cow’s milk will be thus transferred {140} to the woman.^140.1^ In Warwickshire the burning of cow’s milk will cause the cow to run dry; and a like belief attaches among various tribes of Africa, even to the boiling of milk, as well as to its consumption by “any one who ate the flesh of pigs, fish, fowls, or the bean called maharagué.”^140.2^ In Switzerland it is held that a knife or needle dipped in the milk reaches the beast which has yielded it, and causes pain as if wounded in the udder.^140.3^ It seems to have been currently believed in the seventeenth century in France, that if milk curdled too rapidly, a little of it thrown upon a hawthorn would retard the process.^140.4^ About Chemnitz to mix the milk of two men’s cows, is to cause the cows of one to dry up.^140.5^ In Altmark some milk of a badly milking cow is poured into the well of a neighbour who has a good milker, and thereupon the condition of both is changed.^140.6^

So of saliva. We have seen that, equally with other issues of the body, saliva is a means of witchcraft, whereby the spitter may be injured and perhaps done to death. Wherefore all over the world, from Africa to the Sandwich Islands, from Europe to New Zealand, the spittle is hidden or erased as soon as it is ejected, so that it can no longer be discovered or rendered available by sorcerers. By parity of reasoning, in Sweden and Germany, as well as among the Galician Jews, one is forbidden to spit in the fire, lest bladders be produced on the tongue, or other {141} sores in the mouth;^141.1^ and in various parts of France, lest pulmonary consumption result. To spit on glowing iron, in the department of Aube, is almost as bad; and in the Gironde it is believed that a cold will be increased by spitting in the fire.^141.2^

So too of other portions of the body. The Poles say that a girl who drops tears on a corpse will become consumptive. At Zwickau in the Erzgebirge any who does so is in danger of an early death.^141.3^ A fine appreciation of the antiseptic properties of tobacco is reputed to be shown by some French smokers, who preserve in their tobacco-pouches the teeth lost from their heads, believing by this means to prevent toothache.^141.4^ It used to be the custom in Derbyshire to preserve all one’s shed teeth in a jar until death, and then to have them buried in the coffin with their owner; for, it was said, on reaching heaven the man would be obliged to account for all the teeth he had upon earth: an obvious afterthought, and not the real reason.^141.5^ I have already mentioned the English superstition that a child’s cast tooth must not be thrown away, but burnt. The practice on the Riviera is the same.^141.6^ In Piceno the infant is made to hide the tooth in a crack of the {142} hearth, in the hope of finding a gift the next morning. In the Abruzzi it is enough to put it into any hole.^142.1^ While among the southern Slavs the child is instructed to throw it into a dark corner, crying: “Mouse, mouse! There is a bony tooth; give me an iron tooth instead.” He is then to spit; and this is done that no more teeth may fall out. Sometimes his cast tooth is plugged into an old willow, that he may never suffer from toothache.^142.2^ In the Erzgebirge, to attain the same end the father is told to swallow a daughter’s tooth, and the mother a son’s.^142.3^ The origin of the superstition, widely spread in Europe, that the mother should bite and not cut a baby’s nails, may possibly be found in some analogous reason.

The liability to injury in consequence of an accident happening to, or wilful act inflicted on, a detached portion of the body or its issues, implies the opposite possibility. Good may be received, health may be restored by the same means. Hence has arisen a great body of folk-medicine and surgery. Incidentally we have already noticed some examples of this; but the most familiar is undoubtedly to be found in the cure of warts. To rub the warts with a piece of flesh-meat (various kinds are prescribed—in this country beef or bacon seems the favourite) usually raw, and {143} then to bury it in the ground, or throw it where it will speedily rot and disappear; to rub them with an apple, an onion, a potato, a turnip, a willow-twig whereon a corresponding number of notches has been cut, peas, beans, knots of barley-straw, a branch of tamarisk, or some other vegetable substance easily obtained, and afterwards bury, burn it or throw it away; to tie knots in string, touch every wart with a knot, and then treat the string like the meat; to stroke the warts with a corpse’s hand; to wash them in flowing water, especially at a time when bells are tolling for the dead, or over which the corpse is carried, or in water found in a hollow stump or other unexpected place; to rub them with a snail, and then impale the creature on a thorn or (in Germany) nail it to the doorpost with a wooden hammer; are remedies known all over Europe and the United States; and they date back to classical antiquity. The beef, the apple, the string, the dead hand decay; the water flows far out of sight, or dries up; and in like manner the warts they have touched also disappear.

The principle has many other applications. A remedy for fever in use in the sixteenth century in the Mark of Brandenburg was to cut the patient’s nails, bind them on the back of a crawfish, and throw the crustacean back into flowing water.^143.1^ In France, and, it seems, in England also, the remedy recorded a century later for the quartan ague was to wrap the nail-parings in a portion of a shroud, and fasten the package around the neck of an eel, which was then {144} returned to the water.^144.1^ In these cases it can hardly be doubted that the sufferer was to benefit by the cooling influence of the water. In the north-east of Scotland it was usual to put the nail-parings of a consumptive patient into a rag from his clothes, the rag was waved thrice round his head, the operator crying “Deas Soil,” and then buried in a secret place.^144.2^ For ligature, or impotence, believed to be caused by witchcraft, the cuttings of the hair and nails are, in Germany, wrapped in a cloth, stuffed into a hole made in an elder-tree, and the hole closed with a plug of hawthorn.^144.3^ For infantine rupture, in Switzerland, some of the child’s nails and hair, with a piece of paper inscribed with his name, are put into a hole bored in a young oak, and the hole is then stopped with wax.^144.4^ Among the Transylvanian Saxons at Kronstadt the hair and nails of an anæmic patient are buried under a waxing moon beneath a rose-bush.^144.5^ Here the rose is evidently expected to diffuse its colour in the sick man’s veins. The collection just cited of old remedies in use in the Mark of Brandenburg directs that when hairs grow in an ulcer they should be plucked out and nailed up in an elder or oak-tree towards the east.^144.6^ The ancient English leech-book attributed to one Sextus Placitus prescribes, for a woman suffering from flux, to comb her hair under a mulberry tree, and hang the combings on an upstanding twig of the tree. When she is healed she must gather them again and preserve them. If on the contrary she {145} desire ut menstrua fluant, the combings must be placed upon a twig hanging downwards.^145.1^ The mulberry appears to be chosen because of the form and colour of its fruit, in accordance with the old doctrine of Signatures whereby the remedy for a disease was pointed out by some fancied resemblance of form or colour to the diseased member. To restore falling hair, Etmuller, writing in the seventeenth century, advises burying some of the hair in an oak, or, to cure the gout, some of the toe-nails. Bronchitis in growing children is cured, among the Pennsylvanian Germans, by making a gimlet-hole in the door-frame at the exact height of the child’s head. A tuft of his hair is inserted, and the hole pegged up. As the child grows above the peg he will outgrow the disease. The door-frame appears to be a mere substitute for a tree.^145.2^

Specimens of this kind of remedy might be multiplied indefinitely. They are usually regarded as cases of transplantation. By the process described the disease is supposed to be transferred, or transplanted, into the tree, or very often into another human being or one of the lower animals. This idea is present in a recipe for fever given by Beckherius, whose medical work was published in London in 1660. He advises the tying of the patient’s nail-clippings in a rag to the door of a neighbour’s {146} house:^146.1^ a remedy equally known to the Romans.^146.2^ Rupture in a young person is to be cured in Thuringia by cutting three tufts of hair from the top of the head, binding them in a clean cloth, carrying the parcel into another parish, and so burying it in a young willow that the hole may close up and grow together.^146.3^ We can hardly understand apart from transplantation the direction to carry the parcel into another parish and there plant it in a tree, or to fasten the rag of nail-clippings to a neighbour’s door. At other times the hair and nails are given in food to various animals, or are thrown in the highway to be picked up by any passer-by, who is supposed to contract the disease and thereby free the original patient. Many of the cases, however, which have been classed as transplantation are not really so; for it will be noted that it is a very common direction (as in the prescription just cited) to carefully close up the hole made in the tree, and as it heals the patient’s health will improve. But if the disease were to be transferred to the tree, the latter could scarcely be expected to heal; and if it did, there would be ground for suspecting that the rite had not been properly performed. Formerly it was a very common remedy for rupture and other infantile complaints to split a tree and pass the child through it three or seven times. The tree was then bound up and often plastered with clay, so as to ensure its recovery; and it was believed that the more rapidly it healed, the more rapidly the child would be restored to health. In fact, as we have seen, it thenceforth stood in relation to the child as his External Soul or Life-token. The earliest mention of this prescription {147} is by Marcellus of Bordeaux, physician of the Emperor Theodosius I., not later than the beginning of the fifth century of our era; and it has continued in use, even in England, down to the present day. From first to last the importance of the tree’s recovery and preservation has been a cardinal point.^147.1^ It is perfectly clear, therefore, that whatever the intention of the rite may have been, it was not transplantation. Transplantation, in fact, seems to be a foreign graft on many of the old prescriptions. It may be questioned, for example, whether it is the primitive idea of either Beckherius’ prescription or the Thuringian; and I cannot help thinking that the doctrine of Transplantation is a modern interpretation of an older rite, an interpretation which has in many cases wrought such changes in its substance that the true and profounder significance of the rite is now hardly to be recognised. This may not hold good in every instance. The question, however, is immaterial to my present contention, and cannot be argued at length here. It is enough for my purpose to prove that a large class of remedies cannot be explained as Transplantation, although the theory of Transplantation may have a tendency to appropriate and modify them. The remarks which follow will, I hope, make the position clear.

Magyar folk-medicine prescribes a curious remedy for {148} lunacy. The head of a corpse is wetted with the patient’s blood and saliva, so that “he may obtain as much intellect as the dead man had”: in other words, the crazy man is brought into such union with the dead as will result, not in the transfer to the latter of his lunacy, but the transfer to the lunatic of the intellect of the dead. Similarly, the toothache is cured by spitting on a grave-mound, or rubbing the aching tooth with the tooth of a corpse, which perhaps is sound, or at all events can no longer suffer.^148.1^ If it be desired to render a woman unfruitful, the organs of a dead man, whose potency is at an end, must be rubbed with her menses. It is even deemed sufficient for her to make water on a corpse. For the green-sickness, a few drops of the sick man’s blood mingled with the excrement of one who is recently dead, and flung into the open grave just before the body is put in, will prove a cure.^148.2^ To stay bleeding, the Saxons of the Seven Cities write with the blood the letters INRI on a piece of wood and throw it into a spring, saying: “Three women of the spring (Brunnenfrauen, spirits of the spring) wish to behold blood. They say: Blood, stand still, that is God’s will! Out of this wood the cross whereon Jesus hung, was made. Amen!” A syphilitic patient is directed, on three several Sundays while the bells are ringing for divine service, to write his name in his own blood on his drawers, and, hanging them on a tree, there to leave them permanently.^148.3^ {149} The Gipsies of the same neighbourhood cure pimples by dropping before sunrise some blood from the ring-finger into flowing water, that it may be swallowed by a Nivashi, or water-spirit; and they cure dropsy by letting nine drops of blood from the index-finger fall, by a waning moon, into flowing water, that the Nivashi may draw the water from the patient’s body.^149.1^ A prescription recorded by Reginald Scot for a bloody flux runs as follows: “Take a cup of cold water, and let fall thereinto three drops of the same blood, and betweene each drop saie a Paternoster and an Ave, then drinke to the patient, and saie; who shall helpe you? The patient must answer S. Marie. Then saie you; S. Marie stop the issue of blood.”^149.2^ It will be observed here that the blood is drunk by the operator; and it could not have been intended to transfer the disease to him. The invocations as given are certainly not part of the original rite. What that rite was, of course we do not know. We may conjecture that the primitive operator was a sort of shaman in special communion with his god. The patient’s blood, entering him, would be brought into contact with the god; and the god through it would be united with the patient for his healing.

In the light of examples like these we must interpret many prescriptions which have been hastily put down as cases of transplantation, or have been turned by the folk themselves into transplantation formulæ. For instance, a Gipsy remedy for fever bids the sufferer go before sunrise to a little tree, scratch his left little finger, and smear the blood on the tree, saying: “Go away, fever; go away, pain; {150} go away into the tree, whence thou hast come; thither go thou, fever!”^150.1^ No specific tree is indicated; and there can be little doubt that the original words of this ban have been forgotten, and meaningless rhymes substituted—so far at least as the words “Go away into the tree whence thou hast come,” which rhyme in the original with the two previous lines. So also, in Dr. Colerus’ collection of remedies from the Mark of Brandenburg, we find that, to cure the toothache, a splinter must be taken from a willow, and the teeth pricked with it until they bleed; the blood must be allowed to drip upon the splinter, which must be then cunningly put back into the tree, covered with the bark and plastered with mud, that it may grow together again. This prescription is still current in various parts of Germany and among some of the non-German populations of Eastern Prussia. In Pomerania it appears with the addition that the performance must be in silence, and the variation that the tree must be one struck by lightning.^150.2^ If it were simply intended to transplant the toothache into the tree, there would be no need to be careful about the healing of the wound. But here, as in the cases of children passed through split trees, it is of importance to the recovery and after-life of the patient that the tree recover and be allowed to flourish. Moreover, a lightning-struck tree would, in heathen times, have been sacred; and the requirement of silence confirms its sacred character. The object of the ceremony, therefore, is not a transplantation of the disease, but a healing union of the diseased tooth {151} with the tree. In the province of Liège it is sufficient to touch the tooth with the splinter.^151.1^ The rite there appears to be in decay, for the real intention to incorporate in the tree blood from the tooth and surrounding gums is manifest from a variation current at least as early as the seventeenth century, when it is mentioned in England by John Aubrey. It consists in scarifying the gum with an iron nail, and burying the nail in the tree.^151.2^ And Sir Kenelm Digby gravely prescribes it, directing the nail to be driven up to the head into a wooden beam, which of course is a makeshift for a tree.^151.3^ Kuhn, reporting the same practice from the Mark, says expressly that the tooth must be bored with the nail until the blood comes, the nail must then be driven into the north side of an oak where the sun does not shine, and then so long as the tree stands the patient will have no more toothache.^151.4^ About Liège the nail is, according to one prescription, to be drawn from a coffin. According to another it must be a new nail and must be driven into the first tree you come to.^151.5^ At Pforzheim, when a tooth is drawn, it is to be nailed into a young tree, and the bark drawn over it; if the tree be cut down the toothache will return.^151.6^ At Agnethlen, in Transylvania, {152} the sufferer bores a hole in a tree, chews with the aching tooth a piece of bread, swallows half and spits the rest into the tree, saying: “Tree, I give thee half of what I have; take away all my pain, and convey it down into the earth!”^152.1^ The consumption of half the bread by the patient is conclusive against transplantation. And with this we may compare a recipe against the rickets in use in Schleswig-Holstein. The sick child is rubbed over with a handful of oats, and the oats are then sown in a secret place; as they grow the rickets disappear.^152.2^

In view of the cases I have cited it may be doubted whether the intention (at all events, the original intention) of many of the prescriptions of hair, saliva, food and other things belonging to the patient, to be given to the lower animals was transplantation, and not rather union with another and a healthy body. Thus, in Kerry and Leitrim a cure for the whooping-cough is to pour some milk into a saucer, let a ferret drink some of it, and give the rest to the sufferer. In Antrim the child is passed thrice under a jackass, to which is afterwards given a bit of oaten bread, and the child is made to eat what the animal leaves.^152.3^ Transplantation in both these examples is out of the question, because the child does not feed until the other creature has finished. So in the Panjab stammering is cured by hanging in a tree a cup, which is kept filled for forty days with water for the birds. The last few drops they leave every day are drunk by the patient. And a remedy in the north of India for boils is to move over the {153} part affected some treacle and parched wheat, and afterwards distribute these things among some Brahman boys.^153.1^ The food, it will be noted, does not actually touch the diseased part: the symbol is reckoned sufficient. But the destination of the food for persons of the sacred caste renders it impossible that transfer of the disease is intended. A ceremony in use among the Southern Slavs as a cure for a fretful child directs the drawing of water in a vessel of greenwood. The mother then, with the child on her arm, dips firebrands thrice into the water, saying: “The Vila weds her son and invites my Marko to the wedding. I am sending not my Marko, but his weeping.” The child is made to drink as much as it can of the water thus brought into contact with the drying, or perhaps the hallowing, power of the fire, the rest is poured over the dog or cat of the household, the vessel is thrown to the ground and left there all night.^153.2^ The entire meaning of this curious ceremony is not very clear; but it can hardly be intended to transfer the constant weeping of the infant to the dog, or the cat. In Buffalo Valley, Pennsylvania, certain diseases are cured by allowing a black cat to eat some of the soup given to the patient—a remedy probably brought from Germany.^153.3^ Here again transference is improbable, seeing that a black cat is a magical animal: we should rather apply the reasoning in reference to Reginald Scot’s remedy for the flux. It is more doubtful whether the same can be said of a Jewish leechcraft, quoted by Dr. Strack from Tholedoth Adam, which bids a woman suffering from undue menstruation {154} bake some of her blood in bread and give it to a pig to devour.^154.1^ But in Tuscany, when one spits blood, ants are to be caught, put into the blood and left there all night. Mr. Leland, in recording this, observes that Marcellus quotes a conjuring verse where ants are said to have no blood.^154.2^ If we may look upon the saying as embodying a general belief, we may suppose that their bloodlessness would be held to react upon the sufferer.

Marcellus mentions a number of prescriptions which cannot be cases of transplantation, but rather intended to unite a diseased body with a sound one for the benefit of the former. Take his remedy for a gathering in the ear by injecting the warm urine of a boy under the age of puberty. Or where incontinence of urine is to be cured by making water in a dog’s sleeping-place, saying the while: “Let me not make water in my own bed, like a dog.” Or the recommendation to apply the cut hairs of a boy under puberty to the suffering foot of a gouty patient. A prescription extolled as et praesens et maximum for consumptives, even when apparently beyond hope, consists in administering the saliva or foam of a horse in warm water for three days: the horse will die, and the sick man recover.^154.3^ Even here, in spite of the horse’s death, we have no warrant for supposing that the disease is transferred to him. The operation upon him is clearly to be attributed to the magical principle so fully discussed in this and {155} the previous chapter. The process is the converse of transplantation. Nothing that has touched the patient is brought back to the unfortunate horse. His death is caused by union through his own saliva with a sick body which absorbs his qualities of health and strength.

An old French remedy for a cough, and probably also for toothache, is traceable back to Marcellus. It was to spit in a frog’s mouth—a method of cure still in vogue in Shropshire and perhaps elsewhere in England.^155.1^ No doubt it was a traditional remedy long before the Emperor’s physician gravely recorded it, and added that the patient must stand shod upon the bare earth under the bare heaven, on a Tuesday or Thursday at waning moon, and repeat seven times: Argidam, margidam, sturgidam. Moreover the patient is solemnly to ask the frog to take the toothache with her; “and then shalt thou let her go alive; and this shalt thou do on a fortunate day and at a fortunate hour.” O learned physician! This does appear, at least as Marcellus understood it, a case of transplantation; and it is no part of my business to combat every instance. I only desire to point out that Transplantation is a theory inadequate to account for many remedies which it has been dragged in to explain; and to express the doubt whether it be not after all a comparatively recent development in folk-medicine.

Saliva prescriptions, numerous as they are, need not detain us longer. Nor will I pause upon those of the fouler excrements. They are made, as we might expect, to subserve the purposes of healing, as well as those of witchcraft, {156} and in the same general manner. I shall, therefore, only add a few references at the foot of the page for the use of students.^156.1^

For various diseases the patient’s bath-water and fomentations, wherein are often mingled simples of different sorts, are in Germany, Hungary and Transylvania poured out upon a tree, into flowing water, into the churchyard, or upon dead human bones.^156.2^ The Magyars, as a depilatory for children born with much hair on their bodies, put ashes on the four corners of the bath-tub, and throw into the water three potatoes, which they fling, after the bath, behind the oven. As the potatoes dry up, the hair is expected to disappear.^156.3^

Not only the bath-water and fomentations but also cloths and articles of clothing which have been in contact with {157} the patient, and especially with the diseased member, are subject to treatment for the purpose of healing, of causing, or of preventing disease. At Rauen, near Fürstenwald, in Northern Germany, the remedy for a violent headache is to bind a cloth round the head at night, and take it on the following morning to a wise man, who will charm not the head, but the cloth.^157.1^ Among the Transylvanian Gipsies a certain kind of sore is cured by covering it with a red rag and pegging the rag by night in a hole in a tree. The words used on the occasion are: “Stay thou here, until the rag become a beast, the beast a tree, the tree a man, to strike thee dead!” So far as they have a meaning they point to transplantation, though not conclusively. Dr. von Wlislocki, who reports them, suggests they contain a reminiscence of a Gipsy Creation-myth. If so, they are probably archaic; but this is doubtful.^157.2^ An old physician relates of a patient who had a violent pain in the arm that it was healed by a plaster of red coral beaten up with oak-leaves, which was kept on the part until suppuration and then in the morning put into an auger-hole in the root of an oak, looking towards the east, and the hole stopped with a peg of the same tree. The pain ceased, but returned more sharply than before when the peg was taken out.^157.3^ In Middle Silesia plasters and bandages from wounds must only be thrown into flowing water—certainly never into the fire, lest the hurt be made incurable.^157.4^ The Masurs in East Prussia, after suffering from an attack of fever, and not until it is over, take off the patient’s shirt and carry it, after sunset or before sunrise, if possible on a {158} Thursday, to a cross-road and suspend it on the sign-post.^158.1^ It is a French prescription for hastening a slow delivery to bind the woman’s girdle about the church-bell and sound the bell thrice.^158.2^ In 1630 the wife of Francesco Noverta of Pordenone was brought before the Inquisition in Italy for taking her husband’s shirt to a wise man to be “signed,” in order to cure him of some disease. The man signed it with a crown, repeating sacred words and invoking the saints. He did more. He gave her an oil to anoint the patient’s back and stomach, a piece of bread for him to eat, and certain herbs to be put under his bolster, together with a powder. But when she got home, so she told the holy inquisitors, she threw all these things on the fire, and kept only the shirt: she had more confidence in the charm than the simples.^158.3^ These cases, in which there is no transplantation, may perhaps be allowed to interpret the ambiguity of some of the following. The Saxons of the Seven Cities cure the swelling of the glands of the neck by stealing a piece of bacon over night and binding it round the throat with a rag, and the next morning hanging the bandage on a tree, or throwing it in the fire. In the former case, the spell to be uttered, while removing the bandage, is: “Tree, thou hast many knots; take away my knots also.” In the latter, it is: “The knotman has seven sons; the knotwife has seven daughters; they married, lived together and did not agree; they parted and disappeared like the bacon in the fire. So, in God’s name, let the knots disappear in N. N.’s neck, that he may enjoy pure the Holy Supper of the Body {159} and Blood of Our Lord. Amen.”^159.1^ Galician Jews cure infantine convulsions by throwing articles of the child’s clothing into a stream where it divides into two branches, and crying thrice: “Here hast thou thine; give me mine.” This is, of course, a prayer for the child’s health. They are also careful not to hang swaddling clothes out of doors to dry, nor to drop them on the ground, else the child whose they are will lose its rest.^159.2^ The garb of Italian babies must likewise be tenderly treated in washing, else the infants will be afflicted with various pains. Abruzzian babe-clothes must not be washed in the water whence horses have drunk, lest the babe’s tender skin be heated. A Tuscan baby is cured of a certain disorder by putting its clothes in boiling water with a nail, some laurel and garden-flowers, like rose or jasmine, and afterwards rinsing them in flowing water.^159.3^ Against a menstruation too copious a Galician Jewess washes her own shift together with her husband’s night-dress.^159.4^ The intention here seems to be not to attempt the absurdity of transferring the menstruation to the husband, but by uniting the patient to a healthy man through the contact of their clothing, to obtain for her that quality of his whereof she stands especially in need. Conversely, one of the remedies of Italian women for suppressed menstruation is to send the sufferer’s shift to the wash with the linen of a woman who has just been delivered; and they firmly believe that a washerwoman may cause them painful menstruation by beating their linen too hard, or by using burning coals with the ashes in {160} making the lye.^160.1^ Nor must we forget here the Bosnian rite for procuring conception, referred to in a previous chapter. The barren woman’s wedding-garment is not worn by the quick woman wound about her body for the purpose of transferring the barrenness to herself. On the contrary, she wears it that her prolific influence may thus be communicated to her friend; and she continues to wear it until that effect is produced.

Other things that have been brought into contact with the body may also be efficaciously treated. In Donegal the piece of turf whereon a sick cow first treads on getting up is cut out and hung against the wall; and the cow is expected to recover.^160.2^ Formerly in France a limping cow was healed by cutting out the turf whereon the lame foot had trodden and putting it to dry on a hedge. To cure quartan fever a certain herb was plucked secretly and in silence, and thrown to the winds.^160.3^ In the seventeenth century a prescription for epilepsy was three nails made on Midsummer Eve driven over their heads into the place where the patient had fallen, his name being uttered the while.^160.4^ For spasms at the heart it is recommended in Transylvania to lie on the back on the turf. The length and breadth of the patient’s body is then marked, and the turf to the thickness of a finger cut out, if possible in one piece, and thrown into a brook with the words: “Spring-wife, spring-wife, take the water from my heart; I give thee what lay under my heart.”^160.5^ In Thuringia, to heal sores {161} on the body three crosses are made with a bit of comfrey on the sores before sunrise, and the comfrey is then buried in a place where it will quickly rot, and whither the patient is not likely soon to come.^161.1^ A like remedy is given in the Grihya-sutra of Âpastamba. If a wife be affected with consumption, or be otherwise sick, one who has to observe chastity is to rub her limbs with young lotus-leaves, still unrolled, and with lotus-roots and certain formulæ; the leaves and roots are afterwards thrown away towards the west.^161.2^ For whooping-cough, a mother in Norfolk looks for a dark spider in the house, and having found it holds it over the child’s head, repeating thrice:

“Spider, as you waste away, Whooping-cough no longer stay.”

She then hangs the spider in a bag over the mantelpiece—formerly no doubt it was hung in the chimney—and when it dries up the cough will be gone.^161.3^ A feverish patient, among the Jews of Galicia, wraps a hair taken from his body about a louse, and throws the creature away. While, against epilepsy, a black hen is rent in pieces over the sick man; or a cock is slaughtered and buried, its head being first cut off on the threshold of a barn: with the decay of its flesh the epileptic recovers health.^161.4^ The old French superstitions recorded by Thiers prescribe for various diseases a branch of a plum-tree hung to dry in the chimney, a cabbage stolen from a neighbour’s garden and hung up to dry, nine grains of barley put into a bottle of {162} clear water, a hard-cooked egg put into an anthill, certain drugs wrapped in a piece of new cloth and thrown into the fire. They do not in every case mention that these articles must be first applied to the patient; but it is tolerably clear that this is meant.^162.1^ And it must also be inferred that the cock in the Galician prescription was formerly brought into similar contact, though perhaps in this case, as in many others throughout Europe, the touching has fallen into disuse. The black hen, it is obvious, could not be torn in pieces without its blood falling on the patient and so bringing it into union with the disease. Remedies of the kind under consideration are naturally most in vogue for external diseases, such as warts, boils and sties. But enough: examples of their application to all kinds of disease are endless.

I have mentioned some cases where corpses have played remedial parts. A few more illustrations may be added, more clearly to bring out the real meaning of the prescriptions, which are divisible into two classes—the one wherein the patient himself is brought into contact with the body, or with some article that has belonged to it, or been in contact with it; the other wherein articles belonging to the patient, or which have been part of, or in contact with, his body are deposited in the coffin, or the grave, and thus brought into permanent connection with the dead. The intention of both appears to be the same, namely, to bring the disease into union with the corpse, in order that, as the latter suffers decay and dissolution, it also may decay and perish.

In enumerating a few instances of the former class, let me first refer to the fact that touching or stroking with {163} the hand of a corpse is a remedy known in every part of Europe for superficial growths like wens, tetters, and swollen glands. In September 1892, a fashionably dressed young woman was one day seen hovering about a physician’s residence in the north of Berlin. When he went out she met him and timidly prayed him to take her, when he had an opportunity, to a dead body. He thought she must be suffering from overstrain or mental disorder, and brusquely refused her. In nowise daunted, however, she begged him earnestly to grant her request, explaining that her object was to remove a deformity. As she said this, she laid bare a delicate white hand blemished by a bony outgrowth, known among surgeons as exostosis. The medical man became interested; and it was not long before he stood with her in the presence of a corpse. The lady grasped the cold right hand and with it repeatedly and silently stroked the ugly excrescence. Then, without speaking, she left the room in all haste; nor was the physician able to learn who she was, or what had led her to seek this means of relief.^163.1^ In the good old days, when what was called Justice was chiefly exhibited in hanging men with short shrift on every convenient pretext and at every convenient place, this remedy was much easier to obtain than it is to-day. In Europe it was universal; and perhaps it was partly the facility for touching an executed criminal that led to a preference in popular pharmacopœia for such corpses. Partly also it may have arisen from another cause. The victims of violence are often regarded as endowed after {164} death with extraordinary virtue. When that violence took the form of persecution for adherence to the Church, the Church herself encouraged and systematised the superstition to her own profit. Popular sympathy with unmerited suffering extended the Church’s doctrine to other murders, judicial murders among them. And often the Church did not hesitate to sanction the popular canonisation, and appropriate the material gains that followed. But beyond all that the Church could sanction, there remained a margin constantly supplied by the bloodthirsty tribunals, as well as by private enterprise. The former may have been more regular in their action; but one thing is certain. Their victims were more uniformly derived from the classes which were chiefly concerned in forming and preserving tradition. The feeling of oppression would be likely to generalise all executions into martyrdoms, entailing miraculous powers analogous to those recognised by the Church. This would be enough to intensify the operation of any potency believed to be the ordinary property of a corpse, and so to favour the resort to the bodies of criminals.^164.1^

Be this as it may, remedies derived from the dead were, and still are, popular. The Saxons of the Seven Cities cure wens and scrofula by drawing a silken thread through a corpse’s hand and then binding it round the patient’s neck. They hold that a silken band out of a grave is a protection against epilepsy. Earth from a sucking infant’s grave is {165} put upon the mother’s breast to dry up her milk. Gout is healed by rubbing a rag from a dead man’s clothes on the suffering parts and hanging it all night upon a tree. Against cramp, a string wherewith a corpse has been measured is worn on the body next to the skin. A drunkard’s craving for drink is stayed by giving him some of what he best loves, poured over a silver coin which has been placed in a corpse’s mouth. Diseases of the eyes are cured by going early on a fine Sunday morning in spring to a pious man’s grave, and washing the eyes in the dew that lies upon it. Herbs grown in the churchyard, and gathered on Good Friday when the bells are sounding for service, are good against every kind of sickness.^165.1^ Among the Poles and Masurs it is believed that to smell a flower growing in the churchyard causes permanent loss of the sense of smell.^165.2^ The Negro population of Barbados resorts to the touch of a dead hand for all swellings and chronic pains, and believes that to wash the eyes in rum which has been used to wash a corpse is to be safe from disease of the eyes for the future.^165.3^ In the Abruzzi the hand of a dead priest has potency against scrofulous tumours, and a certain remedy for headache is to rub the forehead and temples with the tears of a dying man.^165.4^ A prescription in Middle Silesia, against epilepsy and against toothache is a ring smithied from a coffin-nail found in a grave.^165.5^ In the Netherlands {166} an aching tooth is rubbed with a bone from the churchyard; or, in the province of Namur, the sufferer goes to bite a cross erected on the wayside where a violent death has occurred.^166.1^ The bone, among the Masurs and generally in Prussia, is replaced by the index-finger of a corpse.^166.2^ In old French belief it should be a tooth, if possible the tooth of a man who has come to a violent end, as by hanging; and the best time for its application is on Holy Saturday when the bells are ringing. Other French prescriptions are: for fever, to hang round the neck a human bone taken from the graveyard, or the hem torn (not cut) from a winding-sheet; for colic or lapsus ani, to cut the hem from a winding-sheet, pass it under the loins and wear it as a girdle; for hydrophobia, pills made of the head of a man who has been hanged.^166.3^ In Silesia water left on tombstones will send freckles away. At Gernsbach, in the neighbourhood of Spire, to smear a goitre with the wick of a lamp that has burnt in a dying man’s room will heal it.^166.4^ To cure a Bosnian drunkard, extinguish in brandy one of the candles burning at the head of a corpse before the funeral, and give him the brandy to drink. Even a bit of the wick when the candle is put out in the ordinary course, {167} given in brandy, will be sufficient; or indeed brandy bought with a coin which has been used to close the eyes of the dead.^167.1^ The last is doubtless a degenerate form of a superstition akin to that of the Transylvanian Saxons adduced just now. In the Lettish prescription the corpse’s mouth is to be washed out, and the water given to the tippler. After drinking it, we are told, he can never drink again, which is quite likely.^167.2^ The reasoning which has given rise to all these beliefs perhaps applies also to the tradition in Wales, Ireland and the Isle of Man that it is unlucky to disturb old burial-places and old churches, and utilise their materials. Professor Rhys relates an example in which a farmer in the Ronnag, a small valley near South Barrule, in the Isle of Man, carted earth from an old burial-ground and used it to manure his fields. His cattle died, and every one attributed it to this cause. The farmer himself was convinced at last, and desisted from the desecration.^167.3^ A similar story is told of a cattle-dealer in the parish of Templepatrick, near Belfast, who attempted to use the soil of an ancient fort as a top-dressing for his land.^167.4^ We may compare with these instances a curious Manx curse: “May a stone of the church be found in the head of thy dwelling!”^167.5^ It would seem as if that which had been part of, or had become by contact united with, the dead, or had been part of the subject of a taboo, were still, notwithstanding severance, in indissoluble connection with the remainder, and thus capable of communicating its evil effects or of bringing into similar connection any other {168} object. Too much stress, however, cannot be laid on this conjecture at present. The question needs further investigation.

The other class of prescriptions consists of such as the following. An English cure for boils mentioned by Mr. Thiselton Dyer was to poultice for three days and nights, and then to place the poultices, cloths and all, in the coffin of a body about to be buried.^168.1^ In Germany, when a sucking babe dies, the mother puts a bottle of her milk in the coffin, and then the breast dries up without making her ill.^168.2^ To the same end a South Slavonic mother sticks in the infant’s shift over the breast two pins, probably to be taken from her own. The coffin-lid must not be nailed at the head and foot, else the mother will bear no more, or if she bear, it will be a difficult labour.^168.3^ In Silesia, to destroy lice, bugs and moths, it is recommended to catch a few specimens, bottle them up in a quill and secretly by a waning moon lay the quill in the coffin of a spotless maiden.^168.4^ The population of North Carolina is mainly of German descent. There, by the same process of logic, it is forbidden in making garments for the dead to bite the thread, lest the teeth rot.^168.5^ The Transylvanian Saxons spit into an open grave to heal sore throat.^168.6^ In East Prussia, as in West Sussex, a child is cured of a certain nightly offence by being taken to an open grave to repeat it.^168.7^ In Donegal, warts are got rid of by throwing some clay from under {169} your right foot in the path by which a funeral is going, and by saying: “Corpse of clay, carry my warts away.” This must be done three times, and as the corpse decays in the grave the warts will vanish.^169.1^ As might be expected, to bring warts into contact with a corpse is a specially efficacious means of getting rid of them. In the Obererzgebirge warts or any other superficial ailments are rubbed with a piece of linen, which is then laid in the coffin with a corpse.^169.2^ To recover from the ague in the Netherlands the sufferer’s garter used to be tied round a gallows.^169.3^ When a death occurs in Poland, if anything has been stolen from the family, a similar object, or a piece of the same stuff, is laid in the coffin; and as it decays the thief withers away and dies. It is even enough, in case of robbery, to lay a portion of the stolen goods in the churchyard.^169.4^ We considered in the last chapter the identification of the thief with the property stolen, and no more need be added on the subject.

The principle which underlies all these practices dictated the sympathetic treatment of wounds by washing and keeping clean and bright the instrument inflicting them—a treatment taught by Paracelsus, believed in by Bacon and proclaimed as a valuable discovery by Sir Kenelm Digby, who learned it in France. Though long since discredited by science, it is still in use among the peasantry of England, and can be traced backwards into savagery. A few instances will suffice to exhibit the vast area over which it {170} is found, and the different modes of its application. In Sussex a few years ago Mrs. Latham saw it actually in use. A man had been accidentally wounded by a sword-stick, and the whole time he was confined to his bed the sword-stick was kept hung at his bed’s head, and was polished at stated intervals day and night, and anxiously examined lest a spot of rust be found thereon; for that would have been a token that the wounded man would die.^170.1^ In Suffolk, if a horse be lamed by treading on a nail, the nail must be found, cleaned and kept bright and well greased; and in dressing a human wound the old plaster must be buried, not burnt, else the wound will not heal.^170.2^ Similar treatment of a wound by a tool or weapon was practised within the memory of living men by the descendants of the Dutch settlers in the Hudson River.^170.3^ About Schaffhausen and Solothurn it is held that if one be pricked with a needle, the wound will heal the sooner if the needle be at once plunged into wax.^170.4^ In the Tirol, in order to prevent a wound from giving trouble, the weapon that has caused it is immediately stuck into ash-wood.^170.5^ About Siena a nail which has inflicted any hurt is gently warmed over the fire with a clove of garlic in oil prepared from herbs gathered on Saint John’s day, and it is then used to sprinkle the oil about.^170.6^ In Esthonia, if you cut your finger, you are advised to bite the blade of the knife, and the wound will then cease to bleed.^170.7^ Among the Galician Jews, if a child fall on the floor, the pain will pass away, provided {171} water be poured on the floor, at the spot where the child came in contact with it.^171.1^ These superstitions are not a whit more civilised than those of the races we call savage. Dr. Boas mentions a tribe of North American Indians who are very careful to keep the arrow that has wounded a friend concealed, and as far from the fire as possible; for he would be very ill if, while still covered with blood, it were put into the fire.^171.2^ Melanesians keep the arrow, when extracted, in a damp place, or in cool leaves; then the inflammation will be little and soon subside. A story is told by Dr. Codrington of a man who aimed at another with a ghost-shooter, that is to say, a magically prepared arrow which does not actually reach the foe, but is only believed to do so by being directed towards him. In this case the man’s next of kin, his sister’s child, happened to come between him and the object of his aim, and he felt sure he had hit it full. To prevent inflammation of the imaginary wound he put the contents of his ghost-shooter into water, and the child took no hurt. If a Melanesian have really shot another, and can get back the arrow, he puts it into the fire. To heat the wound he will keep the bow near the fire; and the bowstring will be kept taut and occasionally pulled, to bring on tension of the nerves and tetanus in the wounded man. Or a bundle of certain leaves, tied on the bow will produce a fatal result. Nor is this all. The assailant and his friends will drink hot and burning juices, and chew irritating leaves; they will burn pungent and bitter herbs to produce an irritating smoke. The wound by his arrow has set up such union between the shooter and his victim that these proceedings {172} are expected to react upon the latter.^172.1^ The Zulus are said to have the like belief. They think that if the corpse of a slain enemy swell up, they themselves will suffer pain in the intestines. If they have time, therefore, they tear out the entrails of their fallen foes; if not, they pierce the navel with an assegai, as was done to the body of young Bonaparte, the Imperialist Pretender.^172.2^

“A hair of the dog that bit you” is a remedy which has passed into a proverb. In dealing with witchcraft we had occasion to note some instances of its application, as when the dust of a witch’s footprint is rubbed on the bespelled animal. The Abruzzians hold the bite of a cat to be venomous; and their prescription for it is a bit of the same cat’s fur applied with pounded garlic. So, for a serpent-bite a portion of the skin of the creature is put on the wound; but, as Signor Finamore remarks, the question is to get it.^172.3^ In Sicily the sting of one of the small scorpions found in damp places in the island is healed by scorpion-oil prepared from the same scorpion. The mode of preparing the oil is to decapitate the animal and plunge it into a vessel of oil, which is then closed tightly.^172.4^ In Devonshire a person who is bitten by a viper is advised at once to kill the creature and rub the wound with its fat; and the flesh of a rattlesnake is accounted the best cure for its own bite in the Northern States of America.^172.5^ In Belgium a dog’s bite is to be healed by inducing a bitch to {173} lick the sore.^173.1^ The reason for the treatment is obscure in some of these cases; but we shall probably be right in referring its origin to the desire to set up union between the victim and the animal inflicting the wound, by means of a detached portion of the latter’s substance. This view is strengthened by the treatment directed, in the neighbourhood of Masulipatam, for a scorpion which has stung a man. The brute is to be caught by slipping a noose over its tail, and tied to something to prevent its wandering. For the more it wanders, the more the poison will wander in the man’s body; while to kill it may have the effect of killing its victim. Here the union by means of the injected poison is already complete, and the scorpion is dealt with accordingly.^173.2^

Folk-leechcraft thus provides us with further illustration of the theory lying at the foundation of the story-incident of the Life-token. A severed portion of the body, or any of its issues, or anything once in contact with it, though now detached, is none the less believed to continue in real, if unapparent, connection with it. Whatever, therefore, is undergone by the one, is undergone also by the other. For the purposes of healing, as of injury, to affect the one is to affect the other. It is curious that a large number of the remedies prescribed are of a character that, judging from the examples of witchcraft in the last chapter, one would suppose calculated to inflict injury rather than to heal. To hang in the chimney things which have become united with the patient’s body, or to put them into a coffin, if done with malicious intent, would certainly result in evil to the victim. We must, however, be at all times prepared to {174} find tradition inconsistent. In the cases referred to, the disease is thought of, rather than the patient, as identified with the object operated on; and the intention is to destroy the disease by causing it to waste away. Probably the prescription was at first applied only to excrescences and other diseased growths, like warts, tumours and wens. These alone were touched by the dead hand, or by the cloth, or the spider, which was to be enclosed in the grave, or hung in the chimney. The remedy having been tried for them, would be extended to other ailments, without adverting to the reason of its primitive limitation. So far as regards objects committed to the keeping of the dead, a comparison of love-charms comprising the same process will have suggested an alternative explanation, namely, that they are brought thus into permanent contact with the corpse for the purpose of putting them under the influence of the departed spirit. This is a less materialistic explanation, and one that will have weight with students who can estimate the importance, in savage life, of the worship of the dead. It is possible that there may be an element of truth in it, as well as in the explanation which regards the objects as merely intended to be affected by the physical decay and corruption of the corpse. But, either way, is clearly necessary the postulate that the disease in the patient’s body is capable of being affected by the influence, whatever it may be, on the objects in contact with the dead,—that in them, and by means of them, the patient himself is actually in contact also.

Chapter XI. Sacred Wells and Trees

In the light of the results thus obtained by an examination of certain of the methods of witchcraft and folk-medicine, we next approach a group of rites known in one form or other from shore to shore of the Old World, and the principle of which has regulated religious observances alike in North and South America. These rites are very numerous in the British islands; and it will be convenient to start from some of the most modern forms found in Great Britain. Professor Rhys, in a paper read a year or two ago before a joint meeting of the Cymmrodorion and Folklore Societies, quotes a correspondent as saying of Ffynnon Cae Moch, about half-way between Coychurch and Bridgend, in Glamorganshire: “People suffering from rheumatism go there. They bathe the part affected with water, and afterwards tie a piece of rag to the tree which overhangs the well. The rag is not put in the water at all, but is only put on the tree for luck. It is a stunted but very old tree, and is simply covered with rags.” In another case, that of Ffynnon Eilian (Elian’s Well), near Abergele in Denbighshire, of which Professor Rhys was informed by Mrs. Evans, the late wife of Canon Silvan Evans, some bushes near the well had once been covered with bits of {176} rags left by those who frequented it. The rags used to be tied to the bushes by means of wool—not woollen yarn, but wool in its natural state. Corks with pins stuck in them were floating in the well when Mrs. Evans visited it, though the rags had apparently disappeared from the bushes. The well in question, it is noted, had once been in great repute as “a well to which people resorted for the kindly purpose of bewitching those whom they hated.” The Ffynnon Cefn Lleithfan, or Well of the Lleithfan Ridge, on the eastern slope of Mynydd y Rhiw, in the parish of Bryncroes, in the west of Carnarvonshire, is a resort for the cure of warts. The sacred character of the well may be inferred from the silence in which it is necessary to go and come, and from the prohibition to turn or look back. The wart is to be bathed at the well with a rag or clout, which has grease on it. The clout must then be carefully concealed beneath the stone at the mouth of the well. The Professor, repeating this account of the well, given him by a Welsh collector of folk-lore, says: “This brings to my mind the fact that I have, more than once, years ago, noticed rags underneath stones in the water flowing from wells in Wales, and sometimes thrust into holes in the walls of wells, but I had no notion how they came there.” The Rev. Elias Owen, writing on the Holy Wells of North Wales, relates that the patients who came to the Ffynnon Awen, or Muses’ Well, in the upper part of Llanrhaiadr, near Denbigh, buried under a stone close to or in the well the pieces of wool they had used in washing their wounds.^176.1^

Professor Rhys, in the paper just cited, mentions several {177} wells wherein it was usual to drop pins; but the most detailed account was afterwards furnished by Mr. T. E. Morris, from a correspondent who supplied him with the following information relating to Ffynnon Faglan (St Baglan’s Well) in the parish of Llanfaglan, Carnarvonshire: “The old people who would be likely to know anything about Ffynnon Faglan have all died. The two oldest inhabitants, who have always lived in this parish (Llanfaglan), remember the well being used for healing purposes. One told me his mother used to take him to it when he was a child, for sore eyes, bathe them with the water, and then drop in a pin. The other man, when he was young, bathed in it for rheumatism, and until quite lately people used to fetch away the water for medicinal purposes. The latter, who lives near the well at Tan-y-graig, said that he remembered it being cleared out about fifty years ago, when two basins-full of pins were taken out, but no coin of any kind. The pins were all bent, and I conclude the intention was to exorcise the evil spirit supposed to afflict the person who dropped them in, or, as the Welsh say, dadwitsio. No doubt some ominous words were also used. The well is at present nearly dry, the field where it lies having been drained some years ago, and the water in consequence withdrawn from it. It was much used for the cure of warts. The wart was washed, then pricked with a pin, which, after being bent, was thrown into the well.”^177.1^

In England the custom is well known of throwing pins into the water or hanging rags torn from the devotee’s {178} clothing upon the neighbouring bushes and trees.^178.1^ But without pausing on English examples we pass at once to Ireland. There sacred wells and other places of pilgrimage are numerous and interesting. Mr. W. C. Borlase, quoting from the manuscripts of the late Mr. Windele of Cork, mentions the cromlech of Maul na holtora, in Kerry, as reputed to contain a well to which a legend of a sacred fish attached. It was a place of pilgrimage every Saturday. “The brambles are tied with rags, and there is a deposit of pins as offerings.” The ritual prescribed at this and similar places of pilgrimage is the performance of a circuit from point to point, right-hand-wise, or in the direction of the sun, the recital of a certain number of paternosters and aves, just as at the stations of the Cross in a Roman Catholic church, and finally the deposit of the offering of a rag or pins. A well at Finmagh, in Roscommon, in which a Druid was said to be buried, was regarded as a deity. Here, however, the offerings, thrust through a hole or cleft in the roof, were of gold and silver.^178.2^ This is a rare case. Quite recently Professor Haddon and Dr. Browne found, in the Aran Islands, Galway, rags attached to sprays of the bramble or ivy at most of the holy wells. Buttons, fish-hooks, iron nails, shells, pieces of crockery and other things are deposited in the holy well at Tempulan-Cheathruir-aluinn, or the Church of the Four Comely Ones.^178.3^ Turish Lyn, a pool in the stream a little below Kilgort Bridge, in County Derry, is still resorted to for the cure of various diseases. Among the offerings left on a {179} bush beside the stream are enumerated a piece of cloth, a lock of hair and three stones picked up from the pool.^179.1^ A number of other instances are cited by Mr. Gomme from various authorities.^179.2^ What seems an analogous custom is declared by Sir Ralph Payne-Gallwey to be practised at the Large Skellig, off the coast of Kerry. This island contains the ruin of an ancient monastery, and is accounted a holy place. When workmen from the mainland have been employed on the buildings on the Skellig and are bidding farewell to the island, “they invariably cast some well-worn article of clothing, oftener than not a pair of shoes, at a solitary rock, known as the Blue Man, which stands abruptly out of the ocean.”^179.3^

In the Isle of Man there is a well called Chibber Unjin, or Ash-tree Well, which I mention for the sake of calling attention to an interesting detail of the rite. A patient visiting the well had to take a mouthful of water, retaining it in his mouth until he had made the circuit of the well, and then empty it upon a rag of his own clothing, which he afterwards tied on the hawthorn growing there.^179.4^

I select a few examples out of a large number from Scotland. Saint Wallach’s Well and Bath in the parish of Glass, Aberdeenshire, are famous for their healing qualities. {180} The former is now dry, save in rainy weather; but it was frequented by persons with sore eyes, “and every one who went to it left a pin in a hole which had been cut either by nature or by art in a stone beside the well.” The bath is a cavity in the rock, supplied by a spring which flows into it and overflows into the river Deveron. Children who did not thrive were brought and dipped in it, “a rag, an old shirt, or a bib from the child’s body being hung on a tree beside the bath, or thrown into it.”^180.1^ “There is a big rugged rock,” says the Rev. Walter Gregor, “on the top of Ben Newe in Strathdon, Aberdeenshire. On the north side of this rock, under a projection, there is a small circular-shaped hollow which always contains water. Every one that goes to the top of the hill must put some small object into it, and then take a draught of water off it. Unless this is done the traveller will not reach in life the foot of the hill. I climbed the hill in June of 1890, and saw in the well several pins, a small bone, a pill-box, a piece of a flower, and a few other objects.”^180.2^ Saint John’s Well, at Balmano, in the parish of Marykirk, Kincardineshire, was reputed to heal sore eyes and rickety children. The “oblations” left here were generally pins, needles and rags taken from the pilgrim’s clothes. In the island of St. Kilda is a consecrated well called Tobir-minbuadh, or Well of diverse Virtues. The votaries laid their offerings on an “altar” (probably a rock, or perhaps a rude stone monument) that stood near; and Macaulay in his History of St. Kilda sarcastically remarks: “The devotees were abundantly frugal.… Shells and pebbles, rags of linen or stuffs worn out, pins, needles or rusty nails were generally all the tribute that was paid; and sometimes, though {181} rarely enough, copper coins of the smallest value.” Of Loch-siant Well in the island of Skye we read that the sick people who made a pilgrimage to it, after drinking “move thrice round the well, proceeding sun-ways,” and it was “a never-failing custom to leave some small offering on the stone which covers the well. There is a small coppice near it, of which none of the natives dare venture to cut the least branch, for fear of some signal judgment to follow upon it.”^181.1^ And Mr. David MacRitchie, recording similar offerings at Grew’s Well, Stormont, Perthshire, made on the first Sunday of May (Old Style), and speaking from the information of an old woman on the spot, says: “No good whatever was expected to result from the bathing if no offering was left.”^181.2^ It is rarely that an offering of value is recorded at these wells. A spring is, however, mentioned by Mr. Gregor, called Tobar-fuarmor, in Aberdeenshire, where no cure was effected unless gold was presented.^181.3^ The well and tree on the island of Maelrubha in Loch Maree are dedicated to Saint Maree, or Mourie. We need not concern ourselves whether this holy man ever existed in the flesh. It is clear that he succeeded to the divinity of an ancient heathen god, and wielded all, and perhaps more than all, his predecessor’s powers. Whether the mediæval church ever struggled against the deeply-rooted cult we do not know. Since the Reformation the Dingwall presbytery has in vain striven to destroy it, though at last it seems to be dying before the blasts of modern disbelief. {182} Miss Godden, who visited the shrine in the summer of 1893, describes the tree—an oak—“as a slight white trunk—bare, branchless, leafless, with spreading foot, and jagged and broken top. The cracks and clefts in the stem are studded with coins, nails, screws, and rusty iron fragments. No sign of leaf or shoot remains to give the gaunt shaft any touch of common vegetation. It stands alone and inviolate—a Sacred Tree. In the damp ground at the tree’s foot is a small dark hole, the sides of which are roughly formed by stones overhung with moss and grass. A cover of unwrought stone lies beside it, and it is filled up with dead leaves. This is the healing well of power unspeakable in cases of lunacy.… The tree,” she adds, “is now a Wishing Tree, and the driving in of a bit of metal is the only necessary act.” The well, in fact, long so famous, is now disused, and the ritual of the shrine is in the last stage of decay. Formerly, when an afflicted person was brought thither for the cure of insanity, a portion of his clothing was attached to a nail, which was driven on his behalf into the tree. Sir Arthur Mitchell in the year 1860 found two bone buttons and two buckles nailed to the tree, and a faded ribbon fluttering from another nail. The tree, now dead as the superstition which hallowed it, was then living. Countless pennies and halfpennies had been driven edgewise into it, and the bark was closing over many of them, while it was believed to have covered many others.^182.1^

We turn to the continent of Europe. Close parallels to the practices at the shrine at Maelrubha are found in Germany and Belgium. Such is the ceremony prescribed for hernia in Mecklenburgh. A cross is made over the affected part {183} with a nail on a Friday; and the nail is then driven, in unbroken silence, into a young beech or oak. The operation is repeated on the two Fridays following. A variant prescription directs the part to be touched with a coffin-nail, which is then to be driven over its head into the tree by the sufferer, barefoot and silent. As the nail is overgrown by the bark, the hernia will be healed.^183.1^ In this case the rite does not seem to be attached to any specially hallowed tree. I cited some similar instances in the last chapter, and others will be mentioned presently. We must first consider, however, some cases where the sacred character of the object, whether well or tree, is unquestionable.

In Belgium, halfway between Braine l’Alleud and the wood of Le Foriet, two hollow, and therefore doubtless very ancient, roads cross one another. Two aged pine-trees are planted at the top of the bank at one of the corners; and formerly there stood between them a cross, which has disappeared for some thirty years. It was a very ancient custom to bury in the pines, and even in the cross, pins or nails, in order to obtain the cure of persons attacked by fevers of various kinds. The pins and nails thus employed must have been previously in contact with the patient or his clothes. If any one took out one of these pins or nails from the pines or the cross, and carried it home, it was believed that the disease would certainly have been communicated to some member of his family. The custom is said to have fallen out of use. Yet M. Schepers, who visited the place in September 1891, and to whose article on the subject in Wallonia, a periodical published at Liège, I am indebted for these particulars, found not {184} only rusty nails in the pines, but also pins quite recently planted. He was told that it was equally customary to roll round the pines, or the arms of the cross, some band of cloth or other stuff which had touched the sufferer. As soon as the nail or pin had been driven in, or the ribbon fastened, the operator used to run away as hard as he could. The spot was called À l’crwe Saint Zè, St. Etto’s Cross, or Aux deux Sapins, The two Pine-trees. Saint Etto, it seems, was an Irish missionary to these parts in the seventh century.^184.1^ Nor is this by any means the only instance in Belgium. Two old lime-trees on either side of a Calvary, near the convent of Soleilmont at Gilly, in Hainaut, are covered with nails; and a similar tree is found behind a chapel between Trazegnies and Chapelle-lez-Herlaimont in the same province. At Chastrés, near Walcourt, a chapel of Our Lady is shown with pins thrown in through the interstices of the gate by devotees on reciting their prayers. Numbers of pins have also been taken from the beds of the Meuse and the Sambre at ancient fords, though whether they were put into the water for any superstitious purpose is uncertain.^184.2^

At Croisic, in Upper Brittany, there is a well, called the Well of Saint Goustan, into which pins are thrown by those who wish to be married during the year. If the wish be granted, the pin will fall straight to the bottom. Similar practices are said to be performed in Lower Brittany, and in Poitou and Elsass.^184.3^ Girls used to resort to the little {185} shrine of Saint Guirec, which stands on an isolated rock below high-water mark on the beach at Perros Guirec in Lower Brittany, to pray for husbands. The worshipper, her prayer concluded, stuck a pin into the wooden statue of the saint; and when I saw the shrine, in the year 1889, the figure was riddled from top to toe with pinholes. It was said that the prayer for a husband would infallibly be granted within a year. On the other side of Brittany, in the Morbihan, there is a chapel dedicated to Saint Uférier, credited with a similar reputation. The saint’s foot, if I may be guilty of a bull, is almost entirely composed of holes. It is, however, necessary here that the pin should be a new one and quite straight; not that the prayer will not be granted otherwise, but the husband will be crooked, humpbacked, and lame. In Upper Brittany, at St. Lawrence’s Chapel near Quintin and elsewhere, the condition is that the pin be planted at the first blow; the marriage will then take place within the year.^185.1^ To avoid either the disfigurement or the desecration of this practice the authorities of the churches of Saint Peter at Louvain and of Bon-Secours at Brussels thoughtfully provide pincushions to receive the proofs of the worshippers’ pious enthusiasm;^185.2^ but in Brittany the good priests are less fastidious.

Where the statue is of stone, it is of course impossible to plant the pins. They are then simply laid upon it, or thrust into cracks or hollows in the surface. At Loscouët young children are taken to the Virgin of Menès near the mill of Meu, in order that they may soon walk. The Virgin in question is nothing but the battered remains of a mullion {186} from a window in the ruined château of Menès, formerly the residence of the lords of Loscouët before the signory passed to the abbé of Saint Méen. This mullion the simple peasants take for a statue. The children are held by the armpits, and made to walk thrice round the Virgin, and pins are then placed upon her arms. At Penvenan the chapel of Notre Dame du Port-Blanc is resorted to for the same object. The parents exercise themselves in throwing small coins from the nave into the choir at the statues of the Virgin, and of Saint Yves of the Poor, and afterwards at those of Dives and Lazarus. The children are then put to pick the coins up and drop them into the Virgin’s coffer. Lastly, they are marched round the pavement outside the chapel; and within a fortnight they will certainly walk.^186.1^

All over France the like practices exist, or have died out only within comparatively recent years. In the Protestant villages of Montbéliard, between the Vosges and the Jura, at the moment of celebration of a wedding a nail was planted in the gallery (or, in some places, in the floor) of the church, to “nail” or fasten the marriage. In various parts of the country there are stone or iron crosses which have doubtless replaced wooden ones. In the case of these new crosses, votaries must content themselves with depositing pins upon the arms or the pedestal, or in the joints.^186.2^ In the valley of Lunain there is a menhir called the Pierre Frite, in almost every hole or fissure of which may be found a pin or a nail, placed there by the youth of the neighbourhood in the belief that this action will bring a {187} speedy marriage.^187.1^ The well of Moniés in the department of Tarn had, at the beginning of the present century, a great renown for the cure of various diseases. The rags which had been used in bathing with the sacred water the diseased members, were left stretched out on the neighbouring bushes.^187.2^ An instance where the honour and glory, not to say the substantial gains attendant on the superstition, were early annexed by the Church is that of St. Michel-la-Rivière in the diocese of Bordeaux. Both the honour and the gains were considerable in the seventeenth century, as appears from quarrels between the curé and the fabriqueur of the church decided by the Archbishop of Bordeaux, and other orders made by him. The sick man was required to pass through a hole called a veyrine at the end of the apse; and the patients left offerings not merely of linen, but also of money, wax, and other things.^187.3^ Nor was this case at all singular; for similar practices obtained wherever in the diocese was a church dedicated to St. Michael. In a North German example the object of veneration was an oak-tree; and the pilgrim, after creeping through the hole in the prescribed manner, completed the performance by burying a piece of money under the roots. As many as a hundred patients a day are said to have visited it.^187.4^ Here the Church had neglected her opportunities.

We have already dealt with the custom of creeping {188} through trees. Our concern at present is with the offerings. Passing the Pyrenees, let us note that in the seventeenth century it was usual to stick needles or pins in a certain tree belonging to the church of Saint Christopher, situated on a high mountain near the city of Pampeluna.^188.1^ At Naples it used to be the custom to lead a sick horse round the church of Saint Elias, and afterwards to fasten one of his shoes on the church-door.^188.2^ One who suffers from intermittent fever will go and hang a small pebble on the inside of the door of Saint Giles’ church in the Abruzzian commune of Lanciano.^188.3^

A rite hitherto unexplained was practised from very early times at Rome. From the date of the erection of the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus it was the custom on the festival of the dedication, the Ides of September, for the highest person of the state to drive a nail into the right wall of the Cella Jovis. This was usually done by the consuls or prætor; but in case of the appointment of a dictator the latter performed the ceremony. After it was dropped as an annual performance, recourse was occasionally had to it for the staying of a pestilence, or as an atonement for crime. More ancient still was the corresponding Etruscan practice of sticking a nail every year into the temple of Nortia, the fate-goddess.^188.4^ Curious parallels to this custom are found in modern Europe. Near Angers was an oak which bore the singular name of Lapalud. It was regarded as of the same antiquity as the town, and was covered with nails to the height of ten feet or thereabouts. From {189} time immemorial every journeyman carpenter, joiner, or mason who passed it, used to stick a nail in it. Near the cathedral at Vienna was the stock of an old tree, called the Stock im Eisen, said to be the last remnant of an ancient forest which once covered the neighbourhood. Every workman who passed through Vienna was expected to fasten a nail in it; and it was in fact invested with a complete coat of mail, consisting entirely of the heads of the nails it had thus received.^189.1^ These two examples existed almost down to the present day; elsewhere the rite appears to be still in full force. At Evessen stands a lime-tree on a barrow wherein a golden coffin is believed to have been buried. In the trunk (which is seven mètres in girth at the height of one mètre from the soil) are driven numbers of nails, some of them recently fixed. This is often done by travelling apprentices.^189.2^

At Athens, mothers bring their sick children to the little church of Santa Marina, under the Observatory Hill, and there undress them, leaving the old clothes behind. There is a dripping well near Kotzanes, in Macedonia, “said to issue from the Nereids’ breasts, and to cure all human ills. Those who would drink of it must enter the cave with a torch or lamp in one hand and pitcher in the other, which they must fill with the water, and, leaving some scrap of their clothing behind them, must turn round without being scared by the noises they may hear within, and quit the cave without ever looking back.”^189.3^ Among the inscriptions discovered at Epidauros, recording the miraculous cures attributed to Asklepios, is the record of what happened to {190} Pandaros, a Thessalian who was afflicted with certain unsightly marks upon his forehead. The god appeared to him in a dream, pressing a bandage on the spots and directing him when he left the chamber to take off the bandage and deposit it as an offering in the temple. When the patient untied the bandage in the morning, the marks were transferred to it, leaving his forehead free; and he left the bandage in the temple, with this proof of his recovery,^190.1^ just as crutches are left in modern times at Roman Catholic shrines by persons who believe themselves healed by the presiding saint. It is clear from a reference by Aristophanes that the Greeks were in the habit on certain occasions of hanging articles of their clothing on, or even nailing them to, sacred trees as an offering to the god.^190.2^ Indeed, allusions to the practice are not uncommon in Greek poetry. Among the Romans, Pompey is compared by Lucan to a lofty oak, hung with old clothes and other votive offerings; and Vergil describes an olive-tree whereon the vests and votive tablets of mariners who had escaped shipwreck were suspended.^190.3^ To-day in Lesbos sick women vow to walk before Our Lady, or one of the saints, with bare feet, flowing hair, and their hands tied behind their backs with a handkerchief which they subsequently leave suspended on the image. In one of their tied hands they must contrive to carry a large lighted taper. Lofty sacred trees are still numerous, frequently growing in {191} the vicinity of some chapel. The sick suspend on the branches their shirts or their girdles, in the hope, we are told, of leaving their ailments there. Feverish patients hang their clothes on a tree near the chapel of Saint John.^191.1^

In the Baltic Provinces of the Russian Empire stands a great sacred aspen near the village of Röiks, which, up to the year 1845 at all events, was hung with wreaths and many-coloured ribbons to win the favour of the tree-spirit for sick cattle. Near Pallifer stood in the seventeenth century two holy elms, which are reported to have been hung and bound with ribbons, this time for the healing of human ailments and to obtain good luck. An old lime-tree near the chapel of Keppo is also held sacred. Passers-by tear off ribbons and rags from their clothing and nail them upon it. The trees of the sacred woods on the island of Oesel are hung with rags by the Esthonian inhabitants of the island.^191.2^ In the district of Vynnytzia, government of Podolia in Ukrainia, there is a mineral spring much resorted to. The sick, after bathing, hang to the branches of the trees their shirts, handkerchiefs, and other articles, “as a mark,” says M. Volkov, who reports the case, “that their diseases are left there.”^191.3^

In the last chapter I mentioned a practice of the Masurs in Eastern Prussia of taking off the patient’s shirt after an attack of fever, carrying it to a cross-road and suspending it on a signpost. It is probable that the signpost represents a sacred tree, or perhaps a cross. In Hungary there are two fountains resorted to for the cure of ailing limbs; but it is essential to wait until the water-spirit is in a good humour and to leave behind as an offering articles of {192} clothing and hair from the head. These are put upon the trees that stand around. Both in Hungary and in Transylvania ill-luck is like to befall one when his name-day happens on a Friday. To avoid the threatening evil, a rag is torn off the clothing, and hung, in Transylvania, on a tree before sunrise. The Magyar puts some of his blood and saliva on the rag and then burns it.^192.1^

Leaving the real meaning of these ceremonies to be considered hereafter, we go on for the present with the search for parallel superstitions in other parts of the world. In Hindustan, a festival called Melá is held at the beginning of the month of Mágha (about the middle of January) at the island of Ságar, at the mouth of the Hugli. A temple of Kapila, who is held to be an incarnation of Vishnu, stands on the island, and in front of it is (or was) a Bur-tree, beneath which were images of Ráma and Hanumán, while an image of Kapila, nearly of life-size, was within the temple. The pilgrims who crowd thither at the festival commonly write their names on the walls, with a short prayer to Kapila, or suspend a piece of earth or brick from a bough of the tree, offering at the same time a prayer and a promise, if the prayer be granted, to make a gift to some divinity.^192.2^ Shreds of clothing and feathers may be seen flying from the posts erected on the roofs of the Toda temple-huts in the Neilgherry Hills. The Korwas hang rags on the tree which constitutes the shrine of their village gods. The Patáris, when attacked by fever, tie round a pípal-tree a cotton string that has never touched water, and suspend rags from the branches. Elsewhere in India, as well as in Arabia and Persia, strips of cloth are {193} suspended from shrubs and trees, which, for some reason or other, are venerated; and, in Persia at all events, not only are rags, amulets, and other votive offerings found upon the trees, but the trees are also covered with nails.^193.1^ At the source of the Jordan, as I am informed by Dr. Robert Munro, there is a tree hung with rags; and indeed such trees are not uncommon throughout Asiatic Turkey. Mohammed is said to have made a pilgrimage to a similar one. At Tyana, in Cappadocia, was a pillar to which persons used to go to nail their fevers.^193.2^ With this last may be compared an Athenian legend of Saint John, who is declared to have been a physician especially skilled in the treatment of fevers. Before his death he set up a column and bound under its foundations with silken threads all manner of diseases; fevers with a yellow thread, measles with a red one, and so forth. And he said: “When I die, let whosoever is sick come and tie to this column a silken thread with three knots of the colour that his sickness takes, and say, ‘Dear Saint John, I bind my sickness to the column, and do by thy favour loose it from me,’ and then he will be healed.”^193.3^ Neither of these is an ordinary case of transference, however it may look like it at first sight. It falls rather into the category of rags used to bathe a wounded limb and left in the holy well or on the bushes adjacent.

In Tibet there are numerous heaps of stones erected by wayfarers, to which every one who passes adds, and where he prays. Lamas who come by set up stakes, fastening thereon a bit of silk or other stuff, so that they resemble flags. At the tops of the passes in the mountains between Siam and Burmah are found heaps of stones. Passengers, besides stones, lay down on them flowers and leaves. Among the Mongols heaps of this kind are called obo; and they are said to be all consecrated by Buddhist lamas. Pousselgue describes one on a difficult pass between Urga and Kiachta. A rude image of Buddha was formed of two roughly chiselled blocks. By it stood a large granite urn for the burning of incense; and all around were numbers of stakes covered with offerings of clouts, pieces of paper, prayer-wheels, and even purses and objects of precious metal. Pousselgue’s guide bowed down before the obo and offered up a bit of his fur-robe.^194.1^ Nobody who has read Mr. Cooper’s amusing account of his marriage unawares to a girl in Eastern Tibet will forget how, when he got up to the top of a high hill, a little later in the day, with his bride, the lady contributed her quota of stones and prayers at the inevitable cairn, and then insisted, first, that in order to secure their connubial happiness the baggage must be unpacked and a couple of Khatah cloths taken out and fastened by her unwilling bridegroom to the flag-staves, and then that he must prostrate himself in prayer with her. “And there, on the summit of a Tibetan mountain, kneeling before a heap of stones, my hand wet with the tears of a daughter of the country, I muttered curses on the fate that had placed me in such a position.”^194.2^ Similarly an English traveller in Ladákh was compelled to gratify the spirits of {195} a certain pass with an offering of the leg of a worn-out pair of nankin trousers.^195.1^ Nor is the custom confined to Buddhists. Among the Mrús of the Chittagong Hills every one on reaching the crest of a hill which he is crossing “plucks a fresh young shoot of grass, and places it on a pile of the withered offerings of former journeyers who have gone before.”^195.2^

The Karakasses, too, of Eastern Siberia make to the mountains and rivers which they pass offerings of tobacco, a branch of a tree, a strip of a pelisse or some other trifle. The Kamtchadales and Teleouts offer pine-branches, pieces of meat, fish or cheese, packets of hair or horsehair, little furs or ribbons of cloth. The offerings dedicated to a mountain are suspended from a tree on some hill or other conspicuous place. The Tunguz call these trees Nalaktits.^195.3^ Erman, the German traveller in Siberia, records having seen in the woods between Churopchinsk and Aruilákhinsk trees, at different points along the road, hung thick with horse-hair. It was an ancient custom of the nomadic Yakuts, he was told, to put tufts of their horses’ hair on these trees, and many of the tufts “had so weather-beaten an appearance, that there could be no doubt of their antiquity.” Every horseman who passed added to them, and the custom was called by a name signifying propitiation for the Spirit of the Woods.^195.4^ In the Alazeï Mountains, on the road from Kolymsk to Verkhoiansk, is the tomb of a famous Tchuktchi sorceress. All who pass deposit offerings: on the cross they hang strips of cloth and horsehair; at its foot they lay pieces of meat and fish. {196} He who forgets this act of homage is always punished. The devils cause him to lose his way, his horse breaks a limb, or his sledge is shattered.^196.1^ The Kirghiz honour a solitary poplar, said to be the only tree standing between Fort Orsk on the Ural river and the Sea of Aral. It is covered with shreds torn from the clothing of the tribesmen who have worshipped at it. A certain wild plum-tree is also reverenced in the same way. The number of rags and pieces of sheep-skin attached to it is constantly increasing.^196.2^ Every traveller from Marco Polo downward speaks of the practice as rife in Central Asia. Many of the Tartars are Mohammedans; and the shrine of every Mohammedan saint is adorned with rams’ horns and with long bits of dirty rag, a pious gift no pilgrim would omit to tie on some adjacent stick or tree.^196.3^

Sacred trees covered with clouts hung by votaries, as well as piles of stones cast from the hands of wayfarers, are to be seen everywhere in Corea.^196.4^ We are told that “devils”—probably, as in the Tchuktchi superstition, a generic term for spirits—“are supposed to inhabit certain withered trees; and the natives are careful never to pass a devil-tree without throwing a stone at it, or tying a piece of cloth to one of its branches. If they omit to do this, evil, they believe, is sure to come to them and their families.”^196.5^ Mr. J. F. Campbell records having found in Japan “strips of cloth, bits of rope, slips of paper, writings, bamboo strings, flags, tags, and prayers hanging from every temple,” and small piles of stones at the foot of every image {197} and memorial-stone, and on every altar by the wayside; and he draws attention to the similarity of the practices implied to those of his native country.^197.1^ Another traveller in Japan states that women who desire children go to a certain sacred stone on the holy hill of Nikko, and throw pebbles at it. If they succeed in hitting it their wish is granted. They seem very clever at the game, he says maliciously. Further, the same writer speaks of a seated statue of Buddha in the park of Uyeno at Tokio, on whose knees women flung stones with the same object. Describing a temple elsewhere, he records that the grotesque figures placed at the door were covered—or, as he more accurately puts it, constellated—with pellets of chewed paper shot through the railing that surrounded them by persons who had some wish to be fulfilled. A successful shot implied the probability of the attainment of the shooter’s desire.^197.2^ Japanese pilgrims also paste up their cards containing name and address on the doors or pillars of the shrines they visit.^197.3^

In another Asiatic island, Borneo, a tree hung with countless rags is often seen at the cross-ways, and every passenger tears off a piece of his clothing and fastens it on the tree. The natives who practise it can give no other account of the custom than that they fear for their health if they omit it. Dr. Ten Kate lately found twice in the island of Great Bastard under the branches of a large tree a heap of stones whereon fishermen were wont to place rags of red, green or many-coloured calico. In the same way an old tree-trunk, or a stake propped upright with stones, is found here and there in the Egyptian desert adorned with shreds and tatters of clothing; for every pilgrim as he passes adds a rag. Such a tree is a certain ancient tamarisk-tree, called “the Mother of Clouts,” between Dar-el-beida and Suez. In the Mohammedan districts of North Africa trees of this kind are known as Marabout-trees; and it is thought that by tying on one of them a screed from one’s clothing all evil and sickness passes over to the tree, which is generally a crippled, miserable specimen.^198.1^

But the custom is not confined in Africa any more than in Asia to Mohammedan districts. The Shilluk on the White Nile derive their origin from an ancestor whom they call Niekam; and from his sacred tree they suspend glass beads and pieces of stuff.^198.2^ On the western side of the continent, Mungo Park found a tree in the kingdom of Woolli decorated with innumerable rags or scraps of cloth {199} tied upon its branches at different times by travellers. He conjectures that it was at first intended as an indication that water was to be found not far off; but of this there is no evidence. The custom was, as he says, so greatly sanctioned by time that nobody presumed to pass without hanging up something; and the intrepid explorer himself followed the example. A pool was, in fact, found not far off, as his Negroes predicted.^199.1^ A French traveller in the region of the Congo relates with astonishment concerning the n’doké—which he portrays as “fetishes important enough to occupy a special hut, and confided to the care of a sort of priests, who alone are reputed to have the means of making them speak”—that when it is desired to invoke the fetish, one or more pieces of native cloth, and the like, are offered to it or to the fetish-priest; and the worshipper is then admitted to plant a nail in the statue, the priest meanwhile, or the worshipper himself, formulating his prayer or his desires.^199.2^ Another French traveller in the watershed of the upper Niger reports the custom of sacrificing animals under sacred trees. The animal when slain is eaten; its head is placed under the tree, or suspended from one of the branches, or laid in a fork. Pottery of various kinds, handles of old agricultural implements, old clothes and calabashes, cow-tails, and so forth, lie around the fetish-tree; and under one such tree he saw a piece of {200} hollow wood propped on forks and filled with grass and other plants.^200.1^

In the New World the practice does not seem so common. Darwin, however, notes one instance. On the sandstone plain from which the valley of the Rio Negro has been carved, not far from the town of Patagones, is a solitary tree reverenced by the aborigines as a god by the name of Walleechu. The traveller found it leafless, being winter-time; but from numberless threads were suspended on the branches cigars, bread, meat, pieces of cloth and other things. “Poor Indians,” he says, “not having anything better, only pull a thread out of their ponchos, and fasten it to the tree. Richer Indians are accustomed to pour spirits and maté into a certain hole, and likewise to smoke upwards, thinking thus to afford all possible gratification to Walleechu. To complete the scene, the tree was surrounded by the bleached bones of horses which had been slaughtered as sacrifices. All Indians of every age and sex make their offerings; they then think that their horses will not tire, and that they themselves shall be prosperous.”^200.2^

To sum up:—We find widely spread in Europe the practice of throwing pins into sacred wells, or sticking pins or nails into sacred images or trees, or into the wall of a temple, or floor of a church, and—sometimes accompanying this, more usually alone—a practice of tying rags or leaving portions of clothing upon a sacred tree or bush, or a tree or bush overhanging, or adjacent to, a sacred well, or of depositing them in or about the well. The object of this rite is generally the attainment of some wish, or the granting {201} of some prayer, as for a husband, or for recovery from sickness. In the Roman instance it was a solemn religious act, to which (in historical times at least) no definite meaning seems to have been attached; and the last semblance of a religious character has vanished from the analogous performances at Angers and Vienna. In Asia we have the corresponding customs of writing the name on the walls of a temple, suspending some apparently trivial article upon the boughs of a sacred tree, flinging pellets of chewed paper or stones at sacred images, and attaching rags, writings, and other things to the temples, and to trees. Trees are adorned in the same way with rags and other useless things in Africa—a practice not unknown, though rare, in America. On the Congo a nail is driven into an idol in the Breton manner. It cannot be doubted that the purpose and origin of all these customs are identical, and that an explanation of one will explain all.

The most usual explanations are, first, that the articles left are offerings to the god or presiding spirit, and, secondly, that they contain the disease of which one desires to be rid, and transfer it to any one who touches or removes them. These two explanations appear to be mutually exclusive, though Professor Rhys suggests that a distinction is to be drawn between the pins and the rags. The pins, he thinks, may be offerings; and it is noteworthy that in some cases they are replaced by buttons or small coins. The rags, on the other hand, may be, in his view, the vehicles of the disease. If this opinion were correct, one would expect to find both ceremonies performed by the same patient at the same well: he would throw in the pin and also place the rag on the bush, or wherever its proper place might be. The performance of both ceremonies {202} is, however, I think, exceptional. Where the pin or button is dropped into the well, the patient does not trouble about the rag, and vice versâ. Professor Rhys only cites one case to the contrary. There the visit to the well was prescribed as a remedy for warts. Each wart was to be pricked with a pin, and the pin bent and thrown into the well. The warts were then to be rubbed with tufts of wool collected on the way to the well, and the wool was to be put on the first whitethorn the patient could find. As the wind scattered the wool the warts would disappear. Upon this one or two observations may be made. Either the act of affixing the wool bears the meaning assigned in the last chapter to similar practices, or the rite only survives in a degraded form, and originally some definite sacred tree was its object. If the latter, then the rite is here duplicated. For if the pins were really offerings, to be distinguished in character from the deposits of wool, the prescription to touch the warts with them would be meaningless. But we must surely deem that whatever value attached to the rubbing of the warts with wool would equally attach to their pricking with the pins.

Moreover, the curious detail mentioned by Mrs. Evans in reference to the rags tied on the bushes at Elian’s Well—namely, that they must be tied on with wool—points further to a degradation of the rite in the case we are now examining. Probably at one time rags were used, and simply tied to the sacred tree with wool. What may have been the reason for using wool remains to be discovered. But it is easy to see how, if the reason were lost, the wool might be looked upon as the essential condition of the due performance of the ceremony, and so continue after the disuse of the rags.

Nor can we stop here. From all we know of the process of ceremonial decay, we may be tolerably sure that the rags represent entire articles of clothing, which were at an earlier period deposited. There is no need to discuss here the principle of substitution and representation, so familiar to all students of folklore. It is sufficient to point out that, since the rite is almost everywhere in a state of decay, the presumption is in favour of entire garments having been originally deposited; and that, in fact, we do find this original form of the rite in the ancient and several of the modern examples I have cited on the continent of Europe and elsewhere. Entire articles of clothing seem also to have been usually left at several Scottish wells in quite recent times. Such was a chalybeate spring in the parish of Kennethmont, Aberdeenshire. As its virtue was invoked not only for human beings but for cattle, the tribute consisted of “part of the clothes of the sick and diseased, and harness of the cattle.”^203.1^ If we may trust the slovenly compilation of Mr. R. C. Hope on the holy wells of Scotland, a traveller in 1798, from whom he professes to quote, but whom he neither names nor identifies, relates of the Holy Pool of Strathfillan in Perthshire, that “each person gathers up nine stones in the pool, and after bathing, walks to a hill near the water, where there are three cairns, round each of which he performs three turns, at each turn depositing a stone; and if it is for any bodily pain, fractured limb, or sore, that they are bathing, they throw upon one of those cairns that part of their clothing which covered the part affected; also, if they have at home any beast that is diseased, they have only to bring some of the meal which it feeds upon, and make it into paste with {204} these waters, and afterwards give it to him to eat, which will prove an infallible cure; but they must likewise throw upon the cairn the rope or halter with which he was led. Consequently the cairns are covered with old halters, gloves, shoes, bonnets, night-caps, rags of all sorts, kilts, petticoats, garters and smocks. Sometimes they go as far as to throw away their halfpence.”^204.1^ From this account it appears that stones from the pool, rags, garments which had covered the diseased parts of the devotees, and halfpence, had all the same value. The stones could not have been offerings, and it was evidently not usual to throw away halfpence. The gifts of rags and articles of clothing are ambiguous. If we must choose between regarding them as offerings and as vehicles of disease, the analogy of the gifts at the shrine of Saint Michel-la-Rivière favours the former. Under ecclesiastical patronage, however, the rite had doubtless been manipulated to the benefit of the officials; and we can use the instance no further than as proof that the deposit of garments was ambiguous enough to develop sometimes into pious gifts, if it developed at other times into devices for the shuffling of disease off the patient on another person.^204.2^

Cairns have already been mentioned as occurring in {205} Buddhist lands, where we found an apparent equality in the offerings of stones and of other things at these sacred places, just as at Strathfillan. But the custom of erecting piles of stones is so ancient and widespread, that it may be worth while looking at it a little more closely before proceeding with our inquiry. Dr. Andree, whose ethnographical collections have furnished me with many examples for the present chapter, has brought together a large number of instances of cairns from all quarters of the globe. They resolve themselves, on examination, into three classes.

First are those to which no additions are made and where no rites are performed. Of such it may be said broadly that they only exist where the original purpose of the cairn has been forgotten, and probably the race that erected it has passed away. Of this kind was the cairn at Gilead, said to have been erected by Jacob and Laban on the scene of their final reconciliation and parting.^205.1^ It is hardly necessary to say that there is nothing worthy of being called evidence in favour of the tradition preserved in Genesis. We may conjecture that it was a place held sacred by the predecessors of the conquering Hebrews. If the Batoka were not in the habit of adding to the pile {206} mentioned by Livingstone, that pile must be set down as belonging to the same class. They declared it was made by their forefathers by way of protest against the wrong done them by another tribe not named, as an alternative to fighting.^206.1^ The omission of the name of the offending tribe is an index to their forgetfulness of the real object of the cairn. Such, too, were the small heaps of stones found by Darwin on the summit of the Sierra de las Animas in Uruguay. The Indians are extirpated from the district, and nobody knows the purpose for which the heaps were erected.^206.2^

Another kind of cairn is that which is piled over the place where death, especially a violent death, has been suffered. To this every wayfarer makes his contribution; and doubtless originally the dead body lay beneath the mass. The most familiar instances are the cairns raised over Achan and Absalom.^206.3^ The custom, however, is by no means confined to the Hebrews, or to the Semitic race; and in districts where stones are few, branches and pieces of wood are piled. Thus, near Leipzig is a heap of boughs to which every passenger adds three. Elsewhere in Germany, in Italy, Switzerland, Brittany, Lesbos, Armenia, the upper valley of the Nile, the Philippine Islands, Hawaii, Wisconsin, South Carolina, Venezuela, the valley of the Plate, and Patagonia, similar piles are recorded, as well as among the Bushmen and Amakosa of South Africa. The Bushmen are reported to declare that the Devil is buried under these heaps; and every Bushman throws a stone as he passes, that Satan may not rise again. In case of sickness, pilgrimages are made to them and prayers for help {207} offered.^207.1^ The various graves of Heitsi-eibib, or Tsuni-ǁgoam, the ancestor-god of the Khoi-khoi, are marked by cairns on which every one who passes by flings a stone or twig. Sometimes the offering is a piece of the wayfarer’s clothes, flowers or zebra-dung. A prayer for success is muttered if the wayfarer be hunting; and occasionally even honey and honey-beer are offered.^207.2^ These graves are, in fact, shrines of worship. And it is noteworthy that the gifts to the divinity are in general of no value in themselves, and that prominent among them are the stones and branches which are thrown, in other parts of the world, upon grave-cairns to which no other act of worship is now offered.

The third class of cairns consists of such as are erected on spots which for any reason are recognised as sacred. To this class belong the obo of Tibet. In Buddhist lands cairns are to be seen on the top of every pass and almost of every mountain. Frequently they are adorned with prayer-streamers and bones of sheep; and flat stones inscribed with the formula Om mani padme hum are laid upon them by worshippers. Passengers constantly add to the pile rough stones which they have picked up in climbing the ascent. In India cairns, especially cairns of Kankar, or calcareous limestone, to which every one adds, are not uncommon. Such is the shrine of Anktaha Bir, the hero of the Kankar-heap, in the village of Niámatpur.^207.3^ {208} Among the Dyaks of Batang Lupar the heaps are said to be erected in memory of great liars. Stones and branches are thrown upon them; and after the liar’s name has been long forgotten the heap remains. In the Caucasus the mountain-tops are sacred to the prophet Elijah (who, there is little reason to doubt, has succeeded to an ancient thunder-god) or to some other saint. Perilous places and places struck by lightning are marked by cairns. At the latter a pole is stuck up from which a black goat-skin flies. Around a certain rock in the Sinaitic peninsula Professor Palmer found small heaps of stones, said to have been first erected by the Israelites in memory of the water obtained from that very rock by Moses. The Arabs retain the practice in hopes of propitiating the great lawgiver. If any of them have a sick friend, he throws a stone in his name, and in the expectation of his speedy recovery. In Arabia, indeed, heaps of this kind are often to be seen, some of them of enormous size. In South America the passes of the Cordilleras are marked by cairns originally built before the Conquest. To this day the Indians fling stones upon them, or lay there a little offering of fresh coca-leaves, or spit upon them the coca-quids they have been chewing. Sometimes they stand and pull out a few of their eyebrow-hairs, blowing them in the direction of the sun—an ancient rite recorded by the Spanish conquerors among their observations of the Peruvian cult. In North America piles of stones are often mentioned, to which every traveller is accustomed to add. The old inhabitants of Nicaragua threw stones and grass upon them, believing themselves thereby to be freed from hunger and fatigue. In Europe, Saint Wolfgang’s chapel and well are renowned among the shrines of the Salzkammergut. Up the steep {209} stony path on either side pilgrims carry to the sacred spot heavy stones, which now lie there in heaps. The story goes that when enough have been gathered, the saint will build himself a new and larger church; but this is, of course, a modern theory to account for the practice.^209.1^ In the Aran Islands, though we are not told of any such piles, “numerous rounded pebbles are placed on the well and on the altar of St. Columb Kill.”^209.2^ On the island of Iniskill, off the coast of Donegal, on the other hand, there is a place of pilgrimage where the last of the “stations” performed by the pilgrims is a rough pile of stones, formerly the altar of a now ruined church. On the top of the pile is laid a flat stone, through which a circular hole about three inches in diameter has been bored. In this hole Mr. Borlase found shreds of coloured stuff (doubtless from their own clothes), rosaries and bronze medals, put there by devotees.^209.3^ Lastly, it may be mentioned that, among the Basuto, heaps of stones are to be found by the wayside near a village, to which every traveller adds a pebble, on which he has first spit.^209.4^

Looking over this long list, it is obvious that the second and third classes of cairns are practically the same. Burial-places {210} are sacred all the world over. They are the residence of the dead, who must always be propitiated—all the more if they have died in a manner unusual or regarded with horror. And not only must they be propitiated, but their powers, which are much dreaded, must be secured in aid of the living. The Bushman’s fear that Satan may rise again is a Christian interpretation. It means that he feared lest the spirit which haunted the pile, whoever he might have been, should rise to injure him. The fact of pilgrimages being made to the spot unites it with holy places of the third class. Whatever, therefore, may be the meaning of the offerings at the latter, it is the same as that of the sticks and stones, and other things thrown upon grave-cairns. Now, no valid distinction can be drawn between these offerings and those at wells and trees and other shrines of the kind, enumerated in an earlier part of the present chapter. Alike—and this is a point of cardinal importance in the interpretation of all these practices—the gifts are in the main of small intrinsic worth. It is rarely that we read of gold or silver tribute. Occasionally, under favouring ecclesiastical and other influences, the offerings develop into things of value; but for the most part, whatever their significance may be, it is derived from the giver. The stone is flung, the nail is fixed, by his hand; the rag is torn from his clothes; the coca-quids are from his mouth. The Landnámabók mentions an early settler of Iceland named Thorsteinn Red-nose. He worshipped a certain waterfall, and into it all remnants had to be thrown.^210.1^ This was not a mere paltry economy of worship; for we are told {211} he was “a great blót-man,” in other words, open-handed towards the gods. By casting his remnants into the waterfall he expected to secure the favour of the divinity; and in so doing he acted on the principle which animates the pilgrims at sacred wells and trees, and the travellers who never pass by a sacred cairn without contributing their quota to the pile.

With the practices at cairns in our mind, then, let us return to the customs at wells and trees.

M. Monseur, fixing his attention on instances like those of the Croix Saint Zè and Saint Guirec, in which pins or nails were stuck into the cross, or tree, or figure of the saint, suggests that the aim was, by causing pain or inconvenience to the object of worship, to keep in his memory the worshipper’s prayer. And he refers, by way of illustration, to the tortures inflicted on children at the beating of boundaries, and to the flogging said to have been given to children in Lorraine on the occasion of a capital punishment, the intention of which incontestably was to preserve a recollection of the place or the incident.^211.1^ M. Gaidoz, dealing with similar cases, and similar cases only, propounded years ago a theory somewhat different. In replying recently to M. Monseur, he recalls his previous exposition, and reiterates it in these words: “The idol is a god who always appears somewhat stupid; it moves not, it speaks not, and, peradventure, it does not hear very well. It must be made to understand by a sign, and a sign which will be at the same time a memento. In touching the idol, especially in touching the member corresponding to that which suffers, its attention is directed to the prayer. And more than that is done in leaving a nail or a pin in its body, {212} for this is a material memento for the idol.” In putting it in this way, the learned professor does not desire to exclude the ideas of an offering and a transfer of disease, for he expressly adds that both these ideas are mingled with that of a memento.^212.1^

Let us take stock of the conditions to be fulfilled in order to a satisfactory solution of the problem. It must be equally applicable to sacred images, crosses, trees, wells, cairns and temples. It must account not merely for the pins in wells and the rags on trees, but also for the nails in trees, the pins in images, the earth or bricks hung on the sacred tree in India, the stones and twigs, flowers and coca-quids thrown upon cairns, the pellets which constellate Japanese idols, the strips of cloth and other articles which decorate Japanese temples, the pilgrims’ names written on the walls of the temple of Kapila on the banks of the Hugli, the nails fixed by the consuls in the Cella Jovis at Rome, and those driven into the galleries or floors of Protestant churches in Eastern France. These are the outcome of equivalent practices, and the solution of their meaning, if a true one, must fit them all. M. Gaidoz’ suggestion of a memento comes nearer to this ideal than any other hitherto put forward. But does it touch cases like those of the Lapalud, the Stock im Eisen, and the Cella Jovis, where the rite was unaccompanied by any prayer? The two former cases, indeed, if they stood alone, might be deemed worn and degraded relics of a rite once gracious with adoration, prayer and thanksgiving. But nothing of the sort accompanied the driving of a nail into the wall of the temple of Jupiter, nor, so far as we can learn, the yet older custom observed by the Etruscans at Vulsinii, of {213} sticking a nail every year in the temple of Nortia, the fate-goddess. On the contrary, in both these classical instances the rite was so bare and so ill-understood, that it was looked upon merely as an annual register or record. Almost as little does M. Gaidoz’ explanation seem to fit the throwing of pins into a well, the burial of a coin, as in Mecklenburgh, under a tree, or the marriage-nails of Montbéliard. Like M. Monseur’s theory, it is applicable in its full significance only to examples of the rite as practised on statues; and it assumes that trees and crosses and other rude forms are mere makeshifts for the carven image, deteriorated survivals of idols strictly so called.^213.1^ But this is to put the cart before the horse. There is no reason to suppose that the practices I have described originated later than the carving of sacred images, and were at first a peculiarity of their worship. There is every reason to {214} suppose exactly the reverse. And in this connection it is significant that neither at Rome nor at Vulsinii (the earliest examples we have in point of time) were the nails fastened into the image, but into the temple wall.

I believe that a profounder thought forms the common ground in which all the customs under consideration—or, as I should prefer to say, all the variations of a single custom—are rooted. They are simply another application of the reasoning that underlies the practices of witchcraft and folk-medicine discussed in previous chapters. If an article of my clothing in a witch’s hands may cause me to suffer, the same article in contact with a beneficent power may relieve my pain, restore me to health, or promote my general prosperity. A pin that has pricked my wart, even if not covered with my blood, has by its contact, by the wound it has inflicted, acquired a peculiar bond with the wart; the rag that has rubbed the wart has by that friction acquired a similar bond; so that whatever is done to the pin or the rag, whatever influences the pin or the rag may undergo, the same influences are by that very act brought to bear upon the wart. If, instead of using a rag, I rub my warts with raw meat and then bury the meat, the wart will decay and disappear with the decay and dissolution of the meat. In like manner my shirt or stocking, or a rag to {215} represent it, placed upon a sacred bush, or thrust into a sacred well—my name written upon the walls of a temple—a stone or a pellet from my hand cast upon a sacred image or a sacred cairn—a remnant of my food cast into a sacred waterfall or bound upon a sacred tree, or a nail from my hand driven into the trunk of the tree—is thenceforth in continual contact with divinity; and the effluence of divinity, reaching and involving it, will reach and involve me. In this way I may become permanently united with the god.

This is an explanation which I think will cover every case. Of course, it cannot be denied that there are instances, like some of the Japanese and Breton cases, where, the real object of the rite having been forgotten, the practice has become to a slight extent deflected from its earlier form. But it is not difficult to trace the steps whereby the idea and practice of divination became substituted for that of union with the object of devotion. Still less can it be denied that, where the practice has not been deflected, the real intention has in most places been obscured. These phenomena are familiar to us everywhere, and will mislead no one who understands that the real meaning is not what the people who practise a rite say about it, but that which emerges from a comparison of analogous observances.

A few other customs remain to be considered. Prominent among these is a rite well known to all students of classical antiquity—that of the consecration of locks of hair at various shrines. It was usually performed in consequence of a vow made by the parents at birth. The actual ceremony took place on arriving at manhood or womanhood. A lock of the hair and of the sprouting beard of the youth, a tress from the maiden’s head, was cut off and presented {216} to the god; and in Greece the youth then received the clothing of an ephebos and was admitted to such of the privileges of a free citizen as his age entitled him. The dedication of the hair was regarded as a symbol of that of the entire person. And this dedication was extended to other occasions, such as before marriage, before and after childbed, or at the time of making or fulfilling a vow. Pausanias mentions a statue of Hygeia hardly to be seen, by reason partly of the hair cut off by women and bound or placed upon it.^216.1^ On the death of one very dear, a lock of the survivor’s hair was frequently cut off and placed in the corpse’s hand or upon the grave, as Herakles did to Sostratos, and Achilles to Patroklos. So Death was said to cut off the hair of those who were about to die. Euripides represents him as declaring:

“Sacred to us Gods below That head whose hair this sword shall sanctify.”

Graves and sacred trees were favourite places for the deposit of the hair. Beneath the olive which grew upon the tomb of Hyperoche and Laodike, in the entrance of the sanctuary of Artemis at Delos, epheboi laid the first fruits of their beards, and bridal pairs their hair. At Megara was the grave of the virgin Iphinoe, the daughter of Alcathous. Brides there performed funeral rites, before the wedding ceremony, and cut off their hair. The Roman Vestals, on attaining womanhood, consecrated to Juno Lucina and {217} hung upon her tree, which was older than the temple, the locks of their hair; whence it was called the arbor capillata. At the completion of the mysteries of Cybele the votaries dedicated locks of their hair at the door of her temple; and in the same way the Bacchic votaries, when their mysteries were finished, dedicated their locks at sacred pine-trees. In this connection, too, we may remember that the Flamen Dialis buried the clippings of his hair and nails beneath a lucky tree.^217.1^

The usage also extended to the Hebrews. It is referred to in the legislation on vows and on mourning; and many examples are familiar to us in the Bible, from Samson and Job to the Apostle Paul. The ancient Arabs and Egyptians also on similar occasions cut or shaved their hair.^217.2^ Nor was it confined to ancient times. In the seventeenth century the Serbs used to cut their hair and bind it on the grave of a dead relative; and among the Albanians the sisters, daughters-in-law, grown-up daughters and wife of a dead man are said still to cut their hair in token of grief. The mourning women at Lecce in Apulia pluck out their hair and strew it on the corpse.^217.3^ Zingerle quotes from an old manuscript in the Franciscan monastery at Botzen in the Tirol a superstition which directs the hair of a sick man to be cut off, rolled in wax and afterwards offered at some sacred shrine.^217.4^ A story is told in the province of Posen of the daughter of a day-labourer who was sick and given up by the physician. She begged her parents, as they stood by her bed plunged in helpless grief, {218} to cut off her hair and lay it upon the crucifix in the convent at Exin. This was done, and she recovered; and, marvellous to state, the hair grew upon the head of the crucifix until it reached the ground, to the gratification of the pious from all parts of the province.^218.1^ At Flastroff, in Lorraine, sick or vicious horses are taken in pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Elias on the 25th June. After mass, at which the owners of the animals are present, the horses are paraded round the outside of the chapel. A handful of hairs from the tail of each of them is deposited on the steps of the altar, sometimes accompanied by a gift of money; and the owner takes away a cupful of holy water, made for the purpose, in order to mix it with the animal’s drink. The custom of taking the horses themselves is now disappearing. The owners, instead, take their handfuls of horsehair, make the tour of the altar after mass to kiss the relic of the saint, and deposit the offerings of hair in a niche in the wall of the apse on the left side of the altar. And this has probably been found equally efficacious.^218.2^

In some districts of the Abruzzi there is yet practised a rite that seems to be a survival of an ancient act of worship such as I have just referred to. Two or more girls who are desirous of swearing eternal friendship of the most sacred kind join hands in a church and compass the altar three times. They afterwards exchange kisses; and each of them, pulling out a hair, hides it in some hole or dark recess of the building. One of them then, standing in {219} front of the altar, lifts her hand as if to count her companions, and solemnly chants verses, the import of which is to pronounce them henceforth gossips, spiritual kindred, entitled to share one another’s food, and further to invoke blessing or ban, according as either of them shall fulfil or neglect the duties of the relationship.^219.1^ Reginald Scot, apparently quoting Martin of Arles and speaking of the Spaniards, mentions that “maids forsooth hang some of their haire before the image of S. Urbane, bicause they would have the rest of their haire grow long and be yellow.”^219.2^ Pettigrew cites Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall as authorities for the statement that pilgrims to Tubber Quan, near Carrick-on-Suir, a sacred well dedicated to Saints Quan and Brogawn, after performing certain circuits and reciting prayers, go thrice round a tree on their bare knees and then cut off locks of their hair and tie them on the branches as a specific against headache. The tree, we are told, was an object of veneration and was covered with human hair.^219.3^ So at the two Hungarian fountains already mentioned clothes and hair from the patients’ heads are left on adjacent trees “as gifts for the water-spirit.”^219.4^ In Turkey among the Greek Christians three tiny locks are cut, if they can be found on a baby’s head at his baptism, and thrown into the font in the name of the Trinity; and the font is afterwards emptied into a pit or well under the floor of the church.^219.5^

Outside Europe the ritual cutting and dedication of hair has been found in modern times all over the world. I have space for but few examples, and must content myself {220} with referring the reader for others to the learned work on the subject by the late Professor Wilken, who has made a large collection. Mr. Ainsworth relates that he saw in an Arab cemetery on the Euphrates tresses of hair attached to sticks over the graves of females.^220.1^ And Olearius, who was in Persia in 1637, saw a funeral procession in which three men carried before the corpse each one a tree (the equivalent, probably, of Mr. Ainsworth’s sticks) bearing, among other things, three tresses of the wives of the dead man, torn or cut off in sign of fidelity.^220.2^ When King Ummeda of Búndi, in India, abdicated, an image was made of him and burnt on a funeral pyre, as if it had been his corpse; and among the ceremonies was that of taking off the hair and whiskers of his successor and offering them to his manes.^220.3^ At the junction of the Ganges and Jumna and at other sacred places of pilgrimage, Hindu women cause their hair to be cut by the priest with golden shears, and the locks thrown with certain ceremonies into the stream.^220.4^ The Kirghiz, nominally adherents of Islam, have shrines at the graves of sundry holy men, to whom they offer prayer and sacrifice, and fasten not only ribbons and strips of cloth, but also hair to the bushes, reeds and tall grasses growing around.^220.5^ Among the offerings to Pélé, the goddess of the volcano Kirauea in Hawaii, Mr. Ellis found at her temple locks of human hair; and he learned that they were frequently presented by those who passed by the crater.^220.6^ About Lake Nyassa, {221} in East Central Africa, one of the funeral rites is the shaving of the heads of the deceased man’s relatives. The hair is buried on the site of his house, which is taken down unless he be buried in it. Two or three months later the mourners are shaved again, and the hair is buried at the grave or in the bush.^221.1^ On the Gold Coast the ceremony of taking an oath bears a certain resemblance to the Abruzzian practice above cited. This oath is administered by the fetish-priest. His bossum, or fetish, consists usually of a wooden vessel or calabash filled with various objects. When the person who takes the oath has made his statement and uttered the customary imprecation on himself if he violate his oath, he goes thrice round the sacred vessel repeating the imprecation every time. The priest then, taking a portion of the contents of the vessel, rubs with it the man’s head, arms, abdomen and legs, turns it round three times over his head, and cutting off a piece of nail from one of the fingers and another piece from one of the toes of the oath-taker, and plucking a few hairs from his head, he throws them all into the vessel.^221.2^ The Australian natives at a burial feast tear out parts of their beards, singe them and throw them on the corpse. Sioux mourners are described as cutting locks of their own hair and flinging them upon the dead body;^221.3^ and in various parts of America widows are required to shave or cut their hair.^221.4^ Indeed, haircutting or shaving for the dead is found everywhere. The locks, it is true, are not always thrown upon the corpse or upon the grave; but, as we shall hereafter see in connection with the practice of blood-shedding, {222} it is often considered enough simply to cut the hair or to shave. In such cases the rite must be looked upon as mutilated. The original intention is to bring the hair into contact with the dead. The true rite was exemplified at the death of Asclepios, when

“Round the funeral pyre the populace Stood with fierce light on their black robes which bound Each sobbing head, while yet their hair they clipped O’er the dead body of their withered prince.”^222.1^

It was not, however, always possible or convenient to do this; and it has consequently been dispensed with until the purpose has been forgotten.

These practices all explain themselves in the same way. The dedication of the hair at a temple, or the placing of it in the hand of a corpse, or on the grave, effects union with the divinity, or with the departed friend. The tress is more than a symbol of devotion; it is more than a gage of fidelity. The owner of the head whence it has been taken, and the holder of the severed lock are in actual, though invisible, union. This accounts for the efficacy of the practice in healing disease: this accounts for its value as a guard of fidelity to an oath. In the last chapter we saw that not only hair but nail-parings, teeth and other things previously part of the patient, or in contact with him, were plugged into trees, or hung from their branches, for the purpose of uniting him with a living healthy body, which was believed to react upon him. Much more powerful would be the action of an object regarded as the abode of a supernatural being, even if only a departed friend,—or rather, {223} the action of the supernatural being himself, thus linked through that object with his worshipper, patient or friend. Abruzzian girls put themselves in the hands of the saint when they hide their hairs in his sanctuary, and doubtless feel abundantly satisfied that he will perform the blessing or the ban they invoke upon themselves in their rustic ritual. We had occasion in the last chapter to consider the disposal of the hair when ceremonially cut off. It will be recollected that the Grihya-Sûtra of Hiranyakesin directs the clippings of hair, beard and nails, made up into a lump with bull’s dung, to be buried in a cow-stable, or near an Udumbara-tree, or in a clump of Darbha-grass. It is true that the words accompanying the act of burial were: “Thus I hide the sin of N. N.” These words were probably not primitive, for the real intention of the rite is revealed by the places prescribed for the burial. Had it been meant simply to hide the lump of dung and hair, any secret place would have sufficed. But the cow-stable, the Udumbara-tree and the Darbha-grass were all sacred; and the object of placing these clippings of the person in, or adjacent to, them must have been that the man from whom the clippings had been taken might be blessed by the hallowed influences which would surround those portions of himself, severed indeed to outward appearance, but still subtly connected with his frame. So also something more than a desire for safety leads the sponsors of the Japanese boy to deposit his forelock on the family shrine. And when the Omaha children received the tonsure, the first-fruits (if I may so call them) of their heads, wrapped in the sacred buffalo-hide, not merely secured the heads themselves from harm, but kept them in a perpetual environment of positive good. For the same reason in Tahiti the {224} child’s navel-string was buried in the marae, or temple.^224.1^ In Mecklenburgh and Thuringia the navel-string, or a piece of it, is taken by the mother to her churching and laid down behind the altar or elsewhere in the church. This will keep the child continually surrounded with such holy influences that he will grow up god-fearing and pious. If, on the other hand, it be left in a shop, he will—at least in Thuringia—become courteous and clever in business.^224.2^

Again. Athenian women who for the first time became pregnant used to hang up their girdles in the temple of Artemis. So the Spanish women tied their girdles or shoe-latchets about one of the church-bells, and struck the bell thrice.^224.3^ In the French department of Côtes-du-Nord, to cure a certain childish disease the infant’s cap is placed at the foot of the statue of St. Méen in the church of Plaine-Haute.^224.4^ Among the French superstitions enumerated by Thiers is that of passing a child afflicted with Saint Giles’ sickness through his father’s shirt, and carrying the shirt afterwards—not the child—to Saint Giles’ altar, as a means of cure.^224.5^ European settlers in Virginia and Pennsylvania measure a child for a disease called “the Go-backs” with a yarn string; and having by this means diagnosed the disease they hang the string on the hinge of a gate in the premises of the infant’s parents, believing that the disease will die away with the decay of the string.^224.6^ They have no local shrines.

The converse case of measurement as a method of conveying the divine effluence was a favourite during the Middle Ages, and is still practised in Roman Catholic countries. It consisted in measuring with a string or fillet the body of a saint, and passing the string afterwards round the patient. Many miracles performed in this way were attributed to Simon de Montfort. Pope Clement VIII. is said to have given his sanction to a similar measurement purporting to be the “true and correct length of Our Lord Jesus Christ,” found in the Holy Sepulchre. Copies of this measurement were current in Germany up to a comparatively late date.^225.1^ By an application of the same reasoning it seems to have been believed up to the seventeenth century in this country that, to measure a living person with a rope which had been used in a prescribed manner to measure a corpse, was to inflict misfortune and misery.^225.2^ The object specially in view of the Athenian women was attained in Germany towards the end of the Middle Ages by measuring a wick by Saint Sixtus’ image, and wearing it as a girdle.^225.3^ In Japan it is enough to wear, inside the sash, a coloured strip made in imitation of a temple-flag.^225.4^ The underlying thought in these cases is the same as that of the Breton girdles of Notre Dame de Délivrance, mentioned in a previous chapter. And so far is the practice carried in China that a woman who wishes to bear children will borrow {226} on certain days in the year from the temple of the goddess of children one of the votive shoes offered there, and, taking it home, will pay it the same honours as to the goddess herself; while another woman will take a flower from the hands of the sacred image, or from a vase beside it, and wear it in her hair.^226.1^ Saint Francis’ girdle and other “blessed girdles” were formerly worn in Europe for the purpose of facilitating delivery, and for healing various diseases.^226.2^ And still in Mexico the measure of the head of an image of Saint Francis at Magdalena is sovran for headache, the measurement of his waist for diseases of the abdomen, and so on of other parts.^226.3^

In Poitou sick children are taken to the shrine of Saint Roch at Saint-Rémy, to embrace the Saint’s image. But because it is so horribly ugly, many children turn away with cries of fright. The parents then content themselves with passing a handkerchief over the statue, and afterwards wiping with it the child’s face and hands.^226.4^ Among the Basuto, travellers on entering a strange country seek to render the indigenous gods propitious to them by rubbing their foreheads with a little of the dust which they collect on the road, or by making a girdle of the grass.^226.5^ Newcomers to places lying on the river Körös, in Hungary, used to {227} be dipped in the water as a sort of baptism.^227.1^ Many wells in Ireland are called by the name of Saint Patrick. In the seventeenth century it seems to have been a common belief among the Irish that a stranger who drank at any of these wells would never after forsake the country, or if he left it he would be sure to return thither.^227.2^ At Rome an old superstition, incidentally noticed in the last chapter, prescribes for those who desire to return to the city to drink a little of the Fountain of Trevi and to throw a small offering in the shape of a coin into the basin. And with a little earth from the churchyard of Applecross, in Ross-shire, where Saint Maelrubha is buried, a man may fare the world round and safely come back to the neighbouring bay.^227.3^ Among the North American tribes, figures of sacred animals and gods are drawn in coloured sand on the floor of the medicine-lodge. The patient is rubbed with the dust composing the figures. Applied to dying men, as a Roman Catholic Indian piously told Captain Bourke, it corresponds to Extreme Unction.^227.4^ Those who doubt whether it be equally efficient may be recommended {228} to try both. At any rate the parallel is instructive; for in all these cases a substance which has been hallowed by contact with the divinity, or with his shrine, brought afterwards into contact with the devotee and patient, sets up union between the worshipper and his god; a portion of the sacred earth or water in contact with the traveller or votary, or united with his person, unites him with the remainder in such a bond that he is infallibly brought back to it, or else he is endowed with all the blessings that could be conferred by the touch of the entirety.

Our examination of the practices of throwing pins into wells, of tying rags on bushes and trees, of driving nails into trees and stocks, of throwing stones and sticks on cairns, and the analogous practices throughout the world, leads to the conclusion that they are to be interpreted as acts of ceremonial union with the spirit identified with well, with tree, or stock, or cairn. In course of time, as the real intention of the rite has been forgotten, it has been resorted to (in Christian countries at least) chiefly for the cure of diseases, and the meaning has been overlaid by the idea of the transfer of the disease. This idea belongs to the same category as that of the union by means of the nail or the rag with divinity, but apparently to a somewhat later stratum of thought. Since the spread of Christianity the reason for the sacredness of many trees or wells has passed from memory; and it has consequently been natural to substitute any tree or any well for a particular one. The substitution has favoured the idea of transfer of disease, which has thus become the ordinary intention of the rite in later times.^228.1^

But I cannot close this inquiry without referring to one or two other ceremonies not quite so easily deciphered. The first is reported by a German writer whose authority for the statement I have been unable to trace. He says it is the custom in Wales for a bride and bridegroom to go and lie down beside a well or fountain and throw in pins as a pledge of the new relation into which they have entered. And he adds that in clearing out an old Roman well in the Isle of Wight, about the year 1840, some bushels of ancient British pins for the clothes were found.^229.1^ Whether or not the British pins are to be connected with the alleged custom in Wales, it is difficult to account for a collection of pins in such a situation except upon the supposition that they were purposely thrown into the well. As in the case of the pins found in the Meuse and the Sambre, however, we can only guess at the reason that brought them there. If the alleged Welsh rite be correctly described, no prayer is offered. Could we find an early shape of it, we should probably recognise a solemn consecration of the one spouse to the domestic divinity of the other—a ritual reception into the kin. The analogy with the marriage custom of the Montbéliard Protestants is obvious. An instance in which the same analogy lies even more on the surface is a ceremony in use among the Mohammedan tribes of Daghestan. Imperfectly civilised, they are still organised in gentes, each of which derives its origin from a mythical ancestor. But it is possible for a man to break with his gens, if he desire to do so. The desire must be expressed solemnly and publicly at a meeting in the mosque; and {230} he must announce that every tie is broken between himself and his touchoum, or clan. By way of memorial a nail is then driven into one of the walls of the mosque.^230.1^ It seems to be unnecessary now to enter another clan in place of the one renounced; and the words employed express no more than the detestatio sacrorum, or renunciation. But, as we shall see in the next chapter, this could only have been half the original ceremony. It must once have been followed by admission into another kin, for no one would be content to be a kinless man. The ceremony now takes place in a mosque. Before the conversion to Islam it must have taken place in the hut or temple where the totem or ancestor-god of the new kin was worshipped. And the driving of the nail into the wall of the mosque may be imagined to be the only remaining relic of the rite of admission into the new gens and of initiation into its cult. If this be so, it probably expressed and effected the neophyte’s union with the divinity into whose kin and worship he was entering.

Assuming this conjecture to be correct, we may go a step further. To anticipate again what I shall have to explain more fully hereafter, the union with the totem-god would have to be renewed at intervals. Some such intention perhaps governed the rite at Reggio Emilia, in Italy, which is now called “burying the old year.” At midnight of the last day of the year the head of the household goes into the courtyard of his house and thrusts into the ground a stake.^230.2^ Turning back to Wales, at Gumfreston, in Pembrokeshire, there is a holy well to which the villagers {231} used to repair on Easter Day, when each of them would throw a crooked pin into the water. This was called “throwing Lent away.”^231.1^ On the same day at Bradwell, in Derbyshire, it was the practice for children to drop pins into the various wells in the town. A fairy was said to preside over each well, and to know whether a child had deposited a pin in her well, or not. On Easter Monday every child carried a bottle of sweetmeats all day long; and if a bottle were broken, it was because the child had forgotten to drop a pin into one of the wells, “the fairy of the well being the protector of the bottle.”^231.2^ I need hardly pause on the proof, which the comparison of these rites affords, of the absolute ritual equivalence of throwing pins into a holy well and driving a stake, or a nail, into the ground, or into a wall. Nor—even apart from the evidence of the custom at Bradwell, which is obviously much degraded—can it be necessary to insist on the improbability that anything would be thrown into a holy well with the idea of simply getting rid of it. The pins must have been intended, as elsewhere, to unite the thrower with the god. And the custom may accordingly be supposed to be a periodical renewal of union with the divinity, removed under Christian influences from the day of the pagan festival (perhaps May-day) to the nearest great feast-day of the Church. In the same way the Italian peasant in planting a stake in his courtyard—doubtless in the centre of his dwelling—would be renewing his union with his household god, and emphatically asserting once more his ownership of the house and his headship of the household.

CHAPTER XII. TOTEMISM—THE BLOOD COVENANT—CUSTOMS CONNECTED WITH SALIVA

Thus far, in pursuing our investigations into the significance of the Life-token, we have arrived at the conclusion that the reason of the mysterious sympathy between the hero and an object external to himself is not merely that, actually or by imputation, the Life-token has been part of his substance, but further that, notwithstanding severance, it is still in unapparent but real connection with him, and consequently any mischance he may suffer will be felt by the Life-token and reflected in its condition. The converse is also true. Any portion, actual or imputed, of the hero’s substance, detached from him in appearance, continues in effect so united to him that injury to it will redound to his injury and perhaps to his death. The Life-token and the External Soul are thus equivalent; and they are equivalent not merely in story, but also, and first of all, in human customs and belief.

Moreover, the possibility of evil implies the contrary possibility of good being received by a man through severed pieces of himself. This belief has led to the practices we have considered in our last two chapters. Whether for the healing of a specific disease, or for the more general {233} purpose of promoting his wellbeing, anything which has once been his, as a scrap of his body, his excrements or his clothing, or which has simply been in contact, though only for a moment, with him, is subjected to influences held to be beneficial, with the expectation that they will in this way act upon him. The belief and the practices it has engendered have thus to our eyes a double aspect, physical and spiritual. But we must not forget that everywhere in the earliest times, and among the lowest races even yet—nay, the limitation need not be by any means so strict—among peoples in all but the highest state of civilisation, no substantive distinction is drawn between the physical and the spiritual. The abstract entity we call a soul has no existence for them: it is a philosophical speculation, whereof they have no conception. The soul, to them, is but another body which quits at times in life this visible frame, as a man quits his dwelling, on errands of business or pleasure, and forsakes it finally at death, as a corpse is carried out of doors. It is but a fragment of the man. It may take a fresh form, become a new whole, new but the same; for it will differ only in form, if indeed it will differ so much as in form. And the conception of divinity current in the lower culture corresponds with that of the soul. The god is precisely “a magnified, non-natural man,” though not always in human shape, corporeal and subject to all corporeal wants and infirmities, but endowed with potencies and privileges far beyond those of ordinary men: potencies and privileges, however, the like of which are attained sometimes with much fasting and striving and patience by the greatest shamans. This corporeal nature of the god enables man to enter into communion with him, to put and keep himself in touch with him, to become {234} united with him. In the last chapter we considered some methods whereby this may be done. Some other methods remain to be mentioned; but it will be needless to discuss them at length, because they have not long ago been made the subject of a brilliant exposition by the late Professor Robertson Smith, to which little or nothing can be added.

What seems, however, desirable for the purpose of completing our view of the Life-token and the ideas connected with it, is to turn our attention to some points in the social organisation of savage races, and their survivals in societies, like our own, which have long been organised on principles of a wholly different character. To these points the next four chapters will be devoted. But the organisation of archaic communities is bound up with their tribal worship. It is accordingly necessary to have distinctly before our minds the relation of the tribe to its god, and some at least of the usages expressive of that relation. I shall therefore begin by summarising the results of Professor Robertson Smith’s examination of Semitic institutions, as far as they are relevant to our present inquiry, contributing only a few further illustrations drawn from the usages of nations outside the Semitic sphere.

At a certain period in the evolution of human institutions men are organised in kindreds, called clans or gentes, deriving descent and reckoning kinship exclusively through the mother. As a matter of fact, hardly anywhere throughout the world is this organisation found in an absolutely unadulterated condition; for it seems to have constantly tended to pass over into an organisation where the kinship was reckoned exclusively through the father. But in almost all parts of the world many existing institutions, and institutions described, or incidentally mentioned, by {235} writers ancient and modern, can only be accounted for by postulating the former existence of a system of kinship reckoned exclusively through females. The kindred or clan thus formed believes itself to be descended from a totem, or ancestor to whom honours are paid of a kind for which we have no other word than divine—a word, however, implying a more exalted conception than any to which the clan has yet attained. The totem is not in human shape. Very generally it is an animal, sometimes a tree or other vegetable, occasionally an inanimate object, such as the sun, the earth, wind, salt, or even the rain or thunder. For the savage believes in metamorphosis. We have already investigated at some length this belief, in so far as it relates to changes effected by death and birth. But it is by no means confined to these. Broadly speaking, every object in the universe is regarded as alive; and every object is capable of changing its shape without losing its identity. Death is merely one way of doing so. To the savage, therefore, there is no difficulty in believing that his ancestor is a turtle or a pine-tree, for he knows no distinction between animal and vegetable, between genus and genus. Nay, he will even hold with as little difficulty that the same ancestor is both a turtle and a pine-tree, and will worship him now under the one, and now under the other, form.

The clan bears a representation of the totem as its symbol or crest; is usually called after its name; and the individual members dress and adorn themselves to resemble it in their persons. It is forbidden to kill, injure or treat with disrespect any animal or vegetable of the species to which the totem belongs, for they are all akin. But, at least when an animal, it is customary at stated times to {236} slay and eat it in solemn festival wherein all the kin join.

The home of the clan is the home of its god; and wherever a society has passed beyond the nomadic stage it will be found to have a definite place consecrated to social reunion and worship. There the totem-god is represented by an idol of some kind—ordinarily, in an archaic stage of civilisation, by a post or a rough stone. This is his dwelling-place, or the embodiment he chooses for the convenience of his worshippers,—the god himself. Later, it becomes by degrees a simulacrum, a piece of sculpture, until, in the most elevated form to which paganism has attained, we arrive at masterpieces like those of Phidias.

The stone god is also at first the altar. There the totem-beast is slain, some of its blood is dashed upon the stone, and around it the rest of the blood is drunk and the flesh is eaten by the clansmen. This is probably the primitive form of sacrifice. It is not a gift to the god, but a sacrament in which the whole kin—the god with his clansmen—unites. In partaking of it each member of the kin testifies and renews his union with the rest. The god himself is eaten, and yet he is at the same time embodied in the sacred stone. Archaic thought sees no contradiction in this. Our inquiries into the Life-token have already shown that a man is separable into portions. The savage conception of life permits of its division without destroying its existence or its essential unity. Not only, therefore, is the totem himself divisible: the kin, including the totem-god in every one of his forms, is regarded as one entire life, one body, whereof each unit is literally a member, a limb. The same blood runs through them all; and elsewhere, as among the Hebrews, “the blood is the life.” Literally {237} they may not be all descended from a common ancestry. Descent is the normal, the typical, cause of kinship and a common blood. It is the legal presupposition, a presumption not to be rebutted. But kinship may also be acquired; and when it is once acquired by a stranger he ranks thenceforth for all purposes as one descended from the common ancestor. In a state of society organised on the lines of kinship this is an important matter. A man who is not of the kin is a stranger; and a stranger is a foe. The kinless man has no rights, no protection: he is an outlaw. His hand is against every man’s, and every man’s hand against him. To acquire kinship, the blood of the candidate for admission into the kin must be mingled with that of the kin. In this way he enters into the brotherhood, is reckoned as of the same stock, obtains the full privileges of a kinsman.

The mingling of blood—the Blood-covenant as it is called—is a simple though repulsive ceremony. It is sufficient that an incision be made in the neophyte’s arm and the flowing blood sucked from it by one of the clansmen, upon whom the operation is repeated in turn by the neophyte. Originally, perhaps, the clansmen all assembled and partook of the rite; but if so, the necessity has ceased to be recognised almost everywhere. The form, indeed, has undergone numberless variations. Sometimes the blood is dropped into a cup and diluted with water or wine. Sometimes food eaten together is impregnated with the blood. Sometimes it is enough to rub the bleeding wounds together, so that the blood of both parties is mixed and smeared upon them both. Among the Kayans of Borneo the drops are allowed to fall upon a cigarette, which is then lighted and smoked alternately by both parties. But, {238} whatever may be the exact form adopted, the essence of the rite is the same, and its range is world-wide. It is mentioned by classical writers as practised by the Arabs, the Scythians, the Lydians and Iberians of Asia Minor, and apparently the Medes. Many passages of the Bible, many of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, are inexplicable apart from it. Ancient Arab historians are full of allusions to it. Odin and Loki entered into the bond, which means for us that it was customary among the Norsemen—as we know, in fact, from other sources. It is recorded by Giraldus of the Irish of his day. It is described in the Gesta Romanorum. It is related of the Huns or Magyars, and of the mediæval Roumanians. Joinville ascribes it to one of the tribes of the Caucasus; and the Rabbi Petachia of Ratisbon, who travelled in Ukrainia in the twelfth century, found it there. In modern times every African traveller mentions it; and most of them have had to undergo the ceremony. In the neighbouring island of Madagascar, it is well known. All over the Eastern Archipelago, in Australia, in the Malay peninsula, among the Karens, the Siamese, the Dards on the northern border of our Indian empire, and many of the aboriginal tribes of Bengal, the wild tribes of China, the Syrians of Lebanon and the Bedouins, and among the autochthonous peoples of North and South America, the rite is, or has been quite recently, in use. Nor has it ceased to be practised in Europe by the Gipsies, the Southern Slavs and the Italians of the Abruzzi. The band of the Mala Vita in Southern Italy, only broken up a year or two ago, was a blood-brotherhood formed in this way. Most savage peoples require their youths at the age of puberty to submit to a ceremony which admits them into the brotherhood of the grown men, and into all the rights {239} and privileges of the tribe. Of this ceremony the blood-covenant is usually an essential part, as it is also, either actually, or by symbol which represents an act once literally performed, in the initiation-rite not only of the Mala Vita, but of almost all secret societies, both civilised and uncivilised. In the French department of Aube, when a child bleeds, he puts a little of his blood on the face or hands of one of his playfellows, and says to him: “Thou shalt be my cousin.” In like manner in New England, when a school-girl, not many years since, pricked her finger so that the blood came, one of her companions would say: “Oh, let me suck the blood; then we shall be friends.”^239.1^

That the blood-covenant, whereby blood-brotherhood is assumed, is not a primæval rite, is obvious from its artificial character. It has its basis in ideas which must have been pre-existent, and which I have endeavoured to make clear in this and the foregoing chapters. At the same time its barbarism, and the wide area over which it is spread, point with equal certainty to its early evolution, and to the fact that it is in unison with conceptions essentially and universally human. Even among races like the Polynesians and the Turanian inhabitants of Northern Europe and Asia, where the rite itself may not be recorded, there {240} are, as we shall hereafter see, unmistakable traces of its influence on their customs.

As Society evolved, the clan-system gradually broke up over large tracts of the earth’s surface. In the same measure as the clan relaxed its hold upon the individual members, blood-brotherhood assumed a personal aspect, until, having no longer any social force, it came to be regarded as merely the most solemn and binding form of covenant between man and man. For that purpose the gods of one or both were frequently made party to the contract, and the blood of the covenanters was smeared upon the idols as well as upon one another. The deities thus continued to watch over a rite in which they had originally taken part as members of a clan. For as the bonds of kinship were loosened the totem developed into a god; and even so the totem’s interest in the rite as a member of a clan developed into that of a god as witness and avenger of the covenant. But though the significance of the rite changed, its evolution was continuous. Religion, like other forms of human thought and other human institutions, has been a slow and constant growth. If the whole field be surveyed, it will be found that there are no yawning chasms dividing period from period, and cult from cult. Everything evolves by processes analogous to those with which we are familiar in the physical world. The totem, released from the bonds of kinship, and soaring upward to the heaven of Godhead, ceases not to be worshipped with rites appropriate only to the social reunions of the clan. True, these rites are gradually modified; but alike by their symbolism and by their barbarity they bear unfailing testimony to their real birth. Such was the Hebrew practice of sprinkling the blood of the sacrifice before the Lord, or {241} upon the mercy-seat, daubing it upon the horns of the altar, or pouring it out at the base, and the converse practice of sprinkling it upon the congregation, or putting it upon the priest at his consecration. Among other nations the practice was grosser still.

“Moloch, horrid king, besmear’d with blood Of human sacrifice,”

by no means stood alone. The priest in Guatemala drew blood from his tongue and other members, and anointed with it the feet and hands of the image. And a similar custom is described by Spanish writers as followed in both North and South America.^241.1^ When Rome was at the height of her civilisation Tibullus described the high priestess of Bellona as lacerating her own arm with the sacrificial axe and bespattering the goddess with her blood, and then as she stood there inspired by the goddess with her oracle.^241.2^ This doubtless is the meaning of the passage relating the antics of the priests of Baal in the contest with Elijah, when they leaped about the altar, crying aloud, and cut themselves with knives and lances until the blood gushed out upon them. Their object was not to maim or torture themselves, but to renew their union with the god, {242} by shedding their blood upon him. In course of time the rite would cease to be understood, its practice would change, and then the mere torture, or the outpouring of the blood without any care to bring it into contact with the god, would be regarded as its object. This was perhaps the stage at which Baal-worship had arrived in the time of Ahab. In the Hebrew ritual it was the blood of the sacrifice and not of the worshipper which was sprinkled, and so also in many other instances. But then the victim was identified with the worshipper, or the latter also partook of it by being himself sprinkled with the blood or eating its flesh. The Scandinavian custom, for example, as delineated in the Heimskringla required that the blood should be drained into bowls, and then with a rod or sprinkler “should the stall of the gods be reddened, and the walls of the temple within and without, and the men-folk also besprinkled; but the flesh was to be sodden for the feasting of men.”^242.1^ In either case the worshipper was brought into union with the god. Elsewhere the same object is effected by the substitution of some other substance for blood. Among the ceremonies of purification imposed by certain of the non-Aryan tribes of Bengal upon women after childbirth, is that of smearing with vermilion the edge of the village well.^242.2^ Vermilion is a very obvious symbol of blood; and we shall hereafter see that, by these tribes and others, it is its recognised substitute. Originally the well must have been smeared with blood, and that {243} blood drawn from the offerer’s veins. By the ceremonial union thus effected with the deity who dwells in, or is identified with, the well, the woman would be purified.

The modes of thought portrayed in the ritual of sacrifice are entirely analogous to those disclosed by the practices we discussed in the last chapter. Their great aim is union with the deity. It is attained by placing in contact with him something already part of ourselves, as our blood, hair, clothing, or other property; or else the blood of a victim of which we are about to consume the remainder, just as among medical practices we found that of giving part of the patient’s food to an animal before partaking of the rest, with the object of being united with a healthy body. It may, indeed, be, if we were to trace back the superstition in these medical cases, that the animal made use of was at first a totem-beast. To investigate this, however, would require much greater space than I have at command.

I have on an earlier page alluded to the compacts alleged to be made with the Devil by a writing signed with the blood of the person who enters into the contract. With this may be compared a practice said to be sometimes followed on the Riviera, where two lovers write to one another in their own blood in sign of fidelity.^243.1^ A Breton folktale represents the Devil as aiding the hero on condition of his giving him a drop of his blood or a lock of his hair.^243.2^ According to an Icelandic saga, witches enter into a still closer relation with the Father of Evil by {244} giving him of their blood to drink,^244.1^ thus constituting him their blood-brother; and the same belief seems to be current among the Gipsies of the Danube valley, the Poles and Esthonians.^244.2^ To drink a witch’s blood was also a means of destroying her witchcraft, and doubtless for the same reason: it united her with her victim. Mannhardt quotes a case in Germany where, no longer since than the year 1868, two ignorant men were sent to prison for three months for assaulting a young woman whom they believed to have bewitched a friend, drawing blood and compelling her to drop it into his mouth.^244.3^ But in general it is considered quite sufficient simply to draw blood from her. According to the Scottish prescription she should be “scored aboon her breath”—that is, in the upper part of her face.^244.4^ The superstition, of course, has long been in decay. Merely to draw blood does not of itself constitute blood-relationship; but the barbarous rite of the blood-covenant having practically died out of north-western Europe, the real reason of drawing blood has been forgotten. A similar protection is invoked by Gipsy thieves in Servia. They make a certain powder with which they mix drops of their own blood and put it into the food of any one they suspect knows of their crime. In this way the thief believes that he not merely prevents the person {245} who consumes the mixture from betraying him, but on the other hand causes him henceforth to cherish a friendly feeling towards him.^245.1^

More difficult of interpretation is a horrible usage of the Hurons of North America. Unless they are belied, while torturing a prisoner to death, they would sometimes open the aorta and mingle the blood that gushed from it with some of their own, in the hope of being at all times apprised of an enemy’s approach, and so assuring safety against a sudden attack.^245.2^ Let us compare it, however, with a few cases of cannibalism. The Botocudos devoured their fallen enemies, in the belief that they would thus be protected from the revenge of the dead and would be rendered invulnerable by the arrows of the hostile tribe.^245.3^ The inhabitants of New Britain, notorious cannibals, eat their enemies, and fix the arm- and leg-bones of the men at the butt-end of their spears, thinking thus not only to acquire the strength of the deceased owner of the bone, but also to become invulnerable by his relatives.^245.4^ When the Tchuktchis murder a man they eat a piece of his heart or liver, in order to make his kindred sick.^245.5^ The Eskimo of Greenland do the like, because then the relations of the murdered man will lack the courage to revenge his death.^245.6^ Even in the south of Italy it is still believed that a murderer will not be able to escape unless he taste, or beslubber himself with, his victim’s blood:^245.7^ a superstition {246} which, in these days, has sometimes the contrary effect of leading to his discovery. By means of these examples we may perhaps conjecture the origin of the widely prevalent custom of eating the dead body of an enemy. Little doubt can at all events remain that the savage Hurons intended so to unite themselves with their captive that they would be secured from the blood-revenge of his kindred, and that it was against the kindred and them only that the precaution was adopted. And if this result could be attained by commingling the blood in a manner similar to that of the blood-covenant, it could also be achieved by eating a portion of the foe. Closely connected with cannibalism of the kind I am referring to is the custom of alumbi practised by several tribes in Equatorial West Africa. It consists in serving in food to a guest powder scraped from the skull of a deceased ancestor. “The idea is, that by consuming the scrapings of the skull, the blood of their ancestors enters into your body, and thus, becoming of one blood, you are naturally led to love them and grant them what they wish.”^246.1^ In other words, a blood-covenant is entered into unwittingly by the guest with his host; and it need hardly be said that the trick is only played on those guests whose hearts a greedy host considers it is worth his while to soften.

Naturally superstition extended the blood-covenant by analogy to the lower animals, both in their relations with one another and with man, and utilised it for human profit. Servian Gipsy thieves draw blood from the left shoulder of a stolen beast, dry it to powder and mix the powder with the fodder of other beasts which they intend to steal, so as to be able to capture them without hindrance.^246.2^ An {247} Icelandic story is told of a fairy who used to send her kine to graze with those of a peasant-farmer. One day the farmer found a fairy cow in his stable. He cut its ear until it bled, and so appropriated the animal, to the fairy’s great annoyance.^247.1^ The story is incomplete in not telling us what was done with the blood. It is clear, however, that a bond of blood was created which, in the stage of civilisation wherein the story arose, meant, as between man and one of the lower animals, ownership. From the Arctic circle to the southern Sporades may seem a far cry; yet it is from the island of Calymnos that we are able to supply the missing detail. One day in the spring of last year (1894) Mr. W. R. Paton saw a little girl, the daughter of a shepherd, with her face besmeared with blood. Her mother told him, by way of explanation, that the father had been marking the kids in his daughter’s name. Further inquiry showed that it was the custom to mark these animals by cutting their ears, every shepherd having his own distinctive mark, that they were marked in the name of one or other child of the family, and that some of the blood was smeared on the face of the child in whose name they were marked.^247.2^ A better illustration could hardly be found of the manner in which the customs of one country will throw light upon the customs and traditions of another. Distance in space counts for naught where we are dealing with similar conditions of culture.

This sketch of totemism, including the means of union and communion between the clan and its totem on the one hand, and between the individual members of the clan on the other hand, is hasty and imperfect. Yet I hope it may {248} prove sufficient for our purpose, the more so as the writings of Professor Robertson Smith and Mr. Frazer, who have studied the subject with great detail, are happily easy of access. Without, therefore, dwelling longer upon it we may turn to glance at some of the modifications undergone by the ceremony of the blood-covenant. A rite so barbarous would not maintain itself unimpaired as culture advanced. Other rites are softened in course of time; a part is taken for the whole, or a sham for the real thing; and this is no exception. I have referred to some of the forms it has assumed, but only to such as bear to the most casual observer the mark and witness of the original whence they are derived. There remain to be briefly considered some of the remoter variations.

The sacramental essence of the rite has escaped many modern travellers. Yet it might have been thought obvious enough. It is, perhaps, most clearly brought out where the blood is mingled with the food of the participants. It has been well insisted on, and its connection with the totem-sacrifice exhibited at length, by Professor Robertson Smith. Nor, after what has been said about it in the foregoing pages, and after the analogous superstitions discussed in preceding chapters, is it necessary to dwell on the point here. But it can excite no surprise that the rite should have degenerated into a solemn meal eaten together by the persons entering into the new bond. In early times no one would have a right to eat together save the brethren of a clan; and on the other hand, all who ate together would, presumably at least, be members of the same clan. Hospitality—the relation of host and guest—would form the only exception; and hospitality, as practised in savage and barbarous communities, may be described as a temporary reception into the kin or family. {249} But none save brethren habitually shared the common meal. To eat together, therefore, would of itself be a sign, though not an infallible sign, of kinship. Eating together is—not merely on solemn occasions, as the sacrifice of the totem-beast, but in a lesser degree at other times—an act of communion. The sharing of a common substance as food unites those who partake of it in a common life: it makes them parts of one another: they incorporate one another’s substance. This is the significance of eating “things sacrificed to idols,” and of “sitting at meat in an idol’s temple.” The idol is supposed to have partaken of the meat; and those who afterwards eat of it share by that act the idol’s life; they partake of his substance. This is the significance of the offering of first-fruits; the bulk is holy and fit for the worshippers’ food, because a portion, and through that portion the whole, is first united with the god. What is true of special feasts, and of communion with the god, holds good of everyday meals, and of communion by the clansmen with one another. To admit a stranger into the clan, then, it will be enough that he be allowed to partake of the common meal. If the admission be simply for a temporary purpose as a guest, it will take place without any extraordinary formalities. If a permanent union be contemplated, then ceremonies must be performed indicative of the intention, and uniting the parties in the unmistakable bond of a common life.

One or two examples will suffice. The aboriginal tribes of Bengal have now in many instances undergone a transformation, under the influence of the dominant Aryan religion and organisation, from tribal organisation and status into that of castes. The Mahilis, “a Dravidian caste of labourers, palanquin-bearers and workers in bamboo, {250} found in Chota Nagpur and Western Bengal,” readily admit “men of any caste ranking higher than their own.” The person seeking admission “has merely to pay a small sum to the headman of the caste and to give a feast to the Mahilis of the neighbourhood. This feast he must attend himself and signify his entrance into the brotherhood by tasting a portion of the food left by each of the guests on the leaf which on these occasions serves as a plate.”^250.1^ The Máls of Western and Central Bengal, another tribe which has become converted into a caste, while still retaining many distinctly tribal practices, also admit outsiders. The fashion among them is for the neophyte to give a feast to the Máls of the neighbourhood, and to drink water wherein the headman of the village has dipped his toes.^250.2^ The Mysteries of Greece and Western Asia were celebrated with the sacrifice and consumption of the divine animal; and the persons who joined in the ceremony entered into a brotherhood which, though in the latter times of classic heathendom regarded as spiritual rather than literal, must have derived its significance from a more archaic state of society, when to partake of the totem-animal was to consummate the most sacred rite of kinship. Among the Battas of Sumatra alliances are concluded by the slaughter of a hog or cow. As soon as its throat is cut the heart is torn out and divided into as many pieces as there are chiefs present. The share of each is put on a pointed stick and roasted by holding it over the fire. In turn the chiefs then hold up their respective morsels, saying: “If I should ever violate my oath, I am willing to be slaughtered like the bleeding animal which lies before me, and to be {251} devoured like the piece of heart I am about to eat.”^251.1^ This oath, which is reported to be more than a mere form, points back to an earlier period before the cow or the hog was substituted for a man. In classical antiquity a blood-rite of this kind is many times mentioned which not improbably may represent an early form of the blood-covenant. In the oath said to have been administered by Catiline to his fellow-conspirators, a slave was put to death, and every one drank out of the same cup his blood mingled with wine. The oath they swore was deemed irrevocable: it united them like the brethren of one blood to support one another in life and avenge one another’s death. The same is doubtless the meaning of the act recorded by Herodotus of the Greek and Carian allies of Psammenitus, when one of their number, Phanes of Halicarnassus, deserted to Cambyses, the Persian invader of Egypt. They put to death his sons in Phanes’ sight, drained their blood into a vase, which they filled up with wine and water, and, having drunk it together, they rushed madly but vainly on the foe.^251.2^ And Diodorus Siculus relates of Apollodorus, who aspired in the third century before Christ to the government of the city of Cassandrea in Macedonia, that he slew a youth to the gods, gave his fellow-conspirators the entrails to eat and the blood mingled with wine to drink.^251.3^ A relic of some such ceremony is found in India. Among the Saráogi Baniyás, who are reckoned of the Súdra caste, on the occasion of a marriage the relatives only of the parties meet in a private apartment around the figure of a Brahman, made in dough and filled with honey. The bridegroom’s father, “armed with a miniature bow and arrows, topples over the effigy, {252} which is then disembowelled, so to speak, of its honey, into which all present dip a finger and suck it.”^252.1^ In the New World the bloodthirsty Aztecs ate their human sacrifices. The Yncas, a little more human, offered and ate animals, called by De Molina sheep. Their sacrament consisted of a pudding of coarsely-ground maize, of which a portion had been smeared on the idol. The priest sprinkled it with the blood of the victim, before distributing it to the people.^252.2^ A curious rite is reported as taking place among the Isubus, in the west of Africa, when entering into a covenant to do some murderous or warlike deed. A pot is placed upon the fire, and in the pot a stone, supposed to become by cooking as soft as a plantain. It is then cut with a knife, and each of the covenanting parties must swallow a piece, binding himself thereby to do or abet the deed proposed.^252.3^ A Danubian Gipsy saga relates the mode of admission into a tribe. The chief eats with the candidate a piece of salted bread, and gives him brandy in a glass. When the brandy is drunk the glass is smashed.^252.4^ Drinking, indeed, often becomes the substitute for eating. Among the aborigines of Formosa the manner of taking an oath of friendship is by putting their arms round one another’s necks and drinking simultaneously from the same cup of wine.^252.5^ Among the Slavs the blood-covenant is still practised; and the Church has taken it under her own protection. In her hands it has become transformed into the ritual drinking of wine together. Thus in Crnagora the comrades who are {253} about to enter into the bond of brotherhood attend the church, where the priest awaits them. He hands them the chalice, out of which they thrice drink wine together. They kiss the cross, the gospels and the sacred images, and finally kiss one another thrice upon the cheek. Afterwards the one on whose suggestion the league is formed, gives a dinner to the brother of his choice and adds to it some more valuable gift.^253.1^

But we have seen that an entirely different modification of the rite early took place. The actual drinking of the blood was dropped in favour of mixing it by inoculation,^253.2^ or outwardly upon the bleeding flesh. Among the Norsemen in later times the blood was drawn from each party and simply allowed to flow together in their footprints.^253.3^ Herodotus describes the covenant among the Arabs on the borders of Egypt. Blood was drawn with a sharp stone from the thumb of either party. With a shred of each person’s robe it was then smeared upon seven sacred stones, with an invocation to the divinities Orotal and Alilat, whom the historian identifies with Dionysos and Urania.^253.4^ Professor Robertson Smith commenting on the passage observes that the smearing on the stones “makes the gods parties to the covenant, but evidently the {254} symbolical act is not complete unless at the same time the human parties taste each other’s blood.” And he surmises that “this was actually done, though Herodotus does not say so. But,” he admits, “it is also possible that in the course of time the ritual had been so far modified that it was deemed sufficient that the two bloods should meet on the sacred stone.”^254.1^ I cannot help thinking that what we have learnt in the course of our previous inquiries may help us to the solution of the difficulty. When Abruzzian girls hide their hairs in some secret place of the sanctuary on vowing eternal friendship, they seem at first sight to be performing an act parallel to that recorded of the Arabs; and if so we need not suspect that Herodotus has omitted any feature of the rite. Probably, however, the true explanation does not lie here. We may suppose that the shreds torn by the master of the ceremonies from either garment were roughly tied or twisted together into a wisp, which was then dipped into the flowing blood of both persons, and the blood thus mingled after the fashion of many tribes before it was painted on the stones; or, in the alternative, that the shred from the garment of the one person was dipped in the blood of the other. We have had abundant evidence that a man’s clothes are deemed a part of himself, and that what is done to them is done to him. To dip a portion of my clothes in my friend’s blood, therefore, is to unite me to him, to make him my blood-brother, without the necessity of tasting his blood, or even of literally mixing our blood together. In either way the act would be complete, and the historian’s accuracy justified. Even less than this is necessary among other {255} nations. A man is deemed a blood-brother if the blood of another touch him only by accident and without any outpouring of his own blood. So Dr. Livingstone involuntarily contracted blood-relationship with a Balonda woman in opening a tumour in her arm, by the spurting of some of her blood in his eye.^255.1^ Similarly in the Irish saga of The Wooing of Emer we find Cuchulainn becoming the blood-brother of Devorgoil by sucking from her wound the stone that had struck her from his sling.^255.2^ An Abruzzian prescription for epilepsy is for some one on the first attack of the disease to strike the patient on the ear with something of iron, so that the blood flows. The operator becomes the “gossip” (compare o comare) of the person thus cured. Here it seems to suffice if the blood simply touch the instrument used: a much degraded form of the rite, comparable with that in the Icelandic story of the fairy cow, and with the practice of scoring a witch. In a variant remedy, however, a person unacquainted with the patient bites the ear until the blood flows.^255.3^

A further modification of the rite appears in ancient Arabic literature, whereby the blood shed is not that of one of the contracting parties but of another human victim slain at the sanctuary, and the hands of all who shared in the compact were simply dipped into the gore. At first it would seem likely that the victim was already a member of one of the clans entering into the alliance. This was the case in the province of Zacatecas in Central America. The victim chosen was first mercifully intoxicated to deaden his pain. It does not appear that he was put to death; {256} but his ears were pierced in turn by each member of the contracting clans, who rubbed the spurting blood over his own body.^256.1^ After a while, however, the human victim would be dispensed with, or perhaps among many nations the victim may always have been a sacred animal, originally of course a totem-animal. So, among the Dyaks for the purpose of reconciling two foes, or of welcoming a stranger, a fowl is killed and its blood sprinkled over the parties and the dwelling.^256.2^ In the Chittagong Hills the Kumi and the Shendoos kill a goat or a heifer and smear with its blood the feet and foreheads of the contracting parties. Before doing so, however, the presiding chief takes a mouthful of liquor from a cup and blows it over one party, blows another mouthful over the other party and a third over the victim. Some other ceremonies follow, including the imprecation frequently occurring on any one who violates the compact.^256.3^

The ritual of other peoples deviates yet more from the type. The cannibal Bondjos of Africa merely put red ochre on the arms and rub them together.^256.4^ Two men of the Limbu, a Bengali tribe of Mongolian descent, contract brotherhood by a ceremony at which a Brahman, or, when the parties are Buddhists, a Lama, presides and reads mantras or mystic formulæ, while the two friends thrice exchange rupees, handkerchiefs or scarves, and daub each other between the eyebrows with a paste made of rice and curds. And the description of the performance holds good of the Muriari and other tribes of the same province.^256.5^ {257} In other parts of the world the rite further degenerates into the mere rubbing of noses, or the striking of one another’s breasts with an exchange of names.^257.1^ Our hand-shaking is a pledge of goodwill and fidelity which, we can hardly doubt, points to the same course of ceremonial decay. The exchange of names, practised so frequently among savage peoples by intimate friends, has no different effect. For the name being part of the person, to confer it upon another and to take that other’s name in exchange is to effect union as close as the mixture of one another’s blood. Among the Abruzzians in Italy, as I mentioned just now, the blood-rite is not yet extinct. It is practised in a milder form by two girls who wish to swear eternal friendship after the manner of maidens. Taking each other by the hand and repeating certain prescribed rhymes, in which they pray with emphasis that the one who breaks the bond may go straight to hell, each of them pulls a hair from her own head and puts it on the other’s. Thenceforth they salute one another as “Gossip,” and may safely make one another the recipient of the most sacred confidences.^257.2^

It will readily be understood that the ceremony of the blood-covenant cannot be thus truncated and altered in a variety of ways without a corresponding change in the rights and liabilities, the privileges and disabilities, entailed where the clan system is in the plenitude of its sway. When a Dyak welcomes a stranger by sprinkling the blood of a domesticated bird, or when two Italian girls exchange hairs, one party to the performance is not admitted to the {258} kin of the other. No legal tie of blood results from the ceremony. For all that, a tie is formed. The tie of hospitality, or the tie of gossipry, is, in the contemplation of the Italian peasant, or the Dyak, a tie involving rights and duties similar within its limits to those of blood. So when two Slavs enter into adoptive brotherhood, the evolution of society, which has mollified the rude rite, has also shorn it of many of the resulting consequences; and kinsmen of this kind often betroth their children together while yet in the cradle, in order, we are expressly told, to strengthen the bond between them^258.1^—a betrothal usually impossible in archaic society, because as a rule marriage within the kin is forbidden. But it does not come within my design to do more than point out that these differences arise in the consequences, as well as in the forms, of the rite, and in both cases from the same cause—the growth of civilisation.

There is an analogous group of practices the material of which is not the blood but the saliva. In an able and interesting paper, published in the Transactions of the International Folklore Congress of 1891, Mr. J. E. Crombie has investigated the superstitions connected with the use of saliva. His contention is that it is sometimes believed to contain the element of life, that to spit upon another person is to add to the latter’s store of life some of one’s own, and that for two persons to spit upon one another is to effect an interchange of life. And he refers in support of his argument to various customs, among which may be mentioned the following. At the reception held by an Osmanli mother after childbirth, every visitor who looks at the babe is expected to spit on it and to {259} conceal her admiration under such disparaging remarks as “Nasty, ugly little thing!” to show that she does not envy or ill-wish it. Among the Masai spitting on another expresses the greatest goodwill and best wishes. Pliny records the classical habit of spitting on a lame man or an epileptic, the reason given being to avoid fascination or repel contagion. For diseases of different kinds fasting spittle is a remedy. To cite Pliny again, he speaks of ophthalmia and crick in the neck being thus cured. Growing pains in children are treated in the same manner. Among the Samoans, when a man was ill his relatives used to assemble, and, after confessing whether he had wished the sick man any evil, each of them was required to take some water in his mouth and spurt it out towards him. In making a bargain or contract of any kind the saliva is employed. In Masailand the sale of a bullock is concluded by the seller spitting on the animal’s head and the purchaser on the article he is going to give in exchange. At Newcastle in old days when the colliers combined for the purpose of raising their wages they were said to spit together on a stone by way of cementing their confederacy. So the Anses and the Wanes in making a covenant of peace let fall into a vase each of them some of his saliva, out of which a being was made endowed with the wisdom of them all. And Mr. Henderson relates that in his school-days the highest pledge of faith two boys could give to one another was to spit.^259.1^

The exigencies of a Congress-paper no doubt compelled Mr. Crombie to shorten his list of examples. His conclusion is in harmony with the opinions advocated in the present volume. But if those opinions be correct we may go further than Mr. Crombie has ventured. The transfer of saliva is more than a gift of a portion of the spitter’s life. It is a gift of a portion of himself, which is thus put into the power of the recipient as a pledge of goodwill. Nay, it is a bodily union with the recipient, such as can be effected by a blood-covenant. Possibly as Mr. Crombie suggests, it is, where an interchange of saliva occurs, a form of blood-covenant consequent upon milder manners, like some of the modifications we have already glanced at. Rather it seems to be a more evanescent and less solemn, though still emphatic, form, intended only for temporary purposes. I hope the examples I propose to adduce will bear out this contention.

Let us first recall the uses to which we have, in previous chapters, found saliva put. Equally with the other issues of the body, it is a means of witchcraft whereby the spitter may be injured and perhaps done to death. In the same way it is available as a means of compelling the love of one of the opposite sex. It is dangerous to spit into the fire. To spit the half of a piece of bread which the patient has been chewing, and has therefore {261} mixed with his saliva, into a tree is in Transylvania a specific against toothache. And to spit in certain prescribed places is a remedy for various diseases. The natives of South America spit their coca-quids upon the cairns in the Cordilleras; and every Basuto traveller spits upon the pebble he is about to add to the heap outside the village he is approaching. It is hard to put any meaning into these superstitions, unless it be one that ignores the separation of the saliva from the body of which it once formed a part. The märchen cited in Chapter IX., by causing the heroine’s spittle to answer for her, as if she were present, after she has in fact fled from the ogre’s thraldom, exaggerate the identification of the saliva with its owner to the height of endowing it with a large measure of her consciousness and personality. The same exaggeration is to be observed in a practice among children in New England, doubtless derived from the old country, of divining by means of saliva where a bird’s nest, or something else for which they are searching, is. A boy will spit into the palm of his hand and striking the spittle with the forefinger of the other hand will say:

“Spit, spat, spot, Tell me where that bird’s nest is,”

(or as the case may be); and the direction in which the spittle flies will be that in which the search must be pursued.^261.1^

Turning now to some other practices, we may begin by glancing at the widely diffused lustration of a babe with saliva. The object of the custom is said to be protection against the Evil Eye. Persius, in the first century of the {262} Christian era, describes with great scorn a grandmother or superstitious aunt as taking the child from its cradle and rubbing its forehead with spittle applied with the middle finger.^262.1^ Nor is the custom by any means extinct. To lick a cross on the infant’s brow is among the Transylvanian Saxons a preservative from spells.^262.2^ And over the whole of Europe it is the most ordinary act of politeness to spit on a baby. Among the Dalmatians and Bosnians, when caressing and complimenting a pretty infant, it is necessary, in order to destroy the enchantment produced by the praise, to spit on its forehead; and if you chance to forget this, the parents with a pistol at your breast will constrain you to remember it. Everywhere in the Balkan peninsula the superstition prevails, as well as in Corsica, in the Land beyond the Forest and among the Huzules on the north-eastern slopes of the Carpathians.^262.3^ A visitor to Ireland in the reign of Charles II. records the same among the peasantry of his day; and even yet it is far from disappearing. People in Wicklow spit on a child for good luck the first day it is brought out after birth. At Innisbofin, in the west of Ireland, when the old women meet a baby out with its nurse they either spit upon it or spit on the ground all round in a circle, to keep off the fairies.^262.4^ The design to ward off the spells of witches or (what amounts to the same thing) of fairies appears, however, {263} to be only a specialisation of a more general intention. The evidence points to the meaning of the ceremony as a welcome into the world, an acknowledgment of kindred, a desire to express those friendly feelings which in archaic times none but a kinsman could entertain, whatever flattering words might be spoken. It is said that the ceremony referred to by Persius was performed on the day the babe received its name. In Connemara, immediately after birth, the father spits on his child.^263.1^ Some such custom would seem to have been known in Iceland under the name of Spittle-baptism.^263.2^ When Mohammed’s elder grandson was born, the prophet spat in his mouth and named him Hasan.^263.3^ Among the Mandingos and among the Bambaras of Western Africa, in the ceremony of naming a child, the griot or priest spits thrice in its face.^263.4^ In Ashanti the father varies the performance by squirting a mouthful of rum into his child’s face and calling it by a name.^263.5^ And in the Roman Catholic rite of baptism—a rite, we are called on to believe, having nothing in common with these heathenish practices—the person operated on, whether babe or adult, is to this day bedaubed with the priest’s saliva.

Barbot, writing at the end of the seventeenth century, relates that the interpreter of the king of Zair, in the Congo basin, after rubbing his hands and face in the dust, “took one of the royal feet in his hands, spat on the sole thereof, and licked it with his tongue.”^263.6^ This, if it stood alone, might be held, like the kissing of the pope’s toe, to express {264} mere subservience; but other African customs put a different interpretation upon it. In north-eastern Senegambia if a Massasi be condemned for any offence by the chief and succeed, after sentence pronounced but before punishment, in spitting upon one of the princes, he is considered inviolable, and must be provided with food and lodging at the expense of the personage who has had the imprudence to come within range of his saliva.^264.1^ At Orango in the Bissagos Archipelago, off the Senegambian coast, the ceremony for sealing a friendship is to spit in one another’s hands.^264.2^ On the other side of the continent, a stranger can only be received among the Somali and neighbouring tribes as a guest of some family. When so received he is regarded for the time as one of the stock. And the ceremony of reception amongst the southern Somali and the Oromó, consists in the host’s spitting in his right hand and rubbing it on the stranger’s forehead as a sign of naturalisation.^264.3^ Contact with the saliva thus effects union for the moment as binding as the tie of kinship. We must surely give a similar meaning {265} to the Somali rule which requires chance passers-by to spit on the bier at a funeral.^265.1^ If they thus unite themselves with the dead they will not, either upon him, or through him upon his surviving kindred, work any mischief by witchcraft. In the same way, too, a Kafir sorcerer offers from time to time his saliva to the spirits, that he may not lose his divining power. The king of the principal isle of the Bissagos Archipelago will not swallow a single drop of liquid without spitting the first mouthful over his fetishes or his amulets.^265.2^ And the Basuto diviners believe that if they neglect to spit before eating they will lose their power and become like other mortals.^265.3^ In these cases the spitting is manifestly intended to unite the sorcerer or king with the supernatural Power; and the Basuto form of the offering is perhaps a decayed one, which may be compared to the classical habit of spilling a drop or two of drink as a libation.

These African practices correspond with others elsewhere. When an Irish peasant wishes to welcome a friend with more than usual heartiness, he spits in his own hand ere he clasps his friend’s with it. In the East Riding of Yorkshire people stand by a brook to wish, and they spit into it: doubtless a relic of the archaic worship of water.^265.4^ In Central America, whenever the native traveller came to one of the altars erected everywhere on the roads to the god of travellers, he plucked a tuft of grass, rubbed it on his leg, and, spitting on it, piously deposited it, together with a stone, upon the altar.^265.5^ And in the last chapter I had occasion to {266} refer to the customs of Basuto travellers, which also present the attempt at union with the god in a form analogous to those just mentioned of the Kafirs and Bissagos islanders.

So the custom of spitting on one’s money for luck appears to be an emphatic way of identifying oneself with it. It is usual in England for country people attending a market to sell, to spit on the first money received and put it into a pocket apart; and the object is rightly suggested in an old dictionary “to render it tenacious that it may remain with them, and not vanish away like a fairy gift.”^266.1^ A Walloon receiving money from one suspected of sorcery bites it, otherwise it would return to the sorcerer, together with all the pieces in contact with it in the pocket.^266.2^ The biting is evidently a method of touching the coin with the saliva. So an Eskimo licks anything which is given him; while in some parts of England it is believed that to spit on a gift, such as a piece of money, is to ensure more.^266.3^ For the same reason, as noted in a previous chapter, the Danubian Gipsy who desires to assure a maiden’s love will obtain some of her hairs, spit on them, and then hide them in the coffin of a dead man. A Transylvanian Saxon in a business matter, before he pays the first money, spits on it, that it may bring him more.^266.4^ An Esthonian, if he be required to empty his purse, will spit into it.^266.5^ A Spaniard, in buying a lottery ticket, spits on the money before handing it over, in the hope of thus securing the winning {267} number. Others spit on the ground, put the foot on the spittle, and only take it off on receiving the ticket.^267.1^ The Persian gamester, who always attributes losses to the Evil Eye, blows on the cards or the dice, and feigns to spit on his money before staking it on the game.^267.2^ In France a player spits on his chair.^267.3^ The Cherokee fisherman, before baiting his hook, chews a small piece of Venus’ Flytrap, and spits it upon the bait and the hook, at the same time repeating an incantation addressed to the fish. “Our spittle,” he says, “shall be in agreement,” implying, as Mr. Mooney tells us, “that there shall be such close sympathy between the fisher and the fish that their spittle shall be as the spittle of one individual.”^267.4^ A Girondin fisherman, having baited his hook, spits on the worm to make the fish bite better.^267.5^ In Norway the fisherman also spits upon the bait for luck; the tradesman and the working-man spit on the first money they take. In the Lofoden Islands the fisherman’s wife accompanies him to the boat, and always spits in it to bestow luck upon him.^267.6^ In Upper Ogowe, in Africa, a fetish-horn is shaken around a man to bring him luck, a certain herb is chewed and the quid is spit out upon him; and in the same way chewed herbs are spit upon a new-born child to preserve it from spells. Among the Okandas of the same region, in order to assure to a pirogue a prosperous voyage, the women come with a bouquet of leaves. Striking the forepart of the vessel with the leaves, they make a noise as of driving away something, and finally spit upon it.^267.7^ Olenda, the king of the Ashira in {268} Equatorial Africa, when he gave his parting blessing to his sons and Du Chaillu, whom they were to accompany on a journey, took a sugar-cane, and biting off a piece of the pith spat a little of the juice in the hand of each of the party, at the same time blowing on the hand.^268.1^ In his book on the Highlands of Æthiopia Major Cornwallis Harris describes a search for a lost camel. The man who was sent on the search was given the rope wherewith the animal had been fettered; but before it was put into his hands, spells were muttered over it; and we are told that “the devil was dislodged by the process of spitting upon the cord at the termination of each spell.”^268.2^ So in the old Roman Catholic liturgy, when the priest puts his spittle on the ears and nose of the person he is baptizing he says: “Effeta, quod est adaperire, in odorem suavitatis; tu autem effugare, diabole, adpropinquavit enim judicium Dei!”^268.3^ This conjuring formula perhaps derives its value from the blessed word Effeta, transliterated in our Bibles as Ephphatha, used by Christ, and having nothing to do with the dislodgment of the devil to which the latter part of the spell, like those muttered over the camel-fetter, refers. Moreover, the dislodgement of the devil is an incomplete explanation in both cases, as we shall see directly.

There is a remarkable method practised among some savages for quelling a refractory wild animal when caught alive; and here, as in some other instances, we find Western Africa in curious agreement with North America. {269} Mr. Kane went out with a Cree Indian to hunt the buffalo, and killed a cow which was followed by her calf. “Wishing,” he says, “to take the calf alive, so that it might carry itself to the camp, I pursued and caught it, and, tying my sash round its neck, endeavoured to drag it along; but it plunged and tried so violently to escape that I was about to kill it, when the Indian took hold of its head, and turning up its muzzle, spat two or three times into it, when, much to my astonishment, the animal became perfectly docile, and followed us quietly to the camp, where it was immediately cooked for supper.”^269.1^ There is no ground for doubting the facts related by the traveller, however we may account for them. The same procedure was adopted by a turtle-fisher with whom Mr. Winwood Reade went sporting on one occasion in Western Africa. A turtle was caught, and on being hauled into the canoe the man “welcomed him by patting him on the head and spitting down his mouth.” The turtles, however, are not always so submissive as Mr. Kane’s buffalo-calf; for the fisherman showed Mr. Reade a scar on his arm, which a turtle had once inflicted in retribution.^269.2^ Exactly the same prescription is adopted by the Icelandic parson to lay a ghost. He spits down his throat, or in his face; and the performance is said to be effective.^269.3^

In some of the foregoing illustrations protection against the Evil Eye, or the driving away of evil spirits, has appeared as the reason for spitting. The habit is one almost universal as a counter-charm to witchcraft. If we look at it a little more closely we shall see that it is ultimately {270} referable to the same idea as other spitting customs, namely, that of effecting union between the person spitting and the object on which his saliva falls. This may be done by spitting upon one’s clothes, money, or other property, so as to guard them against attack, as in the case of the gamester’s money or his chair. In Chester County, Pennsylvania, Dr. Brinton records that boys always used to spit on a pair of new boots; and it was important to prevent others from doing the same: hence frequent struggles and teasing at school.^270.1^ The superstition is derived from Europe, where Reginald Scot prescribed, centuries ago, and Pliny centuries before him, spitting into the right shoe before putting it on: a similar practice to that said to be still in use in some parts of Scandinavia of spitting into one’s bed before lying down, spitting upon the floor before rising, upon the grass before sitting down, or into a spring before drinking from it.^270.2^ Captain Binger’s host in one of the villages on the tributaries of the upper Niger never put on his trousers without spitting into them, and never sat down without spitting on the seat.^270.3^ A Clal-lum of North America on meeting an enemy will spit into his own blanket if he happen to be wearing one at the time.^270.4^ In the same way a maiden in Theocritus, on repelling a lover who attempted to kiss her, spat thrice in the breast of her gown.^270.5^ Pliny describes the Roman practice of spitting into the lap as a method of asking pardon of the gods, when indulging in some extravagant hope. It is {271} more probably to be assigned to the kind of superstitions we are now dealing with. In the same chapter he mentions the practice of spitting into one’s urine as a counter-charm.^271.1^ Parallel with the latter practice is that alluded to by Delrio of spitting thrice on one’s hair-combings before throwing them away.^271.2^ In various parts of Italy, if a stone become lodged in a horse’s hoof, it is usual to take the precaution of spitting on it before throwing it away.^271.3^ In addition to the Scandinavian customs just mentioned we also find those of spitting on throwing water out of doors, of spitting on the straw worn in the shoe before throwing it away, into the bath-water of a new-born child, into the water in which another has washed before washing in it oneself (a practice not unknown in England) and others all referable to the same purpose.^271.4^ The Transylvanian Saxons used to spit on the four corners of a new house, saying a prayer at each corner and kissing it; and to protect their belongings from envy they spit and repeat a certain spell every morning on stepping out over the threshold of the house.^271.5^ In Silesia it is proper to spit into the fodder given to a horse, so as to protect it from witchcraft.^271.6^ In Lesbos it is customary to spit on beholding a handsome person (man or woman), a sleek, well-fed horse, cow or sheep, a good milch-goat, or a fruitful tree, {272} in order to preserve the object in question from the Evil Eye.^272.1^ In America a Negro, on turning back in a path, makes a cross with his foot and spits in it, lest misfortune overtake him the next time he passes that way.^272.2^

Another course is to spit on the witch. For this cause the Romans used to spit on meeting not only a lame man, but apparently also an epileptic; for although Pliny speaks of the latter habit as intended to repel contagion, it is more likely a modification of an earlier habit of spitting on the unfortunate person. In Sicily still it is the custom to spit behind a hunchback or a sorcerer. A mother will spit at any one who admires her child, the moment he has turned his back. And when a woman is in the pains of childbirth, one of her attendant friends will go to the window and spit thrice, looking sternly all about, as if she hoped to find and reach with her saliva the witch who is retarding delivery. The Roman nurses used to spit on the ground when a stranger entered, or when any one looked at their sleeping charges.^272.3^ A Russian nurse, with less civilised manners, is said to spit straight in the face of anybody who praises the babe without adding: “God save the bargain!”^272.4^ In Corsica a bewitched child is made to spit in the witch’s mouth.^272.5^ It is a Norse custom to spit on meeting a witch. In the Gironde people sometimes spit thrice in passing a witch’s dwelling. In Germany there seems to be a similar practice when passing any haunted water by night. The Romans spat when passing a place where they had incurred any danger. The intention here is by spitting on the evil thing so to bring it on your side as to prevent its doing you {273} any ill; and the same may be conjectured of the incident said to occur in a Russian tale where the Devil is made to flee by spitting upwards, and of the rite of exorcism on the Gaboon, where the practitioner spits to right and left of the possessed person. The Conibos of South America spit on the ground when they meet evil spirits or persons whom they suppose capable of injuring them.^273.1^

A third course is to get the witch to spit on her victim. This is considered effective in the Aran Islands, where the possessor of an evil eye is required to spit on any one whom he may have affected, and to say: “God bless you!”^273.2^ Captain Bourke mentions a Mexican case where a horse was suffering from the Evil Eye. “The man accused of casting the spell admitted his guilt, but said that he would cure the animal at once. He filled his mouth with water, spat upon the horse’s neck, and rubbed and patted the place until it was dry.” The horse recovered in due course.^273.3^ For the same reason in Italy the dust of the witch’s footprint is flung over the person or cattle bewitched, and the Persians scrape the mud from the sorcerer’s shoes and rub the part affected.^273.4^ The principle is that of taking “a hair of the dog that bit you,” to which I have already sufficiently referred.

The saliva of sacred personages, as we might expect, is of much importance. In this connection the performances of Christian as well as heathen priests in exorcism and {274} other rites will be remembered. The Tunguz shaman, called in to cure a sick man, “takes the patient’s head between his hands, sucks his brow, spits in his face, and fixedly looks at the affected part.”^274.1^ A Tcheremiss conjuror pronounces his spells over a vessel of water, beer, milk or salt and bread, blows or spits upon the contents, and then gives them to the invalid to drink or eat, as the case may be.^274.2^ In Central Australia the old men are the performers of all important tribal ceremonies. They are credited with shamanistic powers; and their treatment of disease is by spurting a mouthful of water over the stricken member and then sucking it.^274.3^ On the Paraguay River, the Guaná medicine-man, when called to attend a patient, spits in the course of his ceremonies strenuously on the suffering spot.^274.4^ Spitting, in fact, when performed by properly qualified practitioners, is a powerful remedy. Vespasian is said to have restored his sight to an inhabitant of Alexandria by spitting on his eyes.^274.5^ The old thaumaturgists of the Church were not wont to be outdone by any one—not even by their Lord, still less by a heathen Pontifex Maximus. Accordingly, we find Hilarion (the saint, it will be recollected, who had so excellent a nose) repeating Vespasian’s miracle on a woman, also in Egypt.^274.6^ More purely spiritual are some other uses of spitting. At Foochow, in China, when a family removes to a house previously occupied {275} by another family, a priest first of all cleanses the dwelling by spirting water from his mouth, or scattering it direct from the bowl he carries; and on returning from a funeral the priest stands at the house-door and spirts from his mouth water over the members of the bereaved family to purify them, repeating as he does so a short formula.^275.1^ Among the Khonds the Meriah, previous to his sacrifice, was paraded through the village, when hairs were plucked from his head by the people, while some begged for a drop of his saliva, with which they anointed their own heads.^275.2^ Dr. Wolf, when in Abyssinia, being mistaken for the new Abuna, or bishop, was compelled to spit upon the people, and to have his feet washed that the devotees might drink the water of ablution.^275.3^ Cases like these are ambiguous: a different and simpler interpretation may be put upon them. In view, however, of other customs relating to saliva, we shall probably not be straining the analogy by describing the fundamental idea rather as the desire for union with the divinity, than the ascription of an inherent power to his emanations.

Having now sketched the results arrived at by Professor Robertson Smith and other distinguished anthropologists in reference to the blood-covenant, and briefly discussed several forms of the rite, I have endeavoured to put before {276} the reader a series of parallel usages with saliva. This has led us to other superstitions more closely related to those of sorcery, medicine and worship earlier passed in review. In all these alike we have found the same ideas—the ideas, namely, which form the core of the incident of the Life-token and the practices it embodies. Armed with the conclusions drawn from the consideration of the blood-covenant, we will go on to examine some other social institutions and ceremonies on various planes of civilisation.

Chapter XIII. Funeral Rites

If I have made clear the corporate character of the clan, or gens, as conceived by savage thought, the reader will have understood how completely the clan is regarded as an unity, literally and not metaphorically one body, the individual members of which are as truly portions as the fingers or the legs are portions of the external, visible body of each of them. We saw in previous chapters that a severed limb, a lock of hair or a nail-clipping, was still regarded as in some invisible but real union with the body whereof it once, in outward appearance also, formed part; and any injury inflicted on the severed portion was inflicted on the bulk. The individual member of a clan was in exactly the same position as a lock of hair cut from the head, or an amputated limb. He had no separate significance, no value apart from his kin. More than that: as we shall see hereafter, injury inflicted on him was inflicted on, and was felt by, the whole kin, just as an injury inflicted on the severed lock or limb was felt by the bulk. This unity of the clan is constantly renewed by the common meal, where the same food is partaken of, and becomes incorporated into the essence of all who share it. In strictness commensal rights belong {278} only to the kin. To eat together means to be of the same flesh and blood, for none others could do so. Such a rule of course came to be modified as soon as hospitality was recognised as a duty or a privilege. But the stranger admitted as a guest to the meal became by that act a temporary member of the kin. The rights conceded to him so long as he remained a guest were the rights of kinship, and entailed corresponding liabilities. He could not, however, share the common meal in its most solemn form, namely, the totem sacrifice, without becoming a blood-brother, and thus entering the kin as a permanent member. In mingling his blood with the blood of the clan, and feeding with them on the totem-animal, he became one with them as much as if he had been already united with them in a common descent. Abandoning his former country and kin and worship, he identified himself with a new organism having a different domicile with different rights and interests and a different cult.

The common meal was thus the pledge and witness of the unity of the kin, because it was the chief means, if not of making, at least of repairing and renewing it. And its importance is emphasised everywhere by its repetition upon every solemn occasion, and by its forming the centre of the entire ritual. This may be taken for granted of many such occasions; but it may seem strange to assign it a position so prominent in some. It is not obvious, for instance, how it can be the most important act of a funeral. The funeral feast, however, is probably universal; and in savage communities it is difficult to overrate its significance. The most archaic form, if barbarity be a test of archaism, in which it is known to us, is where the meat is nothing less than the corpse of the departed kinsman. Cannibalism in {279} any form excites so much horror in civilised mankind that we hesitate to believe it is a stage through which we have all passed. But it is certainly a custom very widely spread and characteristic of a low plane of culture. We cannot, and we need not, now discuss cannibalism in general. Of all the forms it has ever assumed, the most horrible is that of the eating of the bodies of our nearest and dearest; and that is the form we have to consider.

In considering it, and recalling, as we must, some of the repulsive details of the rite, we cannot do better than begin by reminding ourselves of the anecdote related by Herodotus of the Persian king, Darius, to illustrate the power of custom. He tells us that the monarch once called into his presence some Greeks, who were in the habit of burning their dead, and asked them for what reward they would be willing to devour the bodies of their parents. They replied, of course, that nothing would induce them to do such a thing. Then summoning certain Kalatiai, an Indian people who used to eat their dead, in the presence of the Greeks (who were informed by an interpreter of what was being said) he put the converse question to them, for how much they would burn their deceased parents. They, on the other hand, broke out into exclamations, begging him to desist from such ill-omened language. Leaving the moral of this story to be digested as we proceed, we may review some of the other accounts by ancient and modern travellers of the practice under consideration. The Father of History ascribes it not only to the Kalatiai. Among Indian peoples he mentions the Padaioi, concerning whom he furnishes us with a little more detail. The Padaioi were a race of nomads alleged to feed on raw flesh. When any of the tribesmen fell sick they were {280} mercilessly put to death by their most intimate associates, by which expression is perhaps meant their fellow-clansmen. The men were killed by the men, and the women by the women. They sacrificed all who arrived at old age, and feasted upon them. But these were not numerous, because they slaughtered every one attacked by disease. That even the latter were intended to be eaten is clear from the reason for putting them to death, namely, that otherwise as they were wasted by sickness their flesh would be utterly spoilt.^280.1^ In this respect they differed for the worse from the Massagetai, the Scythian nation whose fierce and masculine queen overcame the mighty Cyrus. They only ate the aged. Those who died of disease they stowed away in the earth, accounting it a misfortune that they had not come to be sacrificed. The kindred of an old man would assemble and immolate him, as well as other animals at the same time; and then boiling the flesh all together they would feast upon it. The Issedones, also Scythians, seem to have been somewhat less savage, for we gather that they waited until a natural death removed the aged. When once a man’s father was dead, the rite, however, was not different from that of the Massagetai, save that we are told they preserved the skull, set it in gold, and used it at their solemn yearly festivals.^280.2^ Herodotus is not the only writer of antiquity who attributes this kind of {281} cannibalism to savage tribes. The geographer Strabo likewise records of the Derbikes in the Caucasus that the men of seventy and upwards were put to death and eaten by their nearest kinsmen, but the women were buried; for they never used for food the flesh of any female animal. And the ancient Irish, more savage, he tells us, than the Britons, considered it praiseworthy to devour their dead fathers, though he admits very fairly that his authority for the statement is not decisive.^281.1^ In the Middle Ages Marco Polo found a tribe in Tartary, whose capital he calls Chandul, who used to cook and eat men condemned to death. Those who died by natural means, on the other hand, they did not eat.^281.2^ It is doubtful whether he refers to criminals as thus eaten; and he is silent as to who joined in the feast. No such ambiguity attaches to the usage reported by the Venetian adventurer as existing in the kingdom of Deragola on the island of Sumatra. The savages of this kingdom, when any kinsman fell sick, used to send for their shamans, who made incantations to ascertain whether he would recover. If the answer were favourable, nature was left to do her best; if unfavourable, they sent for the professional slaughterman, by whom he was suffocated and cooked. The next of kin then assembled and devoured him, afterwards enclosing his bones in a coffin, which was put away in a mountain cavern.^281.3^ Less authentic are the accounts preserved by the author of Sir John Maundeville’s travels concerning the East Indian islands. He attributes a similar practice to the inhabitants of islands he calls Caffolos and Dondun. Of that of Rybothe he relates that a dead body is given {282} to the birds of prey, but that the son of the deceased makes a feast, and serves the flesh of the head to his particular friends, making a drinking cup of the skull, which he uses for the rest of his life.^282.1^ Other mediæval writers ascribe the same species of cannibalism to Tibetan tribes.^282.2^

These statements have received confirmation in modern times from the reports of travellers among tribes in the lower savagery almost everywhere. As in the older writers, there is some ambiguity on the question who was expected or entitled to partake of the horrible food. A comparison, however, of the accounts clearly shows that it was originally confined to the clan, though possibly the melancholy satisfaction of uniting oneself with the departed in this manner may, in different places, have been extended by special favour to intimate friends not belonging to the kin, or, by a modification of tribal customs, to the entire local organisation. Not to weary the reader I have selected in a note at the foot of the page a number of references to cases where the rite is reported to exist in full force;^282.3^ and I now propose {283} to examine some changes and adaptations of its form down to its latest survivals in the folklore of civilised Europe.

But first of all we may take note of some observances among the American aborigines, which, though not connected with funerals, afford us a glimpse of the sacramental {284} character of a feast upon a kinsman’s body. The Totonacas, a tribe of the Mexican Chichimecs, used to slay periodically three of their children and mix the blood with certain herbs from the temple-garden, and the sap of the Cassidea elastica, into the consistency of dough, which was called toyoliayt la quatl (Food of our Life). Every six months all adults of the tribe were required to partake of it as a kind of Eucharist. And the compiler, from whom I take the account, sarcastically adds: “They thus partook of human blood without previous miraculous transformation.” The Cacivos of Peru are also said to sacrifice and eat a voluntary victim every year.^284.1^ The Aztecs and the peoples allied to them are infamous for the hideous barbarity of their human sacrifices; and indeed it is incalculable what benefits were conferred on these unhappy nations in the softening of manners and the refinement of character, not to mention the salvation of immortal souls, when the sanguinary rites of Quetzalcoatl and Huitzilopochtli were swept away, to make room for the Unbloody Sacrifice of the Mass and the hecatombs of the Holy Inquisition. Among the Aztecs a prisoner of war was esteemed his captor’s son. He was generally sacrificed at the feast of Xipetotec, deity of the goldsmiths, and Huitzilopochtli. The body was returned to the captor, who cut it up and divided it between {285} his superiors, relations and friends, not tasting it himself, because “he counted it as the flesh of his own body.” He gave the skin to be worn for twenty days by another, who went about during that time collecting gifts for the captor. At another festival of Huitzilopochtli a dough statue of the god was made with certain seeds and the blood of children. It was formally “killed” at the conclusion of the ceremonies, by means of a flint-tipped dart, and then cut up and eaten by the male part of the population. This was called the killing and eating of the god.^285.1^ Nor can we doubt that we have in these rites vestiges of totemistic feasts at which the totem-victim was not improbably represented by a kinsman.

We return to funeral feasts. The Fans of Equatorial West Africa have repeatedly been charged with this kind of cannibalism, but, while asserting it of their neighbours, have always denied it of themselves. The solution seems to lie in the fact that they sell their dead to the Osebas, who are recognised as a kindred race, and buy in return Oseba bodies for the purpose of consumption.^285.2^ In short, repugnance to eat their own relatives has sprung up, without entire abandonment of anthropophagy. A curious compromise between burial in the earth and in the bodies of living members of the tribe appears in an account of the ceremonies on the death of a recent king of the Bangala. He was cut in two lengthwise, and another man slain for the purpose was treated in like manner. One half of the one, and a half of the other, were then put together, so as to {286} form an entire man, and buried. The remaining halves were stewed with manioc and bananas and eaten with other sacrifices.^286.1^ In some cases the flesh of the dead is only eaten in the delirium of grief, or as a mark of particular affection. The latter is related to have frequently happened on the demise of a Hawaiian chief.^286.2^ For the same reason mothers, among the Botocudos of South America, ate their dead children.^286.3^ While in California the Gallinomero burnt the body immediately life became extinct; and the frenzy of survivors reached such a pitch that one of them has been seen to rush up to the pyre, snatch a handful of blazing flesh, and devour it on the spot.^286.4^ A method of consuming the corpse adopted by the savage tribes inhabiting the valley of the Uaupes, a tributary of the Amazons, is described by Dr. Wallace. Their houses are generally built to accommodate the entire community; and the dead are buried beneath the floor. About a month after the funeral, Dr. Wallace tells us, the survivors “disinter the corpse, which is then much decomposed, and put it in a great pan, or oven, over the fire, till all the volatile parts are driven off with a most horrible odour, leaving only a black carbonaceous mass, which is pounded into a fine powder, and mixed in several large couchés (vats made of hollowed trees) of a fermented drink called caxirí; this is drunk by the assembled company till all is finished; they believe that thus the virtues of the deceased will be transmitted to the drinkers.” Similar customs are reported of {287} other South American peoples.^287.1^ Among the Koniagas, an Eskimo tribe of Alaska and the adjacent islands, when a whaler dies, one method of disposing of his body is to place it in a cave. There his fellow-craftsmen congregate, before setting out upon a chase. They take the body out, immerse it in a stream and then drink of the water.^287.2^

Speaking generally, the practice of eating a dead kinsman, which is probably the earliest form of cannibalism, is also the earliest form to be abandoned. In the South Sea Islands, for example, where the custom of eating strangers has continued until recent years, the flesh of one’s own tribesmen is rejected, save in rare instances, such as that of Hawaii. In the Banks’ Islands it is occasionally eaten, in order to establish communion with a dead man for magical purposes: a practice likewise known in Australia.^287.3^ But though the custom changes, the sacramental idea underlying it is retained; and the problem would be how to effect the necessary union between the dead and the living without partaking of the body. On the island of Vate, in the New Hebrides, the aged were put to death by burying them alive. A hole was dug, and the victim placed within it in a sitting posture, a live pig tied to each arm. Before closing the grave, the cords were cut; and the pigs were afterwards killed and served up at the funeral feast.^287.4^ In this way they seem to be identified with the corpse.

In Europe, where flesh is not consumed ceremonially at {288} the funeral feast, other means even more expressive are taken to ensure the same object. In the Balkan peninsula the rites are very significant. In Albania, cakes of boiled wheat and other ingredients are carried in the funeral procession, and eaten by the mourners upon the grave as soon as it is filled up. All expressions of sorrow are repressed as sinful while it is being eaten; and as each person takes his share he says: “May he (or she) be forgiven!”^288.1^ In some parts of the peninsula the cakes bear the image of the dead. They are broken up and eaten upon the tomb immediately after interment, every mourner pronouncing the words: “God rest him!”^288.2^ At Calymnos, among the Greeks, the funeral, as elsewhere, takes place on the day of death. Kólyva cakes like those in Albania are then made, and are guarded in the house of the departed all night, with two lighted candles, by a watcher who must not go to sleep. The next day they are carried first to the church and then to the tomb, on which they are set to be distributed. The eating of Kólyva cakes is repeated with similar ceremonies on the third, ninth and fortieth days, and again at the end of three, six and nine months and of one, two and three years, after death.^288.3^ It is impossible to {289} mistake the meaning of these practices: the image of the dead upon the cakes, the acts of carrying them in the funeral procession and eating them upon the grave, elsewhere the night-watching, and everywhere the cessation of mourning and the pious exclamations during eating, all admit of but one interpretation.

The ritual eating of special food is used at funerals in many countries. Pulse is not mentioned as an ingredient of the Kólyva cakes. It was, however, an important part of the funeral feasts of the Romans; and Mr. F. B. Jevons, commenting on Plutarch, has quoted Porphyry’s statement, that Pythagoras bade his followers “abstain from beans as from human flesh,” and the reason mentioned by Pliny as entertained by some for the prohibition, namely, that the souls of the dead are in them.^289.1^ The various taboos and other superstitions connected with beans point to the correctness of this reason, and tend to show that pulse was in some way identified with human flesh. In the French provinces of Berry and the Marche, a plate of beans, or of dried peas, always figures among the provisions of the funeral banquet.^289.2^ In the Marches of Italy the family on returning from the burial-ground sit down together to a large plate of beans.^289.3^ In some parts of Friuli a soup of beans is distributed; in other places cakes of barley, or grated cheese. Elsewhere a loaf or cake of pan di tremeste, composed of rye and vetch, is given, with wine or brandy, to all who come to chant the rosary and other prayers over the corpse on the evening of death.^289.4^ In the neighbourhood {290} of Rimini the feast consists of a broth of chick-pease.^290.1^ But the form assumed by the ritual food is usually either cakes or fermented liquor, frequently both. Cakes called wastê are eaten in the Ardennes.^290.2^ In Wales it seems that a hot plum-cake fresh from the oven used to be handed round to the guests, broken in pieces, not cut with a knife. In Sardinia, on the seventh or ninth day after death, savoury cakes are prepared and sent hot from the oven to all the relatives and neighbours, and to all who have joined in the weeping for the dead, or accompanied the corpse to the tomb. The family then gathers at supper, celebrating the virtues of the deceased between the mouthfuls of food and their tears.^290.3^ Dough-nuts, among the Turks, are sent to friends and to the poor on the third, seventh, and fortieth days after the funeral; and prayers for the soul are requested in return.^290.4^ Bread carried in the funeral procession is distributed to the poor by the Tamil population of Ceylon.^290.5^ On one of the Banks’ Islands, “when a great man dies, the people from all the villages around bring mashed yams the next morning to the place where the dead man lies and eat them there.”^290.6^ Among the Abyssinians the poor receive from the banquet pieces of bread and of the entrails and liver of the animals which are served up.^290.7^ {291} The Tcheremiss of the Kama and the Volga provide small pancakes, which they eat as soon as the grave is filled up, every one depositing three morsels upon the grave, saying: “This is for thee.”^291.1^

In several of the cases cited the eating of the dead has evidently undergone a natural transformation into eating with the dead. But wherever a special food is used it may be suspected to represent the flesh of the deceased. In the funeral cakes of the Balkan peninsula the identity is manifest. I shall try to show that it is the same nearer home. In various parts of England and Wales a custom of giving small sponge-cakes to the guests is yet in force. In Yorkshire and elsewhere the last part of the funeral entertainment before the procession started for the churchyard was to hand round glasses of wine and small circular crisp sponge-cakes, whereof most of the guests partook. These cakes were called “Avril-bread.” The word Avril is said to be derived from arval, succession-ale, heir-ale, the name of the feasts given by Icelandic heirs on succeeding to property.^291.2^ Now, although it might be suspected that the avril-bread represented the corpse, we should not be justified in holding that it did without more direct evidence. That evidence can fortunately be supplied, from a funeral which took place near Market Drayton in Shropshire on the 1st {292} July 1893, as described by an eye-witness. “The lady,” writes Miss Gertrude Hope, “who gave me the particulars, arrived rather early, and found the bearers enjoying a good lunch in the only downstairs room. Shortly afterwards the coffin was brought down and placed on two chairs in the centre of the room, and the mourners having gathered round it,” a short service was then and there conducted by the Nonconformist minister, as is frequently done, before setting out for the grave. “Directly the minister ended, the woman in charge of the arrangements poured out four glasses of wine and handed one to each bearer present across the coffin, with a biscuit called a ‘funeral biscuit.’ One of the bearers being absent at the moment, the fourth glass of wine and biscuit were offered to the eldest son of the deceased woman, who, however, refused to take it, and was not obliged to do so. The biscuits were ordinary sponge biscuits, usually called ‘sponge fingers’ or ‘lady’s fingers.’ They are, however, also known in the shops of Market Drayton as ‘funeral biscuits.’ ” These cakes are not exactly of the shape mentioned by Canon Atkinson as used in Yorkshire, but that is of no importance, because their shape varies with the place. What follows is enough to show that the scene described is not a solitary one. “The minister, who had lately come from Pembrokeshire, remarked to my informant that he was sorry to see that pagan custom still observed. He had been able to put an end to it in the Pembrokeshire village where he had formerly been.”^292.1^

Here, it will be observed, the ritual food is handed across the coffin. Pennant, writing early in the fourth quarter of the eighteenth century, says that in Wales “previous to a {293} funeral, it was customary, when the corpse was brought out of the house and laid upon the bier, for the next of kin, be it widow, mother, sister or daughter (for it must be a female), to give, over the coffin, a quantity of white loaves, in a great dish, and sometimes a cheese, with a piece of money stuck in it, to certain poor persons. After that, they present, in the same manner, a cup of drink, and require the persons to drink a little of it immediately.” The Lord’s Prayer was then repeated by the minister, if present; and the procession started.^293.1^ We can have little doubt that this was the same custom. A hundred years earlier still it was witnessed by John Aubrey at Beaumaris. He mentions it as occurring when the corpse is brought out of doors. The food consisted of cake and cheese, with “a new Bowle of Beere, and another of Milke with ye Anno Dni ingraved on it, & ye parties name deceased.” And Dr. Kennett, who annotated his manuscript, refers to a practice at Amersden, in Oxfordshire, of bringing to the minister in the church-porch after the interment a cake and a flagon of ale.^293.2^ In Wales and the Welsh border the custom underwent a curious development. It became, for some cause, a profession to eat this funeral meal, and thereby, as was believed, to become responsible for the sins of the deceased. Aubrey describes one of these Sin-eaters, as they were called. “One of them I remember lived in a Cottage on Rosse-high way. (He was a long, leane, ugly, lamentable poor raskal.) The manner was that when the Corps was brought out of the house and layd on the Biere, a Loafe of bread was brought out, and delivered to the Sinne-eater over the corps, as also a Mazar-bowle of maple (Gossips bowle) full of beer, wch he was to drinke up, and {294} sixpence in money, in consideration whereof he tooke upon him (ipso facto) all the Sinnes of the Defunct, and freed him (or her) from walking after they were dead.”^294.1^ The profession of Sin-eater and the full ceremony, pagan enough in all conscience, have vanished from the earth only within the lifetime of persons yet living. The most modern account of it was given by Mr. Matthew Moggridge of Swansea to the Cambrian Archaeological Association at Ludlow in the year 1852. He said that “when a person died, the friends sent for the Sin-eater of the district, who on his arrival placed a plate of salt on the breast of the defunct, and upon the salt a piece of bread. He then muttered an incantation over the bread, which he finally ate, thereby eating up all the sins of the deceased. This done, he received his fee of 2s. 6d.” (a modest fee for the service, all things considered, though it had risen since Aubrey’s day), “and vanished as quickly as possible from the general gaze; for as it was believed that he really appropriated to his own use and behoof the sins of all those over whom he performed the above ceremony, he was utterly detested in the neighbourhood—regarded as a mere Pariah—as one irredeemably lost.” Mr. Moggridge specified the neighbourhood of Llandebie, about twelve or thirteen miles from Swansea, as a place where the custom had survived to within a recent period.^294.2^

Thus in our own country we find the relics of a ritual feast, where food is placed upon the coffin, or rather upon the body itself, or handed across it, and so in a manner identified with it, and where it is expressly believed that by the act of eating some properties of the dead are taken over by the eater. Let us now turn back for a moment to the East. At a Hindu funeral in Sindh the relations, in the course of the march to the place of burning, throw dry dates into the air over the corpse. These, we are told, are considered as a kind of alms, and are left to the poor. On returning to the house, after the cremation, the first thing done is to offer the couch, bedding, and some clothes of the deceased to a Karnigor who is in attendance. A Karnigor is a low caste-man,—according to some, the offspring of a Brahman father and a Sudra mother. North of Hydrabad his appearance and conduct resemble those of the servile, south of that city those of the priestly, order. The condition of the gift is, that the Karnigor must eat a certain sweetmeat prepared for the occasion. If he refuse, the ghost of the dead man would haunt the place. This means that the funeral rites would have been incomplete. The Karnigor has, therefore, the game in his own hands; and, rejecting the first advance, he demands not only all the articles of dress left by the departed, but fees into the bargain. “When his avarice is satiated, he eats four or five mouthfuls of the sweetmeat, seldom more, for fear of the spirit. After this, he carries off his plunder, taking care not to look behind him, as the Pinniyaworo [head mourner] and the person who prepared the confectionery {296} wait until he is fifteen or twenty paces off, break up all the earthen cooking pots that have been used, and throw three of the broken pieces at him, in token of abhorrence.”^296.1^ Can we fail to be reminded of the Sin-eater? Nor is this the most remarkable parallel to be found in India. The burning of the corpse of a king of Tanjore who died in 1801, and of two of his widows chosen for the purpose by the Brahmans, is described by the abbé Dubois. He states that a part of the bones which escaped the fury of the flames was reduced to powder, and this powder, having been mixed with boiled rice, was eaten by twelve Brahmans. The reason for the proceeding is put by the abbé almost in the very words I quoted in the last paragraph. The act “had for its object the expiation of the sins of the defunct persons: sins which, according to common opinion, are transmitted into the bodies of those whom the allurement of gain has induced to surmount the repugnance that a food so detestable should inspire. Moreover, people are persuaded that the money which is the price of this base condescension is never of any profit to them.”^296.2^ If any doubt could remain as to the meaning of the Welsh custom, this would be enough to dissipate it. But in truth it is not needed; for we have in Europe other usages that set the meaning in the clearest light. In the Highlands of Bavaria, when the corpse is placed upon the bier, the room is carefully {297} washed out and cleaned. Formerly it was the custom for the housewife then to prepare the Leichen-nudeln, or Corpse-cakes. Having kneaded the dough, she placed it to rise on the dead body, as it lay there enswathed in a linen shroud. When the dough had risen, the cakes were baked for the expected guests. To the cakes so prepared, the belief attached that they contained the virtues and advantages of the departed, and that thus the living strength of the deceased passed over, by means of the corpse-cakes, into the kinsmen who consumed them, and so was retained within the kindred.^297.1^ Here we find ourselves at an earlier stage in the disintegration of tradition than in the Welsh practice. The identification of the food with the dead man is not merely symbolic. The dough in rising is believed actually to absorb his qualities, which are transmitted to those of his kin who partake of the cakes; and—consistently with the requirement that the relatives eat the cakes—the qualities transferred are held to be not evil but good ones: the living strength, the virtues and so on of the dead are retained within the kin. Not less striking than the resemblance just pointed out between the objects of the Hindu and the Welsh rites, is that between the objects of {298} the Bavarian custom and that of the Tariánas and other tribes of the Uaupes for consuming the pounded remains of their kinsmen in their caxirí. In both cases, indeed, there is more than resemblance. The objects are absolutely the same; and it is inconceivable that the European usages wherewith we are dealing had any other origin than a cannibal feast, the material of which was the very body of the deceased kinsman.

It is natural to inquire whether any trace of this cannibalism lingers among the Irish, who alone among European races have been charged with it. There is a trace, though it must be admitted a fainter trace than we have found on this side of Saint George’s Channel. Yet I think when we compare it with the latter we shall conclude that it is enough, and therefore that in all probability Strabo’s accusation was not unfounded. The drinking which goes on at a wake is of course a relic of the funeral feast. It takes place in the presence of the corpse. A foreigner, describing a nobleman’s obsequies which he witnessed at Shrewsbury in the early years of King Charles the Second, states that the minister made a funeral oration in the chamber where the body lay, and “during the oration there stood upon the coffin a large pot of wine, out of which every one drank to the health of the deceased. This being finished six men took up the corps, and carried it on their shoulders to the church.”^298.1^ I am not aware whether in Ireland the whisky is thus brought into immediate contiguity with the bier. In Connaught it was the custom about a generation ago, and probably still is, to place a plate of tobacco cut in short lengths, and a plate of snuff on the breast of the corpse; a boy stood at the door with a {299} basket of pipes, and each person helped himself according to his inclination.^299.1^ Whatever may be the case as regards tobacco, I am informed by eye-witnesses that it is still an Irish custom to lay a plate of snuff on the breast of the dead; and everybody who attends the funeral is expected to take a pinch. This ceremony must have assumed its present shape in recent times; but it cannot be doubted that it represents the more archaic consumption of food or drink similarly placed.

I mentioned just now that dates were thrown, at a funeral in Sindh, over the corpse, and left to the poor. Before the funeral at Calymnos, figs and other fruit contributed by the relatives of the deceased, are carried from his house to the churchyard and there distributed among the poor.^299.2^ In classic times the Greeks and Romans used to offer to the manes of the departed on the ninth day after the burial; and on the steps of the grave-monument a simple meal of milk, honey, oil and the blood of the sacrificed animals was prepared. If the tomb were large enough, there was a separate apartment provided, where the meal was consumed. As numerous guests were impossible in the limited space ordinarily available, the wealthy used often to distribute flesh-meat among the people, and in later times money.^299.3^ To-day, in the Abruzzi, when a {300} maiden dies, comfits and money are distributed during the procession from the house to the church, and in some places also from the church to the graveyard, just as they are distributed during a wedding procession. This perhaps has no significance for our present inquiry; but the funeral feast which follows the burial must not be left unnoticed. Its material is provided by the most intimate friend of the dead,^300.1^ who sometimes joins in it. No one else is admitted beside relatives. The table whereon the coffin has rested is the one used for the meal, and if not large enough, others are added to it to extend it. On returning to the house the party, after an interval of solemn silence, begin by telling their beads. The nearest of kin, one after the other, hand round the food, and the life and merits of the defunct are the invariable subject of conversation. They repeatedly press one another to eat and drink. This and the talk about the departed, from the way they are mentioned, appear to be important parts of the ceremony. The utensils must be returned empty and unwashed to the friend who has furnished the meal. Nothing eatable may be sent back: it must be finished by the servants and those who have taken part in the preparations for the funeral. Nor may the meal be taken in the usual room.^300.2^

Several things are noteworthy in the Abruzzian feast; and there are few readers with the ceremonies we have {301} been discussing in their minds, who will not come to the conclusion that where the solemn banquet is spread on the table where the corpse has previously lain, where there is mutual urging to eat and nothing is permitted to be left, and where the virtues of the deceased are discussed as part of the rite, there is a presumption that the feast was originally upon the flesh of the dead. Among the Masurs, though we hear nothing about the requirement to finish the food, special food is provided, which we already know as a suspicious circumstance. Combined with the other details I am about to give, I venture to think it affords fairly strong evidence as to the original character of the mortuary feast. The body is placed on a table in the middle of the room, and the neighbours and relatives assemble round it. Buns and schnaps are placed on the table for the men; and the schnaps is drunk in turn out of the same glass. The women drink it with a spoon from a bowl. Suitable religious songs are sung. After the funeral, schnaps thickened with honey is served to the women on the same table; and at the feast which follows, presumably on the same table, groats mingled with honey are a special dish. In some districts the body is covered with a table-cloth, which is afterwards put over the funeral bakemeats on the table; and no one can take them until it is removed. At the meal all drink in brandy to the everlasting rest of the departed.^301.1^

In classical times and classical lands, as we saw, the tables were spread at the tomb. At Argentière, in the department of the Hautes Alpes, France, this continues to be done immediately after the burial; and the table of the curé and the family is placed upon the grave itself. The dinner {302} ended, every one, led by the next of kin, drinks the health of the departed. Here the situation of the chief table is unambiguous. We should hesitate to say so much of the classical feast, or of the custom prescribed by the ritual of the monastery of Saint Ouen at Rouen, where after the abbot’s death a repast of spices and wine was given in his chamber.^302.1^ Neither the celebration of the formal meal in the death-chamber nor at the grave is conclusive of itself. When once the practice of eating the dead was abandoned, and only a symbol of the loathsome food remained, the meaning of the symbol would tend to pass out of memory, and, according to varying circumstances, sooner or later the symbol itself would undergo change and disappear. The totem-feast, on the other hand, of which it may be plausibly maintained the cannibal feast on the dead kinsman was originally part, shorn of its most savage detail, would remain in full vigour. So far as it was a funeral observance it would receive a specific development with appropriate surroundings, and its totemistic character would gradually be forgotten. Moreover, it is possible that the cannibal feast was by no means universal at any time. However this may be, the totem-feast being a sacramental rite, a communion between the living members of a clan and their totem, one of the most obvious extensions of the sacramental idea would be that of communion with the dead. The latter would be supposed to join in the feast and partake of the food: a portion of which would accordingly be reserved for them. And as the deceased member of the clan would be supposed to be sojourning at his grave, it would of course be greatly for the convenience of all parties that the feast should be held {303} there, and the portion meant for him deposited in or upon the tomb. Death had not relieved him of the wants of life; but it had released him from certain of its limitations. The conditions of his existence were changed. While in some directions he had been deprived of power, in others he had become possessed of greater power than during life; and all beings possessed of extraordinary power were regarded with distrust. Savage man felt himself capricious, revengeful, envious, cruel. The feelings he experienced, the feelings he saw manifested in his fellow-men, he attributed to the mightier creatures of his imagination. Now life was, in his contemplation, so much more desirable than death, that the dead would naturally have been supposed to envy the living. Here was a distinct cause of ill-will. The dead man must, therefore, be kept from haunting the survivors. To that end his funeral rites must be fully and properly performed, and every precaution taken both to persuade him to stay at a distance and to prevent him from finding his way back. One means to do this was to provide him with food in or upon his sepulchre. He would thus be induced to abide there, or, as the case might be, to take his departure straight thence to the dwelling-place of spirits, and not to linger among the kindred who were anxious to be rid of him. This belief gave rise to the repetition of feasts of the dead, for the needs of the dead must be constantly supplied. Besides, to keep them in good humour would be to enlist their sympathy and their help; and who could know how much that help might mean against enemies, or in the chase, or in the operations of agriculture? Thus, not only love for the departed, and the desire for communion with them, but every other motive concurred on the one hand to provide {304} them with food, and on the other hand to consult their convenience in facilitating their enjoyment of it. The reasoning was not free from inconsistencies, because there were cross-currents of tradition. All of them did not flow from the habit of looking upon the dead as abiding permanently in their graves. Probably this was the original faith. But the belief in a separate realm of souls grew up as culture advanced, and disturbed the earlier tradition. The possibility of return to life by a new birth into the kin was another opinion that affected it. And the doctrine of Transformation must, from the most archaic times, have intervened as a modifying influence, for transformation implies locomotion. The savage did not always trouble himself to reconcile inconsistencies. His simple credulity accepted them all. We need not wonder; for even the mind of civilised and educated man is built in watertight compartments: whereof no reader will want examples.

The meal at the grave, then, or in the death-chamber, may be a meal at which the dead man is one of the convives. Instances are numerous in the lower culture. Some of them, like that of the Tcheremiss Tartars, have been mentioned; and I select a few more, out of many, further to illustrate the practice. It will be convenient to begin with the Tchuvash, whose seats are on the middle reaches of the Volga, because their customs, if correctly reported, seem, like those of the Tcheremiss, to show the eating of the dead passing over into the eating with the dead. After burial in the public cemetery the relatives deposit on the grave some cakes and a piece of cooked fowl, saying, like the Tcheremiss: “This is for thee.” The old clothes of the deceased are thrown over the tomb; and the rest of the cakes are eaten by the funeral escort, {305} by whom the repast is regarded as taken in company with the dead. On the fortieth day after burial an animal, designated by the deceased in his lifetime for that purpose, is killed. Libations are made, and half the flesh with other food is deposited on the grave. This is devoured, amid lamentations of the relatives, by dogs; “for it is believed that the dogs become the dwelling-place of the souls of the dead. The feasting then begins, and eating and drinking continue until all the supplies are exhausted.”^305.1^ The Tchuvash appear to be the same people of whom Hanway, in the middle of the last century, relates that they throw their dead into the open field to be devoured by dogs, of which many run wild, and some are kept for the purpose.^305.2^ If the dogs become the dwelling-place of the souls of the dead by eating of the memorial banquet, we are presented with a result comparable with that obtained by the Bavarian Highlanders and the Tariánas; and we may conjecture that in earlier times the deceased was eaten by the kin.

Immediately before the burial of an Ainu, millet-cakes and wine are handed round to the assembled relatives and friends. Each person “offers two or three drops of the wine to the spirit of the dead, then drinks a little, and pours what is left before the fire as an offering to the fire-goddess, all the time muttering some short prayer. Then part of the millet-cake is eaten, and the remainder hidden in the ashes upon the hearth, each person burying a little piece.” After the body has been interred these fragments are carried out of the hut and placed together before the eastern window, which is always a sacred spot.^305.3^ When a {306} dead Chinaman is put into his coffin, a quantity of food is put before him, and afterwards removed and eaten by his family; and again at the burial eatables are taken from the house and set on the tomb, and subsequently brought back to be consumed at the funeral meal.^306.1^ Moreover, at each of the oft-repeated memorial feasts for the departed, some of the food is first placed before the ancestral tablets, or the tombs, and then eaten by the family; and it is believed that the spirits partake of its “essential and immaterial elements.”^306.2^ In the funeral rites of the Dyaks food is set before the dead ere the coffin is closed. It is allowed to stand for about an hour by the corpse, and is then devoured by the next-of-kin.^306.3^ On the death of a Hungarian Gipsy he is carried out of the tent or hut. It is now the duty of the members of his clan to offer to the deceased gifts, especially food and drink, which they lay beside the body and later on themselves consume.^306.4^ The Sàkalàva of Madagascar bury in a family cemetery. “A cup and a plate are placed by the side of the coffin, and every now and then the friends go in large numbers, and taking rice and rum with them, hold a feast in these cemeteries, and believe that the spirits of their dead ancestors and relatives come and join them.”^306.5^ The Hillmen of Rájmahál on the death of a chief, hold a feast where a part of the provisions is dedicated to their god and to the spirit of the deceased, and thus becoming forbidden {307} to the survivors, is thrown away.^307.1^ On Florida and San Cristoval, and possibly other of the Solomon Islands, at the funeral feast a bit of the food is thrown into the fire for the departed, with the words: “This is for you.” On Lepers’ Island and the Banks’ Islands, the feasts are repeated for a long period; and a portion is always set aside with the words: “This is for thee.” On the Banks’ Islands, indeed, at ordinary meals when the oven is opened a morsel of food is put aside for the dead with the words: “This is for you; let our oven be well cooked.”^307.2^ The tribes about Lake Nyassa, in Central East Africa, hold a memorial feast two or three months after the death, of which the spirit of the deceased is considered to partake.^307.3^ Among some of the Senegambian tribes, when the grave is filled up, a fowl, with its legs tied, is laid upon the mound, within reach of some water and boiled rice, which are placed at the head of the grave. If it eat any of the rice it is killed, the tomb is sprinkled with its blood, the flesh cooked and partly eaten, partly left for the dead. This ceremony is repeated at every renewal of the customary lamentations.^307.4^ The Koiari tribe of New Guinea cook food at stated times, formally present it to the dead man, and then eat it.^307.5^ The Dorah tribesmen on the same island hold a feast two or three months after the death of a first-born son, when the skull is produced, adorned with a wooden pair of ears and nose and with eyes of coloured {308} seeds. The head thus prepared is honoured with a portion of all the dishes.^308.1^ So on the island of Nagir, in Torres Straits, at the death-dance held three months after the death of a man whose skull was afterwards sold to Professor Haddon, the skull being prepared and adorned was placed on a mat in the midst of the assembly. Food was provided for the immediate relatives, and laid before the skull. The feast then began; and it must have been accompanied by much enjoyment, for we are told that all got very drunk.^308.2^ Perhaps this was the way in which the Issedones used the skulls of their dead. The same intention is doubtless to be understood of the memorial feast, or Karmantram ceremony, of the Eastern Kullens of Madura, in Southern India. After a meal, to which the relatives are invited, in the evening a bier, followed by the kin, is carried with music to the grave. The dead man’s wife’s brother digs up the corpse, and removes the skull, which he washes and smears with sandal-wood powder and spices. He then seats himself on the bier, holding the skull in his hand, and is carried without music to a shed in front of the house of the deceased, where the skull is set down, and the relatives weep and mourn over it until the following noon. The succeeding twenty-four hours are given over to drunken revelry. This, it will be observed, is in the presence or immediate neighbourhood of the skull. It is afterwards carried back by the person who brought it from the grave, seated again on the bier and accompanied by music. Arrived once more at the grave, the son or heir of the deceased, at whose expense the rite is performed, burns the skull and breaks an earthen pot. The relatives on {309} returning bathe and then feast together,^309.1^—an ordinary conclusion to a funeral ceremony. Here, if I am right in my interpretation, only drink is offered—by no means a solitary instance. The Livonians used to stand round a corpse drinking, inviting it to partake, and pouring for that purpose a part of the liquor over it. The pagan Lapps sprinkle the grave with brandy, part of which is reserved for the mourners at the funeral feast. However, they also kill the reindeer that draws the body to the burial-ground, eat the flesh and bury the bones, but in a separate coffin.^309.2^ Among the Peguenches in the south of Chili, when the body is deposited in the graveyard, but before it is put into the ground, a feast is prepared. Every one who partakes, before eating throws a morsel of food towards the corpse, crying out “Yuca-pai.”^309.3^ At the other extremity of the Western Continent the Eskimo sometimes pay a formal visit to the sepulchre taking pieces of deerskin and fat. Of the fat they eat a portion, standing round the grave, and talking the while to the dead. Then each of them lays a piece of deerskin (still covered with the fur) and a piece of fat under a stone, exclaiming: “Here is something to eat, and something to keep you warm.”^309.4^ The feast with the dead is common among the North American tribes. It is eaten at the grave. A fire is kindled; and each person before eating cuts off a small piece of meat which he casts into the fire. The smoke and smell of this, they say, attracts the {310} ghost to come and eat with them. Nor only so. The practice of setting aside a portion of their food for the ghost whenever they eat or drink is continued, sometimes for years, until they have an opportunity of sending out this memorial with a war-party, to be thrown down on the field of battle, when their obligation to the departed ceases.^310.1^

Among the examples I have given, the skull of the dead man often appears at the festivity. Other representatives of the deceased are also found. The Tcheremiss kart, or shaman, wears the garments of the deceased; and when the feast is over it is he who gives what is left to the dogs.^310.2^ The Teng-ger tribes of Java accord the most conspicuous position to a mannikin about a foot and a half high, made of leaves, dressed in the clothes of the dead and ornamented with flowers.^310.3^ The practice of making images of the dead and conjuring the spirits into them is not an uncommon one; and wherever it exists we are justified in assuming that the images would not be allowed to go without their due share of nourishment at proper times.

The meaning of some ceremonies may not be quite so clear; as when one tribe of Tartars, having eaten the favourite horse of the departed, sticks up its head on the grave; or another tribe, killing and eating a fat mare, hangs her skin from the branches of the tree that shades the tomb.^310.4^ The southern tribes of British Columbia often killed the horse of the deceased and decked the grave with its skin.^310.5^ The Yoruba of West Africa collect the bones of the fowls and sheep eaten by the guests, and of the other {311} victims sacrificed, and place them over the grave.^311.1^ The Kamtchadales eat a fish in memory of the departed and throw the fins into the fire.^311.2^ The Kirghiz Tartars burn on the tomb the bones of the horse they have eaten—usually the favourite of the dead man.^311.3^ Animal bones, burnt and unburnt, and especially the head of an ox, are frequently found in opening barrows in this country, pointing to practices on the part of the prehistoric inhabitants analogous to these.^311.4^ Probably, in many cases at least, they are the remains of a banquet common to the living and the dead.

The drink bestowed on the dead in some of the foregoing instances perhaps represents blood; and blood, it will be remembered, was the share of the totem-god in the sacrificial feasts. Nothing could, therefore, more plainly bespeak the meaning of these funeral rites. In some cases, indeed, as we have seen, the blood is sprinkled upon the grave. So among the Wanyika the corpse when buried holds in its hand a piece of skin taken from the head of a goat or cow which has been killed for the feast, and the grave is sprinkled with the blood before it is filled up.^311.5^ The dead body of a Yoruba is spattered with the blood of a he-goat slain to propitiate the phallic deity, Elegba; but whether the mourners partake of the flesh we are not told: most likely they do.^311.6^ In the same way wine was sprinkled on a Roman’s grave—a ceremony of which we find the relic, after cremation began to be practised, in the formal extinction {312} of the ashes by the outpouring of wine. The rites of the Todas and Kotas of the Neilgherry Hills are complicated; and only a portion of them need be noticed in this connection. The corpse is burnt; but a piece of the scalp and some of the finger-nails are first cut off and preserved between two strips of bark as relics. On the anniversary, or some other suitable day, buffaloes are sacrificed; the relics are rubbed with their blood and ceremonially burnt; and their flesh is eaten by the Kotas.^312.1^

We may dismiss funeral banquets with one further observation. The intention of sharing a common meal with the dead is by no means abandoned at the completion of the funeral ceremonies. The feasts, as in several cases we have already noted, are repeated at intervals. Indeed, at all festivals when the entire kin is assembled the deceased members are conceived as assembled with them; a portion of the food is set aside, a portion of the drink is poured out for the departed. The cult of the dead in this form survives into the higher phases of civilisation. At various times in the year, particularly at Halloween, all over Europe, the tables are set, the doors are opened, and the ghosts are invited to partake of the fare provided by their descendants and relatives; and it is believed that they actually come and enjoy the food prepared for them, and warm themselves on the hearth, which, in the days of their flesh, they used to tend, and around which they used to gather, when work was over, to eat their frugal fare, and to rejoice one another with social converse and the performance of domestic rites. A tender custom! and one that pleads pathetically for its continuance as a witness to {313} a faith in comparison wherewith Christianity is a thing of yesterday, a faith not less true than Christianity itself in its recognition and its consecration of some of the deepest and most vital emotions of our nature.

There are other ways of forming a sacramental union with the dead. Among the Tolkotins of Oregon, who burnt their dead, the widow was compelled to pass her hands through the flame and collect some of the liquid fat exuding from the body, wherewith to daub herself. The Modocs appear to have smeared their persons with the blood of any of their kindred who died violent deaths.^313.1^ On the Gilbert Islands “the nearest relations,” whatever that expression may include, are said to rub themselves with the saliva which escapes from the mouth in the agonies of death.^313.2^ Other savages rub themselves with the liquid flowing from the putrefying corpse. There is no need to dwell on this loathsome custom. It is reported of tribes extending over a considerable area of the earth’s surface, namely, of the Krumen near Sierra Leone, the Antankàrana in Madagascar, the aborigines of Victoria, the Andrawillas in East Central Australia, the Koiari of New Guinea, the Laughlan Islanders between New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, the inhabitants of New Britain and the Similkameens of British Columbia. Of the last we are told in so many words that they believe that in this way some portion of the deceased becomes incorporated in them.^313.3^ Nay, some {314} peoples, like the Banks’ Islanders and the Aron Islanders imbibe these fluids; but the Nias Islanders perform the duty by deputy in the persons of their wretched slaves, who according to one account are suffocated in the process.^314.1^ Of a party of Tasmanians who were deported to Barren Island we are told that they were seen to collect the ashes of the dead after burning, and smear a portion of them every morning on their faces, singing the while a death-song and weeping.^314.2^ Among the Digger Indians of California the relatives are said to cover their hands and faces with a mixture of tar and the ashes of the deceased.^314.3^ And the Correguajes Indians of New Granada burn the bones when the wild beasts have removed the flesh, and use the ashes as a pigment for painting themselves, “the relatives having the first right to its use.”^314.4^ Earlier in the chapter I mentioned a method of dealing with the dead body of a Koniaga whaler. An alternative method is to cut it into small pieces and distribute it among the other whalers, each of whom rubs the point of his lance upon it, so to unite the weapon with the skill and power inherent in the deceased, and preserves the morsel as a permanent talisman.^314.5^ Sometimes a Tchuktchi, tired of life, is put to death by his kinsmen at his own desire. All who take part in the ceremony bathe their faces and hands in his blood. They then burn his body on a funeral pyre, {315} standing around it and praying the departed not to forget them.^315.1^ A Dyak rite identifies the victim at the commemorative festival with the deceased. The corpse is put into a temporary coffin for preliminary burial until the Tiwah, or Feast of the Dead, can be held. On that occasion a slave, or prisoner of war, is provided and dressed in the usual clothing of the deceased. Thus clad, the victim is wounded by all the assembled guests and finally killed. The priestesses in attendance then daub the relations of the deceased with the victim’s blood, “so to reconcile them with the departed and to give them to understand that they have now fulfilled their obligation towards his wandering soul.” After a night of debauchery the remains of the dead man and the victim are placed in one permanent coffin, in the family dead-house; but the victim’s skull is ranged with others outside.^315.2^ The details of this ceremony are unmistakable, though it is right to say that the victim is now regarded simply as an attendant on the departed in the other world.

Other means are also adopted. Among the Andaman Islanders, over a large part of the Southern Ocean, in various districts of America, and perhaps among the Wahuma of East Africa, certain of the bones, either whole or calcined, are worn. Naturally the widow is, above everybody, expected to do this. Among the Mosquitos of Central America and the tribes of Honduras the widow took up the bones after burial for a year and carried them for another year, sleeping with them at night. Not until she had ceased to do this was she permitted to marry again.^315.3^ In {316} Australia the Kulin widow seems to have carried the head and arms of her husband for an indefinite time, if not for the rest of her life.^316.1^ Among the Kurnai the mummified corpse was carried about by the family in its migrations for years under special charge of the parents, the wife or other near relatives, and finally, after it was buried or stowed away in a hollow tree, the father or mother, if living, would carry the lower jaw “as a memento.”^316.2^ The Kiriwina widow in New Guinea hangs from her neck her husband’s lower jaw richly ornamented with glass and shell beads.^316.3^ The Mincopie widow is said to wear the entire skull.^316.4^ Among the natives of the western districts of Victoria the widow of a chief by his first marriage wears a bag containing some of his calcined bones for two years, or until she marries again; and she also gets the lower bones of the right arm entire, which are carried in an opossum skin for the same period. Conversely, a widower wears his wife’s calcined bones in a bag of opossum-skin for twelve moons, and then buries them.^316.5^ The Taw-wa-tins and Tacullies of British Columbia, and the Tolkotins of Oregon, compel a widow to wear her husband’s calcined bones for three years, during which time her life is made a burden to her by his kindred, so that widows marrying again have been known to commit suicide rather than undergo the suffering a second time.^316.6^ {317} In many cases the bones are permanently worn by the relatives of the deceased: in other cases, only for a time. Sometimes they are expressly recognised as charms; but always they seem to be something more than mere memorials of the dead.^317.1^

The skull and various other bones are yet more frequently kept in the dwelling.^317.2^ The instances to which {318} reference is given in the note are, with the exceptions of the Issedones in antiquity and the Krumen of the Grain Coast and the Andaman Islanders among modern savages, confined to the islanders of the Pacific Ocean, and certain tribes of North America, Honduras, and the northern parts of South America. Where the circumstances permit, as in the case of the Ichthyophagi and other ancient Ethiopian tribes, the old Egyptians, the Chinese, the Solomon Islanders, the Banks’ Islanders, the islanders of Ambrym in the New Hebrides, and the Yorubas of the Slave Coast, the corpse is kept either permanently, or for a lengthened period in the house unburied.^318.1^ And after burning, the ashes are similarly kept by several of the aboriginal peoples of Bengal and Assam, until the time arrives when they can be solemnly committed to the river or put into the family grave.^318.2^ The Wakonda burn the corpse; and the ashes, collected into a jar are preserved by the family.^318.3^ Along the Skeena River in British Columbia the natives cremated their dead, and sometimes hung the ashes in boxes to the family totem-pole.^318.4^ Like certain Tibetan tribes, and perhaps {319} the Issedones, some of the native Australians used the skull for a drinking-cup.^319.1^

A custom more widely spread than that of keeping the bones, because attended with much less inconvenience, is that of taking and keeping some of the hair, nails or pieces of garments of the dead. It may, indeed, be said to prevail through the greater part of the world; nor has the custom of preserving a lock of hair cut after death as a memorial of the departed yet vanished from among ourselves. An acute writer in the Contemporary Review some years ago related that in the West Indian island of St. Croix those who washed the dead prior to burial always took a lock of hair, a garment, or at least a fragment of a garment, in order to prevent the spirit from molesting them for venturing to tamper with the place of its late habitation. And he adds: “At first thought, it seems most natural to believe that the surest way to prevent any visit from a dead man is to take nothing of his with you. But not so. A liberty has been taken with his body by one who is probably a total stranger, hired perhaps for the express purpose of preparing him for his coffin. Now, if you take something of his, something that is either a part of him, or has been on his person, you in a sense identify yourself with him; you establish as it were, a kind of relationship, and thus the liberty you take with him must seem much less to him.”^319.2^ The reader who has followed the argument of {320} the preceding paragraphs and the preceding chapters will have no difficulty in admitting that here the true theory has been touched. The motive that prompts an English mother to wear in a brooch a lock of hair and the likeness of the darling she will see no more on earth is the same as induces a Friendly Islander to pass a braid of the hair of his dead kinsman through his own ear, and to wear it there for the rest of his life. It is the same as leads a Mosquito widow to carry about her husband’s bones and to sleep with them. Consciously or unconsciously, the idea at the root of these and similar practices is that of sacramental communion with the dead. In the West Indian Negro practice just cited we see the application of this idea to the protection of the person who may perchance have incurred the wrath of the dead. Thus applied, it is analogous to that of counteracting witchcraft by uniting the witch in blood-brotherhood with her victim.

Hitherto we have only considered methods of effecting communion with the dead based on the appropriation by the living of some part of the corpse. This, however, implies the reciprocal possibility of communion formed by means of a gift of some portion of the living body to the {321} dead. Nothing more nor less I take to be the real meaning of the practice, forbidden to the Hebrews, of cutting oneself for the dead.^321.1^ We find this practice in its most complete form among the Orang Sakei, a people whose chief seats are about the river Siak on the eastern side of Sumatra. There, at a funeral the kindred, making a cross-cut with a knife on their heads, drop the blood on the face of the corpse. Individuals are found who by repetition of this mutilation have lost all the hair from their heads.^321.2^ They have indeed, in the words of the Deuteronomist, made a baldness between their eyes for the dead. At Tahiti, in Captain Cook’s time, mourners were in the habit of wounding themselves with knives and clubs consisting of canes or pieces of wood set with sharks’ teeth, and allowing the blood and tears to drip on small cloths which they threw under the bier. As described by Mr. Ellis, some half century later, the performance was a little different. Both sexes cut themselves. The females wore short aprons of a special kind of cloth, which they held up to catch the blood until it almost saturated them. The aprons were then dried in the sun and given to the nearest surviving relatives as proofs of the affection of the donors, and were preserved by the bereaved family as tokens of the esteem in which the departed had been held.^321.3^ It is easy to see that this may have been a modification of the rite as it prevailed in Captain Cook’s day, and that both may have been derived from a rite similar to that of the Orang Sakei. In Australia the rite is found both in its original and its {322} degraded forms. When the body is placed in the ground the practice of several tribes is that the mourners leap into the grave in turn, and are there cut on the head with a boomerang, so as to allow the blood to fall over the corpse. Among the tribes of the Murray river, the kindred of the deceased, assembled round the corpse, or at all events in its presence, used to lacerate their thighs, backs and breasts with shells or flints until the blood flowed in streams. After burial the women visited the grave at stated intervals, by night or in the early morning, there to renew their wailings and lacerations. With other tribes it is enough for the mourners to gash themselves, or be gashed by others, in sign of grief: the process of ceremonial decay has caused the need of bringing the blood into contact with the body of the deceased to be no longer recognised.^322.1^ The Mosquito Indians lacerate and bruise themselves until they bleed in the dead man’s hut.^322.2^ The Bororó women in Central Brazil, at the festival for a dead man, cause their limbs to be scratched until the blood flows, and allow it to drip into the basket containing the bones.^322.3^ Four aborigines executed for murder at Helena, on the head waters of the Missouri, in December 1890, were mourned by two squaws. One of the squaws cut off two of her fingers and threw them into the grave. The other gashed her face. Both caused the blood to flow into the grave, and had previously scalped their children.^322.4^ In another case {323} of which a traveller in the early part of the present century was a witness, the mourners’ blood was made to flow over the dead man and over the food that was buried with him. But, though we have sufficient testimony to the archaic form of the custom among the North American peoples, that form is far from universal. More usually they are content with simply wounding themselves, careless where the blood may fall.^323.1^ On the occasion of a burial among the Battas the wives of the dead not only weep and howl, but scratch their faces and bodies until the torn skin hangs down in places, and the blood streams on the earth.^323.2^ When an Abyssinian corpse is about to be removed to its final resting-place some of the mourners “frantically grasp the bier, as if wishing to retain it by force; others, convulsed by the throes of agony and despair, rend their clothes, tear their hair, lacerate their faces and necks with their nails, so that the blood trickles down in streams.”^323.3^ The Abyssinians call themselves Christians; but in this respect they have hardly advanced beyond many benighted pagans, like those already mentioned, or like the Gallinomero of California who burnt the bodies of their dead, and howled and wounded themselves the while in a manner, we are told, too terrible for description.^323.4^

Nor is mere cutting and wounding all. Many savages deem it necessary to inflict permanent mutilations on themselves, like the squaws of Montana just mentioned. Among {324} the Fiji Islanders, when a king died, each of the women cut off a finger-joint. These were hung upon the eaves of the royal house. The amputation of a finger-joint was a common sign of mourning; and poor people made a business of it, receiving payment from the relatives of the dead in exchange for their severed members.^324.1^ In numerous cases of mutilation, as of laceration, however, the evidence is wanting that the amputated member, like the blood, was brought into contact or proximity with the corpse. In such the rite is probably in a decayed form. The mere wounding or amputation had come to be looked upon as enough. With regard especially to amputation the process is clear. As the totem developed into a god the idea of sacrifice evolved in like measure from sacramental communion into a gift, a present to propitiate an offended being, a substitute for the votary himself who had deserved death, or (as in the instance of Admetos) whom the divinity was calling out of life. To save themselves from death, or from calamity, men offered up something of less value than their own lives, or than that whose loss or injury they dreaded, but still something of value and importance. Thus, as Dr. Tylor recalls, mothers in the southern provinces of India will cut off their own fingers as sacrifices lest they lose their children; and golden fingers are sometimes offered—“the substitute of a substitute.”^324.2^ At length a virtue is attached to the mere abnegation. To deprive oneself of what is held dear, or what is essential to enjoyment, or even to life, is in itself of merit, {325} quite apart from any thought of benefiting the deity. The shedding of blood, or the amputation of a finger, for the purpose of communion with the dead would follow a parallel course, and would gradually acquire virtue alone as a means of testifying to the affection and the grief of the survivor, without bringing the survivor into ritual union with the departed.

In the closest connection with wounding and mutilation for the dead, is the cutting, tearing or shaving of the hair. We have already studied gifts of hair to the dead; and if our conclusions as to them be correct, we must also conclude that the cutting or tearing of the hair as an expression of mourning is a relic of that custom which led Hecuba to lay her grey locks upon Hector’s grave and Achilles to bestrew the body of Patroklos with his shorn tresses. Dr. Wilken contends that the intention alike of wounding, of mutilation and of the gift of hair is the dedication of oneself to the dead, a consecration of the entire person, a pledge of ultimate reunion. That it is so in some cases seems clear. But this dedication must in a far greater number of instances be made repeatedly to quite different personages who have stood during life in a variety of relations to the mourner. Where only wives devote their hair to their dead husbands and are not allowed to marry a second time, things would arrange themselves easily in the next world. But if they shed their blood, or shear their locks also for fathers and brothers, for kindred and friends all round—nay, perhaps for another husband or two,—then one would imagine that even savages might anticipate awkward contingencies yonder. The truth is that the practice has sprung from a lower plane of culture than is supposed in a theory of self-dedication and {326} future reunion. We know little of the belief in a future life entertained by the Tasmanian aborigines. From what little we do know it is safe to say that the Tasmanian woman who threw her hair upon the grave of her mother or her child, had no thought of self-consecration to the dead or of meeting again in another world. But she cherished the belief that by means of her hair she could still be in some sort of union with one she had loved. In short, the radical idea of all the practices we have discussed in the present chapter is the same, however much it may be modified with rising civilisation and the gradual evolution of the conception of deity and spirit and the life after death. It is grounded in the conviction of the continued, though mysterious, oneness of a body with its severed parts, and the absence of any conception of spirit apart from a visible and tangible material existence.

Other funeral rites point in the same direction. We will confine our attention to one. The custom of burial in a common grave or at least in one general cemetery, is very widespread. It is found in all quarters of the globe. The reason is given by Sir Richard Burton in describing the practices in Sindh. “They believe that by interring corpses close to the dust of their forefathers, the ruha, or souls of the departed, will meet and commune together after death.”^326.1^ This is a belief that could not have arisen, save at a time when no sharp division had been drawn between body and spirit. Mr. Crawfurd says: “When a Javanese peasant claims to be allowed to cultivate the fields occupied by his forefathers, his chief argument always is that near them are the tombs of his progenitors. A Javanese, as I have remarked in another place, cannot endure to be removed {327} from these objects of his reverence and affection: and when he is taken ill at a distance, begs to be carried home, at all the hazards of the journey, that he may ‘sleep with his fathers.’ The bodies of some of the princes who died in banishment at Ceylon, I perceive, were, at their dying request, conveyed to their native island.”^327.1^ I need not dwell on the practice itself of burying the kindred in one place. It is well known, and even among ourselves is not destitute of force, appealing as it does to our most sacred feelings. As little need I dwell upon the belief underlying it. But some of the modes of giving effect to it may detain us for a few moments.

Even if already buried in another place the Sindhi and their neighbours, the Yusufzais of Afghanistan, will exhume the bones and bring them home for a fresh burial.^327.2^ So do the natives of the Gold Coast, even though years have elapsed since the death.^327.3^ Dr. Brinton tells us that “the custom of common ossuaries for each gens appears to have prevailed among the Lenâpe”; and he quotes Gabriel Thomas as relating that “if a person of note dies very far away from his place of residence, they will convey his bones home some considerable time after, to be buried there.” The Nanticokes buried their corpses for some months, and then, taking up the bones, they cleaned them and deposited them in a common ossuary. When they removed to another place these bones were carried with them.^327.4^ Common ossuaries were very usual among the North American tribes; and in the Ohio mounds is evidence that the {328} custom dates back to a considerable antiquity.^328.1^ These are only a few of the examples that might be given. It is thus by no means necessary that the entire body should be buried in the common ground: the bones only were sufficient. But sometimes it is not practicable to bury the whole skeleton; nor is it necessary. If what is done to a detached portion of the body be done to the whole, all that is necessary is to make a selection. The bones usually chosen are those of the skull; the reasons for the choice being probably those which determine the choice of the skull as a keepsake, according to a custom considered a few pages back. When the Samoans made war at a distance from their homes, they brought back, in returning, the skulls of their dead to the ancestral graves.^328.2^ Among the villagers of the Wanyika, in the highlands of Eastern Africa, the head is dug up some time after interment and sent to the capital to be buried, for there was formerly the general cemetery of the whole tribe, and there still its councils are held.^328.3^ It is the custom of the Greeks and the Orthodox Albanians, as of the Bretons and other European peoples, to dig up the bones after a certain period of burial, wash them in wine, and deposit them in an ossuary. But, because the Albanians lead a migratory life, a large proportion of the male population dies abroad. “The bones of these wanderers are afterwards collected and sent home; or, at any rate, a portion of them—a skull or a single bone—is brought back to their native place.”^328.4^ Among the {329} ancient Romans a bone of such as died abroad or in war was sent home to the relatives for burial. This usage was expressly recognised by a law of the Twelve Tables which abolished in all other cases the pre-existing custom of cutting out a bone in order to bury it when the rest of the body was burnt.^329.1^ At the cremation the hot ashes were extinguished in wine, collected by the relatives and deposited in an urn in the grave-chamber. At Kalna, near Calcutta, is a place called Samáj Bati, where a bone of every deceased member of the family of the Rajah of Bardwan is deposited.^329.2^ Various tribes of Bengal, among which are the Santals, Oraons and Garos, ultimately commit some of the burnt fragments of bone to the river, where they are carried down by the current to the far-off eastern land whence, if we may trust the national traditions, their ancestors originally came, thus “uniting the dead with the fathers.” Instances, we are told, have been known of a Santal “son following up the traces of a wild beast which had carried off his parent, and watching, without food or sleep, during several days for an opportunity to kill the animal, and secure one of his father’s bones to carry to the {330} river.”^330.1^ The Khási of Assam, on the other hand, place the ashes in the family bone-receptacle; and it is worthy of note that those of husband and wife are never placed in the same, because they belong to different clans, and the ashes of the children are put in that of their mother. Major Godwin-Austen says “that the collection of the bones into one vault, as it may be termed, is done under the impression that the souls of the departed may all mingle together again in one large family without trouble or suffering. The idea of a member of a family being a wanderer in the other world, cut off from, and unable to join, the circle of the spirits of his own clan is most repugnant to the feelings of a Khási or Sinteng.” Consequently great efforts are made to recover, even after the lapse of many years, the calcined bones of any member of the gens who may have died at a distance.^330.2^ Some of the Garos, neighbours of the Khási, seem to follow this custom, while others put the ashes into the river like the Santals.^330.3^ The Bhumij of Bengal inter some of the unconsumed fragments of bone at the foot of a tulsi-plant in the courtyard of the dead man’s house, and the rest in the original cemetery of the family. “The theory is that the bones should be taken to the village in which the ancestors of the deceased had the status of bhuinhárs, or first clearers of the soil; but this is not invariably acted up to, and the rule is held to be sufficiently complied with if a man’s bones are buried in a village where he or his ancestors have been settled for a tolerably long time.”^330.4^

Dr. Henrici brought from the Little Popo region of West {331} Africa to Berlin some Negroes, among whom was one who was a great favourite in the explorer’s family. Unfortunately he died; and his brother, who was with him, cut off, before burial, “a lock of hair and some finger-nail of the dead man to send to his parents in Africa in proof of his death.”^331.1^ Not merely in proof of his death was this done, as the newspaper reports; for here we have what is called “the Yoruba custom of Ettá.” It is practised by the tribes of the Slave Coast. When a man dies away from home the greatest exertions are made by his family to obtain something belonging to him, to be buried with the usual rites in his native place. Clippings of the hair and nails are usually carried home by his companions, if he have any. But these do not constitute an irreducible minimum; for if they cannot be obtained, a portion of his clothing is, as we might expect from our study of other superstitions, enough.^331.2^ So among the Dyaks (who, it will be remembered, have family mortuaries), if any one be murdered, eaten by a crocodile, or suffer some such misfortune, so that his body cannot be found, all his clothing obtainable is tied up in a bundle and buried.^331.3^ Similarly, if a Khási corpse cannot be recovered, as would happen, for example, if he were drowned in one of the large rivers in the plains, his kinsmen assemble on some prominent rock or hill overlooking the low country. One of them, taking in his hand some money-cowries, “and looking towards the site of the accident, shouts out the name of the deceased and calls on him to return; his spirit having been supposed to do so, they proceed to burn the cowries, which are symbolical of his bones, and any clothes {332} of the deceased they may possess.” The ashes are placed in the bone-depository.^332.1^ When a Chinaman dies in battle, or at a distance from home, and his body cannot be obtained, an effigy of paper or wood is made, his soul is summoned to enter it, and it is then buried by his family with all the usual obsequies, as if it were his body.^332.2^ In Samoa, if it were impossible to recover the body, or at least (as we have seen) the skull, there was still a method left of performing the all-important rites for the dead. The relatives would go to the battle-field, or, if the man had died at sea, to the shore, and, spreading a cloth or fine mat, would watch until some reptile or insect crawled upon it. They would then quickly enclose the creature, take up the mat and bury it in the proper manner, as if they had the corpse.^332.3^ The luckless insect is, in fact, identified with the departed, in accordance with the beliefs discussed in an earlier chapter.

Here, though the subject be far from exhausted, we may terminate our inquiry concerning funeral ceremonies based on the conception of sacramental union, on the one side with the survivors, on the other side with the forefathers of the clan. They afford ample evidence that death, as the most solemn and mysterious fact of our existence, has exercised the thoughts of men from the remotest ages. When they arose the idea of a soul or spirit, as distinct from its corporeal tenement, had hardly yet been evolved. Reason, as well as feeling, could do no otherwise than cling to the bodily relics of the dead. And still it clings, even in the highest plane of culture. And still—whatever hopes may linger in the recesses of the mind of reunion, in {333} some brighter and more lasting state of being, with those whom we have loved—we cannot but cherish the relics left to us of their bodily presence and think of the departed as yet about us while we hold these treasures; and there is consolation, albeit a dreary one, in the expectation that when we can hold these treasures no longer, the dust which has been dearest will be that which mingles with our own.

Chapter XIV. Marriage Rites

Marriage, or sexual union of a more or less permanent character, from the intimate connection which it creates, has obvious analogies to the admission of a new member into a clan. In early stages of culture it was not, however, deemed to constitute admission into the clan; and to the present day, in English law, husband and wife, though united by the closest of all ties, are not reckoned among the next of kin to one another. Still it inaugurates a new relationship, not only as between the immediate parties, but also as between their respective kindred. As doing so, it is an occasion on which the consent and concurrence of the kindred are required, and it is appropriately solemnised by rites bearing a close resemblance to the blood-covenant. An examination of some of these rites will be useful in strengthening our apprehension of the sacramental ideas of savages, and will help to complete our view of the savage conception of life.

Among several of the aboriginal tribes of Bengal a curious ceremony is practised. It is known as sindúr (or sindra) dán, and consists in the bridegroom’s marking his bride with red lead. This ceremony is the essential part {335} of the entire performance, which renders the union indissoluble, in the same way as the putting on of the ring in the marriage service of this country. The sindúr, or red lead, is generally smeared on the bride’s forehead and the parting of her hair, but sometimes on her neck. It is usually done either with the little finger or with a knife.^335.1^ In either case this detail is significant, because it points to the origin of the custom. There can be no doubt that vermilion is a well-recognised symbol of blood. I have already mentioned the primitive usage of daubing the stone which was both god and altar with the blood of the sacrificed victim. Everywhere in India the idol, whether a finished simulacrum or a rude unchiselled stone, is dashed with vermilion. Sometimes the object of worship is a tree; and its stem in the same way is streaked with red lead. Sir William Hunter lays it down that the worship of the Great Mountain, the national god of the Santals, “is essentially a worship of blood.” Human sacrifices were common, until put down by the British. At the present day, “if the sacrificer cannot afford an animal, it is with a red flower or a red fruit that he approaches the divinity.”^335.2^ Nor is red as a symbol of blood confined to India. We do not need to go further afield than the Roman Catholic Church, or even certain sections of the English Church, to find red worn in ecclesiastical ceremonies on the day of a martyr’s commemoration, expressly as an allusion to the outpouring of that martyr’s blood. The use of the colour in the wedding ceremony has reference also to blood. {336} Among the Dom, the Muchi, the Sánkhári and other Bengali tribes red is the bridal colour;^336.1^ as it is likewise in China, at least where the bride is a maiden.^336.2^ In Ukrainia at a certain stage of the proceedings a red flag is hoisted and red ribbons adorn the dresses of the bride and other members of the party. The meaning attached to them in this case does not admit of doubt;^336.3^ and it may be legitimately inferred in the others.

But the proof of the significance of the sindra dán rests not on the antecedent probability afforded by the use of red in rites of worship and marriage. Among the Bírhors the wedding ceremony is very simple. It consists entirely in drawing blood from the little fingers of the bride and bridegroom, and smearing it on one another.^336.4^ The ritual, on the other hand, of the Káyasth, or writer caste of Behar, is as complex as that of the Bírhors is simple; and it bears at every stage the marks of antiquity. After the bridegroom arrives with his procession at the bride’s house, but before he is allowed to see her, her nails are solemnly cut. The opportunity is taken to draw from her little finger a drop of blood, which is received upon a piece of cotton soaked in red dye. Later on, after the bridegroom has formally rubbed her forehead with the sindúr, his neck is touched with this piece of cotton; and the bride’s neck is also touched with a similar piece brought by the bridegroom, but not containing any of his blood.^336.5^ Here we seem to {337} have the ceremony in a double, if not a triple form. The dye on the cotton would represent blood. Nor is it unimportant that the bridegroom having previously plastered the sindúr, which stands for his blood, on the bride, does not need to bring his blood into contact with her. Among the Kewat, another caste of Behar, the ceremony is also duplicated. After the sindúr dán a tiny scratch is made on the little finger of the bridegroom’s right hand and of the bride’s left. Blood is drawn from each and mingled with a dish of boiled rice and milk; and either party then eats the food containing the other’s blood.^337.1^ Similarly in the Rájput ritual the family priest of the bride’s household fills the bridegroom’s hand with sindúr and marks the bride’s forehead with it. This is done on the first day. The next morning they are brought together, and each of them is made to chew betel with which a drop of blood from the other’s little finger has been mixed. The bride is then conducted to the bridegroom’s house, and the marriage is consummated.^337.2^ Among the Kharwár blood mixed with sindúr is exchanged, although what is now the final and binding act of smearing the sindúr is performed by the bridegroom alone.^337.3^ The Kurmi bridegroom also touches the bride between the breasts with a drop of his own blood, drawn from his little finger and mixed with lac-dye, prior to the performance of the sindra dán.^337.4^ Among the Rautiá, as among the Birhors, the sindra dán is effected with one another’s blood taken from the little fingers.^337.5^

The meaning of the ceremony therefore cannot be mistaken. It is precisely parallel to the blood-covenant: it {338} constitutes a permanent bodily union between the parties. Oriental scholars regard it as in origin Dravidian. It is, however, now practised also by the Aryan Hindus, and its survival among many aboriginal tribes in a double form is ingeniously attributed by Mr. Risley to its readoption by them from the Hindus in the later form of smearing with vermilion, after the connection between the red lead and the blood had been lost sight of.^338.1^ It is certain that many customs have been taken in recent times by the Dravidian populations from the Hindus; and the theory of readoption is confirmed by the fact that the red lead is usually smeared only by the bridegroom on the bride, as if it were an act of ownership, whereas the blood-smearing is done by both parties.

Beyond the limits of Bengal, blood is not often a prominent feature in marriage rites. Yet some significant instances may be cited. We cannot reckon that of the ancient Aztecs among these. When, after the marriage feast, the Aztec bridal pair retired to their chamber, it was only to fast and pray during four days, and to draw blood from various parts of their bodies. The object of this bleeding, however, is said to have been the propitiation of their cruel gods. In fact, the idea of propitiation seems to have entered into the rite, and to have ousted what probably was the original intention—that, namely, of sacramental communion with the divinities. Such communion with the divinities may, of course, have been indirect communion with one another; though there is not sufficient evidence to warrant our asserting that this was meant, and still less that direct communion of the same kind was effected. But we are not left without {339} examples elsewhere. The ceremonies of the Wukas, a tribe inhabiting the mountains of New Guinea, are exactly in point. Their weddings begin with an elopement, followed by pursuit and capture of both fugitives. The next step is to bargain for the price of the bride. When this is settled the marriage is performed by mutual cuts made by husband and wife in one another’s foreheads, so that the blood flows. The other members of both families then do likewise—a proceeding, we are told, “which binds together all the relations on both sides in the closest fraternal alliance.”^339.1^ The writer I am quoting does not, indeed, mention any daubing or exchange of blood; but it is clear that this must be understood. On the island of Banguey, off the northernmost point of Borneo, is a tribe of Dusuns. Mr. Creagh, the governor of British North Borneo, visiting them a year or two ago, found that their marriage-rite consisted in transferring a drop of blood from a small incision made with a wooden knife in the calf of the man’s leg to a similar cut in the woman’s leg.^339.2^ An Annamite story points to a ceremony in which the blood was drunk. A husband and wife swore that when one of them died the other would preserve the body until it came to life again, and would not marry a second time. The wife died, and the husband kept her corpse for seven months. At length the village elders remonstrated, fearing that the dead woman would become a demon and haunt {340} the village. Rather than bury his wife, the husband arranged that they should help him to make a raft, and he would put the body upon it and float with it whithersoever the winds and the waves would take him. The raft was borne to the eastern paradise; and there Buddha, touched by the man’s story, raised his wife from the dead, and asked her if she loved her husband truly and constantly. She vowed she did. Whereupon Buddha directed him to draw a cupful of blood from his finger, and give it to her to drink: which was done. It is sad to relate that after all this she proved unfaithful, and, when she died, was changed by Buddha into a mosquito, which is always sucking blood, but never can get enough to restore to her husband, in accordance with Buddha’s command, the entire cupful of blood she had taken from him.^340.1^ A tale from Mota, one of the Banks’ Islands, relates that certain women, who desire to become the hero’s wives, make him give them some of his liver to eat.^340.2^

On these two stories it would be easy to lay a stress greater than they will bear. But if they have any meaning it is in the direction we are seeking. Coming to Europe, however, we find a tale where we are on firmer ground. A Norwegian youth was curious to see if it were really true that the Huldren, or wood-women (a kind of supernatural beings), occupied the mountain-dwelling in the autumn, after it was deserted by the family for the lowlands. The story runs that he crept under a large upturned tub, and there waited until it began to grow dark. Then he heard a noise of coming and going; and it was not long before the house was filled with Huldre-folk. They immediately {341} smelt Christian flesh, but could not find the lad, until at length a maiden discovered him beneath the tub, and pointed at him with her finger. He drew his knife and scratched her finger, so that the blood flowed. Scarcely had he done it, when the whole party surrounded him; and the girl’s mother, supported by the rest, demanded that he must now marry her daughter, because he had marked her with blood. There were several objections to marrying a Huldre-woman: among others, that she had a tail. But there was nothing else for it; and happily, when she had been instructed in the Word of God and baptized, she lost the undesirable appendage, and made the youth a faithful and loving spouse.^341.1^ Now it may very well be that the reason for compelling this marriage is incomprehensible to the modern teller of the story, at least as a serious one. Yet the story can hardly have arisen and been propagated, with the incident in question as its catastrophe, unless a custom of marking with blood in connection with a wedding ceremony had been known to the original tellers. The barbarous nature of the custom is indicative of a much lower grade of civilisation than the Norwegian people have now, and long since, attained. And its ascription to the Huldre-folk suggests that it was practised by a non-Aryan race rather than by the Norsemen. It was certainly practised by the Finns; for a Finnish poem, entitled The Sun’s Son, describes its hero’s wedding ceremony in the following terms:—The bride’s father “leads and places them on the whale’s, the sea-king’s, hide. He scratches them both on their little fingers, mixes the blood together, lays hand in hand, unites breast to breast, knits the kisses together, bans the knots that jealousy has conjured, {342} separates the hands, and looses the knots of the espousal.”^342.1^ The correspondence of this rite with that of the aborigines of Bengal extends to the fingers whence the blood is drawn; and it cannot be doubted that we have here in full the ceremony referred to in the Norwegian tale. It will be remembered that the Icelandic saga of the farmer who appropriated a fairy cow stops short in its description of the act with the drawing of blood. The story now before us has suffered a similar curtailment.^342.2^

In other parts of the world we find red paint of some kind used apparently as a substitute for blood. An Australian bridegroom in the neighbourhood where Sydney now stands used to spit on his bride, and then with his right thumb and forefinger he took red powder and streaked her all over the face and body down to the navel.^342.3^ The Caribs are reported to have had no specific rites of marriage. But a full-grown man would sometimes betroth himself to an unborn child, conditionally on its proving a girl. When this was done the custom was for him to mark the mother’s body with a {343} red cross.^343.1^ This is an act hardly susceptible of more than one interpretation. The red mark over the mother’s womb was no doubt originally made with the man’s blood, and, since the child itself could not be reached, was the expedient for effecting the union between him and the unborn infant.

The blood of a fowl often takes the place of that of the parties, in the East Indies. Among the aborigines of Southern India a fowl is sacrificed at the threshold of the bride’s room, and the foreheads of bride and bridegroom are marked with its blood; while among the Káháyáns of Borneo a cock and a hen are slaughtered, their blood received in a cup, and the happy pair are marked from head to foot with it.^343.2^

Out of many other ceremonies expressive of union I select for illustration that familiar to us in the Roman law under the name of Confarreatio. This solemn form of marriage took its name from the central rite, in which the man and woman seem to have eaten together of the round sacrificial cake, called the panis farreus. At all events, in the corresponding Greek ceremony they partook together of a sesamum-cake. In one shape or other this rite is found in many lands, perhaps over the greater portion of the globe. It has been too often described to need an extended notice here; but a few of its various forms may be mentioned, before we pass on to consider some of the analogies between the effects of marriage and of the blood-covenant.

We may as well begin with the Santals, one of the tribes of Bengal of which I have already spoken. Among them the {344} couple to be married fast on the wedding-day until after the sindra dán, when they sit down together and eat. Colonel Dalton, in describing the custom, reminds us that it is the more remarkable because the Hindu husband and wife never eat together, and tells us that this meal is the first time the maiden is supposed to have sat with a man at his food, and that it “is the most important part of the ceremony, as by the act the girl ceases to belong to her father’s tribe, and becomes a member of her husband’s family.”^344.1^ Among the Santals, in fact, marriage is admission into the kin. None but members of a kin have, we know, commensal rights; and admission frequently takes the form of a ceremonial common meal, which probably is a modification of the blood-covenant. Among the Khyoungtha, one of the Chittagong Hill-tribes, the bride and bridegroom are tied together with a new-spun cotton thread, and the poongyee, or priest, muttering prayers, takes a handful of cooked rice in each hand, and crossing and re-crossing his arms he gives seven alternate mouthfuls to each. Then he hooks the little finger of the bridegroom’s left hand into the little finger of the bride’s right, and with some further mutterings the ceremony is concluded. The Chukma, a neighbouring tribe, bind the couple together with a muslin scarf; and in that position they have to feed one another. Their hands are guided by the bridesmaid and best man to one another’s mouths amid general hilarity.^344.2^ Father Bourien was present at several marriages of Mantras or wild tribes of the Malay peninsula. According to his report, “a plate containing small packages of rice wrapped up in banana-leaves having been presented, the husband offered one to his future wife, who showed herself eager to {345} accept it, and ate it; she then in her turn gave some to her husband, and they afterwards both assisted in distributing them to the other members of the assemblage.” In the feast which followed the remaining ceremonies husband and wife ate from one dish.^345.1^ Eating from one dish, or one leaf—a more archaic form of dish—is in fact the usual rite all over south-eastern Asia and the East Indian islands; and although the Hindu husband and wife now never eat together, the ancient ritual prescribed that they should do so at the marriage ceremony.^345.2^ Boiled rice appears to have been the food, as it is in Dardistan at the present day, where a dish of rice boiled in milk is brought in, and the boy and girl take a spoonful each.^345.3^ Married couples of Kafa, in the north-eastern corner of Africa, are only allowed to eat out of the same dish and drink out of the same horn or glass. And the etiquette is more rigorous than that of Sairey Gamp and Betsy Prig; for they are expected to eat as well as to “drink fair.”^345.4^ The custom of eating together as a marriage rite is recorded as in use by the aborigines of the greater part of America. The simple ceremony is thus related in a Pawnee legend: “He entered his tent. She made a very good bed for him. She was sitting with him. She married him. She had food with him. And the young men said as follows: ‘Why friends, the chief’s daughter has married the Orphan.’ ”^345.5^ It is the same among the Polynesians. On the island of Mangaia, in the Hervey Group, the pair sit to eat together in the presence of their friends on a single piece of the finest native cloth, just as in the {346} Finnish lay they sat on the whale’s hide, and at Rome they sat, during one portion of the proceedings, on the fell of a sheep which had been slain in sacrifice.^346.1^ Among the tribes of New Guinea, when the bride is brought to her husband’s dwelling a dish of food is presented to them, out of which they both eat. In some cases a roasted banana is eaten half by the bride, the other half by the bridegroom.^346.2^ So, after getting into bed the South Slavonic bride from her bosom takes an apple which has been given to her by the bridegroom in the course of the day, eats one half of it and hands the other to him.^346.3^ One of the Epirote ceremonies is the eating of a cake made of flour, butter and cheese. It is cut into slices; and the husband taking one dips it in honey and eats, afterwards giving to his wife. This is repeated thrice. Then, after eating some fruit, a round loaf with a hole in the middle is brought to them. Putting their fingers into the hole, they pull against one another until the loaf is torn in two; after which they and their nearest relatives eat it.^346.4^ Bread and honey are eaten together in alternate bites by a Greek, or an Albanian, pair.^346.5^ In the Obererzgebirge before setting out for church the bride and bridegroom eat from the same dish; and in some districts of Thuringia they partake of soup from one plate.^346.6^ In Provence, as also in Esthonia, this is done after the return; and in Esthonia a piece of bread and butter, or a little bread with salt, is also eaten.^346.7^ At the same point {347} in the province of Berry, France, and in the Jura, a piece of bread and wine are offered to the young couple. The husband takes the first bite out of the bread; and his example is followed by his wife.^347.1^ The Wallon practice is for the bride to eat half a tart and give her husband the rest: this ensures his affection.^347.2^ In the old Parisian marriage rite the betrothal took place at the church-door. The priest then led the newly wedded into the church, and said mass. After mass he blessed a loaf and wine. The loaf was bitten and a little of the wine drunk by each of the spouses, one after the other; and the officiating priest then taking them by the hands led them home.^347.3^ In the celebration of a Yezidi wedding a loaf of consecrated bread is handed to the husband; and he and his wife eat it between them. The Nestorians, their near neighbours, require the pair to take the communion.^347.4^ Nor is this requirement by any means confined to the Nestorians among Christian sects; and even until the last revision of the Book of Common Prayer the Church of England herself commanded, in the final rubric of the solemnisation of matrimony, that “the new married persons the same day of their marriage must receive the holy communion”:—a practice which continues to be recommended and is occasionally followed.

Many of the foregoing ceremonies include a drink out of the same vessel. Either alone or accompanied by eating, it is usual from Italy to Norway, from Brittany to {348} Russia; and traces of it have been found even in Scotland.^348.1^ According to the old Lombardic laws no further ceremony was necessary to constitute a valid marriage than a kiss and a drink together. The Church long struggled against this rule, but was in the end obliged to sanction it, subject to the condition that a priest should be present to impart the benediction and a “spousal sermon.” It has been adopted into the rites of the Greek Church in Russia, where the priest in the course of the ceremony solemnly blesses a small silver ladle, called the Common Cup, filled with wine and water, and holds it to the lips of the pair, who sip it alternately each three times. In the West of England there is evidence which a careful examination of ecclesiastical records would probably extend to other parts of the country that at the time of the Reformation formal betrothals were usually performed by any respectable friend of both parties. He joined their hands; they gave their faith and troth in his presence; and after the betrothal gift, or token, had been handed over, or else promised, or acknowledged as already received, they kissed and drank together. This seems to have been considered as a binding union, though the banns and religious ceremony generally followed shortly after. To this day in Hesse the custom is preserved in the Weinkauf (literally, wine-purchase), or assembly of relatives on both sides. At this assembly the conditions are fixed on which the bride is to be discharged from her native kin to enter the kindred and protection of the bridegroom. When these are arranged {349} she drinks to her bridegroom in token of her consent, and both then drink out of the same glass. From that moment they are regarded as practically husband and wife; and it only remains to obtain ecclesiastical sanction for the union. This usually follows shortly after; and between the Weinkauf and the wedding it was formerly not thought proper for a virtuous maiden to go out of doors.^349.1^

Going eastward we may note a few out of many other instances. The loving cup is part of the Jewish and Armenian ceremonies.^349.2^ Among the Mohammedan Yusufzais of Afghanistan it is the bride’s father and the bridegroom that drink out of the same vessel;^349.3^ obviously a change of the earlier practice to suit the faith of Islam. In Singbhúm, among the Hos and other tribes, the young couple are given beer, which they proceed to mix, the bridegroom pouring some of his into the bride’s cup, and she in turn pouring from her cup into his. They then drink, “and thus become of the same kili, or clan.”^349.4^ Rice is sprinkled over the heads of a Lepcha pair; they eat {350} together and drink maruá beer out of the same cup.^350.1^ Among the Tipperahs of the Chittagong Hill districts, “the girl’s mother pours out a glass of liquor and gives it to her daughter, who goes and sits on her lover’s knee, drinks half and gives him the other half; they afterwards crook together their little fingers.”^350.2^ The Annamite youth and maiden being placed on either side of the ancestors’ altar, they help one another to drink, exchanging cups and then putting them back one on the other. This is said to be the relic of a very ancient rite which consisted in fitting together the two halves of a calabash, used no doubt for the drink.^350.3^ It was the ancient custom in China for bride and bridegroom to eat together of the same sacrificed animal, and to drink out of cups made of the two halves of the same melon, the bride drinking from the bridegroom’s half and he from hers: thus showing, as we are expressly told in the Lî Kî, “that they now formed one body, were of equal rank and pledged to mutual affection.”^350.4^ At present, about Foochow, and possibly in other parts of the empire, the ceremonial drink is sometimes taken by bride and bridegroom out of the same goblet; where two are used they are often tied together with red cord.^350.5^ In Korea the lady hands a gourd-bottle of rice-wine, adorned with red and blue thread to her spouse, and they drink together out of one little cup several times filled by the bridesmaids who stand beside them.^350.6^ And in general we {351} may say that, as the eating from one vessel, so the drinking together, is found all over the East Indies, on the islands as well as on the continent, and as far to the south as Fiji, save where in the East Indian islands it is replaced by the parallel custom of chewing a quid of betel together.^351.1^ Whatever shapes the practice takes, they all resolve themselves into the thought presented on another side to us by the tale, said to be of Oriental origin, that on the first day Allah took an apple and cut it in two, giving one half to Adam and the other to Eve, and directing each at the same time to seek for the missing half. That is why one half of humanity has ever since been seeking its corresponding half.^351.2^

But here we must go a step further. The remains of the cake, which, in the Roman ceremony of Confarreatio, seems to have been broken and eaten by the bride and bridegroom, were distributed among the guests; just as our own bride-cake, after being cut by the bride and bridegroom, is shared with the entire wedding party. The ritual distribution of cakes or drink is common in Europe from one end to the other. The Esthonian bride gives to each guest of the bread and salt whereof she and her husband have just partaken.^351.3^ At a marriage in the Ukrainian provinces a cake called the korovaï is made with a number of formalities. Immediately before the bride is conducted to her husband’s house this cake is solemnly cut. The moon which crowns it is divided between the happy pair; and the rest is distributed among the relatives in order of age, great care being manifested that every one {352} shall have his due portion. The cutting and distribution are performed with ceremonies showing the importance attached to the act; and we learn from an ancient song that it was formerly the custom to light a candle and search diligently every corner to make sure that no one had been overlooked.^352.1^ A bridal pair of La Creuse, in the south of France, on arriving at their home from the church, find at the door a soup-tureen filled with a certain broth or porridge, of which they are required to taste with the same spoon. The soup-tureen is then passed round to all the guests; after which a glass of wine is taken in the same manner, and the soup-tureen and wine-glass are broken to ward off witchcraft.^352.2^ In Caltanisetta, Italy, the ritual food consists of toasted almonds and honey. An eye-witness at a wedding some five-and-thirty years ago describes a boy, with a towel hung round his neck like a sacerdotal stole, who mounted the table, took a silver spoon, and after blessing the basin in dumb show, tasted the sweet compound within it. The table was then removed; and the boy carried round the basin, while the bride’s mother put a spoonful of the almonds and honey in the mouth of every one present, beginning with the happy couple, and wiped their lips with the towel.^352.3^ As with other rites already referred to, this is one regarded not only among comparatively civilised peoples. Backward races, as convivial in their instincts as the most enlightened, join indeed in feasting on these occasions; but they also join in ceremonially partaking with the newly-made spouses of a special article of food or drink. Such is the Mantra rite already mentioned; {353} such also is the striking ceremony of the Saráogi Baniyás, referred to in a previous chapter, at which a Brahman is slain in effigy and the contents of the figure shared among the kinsmen present. It will be enough to recall two others. Among the Garos of North-eastern India the married couple complete their wedding festivities by each drinking a bowl of rice-beer and presenting a cup to every guest.^353.1^ On the Kingsmill Islands bride and bridegroom are led to their hut by an old woman who spreads for them a new mat of cocoa-palm leaves, and makes around them a circle of cooked pandanus-fruits. Of these she takes two and hands them to the pair, having first called on the goddess Eibong to take them under her protection, and bless their union richly with children. When these two fruits have been eaten the others are divided among the relatives and friends, who are waiting outside to receive them.^353.2^

The meaning of this extension of the rite must be interpreted by its meaning when limited to husband and wife, and both by reference to the rites of kinship. It is not merely assent to the marriage on the part of the guests. It is indeed that; but assent, though, as we shall see, very necessary, may be obtained and given in other ways. To understand its full force we must turn back to some of the examples I have cited. By sitting and eating with her husband, the Santal maiden “ceases to belong to her father’s tribe, and becomes a member of her husband’s family.” The Ho and the Múnda bride and bridegroom, drinking the blended liquor from their two cups, become of one kili. But the woman who enters her husband’s kili, or clan, {354} becomes related to all its members. Becoming of one flesh with him, she becomes of one flesh with all of his kindred. This is implicitly recognised among the Amils of Sindh, where the bridegroom and all his female friends are marked with vermilion by the officiating Brahman.^354.1^ Among the Bodos and the Kochh of Bengal it would seem to be the rule for two women to accompany the bridegroom and his friends in their procession to the bride’s house. These women it is who, penetrating to her apartment, anoint her head with oil mixed with red lead, prior to her being presented to her husband.^354.2^ Conversely, the Santal bridegroom in some districts, after reaching the bride’s village, is stripped by her clanswomen, and by them bathed and dressed in new garments properly stained with vermilion.^354.3^ When, among the Mál Paháriás, the bridegroom has daubed the bride with sindur, the compliment is returned not by her but by her maidens, who adorn his forehead with seven red spots.^354.4^ The analogy to the blood-covenant is in these cases carried to the point of identity. The same may be conjectured with some probability to be the effect of marriage on the island of Bonabe in Micronesia, where the wife is tattooed with the marks representing her husband’s ancestors.^354.5^ Ellis describes the female relatives of a bride and bridegroom in the Society Islands as cutting their faces, receiving the flowing blood on a piece of native cloth, {355} and depositing the cloth, “sprinkled with the mingled blood of the mothers of the married pair, at the feet of the bride.” And he tells us in so many words that the rite removed any inequality of rank that might have existed between them, and that “the two families to which they respectively belonged were ever afterwards regarded as one.”^355.1^

But even when marriage does not amount to reception into the kin, it constitutes a quasi-relationship with the entire kindred; and the ceremony initiates, or at least expresses, this. A crude instance is afforded by the Wukas of New Guinea, already cited. A hideous rite susceptible of no other interpretation is performed by the Kingsmill Islanders immediately upon the consummation of a marriage; and a similar one is mentioned by a Chinese traveller at the end of the thirteenth century as taking place in Cambodia.^355.2^ On Teressa, one of the Nicobar Islands, a pig is killed and the faces of the guests are smeared with its blood.^355.3^ Here the pig’s blood is doubtless a substitute for that of the bridal pair. In the south of India the Wadders use for the wedding feast the rice which has been poured over the new husband and wife: a practice to which a similar intention must probably be ascribed.^355.4^

For the effect of marriage is to give the kindred of the husband or the wife new rights over the person of the spouse. There are in Europe some very general usages pointing to the rights which must once have been exercised by the husband’s kin over the wife. Among the Esthonians, {356} when the bride has at length been brought into the bridegroom’s house a repast is served, and the day is concluded with a dance, wherein all the guests in turn dance with her, for which she is entitled to a piece of money from each of them.^356.1^ The custom of the Polish inhabitants of the Prussian province of Posen is the same.^356.2^ Du Chaillu witnessed a similar wedding dance in Dalecarlia, Sweden. It appears to have taken place in the bridegroom’s father’s house.^356.3^ In the Tirol, and among the Masurs, the bride has to dance the Bride-dance with every one of the guests. In Transylvania she begins with the beistand, or best man; and after every dance she must drink a glass of wine with her partner, who throws a piece of money into a plate ready for the purpose.^356.4^ Among the Wends, every male guest is expected to dance with the bride, formal permission being first obtained from the brautführer. The bridegroom, and this is an important point, is sent away the while; and the dances are continued until midnight, when he is brought back. They take place, unlike the Dalecarlian ceremony, in the bride’s house.^356.5^ In the Lowlands of Scotland, after the wedding ceremony, which was usually performed at the bride’s residence, she was expected to go round the room with her bridesmaids and kiss every male in the company. “A dish was then handed round, in which every one placed a sum of money, to help the young couple to commence housekeeping.”^356.6^ Dr. Gregor describes a similar dance as {357} performed in the north-east of Scotland. It was opened by the bride and her best maid dancing with the two sens, officials sent by the bridegroom on the wedding morning formally to demand the bride. The dance began and ended with a kiss, and when it was over the bride fixed a favour on her partner’s right arm, and the bridesmaid one on her partner’s left arm. “The two sens then paid the fiddler. Frequently the bride and her maid asked if there were other young men who wished to win favours. Two jumped to the floor, danced with the bride and her maid, and earned the honour on the left arm. Dancing was carried on far into the morning with the utmost vigour, each dance being begun and ended by the partners saluting each other.”^357.1^ At Bourges it was the custom for brides on coming out of church to embrace indifferently all whom they met in the street; and still in country places of the province of the Marche the practice is said to be followed, with the variation that it is done before the marriage service. Generally in the province of Berri the guests after the feast approach in turn and deposit an offering (formerly gifts in kind proper for setting up housekeeping), receiving in return a kiss from the bride.^357.2^ In the valley of Pragelato, near Pinerolo, the festivities are held in a large outhouse, the rooms in the house being usually too small. The bride is the first to enter. She stands on the threshold, holding a platter covered with a small cloth. Every one entering, without distinction of age, embraces {358} and kisses her, and drops a piece of money clinking under the cloth.^358.1^ Similar customs obtain in other parts of Italy, sometimes repeated more than once during the festivities.^358.2^ The bride-dance is also practised in Provence. And at the village of Fours, near Barcelonnette, on leaving the church the bride is conducted to a rock (possibly, an erratic boulder) called the Bride-stone, whereon she is made to sit with one foot in a certain hollow of the rock. While in this position each of the relatives and guests comes in turn, kisses her and gives her a ring.^358.3^

We must look back to savage customs to discover the origin and meaning of the European rites I have here set forth; and I think we must connect them with those of the Nasamonians mentioned by Herodotus, the Auziles, an Ethiopian tribe mentioned by Pomponius Mela, and the Balearic Islanders, among all of whom in ancient times the bride was, on the wedding-night, considered as common property.^358.4^ The information we have about these peoples is meagre and fragmentary. About the Kurnai of Australia, however, we have full and precise statements, extending, far beyond the act of marriage, to all their connubial relations. Their only recognised form of marriage was by a species of elopement or capture, performed with the aid of the other unmarried youths of the tribe. With all these youths the unfortunate bride had to observe the Nasamonian rite. She then went off with her new husband. This process {359} had to be repeated once, if not twice again, before her relatives could be got to sanction the match; and meantime both bride and bridegroom incurred their wrath, which was much more than a mere form. But when once the elopement had been condoned, if the bride had an unmarried sister, it is said that she also would be handed over to the husband; and in any case on his wife’s death he had a right to her. Moreover, on his death, his widow, if he left but one, went by right to his brother; if more than one, they went to his brothers in order of seniority. If the wife ran away from her husband with another man, “all the neighbouring men might turn out and seek for her, and in the event of her being discovered, she became common property to them until released by her husband or her male relatives.” Further, the husband was obliged to supply his wife’s parents with the best of the food he killed; but on the other hand he was free to hunt over their country as well as the country of his own ancestors.^359.1^

In considering these particulars we must remember that the constitution of society among the Australian aborigines is in process of transformation. They had a system of group-marriage, whereby every tribe consisted of certain classes, all exogamous. Their table of prohibited affinities is highly complex, and need not be here discussed. It is enough to say that the members of each class were looked upon among themselves as brothers and sisters; but {360} towards the class into which they could marry they were husbands and wives; and they were entitled to act accordingly whenever they met any members of the latter class. No sexual relations were permitted with any other class. The system has been in a state of decadence—greater in some tribes, like the Kurnai, less in others—from a time probably anterior to the English settlement. A custom had arisen, it matters not from what causes, of appropriating one woman, or more, to one man. This custom, if not interfered with, would have issued in the evolution of a different idea of kinship, and ultimately of the true family. In group-marriage the wives were not regarded as akin to the husbands. Marriage was the status into which husbands and wives alike were born. The union required no ceremonies to its consummation, because no relationships were changed by it. But with the rise of monopoly by individuals of one another, the unappropriated women would be kept at a greater distance from the men, and the act of appropriation would gradually assume a ceremonial form. The kindred would be called upon to take part in it, both as assistants and as witnesses. From Mr. Howitt’s account it seems likely that the evolution would be in the direction of patriarchal clans. If so, the woman would be introduced by marriage into a special relation with her husband’s kin. The exogamous classes would ultimately be effaced; a new idea of the clan would supersede them; and the act of marriage would at length operate as admission into the clan.

Now it is clear from Mr. Howitt’s statement that, by the marriage, rights were acquired on the part of the husband’s kin in the wife and on the part of the wife’s kin in the husband. The decaying system would doubtless at that {361} stage operate to permit only members of the husband’s class to take part in the capture of a bride, or of a runaway wife; and they would as yet be all reckoned of his kin. The rights they then exercised would afterwards be held in abeyance; but, subject to the husband’s monopoly, those rights would survive, to reappear upon his death, if not upon any other occasion in his lifetime. The gradual circumscription of the kindred, by the recognition of closer ties than those of the exogamous class, is indicated by the duty laid upon the husband to supply his wife’s parents with food, as well as by the limitation to his brothers of the right to his widows. The peoples referred to by the classical writers I have cited were probably in the stage in which group-marriage had died, or was dying, out in favour of individual unions. The bride was hardly yet conceived of as taken into the kindred. The Nasamonian habits in particular, as recorded by Herodotus, appear little, if at all, advanced beyond those of the Kurnai. Both among the Nasamonians, however, and the Auziles it was the practice for each of the guests who had taken part in the rite to reward the bride with a gift, just as among European peoples the bride is rewarded for her dance or her kiss: an indication that her compliance was becoming something more than the guests could demand,—something they had, therefore, to purchase. This does not appear to have been the case with the Balearic Islanders: at least Diodorus Siculus, who mentions the custom, says nothing about any gift. A similar usage is reported by Garcilasso of some of the aborigines of Peru at the time of the Spanish conquest. Here we are expressly told what we may probably assume to have been the case among the Nasamonians, namely, that it was only the relatives and friends of the bridegroom {362} who shared in the rite; and from the historian’s expressions we may infer that no payment was made.^362.1^ Nor is it found in an account of the marriages of the Wa-taveta given by a lady who has recently travelled in Eastern Africa. In other respects the Wa-taveta would appear to be somewhat higher in the scale of civilisation than the Kurnai or the Baleares. The bridegroom’s friends are limited to four in number. The capture of the bride, in which they aid him, is a mere ceremony followed by a five days’ feast, during which they participate in the Nasamonian rite.^362.2^ More remarkable than any of these, however, as attesting the rights of the bridegroom’s kindred, is a custom of the Eesa and Gadabursi, two of the western Somali tribes. When the bride enters the hut which is to be her new home, she is followed by the bridegroom and some of his nearest male relatives. He takes a leathern horsewhip and with it inflicts three severe blows upon his wife; and his example is followed by his {363} companions, “who by this act obtain ever afterwards peculiar rights and power over the bride, which her husband dare not dispute.”^363.1^

I might rest on these examples the case for the real meaning of the bride-dance and the kiss which the European bride bestows upon the guests (or rather, of course, on the masculine guests) at the wedding. But it is not necessary to do so; for we find even in Europe a practice of which the significance is unmistakable. The most important official at a marriage among the Southern Slavs is the djever (in German, brautführer) bride-leader, or bride-carrier. One only appears to be necessary, but commonly the bridegroom appoints two. They are chosen from his own brothers, or adoptive brothers, or his most intimate and trusty friends; or the chief brautführer may be his godfather. Adoptive brotherhood and godfatherhood are very sacred ties, at least as close as natural relationships; and the duties they impose are rarely violated. It is for this reason that such persons are selected for the office of djever. For the djever is allowed to relieve the tedious festivities of the wedding (and Slav weddings are tedious indeed) as often as he likes by kissing the bride and taking other liberties with her. And in the Bocca and Herzegovina, when the night at length arrives, he sleeps beside her “as a brother with a sister”; or if there be two, they both occupy the room with her. The latter custom is now falling into disuse; and the djever’s place is taken by the bridegroom’s mother and sister, the happy man himself not being permitted to obtain possession of his bride for two, or sometimes three, nights.^363.2^ It needs {364} no words of mine to drive home the conclusion that here we have a survival of a rite identical with that of the Kurnai. The djeveri are the representatives of the entire band of the bridegroom’s brethren and assistants, whose rights are concentrated in their hands. The connection between this usage and those in other parts of Europe comes to the surface in the Wendish requirement that permission for the bride-dance be obtained from the brautführer.

If this conclusion be correct, the ancestors of the European nations must have passed through a stage of society wherein group-marriage was the rule, the groups on either side probably consisting of husbands reckoned, according to the standard of savage kinship, as brothers, and wives reckoned as sisters, among themselves. The limited promiscuity thus established would be entirely in harmony with—nay, it would be a consequence of—the conception of gentile solidarity which I have endeavoured to summarise in a previous chapter. This is what the late Mr. Lewis Morgan called the Punaluan Family. Starting from the kindred-names and customs of Hawaii, he traced it over a large part of the Old and New Worlds, and successfully vindicated its existence against the criticisms of Mr. MacLennan. The most striking piece of evidence in favour of Mr. Morgan’s theory that has come to light since he wrote is perhaps to be found among the inhabitants of the island of Tanna in the New Hebrides. Their rules of marriage and terms of relationship may be studied in detail in a paper by the Rev. William Gray, read at a meeting of the Australasian Association, held at Hobart in January 1892, and published in the report of the meeting. It will suffice here to say that in the laws and language of the {365} Tannese no distinctions are drawn between a wife and a wife’s sister, between a husband and a husband’s brother; all a man’s brother’s children are his own; all his wife’s children and his wife’s sisters’ children are alike his; the relation of uncle or aunt and nephew or niece does not exist, for the person whom we should call uncle or aunt is recognised by a Tannese as his father or mother, or else the term is indistinguishable from those for wife’s or husband’s father or mother; in like manner the terms for nephew and niece are the same as those for son-in-law and daughter-in-law; and the children of a man’s father’s brothers, or of his mother’s sisters, are regarded as his brothers and sisters equally with the children of his own parents.^365.1^ For such a condition of society any explanation is impossible, unless it be that an entire band of brethren is—or was down to a recent period, yesterday if not to-day—actually or potentially married to an entire band of sisters. The Punaluan Family is thus Australian group-marriage surviving into a somewhat higher stage of culture, but surviving, of course, in a more restricted form. The sense of solidarity has become stronger, but more circumscribed.

When in the progress of culture group-marriage began to give way to individual appropriation, and inroads were made upon the totemistic clan, the clan-brethren would not immediately cease to be specially interested in the marriage of one of their number. Their rights would not be extinguished all at once; they would only become dormant. They might never be exercised during the continuance of the marriage. Probably they never would be, at all events without the individual husband’s assent. {366} But, whether exercised or not, there the rights would be, ready to arise upon a favourable opportunity. Rights thus in abeyance would be likely to be exercised at the entrance upon marriage, prior to the husband’s sole ownership, if the assistance of the clan-brethren were required to obtain the bride. They might be exercised also during the marriage, if the wife ran away and the clan-brethren helped to recover her. The opportunity for asserting the rights would come with the call for assistance.

In the most archaic period, such as may be represented for us by the Kurnai, the assistance would take the form of physical force. But after a while purchase began to supersede violence as the method of bride-winning, and capture dwindled to a form. The help of the clansmen would be equally required in purchase as in capture. I select a few examples from different parts of the world. Among the Nestorians, relatives and friends are called on to contribute to the dowry and wedding-dress given by the bridegroom to the bride, and the presents he has to make to her parents, as well as the expenses of the feast.^366.1^ The tribes of the Caucasus are divided into exogamous clans; and when a member of a clan marries, all the brethren contribute to the ransom paid for the bride. Every member of a Kurdish commune pays a share of the purchase-money. A similar collection is made among the comrades of the Lithuanian bridegroom. In Ukrainia, before the bridegroom and his suite set out for the bride’s dwelling, each of the suite is called upon by the best man to make a contribution towards the sum which is afterwards paid to the brothers of the bride.^366.2^ Among the Khonds of Orissa a {367} large price in cattle and money is paid for a wife; and this is chiefly subscribed, as among others of the aboriginal tribes, by the bridegroom’s “near relatives and his branch of the tribe.”^367.1^ The inhabitants of Sumatra buy their wives; but the debt is often allowed to remain for many years undischarged. “Sometimes it remains unadjusted,” says Marsden, “to the second and third generation, and it is not uncommon to see a man suing for the jujur (or price) of the sister of his grandfather.” And he adds that “in Passummah, if the race of a man is extinct, the dusun or village to which the family belonged must make it good to the creditor.”^367.2^ This implies that the dusun was originally collectively liable for the payment. The Melanesian custom seems to be for the youth’s kindred and friends to contribute to the sum he is called on to pay.^367.3^ Among the Basutos a marriage is an affair of much concern to the relatives of the young people on both sides. The bridegroom’s relatives furnish the cattle he gives for her, and go in a body to make the bargain and present the beasts.^367.4^ On the western continent the Araucanian aspirant for matrimony takes counsel with his friends and relatives, who inform him what contributions they are prepared to make towards the amount of the purchase-money. Among the Peguenches the relatives negotiate the marriage and collect the articles of value to be paid for the damsel.^367.5^ In Guatemala the price was furnished by the bridegroom’s clansmen.^367.6^ In what is now Los Angeles County, California, {368} the male relatives “proceeded in a body to the girl’s dwelling, and distributed small sums in shell-money among her female kinsfolk, who were collected there for the occasion,” and who afterwards returned the visit and gave baskets of meal to the bridegroom’s kindred.^368.1^

From these examples, and many more might be cited, it is obvious that the purchase was made by the clan, just as the capture was probably made by the clan. And we might well expect to find that the clan, and not merely the individual, acquired by the act rights over the bride, such as would be expressed in the rude Nasamonian custom, and in the Bride-dance and other survivals of modern Europe. I have only space for a few examples indicating community of wives or of husbands. But the subject has been so exhaustively treated by anthropologists of distinction that little more than a passing notice is needful. An observation or two must, however, be made first of all, in reference alike to the examples that follow, and to those I have cited in previous pages. When we read, whether in classical writers or in the works of modern travellers, of community of women, we must always beware of giving the words the meaning of absolute promiscuity. Very strong evidence, and not merely that of writers imperfectly acquainted with the language and customs of a savage people, is called for to establish absolute promiscuity. But limited promiscuity among the members of a clan is a different matter. As a savage practice it is beyond doubt; and I have already pointed out that it owes its origin to the solidarity of the kindred in the lower culture. We must fully grasp the meaning of this solidarity if we would avoid the twofold chance of error in descriptions of savage life {369} and the inferences to be drawn from them. The chance of error too, it may be parenthetically observed, is not confined to marriage ceremonies, nor to the abiding customs of the conjugal relation; but we must guard against it on many other occasions, as for instance those described in the last chapter. Travellers having but a superficial knowledge of the peoples they describe—especially in the days before savage kinship had become the subject of scientific investigation—are not careful to define, because they do not understand, the relationship of members of a tribe to one another. Their vague expressions “relatives” and “friends” are therefore subject to interpretation by what has been ascertained of clan-organisation, if we would avoid one source of error. But there is a further consideration which ought not to be overlooked. The clan system has rarely been found complete and unimpaired. The evolution of civilisation is always modifying it, sometimes in one direction, sometimes in another. Consequently ceremonies limited in theory to the clan-brethren display a constant tendency on the one side to limitation to the smaller circle of the family, as the family is evolved from the clan; and on the other side to extension among the intimate friends and relatives of the person chiefly concerned, as blood-relationship begins to be recognised outside the clan, and as the ties of friendship are knit between man and man regardless of kinship. Herein lies our other difficulty. The criticism that the privileges we are discussing are not recorded as belonging to the members of one group only, though it applies with greater force to the instances mentioned by classical writers, who understood the gentile system, than to modern writers who do not understand it, is by no means enough to dispose of the evidence where {370} such record is wanting. Unfortunately we cannot cross-examine the writers. We can, however, and we must, read their accounts by the light of more accurate investigations. We shall then be inclined to admit that most of the cases alleged are not referable to phallic worship, nor to an outbreak of indiscriminate licence occurring in the midst of long-established monogamy, to which they are sometimes ascribed.^370.1^

Turning now to the privileges themselves, it must be remembered that we have not to deal with cases in which polyandry is still open and avowed, but to customs which indicate its former existence. Group-marriage, like that of the Australians, the more limited polyandry of the Tibetan peoples, and the ruder polyandry like that of the Nairs, whether it be the remains of a more savage and unorganised society before the rise of the clan, or a sporadic degradation of clan-marriage, may be studied in the writings of MacLennan, Morgan, and Robertson Smith. Group-marriage and Tibetan polyandry, indeed, we must assume as the precursors of the state of barbarous culture where the marriage is primarily between individuals, but in which the kin still have certain rights over the spouse. And in dealing with the rights of the husband’s kin we are not required to take into account whether his marriage be polygynous or no.

Bearing these things in mind then, let us consider a few examples. Among the Santals, it is said, “a man’s younger brother may share his wife with impunity; only they must {371} not go about it very openly.”^371.1^ In dealing with women taken in adultery the main point considered by the Dhobás of Orissa is whether the paramour be a member of the caste.^371.2^ For, while a slight penance is deemed sufficient penalty for such a lapse of virtue, and the husband by no means invariably insists on divorce, the offence committed with an outsider is incapable of atonement, and the offending woman is turned out of the caste. Here, although the limits of the gotra are not coextensive with those of the more venial sin, it is to be observed that the Dhobás all claim descent from a common ancestor, and they eat and drink together indiscriminately. It is not considered any offence among the Bhuiyars of South Mirzapur for a married woman to grant her favours to her husband’s brothers. More distant relatives must give a tribal feast; or, if the kindred be very remote, the paramour must repay to the husband the cost of her marriage.^371.3^ Similarly, in Southern India a Cunian woman who has been guilty of an intrigue with a lover of her own tribe is not disgraced thereby; and if her husband desire to get rid of her she will have no difficulty in finding another.^371.4^ Among the Thlinkits of North America a wife has the privilege of selecting as her lover a brother or near kinsman of her husband; and such a man is required to contribute towards her maintenance. On the other hand, a seducer who is no relation may be slain by the outraged husband, or compelled {372} to submit to a heavy fine.^372.1^ The right loosely described by Herodotus as exercised by the Massagetai over other men’s wives must probably be understood as limited to kinsmen.^372.2^ In the island of Timor a brother made by the blood-covenant coming to the house of one of the brothers of the same covenant or clan “is in every respect regarded as free and as much at home as its owner. Nothing is withheld from him”: not even the wife. “And a child born of such a union would be regarded by the husband as his.” For, as Dr. Trumbull appositely comments, “are not—as they reason—these brother-friends of one blood—of one and the same life?”^372.3^

The common meal, as we have seen, implies brotherhood. The rites of hospitality among many nations constitute a temporary brotherhood, and confer on the guest many of the privileges of a kinsman. This, it seems reasonable to think, may have been the ground of that widely extended custom of offering the host’s wife to his guest. The custom is too well known to require more than a passing reference. Nor do I propose to give more to another custom, that, namely of the exchange, temporary or permanent, of wives. Where it is not dictated by mere occasional wantonness, but is a regular institution, it is usually limited to brethren of the blood. These cases may not go very far: to understand the true value of their evidence they must be placed side by side with cases where the husband’s prior right is determined either by his death or divorce. Among the Arabs, if a man divorced his wife, his heirs had a right to take her. “That implies,” as Professor Robertson Smith points out with unanswerable force, “that the kin had an interest in {373} the woman’s marriage even while her husband lived, and that their interest became active as soon as he divested himself of his special claims on his wife. In short, the right of the heir is a modification of the older right of kinsmen to share each other’s marriages; and as soon as the exclusive right conferred on the husband by more modern law ceases and determines, whether by marriage [? death] or divorce, the older right of the kin revives.”^373.1^ Although it does not appear that a similar privilege is exercised by the kindred among the Bengali tribes, their rights over a woman are usually guarded by the requirement that divorce can only take place with the consent of a council of relatives or a panchayat of the village or caste.^373.2^ It is generally admitted now that the institution of the Levirate is traceable to polyandry wherein the husbands were united among themselves by the ties of blood. The Levirate was an institution deeply rooted in Hebrew polity, consecrated, if we may believe the traditions preserved in the most ancient Hebrew book now extant, by divine sanction under the tremendous penalty of death, and even in historic times enforceable by the public disgrace of a man who refused compliance.^373.3^ It has only become obsolete among the Jews in Europe during the last three centuries, while those of Palestine still hold to it.^373.4^ When a man died married but childless, leaving brothers, it was the duty of the eldest of the survivors to take the widow {374} and beget issue for the deceased; nor was any form of marriage necessary between him and her. The same rule was prescribed in the Laws of Manu to the Hindu Aryans. There a brother or some other kinsman, not merely of a dead man, but also of a man who, in consequence of disease or mutilation, was incapable of himself begetting issue, might be appointed for the purpose; and the reason is expressly declared in the Apastamba to be that the bride is given to the husband’s family, and not to the husband alone. Moreover, logically following out the idea of solidarity, Manu declares that if only one among brothers have a son, all have male offspring through that son; and conversely, if only one of all the wives of one husband bear a son, all are mothers of male children through that son.^374.1^ If a Malagasy die childless, his next younger brother “must marry the widow to keep his brother in remembrance; the children of such marriages being considered as the elder brother’s heirs and descendants.”^374.2^ The Basuto custom is the same.^374.3^ But the Levirate is only a specialised form of a more general rule. It was developed when society had passed into the patriarchal phase, in order to preserve due succession. It shows how strong the feeling of solidarity of the kindred was. And that the wife was not regarded as no more than heritable property is brought into clear relief in the Hebrew and Hindu laws, where cohabitation ceased on the birth of a boy. Though this limitation be not observed by the Malagasy and Basutos, at least we cannot forget that the children begotten by the levir (that is, the man who took the widow) rank as his brother’s, and are entitled to his brother’s property. If the wife were {375} simply inherited, both she and the children she afterwards bore would become the property of the man to whom she passed.

Omitting as equivocal the numberless and widespread instances where the heir takes possession of his predecessor’s wives with the rest of his property, we may take note of some whose interpretation is less open to question. Usually among the aboriginal people of Bengal the younger brother, or cousin, of the deceased husband has the first claim on the widow, a claim which must be released before she is at liberty to wed any other person. The cases are few where, as among the Santals, the consent of the younger brother’s first wife must be procured; and they only exist where such consent would be necessary in any case to his second marriage.^375.1^ Several tribes of the North-west Provinces practise the custom. Indeed, it seems usual among the aborigines over the greater part of India; and frequently no ceremony of any kind is necessary. Where, as among the Játs of the Panjáb, a ceremony is performed, it is of the simplest kind. The husband’s brother simply throws his scarf or cloak over the widow’s head.^375.2^ If a Ját youth die betrothed, but before consummating the marriage, his father can claim the girl for another son, or, in default of a son, for any male relation in that degree.^375.3^ A virgin widow among the Baiswars of South Mirzapur can be married, but it is usual to give some remuneration to the family of the deceased husband.^375.4^ When a Habura is sentenced to a long term of imprisonment, or is transported for life, his {376} wives are taken by his brothers.^376.1^ In the Hindu Koosh, while a man’s property passes to his children, his brother takes the widows. It is disgraceful to refuse them; and they can marry nobody else without the consent of their husband’s brothers.^376.2^ An Afghan ought to marry his brother’s childless widow. If any other man offer first it is a grave insult to him.^376.3^ Among the Ostiaks and other Turanian tribes, a younger brother is bound to marry his elder brother’s widow.^376.4^ On the island of Sumatra, while the inheritance descends to the sons, the brothers in order of age have a right to the widow married by jujur, or purchase. In the event of their declining her successively they may give her in marriage to any relation on the father’s side, the person who takes her replacing the deceased. If she marry a stranger, the new husband may be adopted into the family to replace the deceased, or she may be married by purchase, as the relatives please.^376.5^ On the adjacent island of Nias one of the sons may marry all the widows save his own mother; and if no son exercise this right, they pass to a brother. If they do not marry they must be maintained by the family of their dead consort.^376.6^ On Engano a man in marrying pays the value of two hundred cocoa-nuts to the bride’s family. Yet he does not thereby acquire her for himself. On the contrary, he becomes part of her family; and if she die and he marry again, an indemnity must be paid to her relatives. If he die, however, {377} the widow must offer herself to his brothers; nor can she wed any one else until they have refused her.^377.1^ The widow of a Gilbert Islander is taken by his surviving brother into his own hut, and she can then marry no one else.^377.2^ A bachelor or widower among the Andaman Islanders is expected to marry his brother’s widow; and the term brother, as in most savage lands, includes what we call a cousin. Of the property of the deceased the widow retains as much as she requires for her personal use, dividing the rest between his male relatives.^377.3^ Among the Sihanaka, one of the aboriginal tribes of Madagascar, a widow is stripped and in various ways ill-treated for several months, and only allowed to return home to her own kindred after having obtained a formal divorce from her husband’s family.^377.4^ In Africa, individual property is hardly recognised by the Krumen of the Grain Coast: almost everything is possessed by the family community. When a Kruman dies his wife passes over to his brother or some other near relation. An Oromó widow can only marry with the consent of her husband’s brother. A Zulu is obliged to cohabit with all the widows of an elder brother. Among the Tedas in Sahara, if an affianced bridegroom die before completion of the marriage, his place is taken by his brother or nearest kinsman.^377.5^ On the Slave Coast a younger brother was formerly compelled to marry the headwife of his elder brother deceased, while the subordinate wives devolved with the rest of the inheritance on the sons. {378} Compulsion has now become obsolete; but the headwife still resides with her husband’s relatives; and if she marry any other man than her first husband’s brother, the second husband repays to the relatives (apparently not to the heirs as such) of the first the amount originally paid for her.^378.1^ In Natal, when a Kafir dies, “those wives who have not left the kraal remain with the eldest son. If they wish to marry again, they must go to one of their late husband’s brothers.” Children born of such a marriage, however, belong to the son.^378.2^ On the western continent the Thlinkit, among whom we have already found traces of clan-marriage, require the eldest brother or nephew to marry the widow.^378.3^ In Guatemala, where, as we know, the kindred of the husband bought the wife, she passed over into her husband’s clan, and was taken on his death by his brother or her stepson.^378.4^ Among the Hidatsas it is a common practice for a man to marry his brother’s widow; but apparently this is subject to her consent.^378.5^ When one of the Blackfeet, or one of the Omahas, died, his wives became the potential wives of his eldest brother, while his property passed to his sons, though a few horses were generally given to his brothers.^378.6^ An Ojibway widow may be taken by her husband’s brother, or apparently by any one of the clan; and this is sometimes done at the grave by the ceremony of walking her over it, in which event she {379} is not required to undergo the terrible ordeal of mourning. Or she has a right to go to him, and he is bound to support her.^379.1^ The Miwok of California destroy the property of the dead; but the eldest brother is entitled to the widow.^379.2^ The Aztecs regarded it as a duty to marry a brother’s widow; and the reason given is that her children, if she had any, might not remain fatherless—a reason, however, which would not apply where she had none.^379.3^ In Samoa, where property belonged to the kin, one of the brothers, or some other relative, took the wife; and her children were taught to regard him as their father. The reason here alleged was the desire to preserve the woman and her children to the family, whose number and influence were thus maintained.^379.4^ In New Caledonia, where the property seems to descend to the eldest son, the husband’s brother is bound to marry the widow.^379.5^ In the Loyalty Islands she could not marry again without the consent of her first husband’s family.^379.6^ A Tasmanian woman became common property; but she might be given in marriage again.^379.7^ In some at least of the islands of New Britain also, a widow became common property;^379.8^ and a similar custom seems to have been followed by the Eskimo.^379.9^ The natives of the west of Victoria divided the property of a departed tribesman equally among his widow and his children; but it was his brother’s duty to marry the widow if she had offspring, because he was bound to protect her {380} and rear the children. He seems to have been at liberty to marry her also if she were childless.^380.1^ The duty or the right of a deceased husband’s brother to take the widow seems, in fact, to be general among the aborigines of Australia, and to be wholly disconnected with the right of succession to property. And the evidence that it is a survival of group-marriage is confirmed by the custom of the Gippsland tribes, which, there is reason to believe, sanctioned the occasional cohabitation of a single man with his living brother’s wife, and of a married man with his wife’s sister. “A man spoke of his sister-in-law as puppar-worcat, which means another wife; and when a wife died her sister not infrequently took her place.” In Europe, among the Moslem Albanians the sons succeed to the property, but the brother has a right to the widow with or without her consent. Nor can she marry any one else in the same village save with his consent. If, however, she marry into another family, her husband’s heirs are entitled to half the dowry. The brother of an affianced husband who dies is entitled to the bride on paying additional dowry.^380.2^ A trace of the right of a surviving brother to the widow is perhaps found among the Scandinavians; and the conjecture derives some support from the conduct imputed to Frigg, the wife of Odin, who is accused by Loki of laying her husband’s two brothers in her bosom.^380.3^

I have mentioned some cases in which payment for the widow who marries out of her husband’s kin, is made to the kin. A few others may be added. This is the custom of the Toaripi, Dori, and Koiari tribes of New Guinea. If she belong to the first-named tribe she remains with her husband’s relatives until her second marriage, only when she has children; if she belong to either of the latter she remains, whether with or without children.^381.1^ In Kulu, Ladák, the widow could be sold by her husband’s relatives into a second marriage; but so long as she did not quit her husband’s house she was at liberty to keep a paramour.^381.2^ Among the Smoos of Central America we are told that widows are the property of the husband’s relatives, to whom “widow-money” must be paid before they are allowed to marry.^381.3^ In the western provinces of China, Mr. Cooper tells us, when a widow signifies her intention of marrying again, her deceased husband’s relations generally dispose of her to the highest bidder; but she cannot be forced to marry against her will: by which I understand that it rests with her to say whether she will marry or not; but if she decide to marry, her deceased husband’s relations have the right to determine whom she shall marry, and to receive the bride-price.^381.4^

The foregoing examples all show the wife as bound to the husband’s kin. The right of a man to his wife’s sister, either in his wife’s lifetime, or after her death, or, as it is found among some races, the right of a woman to share her sister’s husband even in her lifetime, is equally widespread. I have incidentally alluded to it as practised by the {382} Gippsland tribes of Australia. Among the North American Indians, who preserve many traces of mother-right, the usage was common. The Blackfeet regarded all the younger sisters of a man’s wife as his potential wives. If he did not care to marry them they could not be married to any other man without his consent.^382.1^ Among the Root-Diggers of California to a whole family of sisters the happy husband often added their mother; and the Seminole and Carib customs were the same. The Pawnee who had married an elder sister might demand all the younger ones as they arrived at maturity. An Osage was obliged to wait two years after his first marriage before demanding another of the same family; and after complying with this demand the parents might refuse him any more. Among the Hidatsas, as probably among other tribes, the wife’s sisters included her cousins according to our reckoning. A Mutsun wife would often press her husband to wed her sister or even her mother.^382.2^ An Omaha can marry three wives, who are generally related. Sometimes a wife invites her husband to wed her sister, her aunt or her niece, because “she and I are one flesh.”^382.3^ Among the Sioux and some other tribes the lover would attach to another man’s tent as many horses as corresponded in value to the daughters he desired to marry; and if the proposition were accepted they were all married at once.^382.4^ In other cases it seems that marriage with one daughter only gave a right of preemption over the others.^382.5^ Among some of {383} the tribes of Guiana the husband has to wait until his first wife is dead before marrying her sisters.^383.1^ Similar regulations are found among the aborigines of Bengal. In many of their tribes a man may marry two sisters; but, in accordance with the rule as to marriage of a widow with a deceased husband’s brother, the second wife must be a younger sister of the first, not an elder. A second sister, however, cannot always be married during the lifetime of the first.^383.2^ Among the Todas a woman became wife to several brothers, and her younger sisters, on attaining maturity, became successively her fellow-wives.^383.3^ An Ostiak is allowed to take several sisters.^383.4^ In the Laws of Manu it is provided that, “if, after one damsel has been shown, another be given to the bridegroom, he may marry them both for the same price.”^383.5^ This refers, of course, to two damsels in the same family. Among the Somali of Eastern Africa a widower commonly marries his deceased wife’s sister.^383.6^ On the other side of the continent a folktale from Angola represents the eldest of four sisters as replying to an offer of marriage: “Very well. Thou shalt marry me, if thou marriest us all, the four of us. If thou thinkest that thou wilt have me alone, the eldest, thou canst not marry me. It must be that we marry our one man, the four of us in the fourhood of one mother.” And the gallant had no choice but to fall in with her terms.^383.7^ In historical times the Israelites were forbidden to take a {384} woman to her sister to be a rival to her in her lifetime;^384.1^ but the more ancient practice, if we may judge by the legend of their eponymous hero as well as by analogies in other parts of the world, permitted it. Under supernatural guidance the Church has bettered the prohibition, so as to prevent the posthumous vexation of a wife by the succession of her sister to her husband’s affections, and has been at pains to give it the logical extension to marriage with a deceased husband’s brother, in the very teeth of the divine institution of the Levirate. It would be profane to call a bargain the provision whereby the English bishops once compounded for the sin of assenting to a nobleman’s union with his deceased wife’s sister, by condemning all such unions for the future. Among the heathen Hovas of Madagascar the first wife might at any time be divorced, unless she allowed her husband to marry her younger sisters and younger cousins. A Gilbert Islander had a right to dispose of his wife’s younger sisters.^384.2^ In Samoa a younger sister often accompanied the bride and became an inferior wife to the bridegroom.^384.3^ On the island of Mangaia, “if a man of position married the eldest girl of a slave family, the younger sisters became his as a matter of course, being only too glad to have a protector. Even amongst those of equal rank a man often had two or three sisters to wife at the same time. Even now, in Christian times, a woman feels herself to be deeply injured if her brother-in-law does not, on the death of his wife, ask her to become a mother to his children.”^384.4^ How greatly it is to be regretted that they who have professed to christianise these poor, {385} benighted Polynesians have disregarded the Church’s canon against such marriages, and permitted so-called Christian homes to be contaminated by the presence of a deceased wife’s sister in the capacity of wife!

Until group-marriage had practically passed away, and society had organised itself into true clans, there could be no actual reception of the wife into the kin. We must therefore not look to so archaic a condition as group-marriage for rites of reception, or for the resulting status of the wife. Where the clan has been most completely organised, we may expect to find its results most logically carried out; and some of the most logical results will often remain even when society has passed into a still higher development. So it was in Rome, where the wife entered into the familia of her husband, or, if her husband had a father living and were still in his power, into that of her husband’s father. Her offering, on the day following her marriage, to her husband’s Penates seems to have been a solemn initiation, in so far at least as that had not been effected by the ceremonies of the confarreatio. This is also the meaning of somewhat similar rites performed by a bride in Ukrainia on entering her new home, where she is first welcomed by all the female neighbours of her bridegroom’s family,^385.1^—and of many ceremonies of the same kind elsewhere, notably the Brahman rites in India. A Chinese married woman is taught to regard her husband’s parents and his remoter ancestors in every respect as if they were her own; while she ceases, on the other hand, to have any but a secondary interest in her own relatives. According to Confucius the very object of marriage was to furnish those who should preside at the sacrifices, among {386} which a prominent place is given to the ancestral offerings. This was indeed expressed in the formula of demand for the hand of a maiden in ancient times. And just as at Rome the bride offered sacrifices to her husband’s Penates, so in China, on the day after the wedding, she prepared and presented a sucking-pig to her husband’s parents, and when they had done eating she finished what was left.^386.1^ In this way among the polite Chinese the union of the bride with her husband’s parents is signified and completed. I have already mentioned the Santali and other customs of Bengal, as well as that of the more barbarous islanders of Bonabe, who tattoo the wife with marks representing her husband’s ancestors.

Sometimes a man on marrying was received into the clan of the wife. It is now generally recognised that the words “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh” could have originated only at a period when it was customary for a husband to go and dwell with his wife’s kin: that is to say, before the development of the patriarchal system on which the Hebrews in later times were organised. Professor Robertson Smith suggests, ingeniously and with probability, that the expression implies “that the husband is conceived as adopted into his wife’s kin”; for, as he has previously pointed out, both in Arabic and in Hebrew (notably in the priestly legislation of the latter) the word for flesh is equivalent to kindred or clan.^386.2^ Residence is indeed one of the tests of kindred. But it is only one, and by no means a conclusive one. For this reason the stories of Isaac’s marriage and those of Jacob cannot safely be cited in support of {387} this suggestion. The curious incident of the bargain with Shechem is more to the point; for in that case a rite was to be undergone which would have the effect of making Shechemites and Israelites “one people.” If, however, we find cases of marriage where not only does the husband dwell with his wife and her family, but his property and earnings also go to them, or are shared in common with them, this will be further evidence of reception into the kin. Among the Kochh a man is taken on marriage to live with his wife and her mother, and all his property is made over to her.^387.1^ The Bayaga, a tribe of dwarfs in Equatorial Africa, require the husband to live with his wife’s family, and all the produce of his hunting belongs to them. He may, however, return to his own community and take his wife, but only when he has a son, and that son has killed an elephant. And then he leaves the son behind to fill the place of the daughter taken away.^387.2^ This appears to be an instance of the archaic system of mother-right in process of decay. Neither the case of the Bayaga nor that of the Kochh goes quite far enough to be decisive. The North American Indians had customs in their various tribes, which exhibited almost all gradations between the complete absorption of the husband in his wife’s clan, and the last stages of dissolution of the system of mother-right. Without discussing them we may turn to two examples in the East Indies where the matter is put beyond doubt. According to Brahman law the wife now enters the gotra {388} of her husband. The ceremonies are very elaborate, and include of course a solemn procession on the bridegroom’s part to fetch the bride. He is formally welcomed first by the bride’s father, and then by her mother. Follows a rite which, if it mean anything, is a survival of reception into the wife’s kin once practised either by the Aryan invaders of India, or the aboriginal tribes with whom they intermarried. It is called “Satusi or the seven lights of Hymen. Seven married ladies (including the bride’s mother or, if she be a widow, one of the bride’s aunts) in their best attire, each with a small torch made of chita-twig and cotton steeped in oil, go round the bridegroom in succession, led by the bride’s mother, who carries on her head a kulá or flat bamboo-basket, on which are placed twenty-one small lights made of dhatura-fruits. As they go round, they sprinkle libations of water, one of them blows a shell-trumpet, and all vociferate the hymeneal cry of ulu-ulu. After going seven times round the bridegroom, the lights are thrown one by one over his head, so that they fall behind him. The kulá is then picked up and placed in front of the bridegroom, and the bride’s mother takes her stand upon it, and touches the forehead of the bridegroom with water, paddy and durba-grass, betel and areca nut, white mustard-seed, curds, white sandal-paste, vermilion, a looking-glass, a comb, a bit of clay from the bed of the Ganges, a yak’s tail, shells, a cluster of plantains, and certain other odds and ends, while the rest of the women keep up the cry of ulu-ulu. The bridegroom’s height is measured with a thin thread, which the bride’s mother eats in a bit of plantain. She then places a weaver’s shuttle between his folded hands and ties them together with thread, and calls upon him, now that he has {389} been bound hand and foot, to bleat once like a sheep to signify his humility and subjection. Last of all, she touches his breast with a padlock and turns the key, whereby the door of speech is closed to the passage of hard words against the bride.”^389.1^ Later accretions are obvious here, but the substance of the ceremony is ancient and can only be explained in one way. In Sumatra there was an old form of marriage, which has been prohibited for a century past, called ambel anak. A man thus married paid no money to the wife’s father, but entered his family on the footing of a son. He became entirely separated from his own kin, who renounced all interest in him, and he lost his right of inheritance. All his earnings belonged to his wife’s family, who became liable to any debts he might contract after marriage and responsible for his crimes, just as his own family were before. His wife’s family might divorce him, in which case he went forth naked as he came. The custom was evidently in decay long before its abolition, for the husband’s status was in some respects hardly so good as that of a natural-born son, while on the other hand there were provisions for enabling him to redeem himself, his wife and children, by paying her jujur or bride-price, and an additional sum for any daughters who had been born. But this could only be accomplished with the goodwill of his wife’s family, because he was incapable of accumulating any property apart from the common stock of the family.^389.2^

The severance of the married person from the clan of which he or she has been previously a member is, as might be expected, sometimes the subject of a special symbol in {390} marriage ceremonies. Thus, among the Santals, when the clothes of a married pair have been tied together (the symbol among many peoples of their union), burning charcoal is pounded with the household pestle, and the glowing embers are extinguished with water. In this way the old household fire of the bride is, so far as she is concerned, put out for ever.^390.1^ In Nepal the Sinuwár bride’s parents wash her feet when they give her to the bridegroom, and splash the water over their own heads. By doing this they believe that they wash from her, and as it were take back, the quality of membership of her original sept, and transfer her to the sept of the bridegroom. On the next morning the bride washes the bridegroom’s feet, and drinks the water, saying at the time that she does this as a sign that she has entered his sept, and is truly his wife.^390.2^ Among the Wends there are traces of mother-right, though it is no longer the system on which their society is organised. The first night of marriage is always spent at the bride’s house; and sometimes, it would seem, the bridegroom takes up his permanent residence with his wife’s family. On such occasions he bids a solemn farewell, and says to his parents: “Henceforth you will see me no more, nor speak to me; for I am leaving you. Amen.”^390.3^ The separation of a Chinese woman from her family on marriage is so complete, that when she returns home on a visit, no brother, nor even her father, may sit with her on the same mat, nor eat with her from the same dish.^390.4^ The Marri of Manbhum do not even allow their {391} married daughters to enter the house.^391.1^ Among the Rájputs a married daughter may never return to her father’s house without his special leave. He is not likely to send for her, because he must then give her a fresh dower. Conversely, neither he nor any of her near elder relations may go to the village whereinto she is married, nor even drink water from the village well; and though more distant relations taboo not the whole village, they may not eat or drink from her husband’s house.^391.2^ Among the Hebrews a priest was forbidden to defile himself for the dead, except for his own kin. His married sister was not one of these, only a sister “a virgin which hath had no husband.” A stranger outside the priest’s kindred, though his guest or hired servant, was not permitted to eat of the heave-offering of the holy things. If a priest’s daughter were married to a stranger, she could not eat of it. But in this respect her separation seems not to have been absolute; for if she were divorced or became a widow, being childless, and so returned “unto her father’s house as in her youth,” she might “eat of her father’s bread.”^391.3^ The change of kin was so marked among the Romans that one of their lawyers explained the word soror, a sister, as “quasi scorsum nata, because she is separated from the family wherein she was born, and passes to another.”^391.4^

When the consequences of marriage are the severance from the family or clan of one of its members, and the union of that member to another family or clan, so as to become one flesh with it, and hardly less where, though the member in question be not lost to the clan, a special relationship is about to be entered upon with the other {392} clan for the purpose of producing new members for it to the exclusion of the former clan, it is obvious that each of the two families, or clans, has a very important interest in the transaction. The marriage would affect not only the two principals; it would extend to every member of the family, or clan, diminished, and every member of the family, or clan, thus enlarged and strengthened. Such an interest as this would entitle every member of both to be consulted; and their assent would be required to its validity. Such assent would be shown, as we have already noted, by the presence and assistance of the kindred at the act of marriage; or it might be signified by gifts. But, however shown, it would in many cases have to be purchased by gifts. I have already mentioned a number of instances where the price, or dowry, of the bride is contributed by the bridegroom’s kinsmen. We are about to deal with the converse case, wherein the price, however made up, is divided between the bride’s relatives.

Bride-purchase has been, at some time or other, practised almost all over the world; and where we do not find it still in all its ancient force we frequently find the relics of it. As, in the progress of civilisation, the bonds of the family are drawn tighter, the power of the father over his children increases, and that of the more distant kinsfolk decreases. The substantial price in such cases is paid to the parent; and the other kinsmen are recognised only by a smaller, frequently a nominal, present. Lastly, the gifts on both sides are transformed into a dowry for the bride, and into wedding presents intended for the behoof of the happy couple. In various nations the application of the marriage gifts is found in all stages of transition, from the rudest bargain and sale up to the settlements so dear to {393} English lawyers, and the useless toys which the resources of the newest culture enable us to bestow upon our friends on these interesting occasions, to assist their early efforts in housekeeping. The examples following are drawn, of course, from conditions of barbarism when purchase prevails, or when survivals of its former practice have not yet been all swept away. Into the general question of the extent of the kindred whose assent is necessary in early stages of civilisation I have no space to go. But incidentally we shall find evidence that the entire clan must have had a voice in the matter. Inasmuch, however, as this chapter has already trespassed on the reader’s patience to so great a length, I shall confine myself to a few of the more indisputable and pertinent instances. To attempt more would be to travel over ground which it would be impossible to survey in a satisfactory manner, without a discussion interesting indeed to the student of institutions, but altogether disproportionate to the present work.

Among races whose customs point unimpeachably to the need of obtaining the consent of the general body of the bride’s kinsmen we may begin with the Turanians. A bridegroom of the Hill tribes of Rajmahál is required to present not only a turban and a rupee to his father-in-law, and a piece of cloth and a rupee to his mother-in-law, but also to several of the nearest relations.^393.1^ Striking are the ceremonies performed by two of the northern branches of this widespread race. After the purchase-money has been agreed upon, but before it is paid, among the Kirghiz the bridegroom is allowed to visit the bride. This is done by some tribes with great formality. The young man presents himself first to the oldest member of the bride’s family, and {394} asks permission to pitch his tent at the encampment. “This request being granted, he distributes presents among the members of the family, and begs them to use their efforts in persuading the bride to pay him a visit in his tent. As success always crowns their efforts, the bride makes her appearance in the tent, where the young couple are left alone. During this interview the marriage is consummated, though the union is not yet formally consecrated. They are now bound to each other, and neither can withdraw from the mutual obligation they have contracted without being exposed to the vengeance of the injured party.” Further presents are given to the relatives on the formal celebration of the marriage after the purchase-money has been paid.^394.1^ Among the tribes of Turkestan the wedding takes place after the payment of the purchase-money to the father. Each party is represented by two witnesses at the wedding ceremony, and a mollah is employed to legalise the contract. All goes on smoothly until “the bride’s witnesses suddenly raise some objection, pretending that they are unwilling to deliver up the bride who is intrusted to their keeping, unless some suitable present is offered for renouncing, on their part, the great treasure placed in their custody.” Nor can the marriage proceed until they are satisfied.^394.2^

The same part is played in Central Europe by the Wendish bridesmaids. The bride awaits her bridegroom sitting at a table by herself. When his procession arrives, the brautführer advances to the table and begs her politely to follow him to the wedding. The bridesmaids interfere, and refuse to give her up without being paid for it: they must have the whole table full of gold! After an {395} amount of haggling, which depends on the persuasive powers of the damsels and the wealth of the bridegroom, they are at length satisfied; and sometimes the business is not concluded until a considerable sum has been paid.^395.1^ At an Ukrainian marriage, presents are made with ritual formalities to every one of the bride’s relations by name; and a formal agreement is entered into by which the number, and even the value, of these presents is declared. Among the persons present are women who are strangers to the immediate family. When the presents to the relatives have been settled, these women climb on a bench beside the family hearth, taking a sieve which they beat like a tambourine, clamouring also for their share of the ransom. And the bridegroom is compelled to throw some small pieces of money into the sieve for them. As M. Volkov, in detailing the proceedings, says, it is clear that all this represents a payment in respect of the bride for the benefit of her whole clan. Among the Bulgarians a like payment, distinguished from that to the father, is made in money for all the members of the family, or rather for the family-community. The father usually gives what he receives to his daughter by way of dowry.^395.2^ The usage probably differs to some extent in various parts of Bulgaria. In Bessarabia the money paid to the father is used to defray the cost of the bride’s wardrobe, but clothing is also purchased for the bride’s relations. If I read the account correctly, the bridegroom also pays the bride’s mother a few ducats and presents articles of clothing to her sisters. Among other members of the South Slavonic stock the custom likewise varies, but all agree in requiring {396} presents to be made to all the near kindred of the bride. The minimum payment is set down by one reporter, writing of the practice in his own district, as twelve florins to the bride, ten to her father, two to her mother, six to each of her brothers, and to the other relations seven florins each.^396.1^

The final difficulties on the part of the Wendish bridesmaids may be compared with the conduct of the women of the bride’s party at a marriage of the Banks’ Islanders. When the last instalments of the purchase-money have been paid, and the bridegroom’s father and his party, after the interposition of all sorts of difficulties, are on the point of succeeding in obtaining delivery of the bride, the women step in and refuse to give her up until an extra sum has been made over to them to induce them to let her go.^396.2^ In Sindh also, as the bridegroom is about to enter the nuptial chamber, his bride’s sister, or a female cousin, opposes him and demands a gift of a few rupees, which he must pay ere he is allowed to pass.^396.3^

A traveller in the earlier half of the last century relates that to a native of Cape Coast the cost of his wedding was seldom more than an ounce of gold among the bride’s relations, two suits of new clothes for the bride, and a fat goat and some palm-wine and brandy for the entertainment.^396.4^ In the Zambesi basin to-day the matter is arranged by “the so-called brothers or next of kin,” who alone have the right to consent, the father having no voice in the matter. But what, if anything, is paid to them as the price of their goodwill, beyond a plentiful supply of pombe, {397} which is drunk together by the brethren on both sides after the wedding, I am not able to say.^397.1^ It seems clear at all events that in many places the price may be commuted for a feast, or a feast may be added to it, and after the custom of purchase has died out the feast only may remain. So among the Arabs, for example, the stipulated sum which forms the dowry and belongs to the bride is paid to her father; but before the husband can claim his rights he has to feast the maiden and her relations and friends.^397.2^

Further illustrations are hardly needed. The custom may be summed up in the words of Professor Hickson, describing what he observed in Minahassa, Celebes, where women enjoy an exceptionally high position: “It might seem also that the harta which is paid by the bridegroom for his bride is of a similar nature to the price paid for a slave, a beast of burden, or any other piece of property. The harta, however, should not be considered as a ‘price,’ it has rather the nature of a ‘compensation’ paid to the bride’s family for the loss of one of its working and child-producing members.”^397.3^

The subject of the ceremonies and institutions of marriage is one of profound interest. It has engrossed the attention of many anthropologists and filled many volumes. The sketch, therefore, that I have here attempted of only one aspect of the subject is obviously meagre and imperfect. Yet I venture to hope that I have succeeded in throwing some further light upon the savage conception of a kindred as an undivided entity—a conception which has survived in a more or less complete form into high planes of civilisation. Rites analogous to that of the blood-covenant are found not merely to bind together {398} the individual husband and wife, but to unite the incoming member to the whole kindred. And although in the most archaic period whose remains are accessible to us it does not appear that these rites meant actual admission into the kin, their analogy easily lent itself to that construction as the organisation of society into clans drew closer and closer together, and especially as the patriarchal clan developed; and marriage at length came in many cases to operate as an actual severance from one kin and an entrance into another. The reason for the rights and privileges acquired by the whole kindred, alike whether marriage operated as a blood-covenant or not, is founded on, and springs directly from, the conception of the kin as one body whereof all the brethren were as literally members as the hand and the foot are members of the physical body of each man. To graft a new member upon such a body, or even to introduce a stranger into a special relation with a member of such a body, is to introduce him or her to a corresponding relation with all. Their rights may for the time be overridden by the paramount claim of the member for whose special behoof the stranger is introduced—a claim enforced often by strength, more often, perhaps, by custom; yet the moment the claim paramount is withdrawn, or suspended, the rights of the remaining members of the kindred arise and are capable of enforcement. They are sometimes also asserted on special occasions even against the claim paramount.

Society has developed, among almost all the higher races, into and through the patriarchal clan. Among many of the lower races who have not, when brought into contact with European culture, already thrown off their original social constitution, a marked tendency to develop in the {399} same direction has been found. Consequently most of our illustrations have been drawn from a condition of things where the bride has been transferred to the bridegroom’s home and has entered into special relations with the bridegroom’s kin. Of the converse case many examples which might have been adduced are complicated by the developing patriarchalism. Inquiry into these complications would have necessitated a volume rather than a chapter. Hence I have been compelled to pass over many a problem not only interesting but important to solve. But wherever I have found it possible to deal within the limits at my command with the case of a bridegroom entering into special relations with the bride’s kin, the same general principles have been observed to govern it.

CHAPTER XV. THE COUVADE AND OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE STRENGTH OF THE BLOOD-TIE—CONCLUSION OF THE INQUIRY INTO THE THEORY OF THE LIFE-TOKEN

In the last three chapters we have discussed some savage customs founded on the belief that the members of a kin are parts of an entire body and connected with one another by an indissoluble tie, so long as they remain members of that body and are not cut off by formal expulsion or renunciation, either with or without union to another similar body. Many other practices are derived from the same notion. I select a few of them for notice in the present chapter.

Prominent among them is the custom to which the name of the Couvade has been given: a name too deeply rooted now to be changed, albeit one founded on a mistake as to the use of the word and a limitation, untenable on scientific grounds, though inevitable in the then state of our knowledge, to certain remarkable developments of the usage. Dr. Tylor was the first to examine the custom in a critical manner. Since the publication of his Researches into the Early History of Mankind, it has been considered by numerous anthropologists, notably by Dr. Ploss, Dr. {401} Wilken, Mr. im Thurn, and more recently by Dr. von Dargun and Mr. Ling Roth; while Dr. J. A. H. Murray in his letters to The Academy has once for all disposed of the evidence for its existence in modern Europe and for the use of the word by the Béarnese, or by any French writers of authority, as a technical term in describing the alleged Béarnese custom. Mr. Ling Roth’s comprehensive paper on the subject happily relieves me from the necessity of dealing with it at length here.^401.1^

The Couvade as generally explained is the custom which requires the father of a child, immediately after its birth, to lie-in as if he were a woman in childbed, while his wife, who has actually given birth to the babe, goes about her ordinary work, and of course waits upon her husband in his feigned sickness. But this definition is inadequate and misleading. In order to attain a true conception of the custom it is not enough to limit our observation to a small number of cases and in those cases to regard only the most prominent phenomena, because they strike us as the most ridiculous. We must clear our minds of the notion that the father takes the mother’s place, in the sense, at all events, that he is made to undergo the treatment she is entitled to, and at her expense. Whether from living a more active and open-air life than her more civilised sisters, or from physical causes more deeply seated, the ease with which a savage woman gives birth is much more like that of a wild beast. She will often deliver herself without aid; and, subject to the ceremonial rules of the tribe concerning {402} uncleanness, in a very little time she is ready to return to her usual occupations. Simulation of her sufferings, not to say disregard of them, by the husband is therefore in most cases out of the question.

Moreover, the lying-in of the husband, so far as it can be so termed, is only part of a large number of observances, by which he is bound, in the more fully developed forms of the custom, from the moment his wife conceives, or occasionally before, until the child is able to speak, or to digest the usual food of the tribe; and in many of these observances both before and after childbirth the wife is included; while she on her part is bound by other observances of a similar character. Thus, Signor Modigliani, sojourning with a native of Nias whose wife was in “an interesting condition,” was the innocent cause of an amusing domestic squabble. For his host in leaving his room one day stepped across the traveller’s outspread legs. This was a serious matter, because it was apt to cause misfortune to the unborn child. The wife did not fail to remind her imprudent husband of his folly, and carried her anger to such a height that he was glad to flee from the blows administered by means of the firewood intended for the domestic hearth. Nor was the quarrel made up without a gift from the traveller of one of his bags of rice. While staying at the house Signor Modigliani frequently obtained from the natives by barter serpents for his collection; and this was a continual cause of difficulties to his host, who was divided between his curiosity and desire to assist at the transaction on the one side, and on the other his dread of the consequences of seeing a dead snake—consequences only to be averted by running away at once to find and burn a living one. At length, however, Signor Modigliani {403} convinced him that it would be enough, when he found a snake, to seize it and simulate burning by passing it over a fire kindled for the purpose, and then to kill it in some other manner, as by suffocating it in alcohol for scientific purposes. Other acts too the Niasese father-expectant must avoid, as talking with Malays or Chinese, lest the child be unable to speak his own tongue, splitting a piece of wood or the atap-leaves wherewith the houses are roofed, lest the infant be born with harelip, eating of a pig found dead, lest the fœtus be born without attaining proper development, killing or cutting up chickens or pigs, lest the babe feel the wounds, eating of the great beetles of which the natives are very fond, lest the little one catch a cough. As reported by other travellers, both parents must abstain before the birth from some of these acts, as well as from passing over a spot where a man has been murdered, or a buffalo slain, or where a dog has been burnt for the purpose of giving effect to certain imprecations, else the child will be affected by the contortions of the dying man or beast. Nor dare they build a house, or thatch it, nor drive nails; and before breaking tobacco or siri it must be drawn out of the bag which contains it, or the babe cannot be born. They look in no mirror or bamboo-tube, lest the child squint. They eat no bujuwu (a kind of bird) or owl, lest he croak or whoop instead of speaking. They touch no monkey, lest the infant get eyes and forehead like a monkey’s. They enter no house where a corpse lies, else he will die. They eat of no pig killed for a funeral feast, lest he get the itch. They plant no pisang-trees, lest he suffer from ulcers. The consequence of eating a certain fish or striking a snake is indigestion to the child, of expressing or boiling-out oil is headache to him, of passing {404} over a place struck by lightning is to make his body black, of firing a field for agricultural purposes, or throwing salt into the pig’s food, or of swearing, is sickness to him; and to eat out of the vessel in which the food is cooked is to cause the babe to adhere to the after-birth.^404.1^

This long list exhausts not the prohibitions in force on the island of Nias; but we may treat it as a sample not merely for that one island but for many other places, and pass on to a few instances of rules imposed at and after the time of delivery. On the Melanesian island of Saa, both before and after the birth, the father “will not eat pig’s flesh, and he abstains from movements which are believed to do harm, upon the principle that the father’s movements affect those of the child. A man will not do hard work; he keeps quiet lest the child should start, should overstrain itself, or should throw itself about as he paddles.” In the Banks’ Islands when the child is born both parents eat only what it could digest. “After the birth of the first child, the father does no heavy work for a month; after the birth of any of his children he takes care not to go into those sacred places into which the child could not go without risk.” In the New Hebrides “he does work in looking after his wife and child, but he must not eat shell-fish and other produce of the beach, for the infant would suffer from ulcers if he did. In Lepers’ Island the father is very careful for ten days; he does no work, will not climb a tree, or go far into the sea to bathe, for if he exert himself the child will suffer.”^404.2^ Turning to the American continent, we will take the report of the latest traveller in the interior of Brazil, Dr. Karl von den Steinen. Here let it be noted that the father is so far {405} from imitating childbed, that the mother is, all over South America, usually delivered on the ground, whereas the father lies in his hammock. So it is among the Schingù Indians visited by Dr. von den Steinen. Their opinion was that the father lay in the hammock because he was obliged to fast, and that he took care of the child because he was obliged to remain at home, while the mother went out to her work, rather than from any intention to simulate the natural conduct of the mother. The father it is who cuts the navel-string; and he is not a free man until the string falls off the child. By these and other American peoples fish, flesh and fruit are tabooed to the father expressly on the ground that for him to eat them is all one as if the babe itself ate them. Among the Ipurina he is forbidden to taste tapir-flesh or pork for a whole year. On the other hand, what very much astonished the worthy apothecary of the Brazilian military colony, the Bororó father, when his child is sick, is in the habit of himself taking the medicine provided for the patient. The Bororó father and mother eat nothing for two days after the birth; and on the third day they may only take warm water: if the father ate anything both he and the infant would sicken. The mother, though she attends to her work, must not bathe until her menstruation has returned. The Paressí parents remain in the hut for five days, until the navel-string falls off; and the father is only allowed to taste water mingled with beijú, otherwise the baby would die.^405.1^ The humorous accounts of the practice among the Tamanacs and Abipones, quoted at length by Dr. Tylor from the Abate Gilij and the Jesuit missionary Dobrizhoffer, need only be referred to here to emphasise the reason given in {406} both cases, namely, that the abstinence described is for the benefit of the offspring. To partake of certain food, to kill any animal, to sneeze, or to commit some other act, would injure the little one.

Readers who have followed the facts and arguments in the earlier chapters of this volume set forth will have no difficulty in arriving at the true interpretation of the usage. It is founded on the belief that the child is a part of the parent; and, just as even after apparent severance of hair or nails from the remainder of the body, the bulk is affected by anything which happens to the severed portion, so as well after as before the infant has been severed from the parent’s body, and in our eyes has acquired a distinct existence, he will be affected by whatever operates on the parent; and, conversely, the parent will feel whatever happens to him, as in some parts of England a mother absent for a while from her child is believed to feel her breasts painful when he cries.^406.1^ The separation is only in appearance; the connection is preserved in spite of it. Hence whatever the parent ought for the child’s sake to do or avoid before severance it is equally necessary to do or avoid after. Gradually, however, as the infant grows and strengthens he becomes able to digest the same food as his parents, and to take part in the ordinary avocations of their lives. Precaution then may be relaxed, and ultimately remitted altogether. But the observance is attended with inconveniences. The parents’ labour is required in hunting, in agriculture, in warfare, in all the various ways in which the {407} life of a household or of a tribe is maintained. The custom therefore is liable to gradual diminution. It is worn away slowly, and compressed into a shorter period. With the tardy and half-unconscious recognition of natural laws it loses bit by bit its importance, until it fades away into little more than a ceremony. In spite of decay, however, and indeed in consequence of it, it may acquire another significance; and among a few tribes, as, for example, the Mundurucus, it becomes “the legal form by which the father recognises the child as his.” This result would have the effect of renewing its vitality. The change of intention is rare, and where the custom is found in its fullest development it is unknown. Accordingly, I venture with all respect to think it is a mistake to see in this legal form the origin of the Couvade, as Dr. Tylor has done, plausible though the explanation seems. Its origin really lies deeper; it lies in the widely pervasive conception of life I have endeavoured to exhibit in these chapters on the Life-token.

This mode of accounting for the practice may seem defective in that it fails to explain the martyrdom suffered by the Carib father, as detailed by Du Tertre. After the unfortunate father has endured a course of fasting for forty days the relatives and best friends, we are told, are invited to a feast, which they preface by scarifying him with agouti-teeth, and then having mashed in water sixty or eighty grains of strong pimento, or Indian pepper, they wash his wounds with the infusion. Not a sound, however, must be drawn from him by his agony, if he would not be deemed a coward and despised by all.^407.1^ In like manner, among the aboriginal inhabitants of Celebes, if the first-born be a son the mother bathes the child in the nearest water-course, while the {408} father, fully armed and dressed in his finest garb, awaits her return. In his turn he then goes to bathe, and when he steps out of the water his neighbours are waiting for him to beat him with reeds all the way back to his dwelling. On arriving there, he seizes his bow and shoots three reed arrows over the hut, saying: “I wish much happiness to my son: may he grow up to be a valiant man.”^408.1^ I do not know whether the Carib ceremony was performed on the birth of a girl, but the Minahassee ceremony is entirely omitted; and the extreme severities of the Carib fast were at all events confined to the first child. The object of the Minahassee father is unquestionable; and from it we may infer that of the Carib. In his person his son undergoes the first tests of his endurance, valour and skill. Success in this is doubtless the guarantee of the child’s courage and of his value to the tribe as hunter and warrior.

If this be so, the Carib tortures, it is evident, spring from the same root as other observances comprehended under the general name of the Couvade. Both in the Carib and Minahassee forms we find the tendency to emphasise the birth of the first child, or perhaps I should rather say, to relax the requirements in the case of after-born children. The tendency is not to be looked upon as a recognition of heirship, but as one arising naturally in the course of ceremonial decay. The first child is the most important; for it is a pledge of the continuance of the family or kindred, and brings very often an accession of honour, or at least of consideration, to its parents. Among peoples where conjugal fidelity is imperfectly developed, moreover, it is the one of whose parentage the father is best assured, and consequently the one on whose health and strength his {409} conduct will be likely, if not certain, to have influence. Thus the motives for the care of the offspring, and therefore for the special observance of all precautions, concentrate upon the first child; and if the custom be found irksome, or for any other reason be liable to loosen its hold, it will generally continue to be fully observed in respect of the first child, long after it has begun to fall into neglect on subsequent births.

The racial and geographical distribution of the practice is a more difficult question than it might at first sight appear, considering the number of authorities who have examined it. If we limit not the definition of the Couvade to the cases where the father actually lies down, but extend it, as it seems proper to do, to all those where he has before as well as after the birth to observe various taboos, in which the mother is often included—then we may find either the custom itself or relics of it over the greater part of the world. America, inhabited by a homogeneous race, displays it everywhere, even among the Eskimos of Greenland, save apparently in Tierra del Fuego. On the eastern continent Mr. Ling Roth puts the matter somewhat strongly when he says that it “is only met with in isolated and widely separated localities.” In Australia it is unknown; nor is there any record of it among the extinct Tasmanians. Summing up the facts, the same writer says: “The custom does not appear to exist or to have existed among those people to whom the term ‘most degraded’ is erroneously applied, people which were better described as savages living in the lowest known forms of culture, such as the Australians, Tasmanians, Bushmen, Hottentots, Veddahs, Sakeys, Aetas, and Fuegians. Neither does the custom exist among the so-called civilised portion of mankind. In {410} other words, Couvade appears at first sight to be limited to peoples who hold an intermediate position between those in the highest and those in [the] lowest states of culture. As such it may be said to represent an intermediate or transition state of mental development.”

We have no need to be surprised that the Couvade is not found in the lowest stage of savagery. The reckoning of kinship through the mother only, and the stories and superstitions which attribute impregnation to other causes than coition, point alike to an imperfect recognition in archaic times of the natural fact of fatherhood. It may further be suggested that where the claim of a father upon his child is still rather that of owner than of begetter, the recognition of the counter-claim of the child upon the father, and the application as between father and child of the belief underlying and directing other magical practices, will not yet have developed. It is probable, indeed, that the customs we include under the generic name of the Couvade would begin with the mother, and that when the fact of paternity was completely recognised, although legal kinship may not yet have come to be reckoned through the father, they would be extended to him. Their disappearance as men advanced in civilisation would, like that of all other customs, be a gradual one; and if they had become at all general we should be likely to discover relics of them among nations in the higher ranks of culture. Accordingly, although there is no authentic record of the existence of the masculine childbed in modern Europe, a number yet lingers of superstitions only referable to the Couvade. For example, just as in the island of Celebes we found the Minahassee father performing a rite intended to secure to his son the qualities of bravery and skill, so among the Esthonians the {411} father runs rapidly round the church during the baptismal service, that his child may be endowed with swiftness of foot.^411.1^ In Altmark the mother busily reads her Bible and hymn-book while the child is being baptized, so that he may be able to learn easily; and with the same object the godparents must repeat together after the minister the passages from the Bible he brings into his exhortation.^411.2^ The husband among the mixed population of East Prussia seems to have been limited in his choice of drink while his wife was lying-in.^411.3^ Over a wide area of the Continent the mother is allowed to do very little work before her churching. In Altmark she must not spin; for in spinning she will wet her finger with her saliva, and that will cause the babe to slaver.^411.4^ The reason assigned in Switzerland for a similar taboo is that she will spin the material for a rope for her child.^411.5^ At the baptismal feast in Altmark the mother must taste of all the dishes if she wish the infant to thrive.^411.6^ Galician Jews permit no member of a household where there is a young child to stay out after sunset, else the little one will be deprived of its rest.^411.7^ In the last illustration we have an extension of the superstition beyond the immediate parents—an extension of which there are traces among savage peoples, like the Abipones, who are reported to have put other relatives as well as the parents upon restricted diet during a baby’s illness.

An interesting form of this extension has been referred to by Dr. Tylor in the third edition of the important work {412} in which he discusses the Couvade, where he notes that in Germany “it is believed that the habits and proceedings of the godfather and godmother affect the child’s life and character. Particularly, the godfather at the christening must not think of disease or madness lest this come upon the child; he must not look round on the way to church lest the child should grow up an idle stare-about; nor must he carry a knife about him for fear of making the child a suicide; the godmother must put on a clean shift to go to the baptism, or the baby will grow up untidy, etc. etc.”^412.1^ I have already mentioned another instance from a land which, to-day at all events, is German in language and polity. There the duty of godparents is exactly parallel with that prescribed for the mother. So too it is held in the Erzgebirge and in Thuringia that the godfather must eat of all the dishes at the feast, for the babe will get a dislike to those left untasted; and in Thuringia he must not only not look about him in returning from church, but he must hasten back to the house, that the child may learn the sooner to run.^412.2^ In the Sollingerwald each of the godparents must hold the babe for a little while; but the youngest of them presents it at the font, doubtless to ensure it a longer life.^412.3^ In the Upper Palatinate even the priest’s conduct at the baptism will affect the child. If he stumble or stutter during the reading of the service, {413} the consequences are serious: the boy will become silly, the girl a nightmare; or if he leave a word out, the infant will never rest quietly in bed, but will be found feet uppermost. In Bohemia, the priest in stumbling as he reads will cause the child to talk in its sleep.^413.1^ In the province of Posen, forgetfulness or mistake on the part of the priest results as in the Palatinate; and the only remedy is rebaptism.^413.2^ The superstition, as we see, is not confined to Germany, though it may be more fully developed there than elsewhere; and without delaying upon examples drawn from Germany and Germanised lands, I proceed to cite a few from other countries before closing what I have to say on the Couvade. Among the Huzules, to have a Gipsy as godparent is to be lucky in horse-breeding and horse-dealing; and by the same people it is considered that if there be a difficulty in putting out the godparents’ candles after the service, the little newly made Christian will have a long life.^413.3^ The peasantry of the Valsesia at the foot of Monte Rosa deem that if the godparents do not recite the creed with a clear voice the little one will stammer all its life. And whoever carries it to the church to be baptized must on no account look back, or the babe will always be timid and easily frightened.^413.4^ In Provence on the other side of the Alps, as well as in Germany and Belgium, the opinion is widely prevalent that the child will resemble, morally and physically, his godparents. Hence great anxiety as to the choice of these important personages. They must be healthy in mind and body, and without any physical defect; for if either of them should be one-eyed, a stammerer, bandy-legged or a hunchback, nobody, in Provence at least, doubts {414} that the poor baby would suffer the like misfortune.^414.1^ In Central France, if a godfather wish his godson to become an excellent and indefatigable singer, he has a ready way to realise the wish; for he has only to set the bells ringing full peal during the baptismal service, and the longer and more vigorously they dance and swell, the more skilful will the neophyte become in striking up an air or in leading a jig. The godfather, however, must not forget on leaving the church to imprint a chaste kiss on both cheeks of the godmother, else there is too much reason to fear the boy will grow up dumb, or at least a stammerer.^414.2^ In the arrondissement of Corte, on the island of Corsica, if either of the sponsors forgets a single word in reciting the creed, the child becomes a wizard or witch, or else a mortolaio, that is to say, a ghost-seer.^414.3^ The latter result also follows in Friuli;^414.4^ while the Irish peasantry hold that if either of the sponsors fails to repeat verbatim after the priest the prayers and promises, the child will always have the power to see fairies or ghosts—which is reckoned unfortunate.^414.5^ Among the Walloons the omission by the priest of certain of the sacramental words seems to have a similar effect.^414.6^ It is a superstition scattered over a large part of Italy that if the priest make any mistake in the baptismal service, or omit to comply with every ritual prescription in baptizing a girl, she will become a witch;^414.7^ and that stupidity or stammering will be the consequence of defects in the recitation {415} of the creed or prayers by the padrini is also commonly believed.^415.1^

The fact is that in the popular mind sponsorship creates a new and real kindred between the godparent and the god-child, and not only between the godparent and god-child, but between the godparent and the godchild’s relations. The effect seems analogous to that of the blood-covenant. Among the wandering Gipsies of southern Hungary a rite similar to that of the blood-covenant is actually performed. The day when the child’s hair is first cut is kept as a festival. The godparents let some drops of their blood fall into a glass of brandy and some on a small piece of bread. The father then pours the brandy on the child’s head and crumbles the bread upon it, “that the child may grow and thrive.” In the same way when the tortures of the Carib father came to an end, the infant was sprinkled with some drops of blood from his wounds, with the object, we are told, of imparting his courage and spirit. So, too, some of the wandering Gipsies of northern Hungary wrap the babe after its birth in rags bedropt with some of the father’s blood.^415.2^ The object in all these cases is to unite the child in the closest bond with the person whose blood is shed. Even where that person is the father himself the rite may perhaps be regarded as a formal adoption into the kin. More likely it is intended to promote the growth and health of the child by renewing the corporeal union already in existence by virtue of the natural blood-tie, or of the equivalent mystical bond forged, as between sponsor and child, by the sacrament of baptism. It would then correspond to one of those periodical renewals {416} of blood-brotherhood which we have dealt with on a former page. Some countenance is perhaps given to this suggestion by a practice of the Southern Slavs. The relationship of godfather and godchild is often created among them by the formal cutting of the child’s hair, as it seems also to have been among the ancient Germans. The ceremony can only take place once. The godfather cuts the hair in the form of a cross and drops it into a cup of water, into which he puts some money as a gift for the child; and the parent then entertains him at a feast and presents him with gifts in return. As the ceremony is not distinctive of any religious denomination, Christian and Moslem do not scruple to enter into the relationship of hair-cutting sponsorship with one another. It unites the families in ties so close as to involve them in one another’s blood-feuds; and a Moslem woman unveils before her child’s godfather, though a stranger and even a Christian. But, important as are the social and political effects of such an institution, it is not to them that I desire specially to direct attention in this connection; rather I desire to compare it with the Gipsy practices just mentioned. It is in great request in Bosnia as remedial treatment for a sickly child. The child is taken to a crossway; and the first passer-by is expected to cut the hair and thus become godfather.^416.1^ Here it is surely intended to enter into a new corporeal union with an entire stranger, and so acquire a fresh stock of health. The objection to this explanation is that the godparent does not seem to take the hair away with him. I do not know if we can suppose that the ceremony has undergone deterioration, and that this part {417} of the proceeding has been lost because its exact reason has been forgotten. I am unable otherwise to account for it. In any case it is unquestionable that the relationship of gossipry in many countries is fully as intimate and sacred as that of blood. Amongst the Southern Slavs, we know, a godfather or an adoptive brother is often the person chosen in preference to any one, even a natural brother, to fill the delicate office of brautführer at a wedding. The Huzules regard sponsors as veritable additions to the family circle. They never choose them from among their neighbours; for there is often strife between neighbours; and strife between gossips, or persons related by the bond of sponsorship, would be a sin.^417.1^ In some parts of Italy the godmother drinks at the baptismal feast out of the same cup with the mother:^417.2^ clear evidence of the intimacy of their union.

One consequence of the relationship thus created is the prohibition of intermarriage. In comparatively early times the Church took over from the Roman law the interdiction of marriage between persons who were only akin by adoption. That interdiction was the direct and necessary result of the recognition of adoption as constituting a true kinship. The analogy of sponsorship at the font was too great to be overlooked; and in following the prohibition into the relationship between persons by this new tie the Church was merely reflecting the opinion of the people, who saw in it a fresh and solemn form of the adoption to which they had been accustomed from the days of savagery. Their horror of such marriages wherever sponsorship is yet a living reality may be illustrated by the superstition recorded in Berri not many years ago, that the fruit of the {418} union was not children but hairy monsters, which when disengaged from their mother’s womb would instantly take refuge under the bed, and when thence dislodged with a pitchfork would fly to the hearth, and after grinning and mowing at their persecutors for a while from the pot-hook above the hearth would eventually disappear, to the relief of every one, up the chimney.^418.1^

The custom of Adoption seems to have arisen with the appearance of the true family. The mode of admission into a totem-kin is by the blood-covenant, and the neophyte becomes a blood-brother. But when the smaller circle of the family emerges, containing only the parents and their descendants either by monogamic or polygynic marriage, adoption by the head of the family of a child from without is found a convenient means of recruiting its numbers. For a long time adoption into the family goes on side by side with admission by blood-covenant into the kin. The object of both rites, though similar, is not identical, inasmuch as the bodies into which admission is obtained are not the same. The blood-covenant, therefore, is not ousted by adoption, and only tends to disappear with the abandonment of the clan-organisation. In fact, in the custom of Adoptive Brotherhood it has continued among the Slavs to the present day. Adoption seems to attain its greatest strength where what we may term legal kinship is reckoned only on one side, whether through the father only or the mother only. When legal kinship comes to coincide with natural kinship the circle of the kin widens, and the organisation of society changes, so as to render less needful the strengthening of the family by adding artificially to its numbers; testamentary rights come into existence; the {419} feeling of natural kinship dominates the legal idea; and kinship by adoption ultimately vanishes. For this reason Adoption is unknown to the English law, and the same may probably be said of other modern nations, notwithstanding their ancestors may have practised it, even where their law is an ancient system, adapted from time to time to the development of national requirements, and not based upon a revolutionary subversion of older institutions.

The ceremony of Adoption is sometimes found as a simulation of the act of birth, at other times as suckling or a simulation of suckling. Diodorus relates a legend of the adoption of Herakles by Hera which doubtless exhibits the ceremony as practised by the prehistoric Greeks. The scene, it will be remembered, is laid in Heaven; for it was to make things agreeable there after the hero’s apotheosis that Zeus persuaded his jealous and vindictive consort to take this course. We are told that Hera having gone to bed, Herakles was brought close to her body, in order to imitate a real birth; and she then dropped him down from under her clothes to the ground. The writer adds that even in his own day this was the rite of adoption observed by the barbarians;^419.1^ nor have we any reason to disbelieve him, seeing that it is still practised by the Turks in Bosnia. In Dalmatia the man who intends to adopt a son (the ceremony is the same if it be performed by a woman) girds the son with one end of his girdle and himself with the other, saying in the presence of witnesses: “This is my son. I make over to him after my life my whole property.” A Slavonic folksong represents an empress as taking the son {420} to be adopted into the palace and passing him through her silken vest that he might be called her heart’s child.^420.1^ Here we are reminded of a mediæval usage at weddings in France and Germany. In the former country a canopy, or veil, was (and perhaps still is) held suspended over the heads of the pair to be married while the service is being performed. It bears the significant name of abrifou, or fool-shelter. The Hessian practice, now extinct, was more picturesque. The bridegroom wore a large black mantle; and as he stood with his bride before the altar he flung with one strong sweep its ample folds around her, so that both of them were covered by it. If the bride, or her husband, had any child, born before marriage, and she took it there and then under the canopy or the mantle, this act was sufficient to render it legitimate.^420.2^ The same usage may once have prevailed in England; for a belief is said to have lingered into recent times among “the folk” here that a mother might legitimate her children born before marriage, by taking them under her clothes during the ceremony.^420.3^ Though the object of the practice is said to be legitimation, the rite is that of adoption. Legitimation and Adoption are in this connection convertible terms.

Elsewhere suckling is represented in the rite. Sir John Lubbock mentions that “in Circassia the woman offered her breast to the person she was adopting.” This was probably the form among the ancient Egyptians. At all {421} events, they esteemed the milk-tie a very sacred one;^421.1^ as did the ancient Irish, with whom, and with the Scandinavians, fosterage had a sanctity equal, if not superior, to the tie of blood, without, however, involving the renunciation of the original kin.^421.2^ At the present time at Kambât, in the Eastern Horn of Africa, the son to be adopted sucks blood from the breast of his adoptive father.^421.3^ In Abyssinia, “if a man wishes to be adopted as the son of one of superior station or influence, he takes his hand, and, sucking one of his fingers, declares himself to be his ‘child by adoption,’ and his new father is bound to assist him as far as he can.”^421.4^

In general, the effect of Adoption was to transfer the adopted child from his own family to that of the adoptive parent. At Rome the rite included the detestatio sacrorum, or relinquishment of the original household, and the transitio in sacra, or initiation into the new worship. By these means the child was discharged from his natural family and received into the new one.^421.5^ The change of worship is, in that plane of civilisation where the custom of adoption is most fully developed, of the essence of the proceeding. Its very object often is to preserve the ancestral cult by artificially providing persons to carry it on. This is the most prominent idea in the Laws of Manu.^421.6^ Annexed to the ancestral cult was the inheritance. Whosoever performed the one was entitled to the other, or {422} at least to a share in the other. In course of time, as the duty decayed and ceased to be acknowledged, the rights of property remained: an excellent precedent for the English House of Lords in insisting on the rights of property while looking askance at its duties. The adopted child is in fact regarded exactly as a natural-born child; he obtains all the privileges, and is charged with all the duties, restrictions and disabilities of a natural-born child. He becomes of one flesh with his new parents and their other offspring, whether natural or adopted. He is entitled to support, to maintenance in his quarrels, to protection, to his fair and equal share of the inheritance. He is liable to obedience, to maintain the family quarrels, to assist in paying the family debts and obligations, to unite in the family worship; and he is debarred from marrying all whom the members of his adopted family are restricted from marrying. As a consequence, adoption can only take place with the assent of both families, or of a council of elders or some more formal tribunal on behalf of the community. Such a tribunal exercises the functions, not merely of judge of the propriety of the adoption, but also of the necessary witness to its validity. And if we do not find the formality always complied with in the punctilious manner of the Roman law, we may usually trace it with greater or less distinctness wherever the custom of adoption has obtained.^422.1^

Passing, with this hasty sketch of Adoption, away from {423} the inner circle of family relationships, let us look at one or two aspects of the wider clan-life, illustrating the strength of the blood-tie.

“The birth-ties of kindred are reckoned the only strong ones,” says Countess Martinengo-Cesaresco, speaking of folksongs; and the observation might be extended with hardly any qualification to every species of tradition. The bond of blood has always proved stronger than any other force that can sway human nature, until it encounters the overmastering energy of one of the great world-religions, or becomes distracted and spent amid the complexities of modern life. Weakened as it is in Europe nowadays, it is yet not entirely dissipated. Its claims are put forth more timidly, but they are still within certain limits respected. To the utmost of those limits they are still efficient instruments in the hands of the poet, the playwright and the novelist,—and that not only on the moral side, where we are accustomed to appeals founded upon kinship, but also on what I may call the physical side. An unaccountable thrill, we are told, shoots through a father who meets unwittingly a child whom he has never seen, or has seen but for a moment long years before. This involuntary recognition of the same blood is a convention not yet wholly discarded by the writers who thus aim at affecting our emotions, because it has not quite passed out of the shadowy region bordering our clear beliefs into the limbo {424} of things that neither prescribe our action nor convince and captivate our imagination. But the Italian peasant, a thousand years behindhand, a thousand leagues deeper in the realm where faith and fancy reign in indissoluble consort on a double throne, undisturbed by the far-off frontier raids of criticism and doubt,—the Italian peasant admits the extreme demands of blood in the vendetta, and believes that when a bottle supposed to contain a portion of the blood of Saint Januarius “was presented to the body such joy was evinced that the blood had nearly burst from the bottle.”^424.1^ If such were the conduct of blood severed for, say, fifteen centuries from the body of which it had once formed part, what may not be expected of blood still flowing in the veins of living men, themselves both parts of one body, the kin,—blood whose stream has welled from the same fount only a generation or so ago? In The Book of the Pious by Jehuda ben Samuel the Pious, who lived at Ratisbon about the year 1200, a story is told, founded on the idea of the physical unity of a kindred. A rich man died while travelling abroad, having at the time of his death a large sum of money in his possession. The servant stole this money and gave himself out as his master’s son. Shortly after the rich man’s departure from home, however, a son was born to him, who, when grown up, sought the aid of the Gaon Saadja. Saadja, it appears, was an historical personage who flourished at Sura in the former half of the tenth century. He advised the youth to apply to the king; and the king commissioned Saadja to decide the matter. The Gaon, accordingly, having the son {425} and the servant both brought before him, caused a vein of each of them to be opened, and one of the bones of the dead man to be fetched from his grave. He laid the bone first in the servant’s blood, but without effect. He then laid it in the son’s blood, which it immediately sucked up; for the bone and the blood, we are told, were of one body. Saadja, therefore, gave judgment in favour of the son, directing the estate to be restored to him.^425.1^

Two other examples may be given of widely sundered peoples among whom essentially the same superstition is current. It is believed in the west of Europe—certainly in Brittany and Flanders—that the body of one drowned will bleed on the approach of a kinsman.^425.2^ The Zulus speak of sympathy by the navel. It is their conviction that a man will recognise his kindred by some mysterious influence of the navel. “A man,” they say, “knows one of his blood-relations by the navel. We have been wondering at the treatment of the man by So-and-so. We thought he knew him; yet he did not know him; he sympathised with him by the navel only.”^425.3^ Obviously this is the birth-tie.

The most instructive application of the doctrine that the kin is, in much more than a metaphorical sense, one body, is to be found in the collective responsibility of the clan. Illustrations might be cited from every corner of the known world. But to do so would be to repeat the same evidence, frequently in the same words, over and over again. I shall, therefore, give only a few of the more striking instances.

I mentioned a page or two back the extreme demands of {426} blood as found in the Italian vendetta. The words were only just written, when I took up the newspaper of the day, and read an account of a trial for murder arising out of a blood-feud in Dalmatia. The actors in the tragedy were not Italians, but Slavs. The facts were shortly these. Two brothers, having quarrelled with a neighbour about some goats, threw themselves upon him with their daggers; but he defended himself with his pistol, and, having killed one, was tried for murder. The jury properly acquitted him, on the ground that he was only acting in self-defence. Hardly had he left the prison when his surviving assailant, with another brother, hastened to his house. They found there only their foe’s wife and daughters; and they waited and watched. Soon they espied the acquitted man’s younger brother, a boy of fourteen, carrying a pitcher of water. Crying “The devil threw thee in our way,” they seized him, and stabbed him so quickly that he had no time even to cry out. They were speedily arrested, tried, found guilty of murder, and condemned, the one to death, and the other to eighteen years’ penal servitude. They protested against the sentence, and appealed to the Court of Cassation at Vienna. There their counsel had the assurance to plead that “in Dalmatia it is every man’s duty to take vengeance where blood has been shed; and that the people feel it right to pursue a family, one of whose members has killed a connection of their own, as long as there is a male descendant.” This was a little more than a civilised court of justice could stand; and it will be no fault of the judges if the Dalmatian savages do not learn that the unity of the kin is not a doctrine of modern jurisprudence.^426.1^

The story shows that we must regard the collective responsibility of the clan as twofold; first looking at the offended clan, and then at the offending. What Professor Robertson Smith points out concerning the Semites is universally true, namely, that when a member of the clan has been slain, the others say, not “The blood of such an one has been spilt,” but “Our blood has been spilt.” The injury is felt by the entire body; and it is the business of the entire body to revenge it. Conversely, not merely the man who commits the wrong is liable for it. His whole kin is involved in the guilt, and must suffer for it until atonement shall have been made. Colonel Ellis, writing of the peoples of the Slave and Gold Coasts, lays down this rule in distinct terms. “The family collectively,” he says, “is responsible for all crimes and injuries to person or property committed by any one of its members, and each member is assessible for a share of the compensation to be paid. On the other hand, each member of the family receives a share of the compensation paid to it for any crime or injury committed against the person or property of any one of its members. Compensation is always demanded from the family instead of from the individual wrong-doer, and is paid to the family instead of to the individual wronged.” And he draws attention to the resemblance of this custom of collective responsibility and indemnification to that enunciated in the old Welsh laws.^427.1^

Happily for mankind the blood-feud is not everywhere so relentless as it is presented to us in Dalmatia. Even savages cannot afford to be for ever engaged in warfare to the death; and that is what would happen if blood were only to be wiped out by blood. The practice of commuting {428} revenge for payment has therefore very generally arisen. The distinction between crimes, as wrongs committed against the State, and private injuries classed by lawyers as torts and breaches of contract, is unknown in the lower stages of civilisation. There was at first no State, and when the State came into existence it was but loosely constituted. Public crimes were confined to treason and the like: robbery and murder were nothing more than private wrongs. Commutation for these was precisely on the same footing as for insult or debt. It was no more unnatural to take payment for the murder of a blood-brother than for a sheep; it no more interfered with the course of justice or the rights of the State than the barter for a tusk of ivory or a bag of gold-dust. To omit to pay the price of the ivory or the gold-dust was as much a wrong against a clan to which, or to one member of which, it was due, as to commit murder. The price of a murder might be heavier, or it might not. But, alike, the price of the goods or of the blood must be paid by the clan of the man indebted or offending. To draw a line between wrongs done to the clan and wrongs done to the individual required a much greater development, on the one side, of the individual, on the other side, of the State, at the expense of the clan or the family. Until that point had been reached, whenever compensation was accepted for a wrong to the kin, every member of the kin, as in the West African custom depicted by Colonel Ellis, was entitled to his share; because the wrong to the kin had reached and was shared by all. Among the Garos of Bengal, proposals of marriage must come from the woman. If a man make the first advances it is an insult, not to the individual woman, but to the whole mahári (literally, motherhood) or kin, “a {429} stain only to be obliterated by the blood of pigs and liberal libations of beer at the expense,” not of the individual offender, but of the mahári to which he belongs.^429.1^ Going back to West Africa, we find that on the river Comoe, as on the Slave Coast, where a man of one community is indebted to a man of another community, the latter has the right to seize the goods of any member of his debtor’s community, on the ground that the group is collectively responsible for the debts of its members.^429.2^ Examples might be added from every part of the globe; but they can be all summed up in the Fijian philosophy as expressed by an old resident to Mr. Fison, while explaining a bloody feud which lasted for years in reference to the shooting of a dog. “It’s just like this, sir; in a manner o’ speakin’, say as me and Tom Farrell here has a difficulty, and gets to punchin’ one another. If he plugs me in the eye, I don’t feel duty bound to hit him back azackly on the same spot. If I can get well in on him anywheres handy, I ain’t partickler. And that’s how these niggers reckons it.”^429.3^

Nor does the solidarity of the kin for this purpose disappear without difficulty even after the State has come into existence and established its sole cognisance of crime. The offender’s relatives continue liable with himself to punishment. This explains the wholesale punishment of barbarous nations, involving persons whom we should regard as absolutely innocent. Achan’s sons and daughters were stoned with their father. The customs of the Habura in the North-west Provinces of India require that when a crime has been committed by members of a certain horde, {430} the chief shall determine who are to be given up. “Usually a compromise is made with the police; two out of six, or three out of eight, are made over to justice, the rest escaping. All the chief does is to repeat a certain form of words, and then, taking two of the grains of wheat offered to their god, he places them on the head of the scapegoat. The oath of the brotherhood is upon him, and whether he be guilty or not he confesses to the police magistrate, or judge, and goes to the gallows or a life-long exile, confident that his chief and brethren will, as they are bound, feed and protect the wife and children he leaves behind, even before their own.”^430.1^ The ancient laws of Ireland provide elaborately for the responsibility of the clan in respect of crimes committed by members. In their case, however, the conception of the crime as a debt due to the injured clan had not yet been wholly effaced; for the provisions for sharing the compensation are equally elaborate.^430.2^ The customs of the Teutons recognised the same responsibility; and in the corruption of blood and forfeiture of property to the crown which, until the legislation of about a quarter of a century ago, were entailed in this country by conviction not only for treason but for any felony, we may discover the last remnant in modern laws of the ancient rule of visiting the sins of the individual upon the whole of his kindred.^430.3^

The forms of medical treatment examined in a former chapter exhibited the connection which remained unsevered when portions of the body, or of its issues, or clothing, had been detached; so that it was sufficient to subject these objects to healing or sacred influences in order to effect the cure of the man himself. But if the kin together form one body in any substantial sense, the treatment of other members than the one actually suffering, if not sufficient to restore him to health, will at all events help his recovery. Among the Dieyerie of South Australia, if a child meet with an accident, all its relations are struck over the head with sticks or boomerangs until the blood flows. And this blood-letting by deputy is held to alleviate the infant’s pain.^431.1^ In civilised times, when the feeling of kindred has become attenuated and the real reason for this vicarious treatment consequently lost, an intimate friend may sometimes take the place of a relative. He may perform the pilgrimage, or undergo the remedy. A Devonshire prescription for curing a friend of boils is to go into a churchyard on a dark night and walk six times round the grave of a person who has been interred the previous day, and crawl over it three times. If the sufferer be a man the ceremony {432} must be performed by a woman, and vice versâ.^432.1^ Parallel with this are pilgrimages made by a friend or relative in the name of a sick person, of which I have cited some instances in a former chapter; and possibly the same principle dictated the early Christian practice of “baptism for the dead.”

I am not aware whether it is deemed enough by many savage peoples to apply the remedy in this way, without also treating the patient himself. That it is considered necessary in various parts of the world to treat not only the sufferer but other members of his tribe, presumably kinsmen, is quite certain. Among the Buryats of Siberia the patient’s tribesmen take part in the ceremony of healing performed by the shaman, and share the wine, tea and sour cream which is drunk by the shaman and the patient.^432.2^ The Wakuni, who inhabit a district of Unyamwezi, treat a victim of witchcraft by killing a cow and spotting with the blood his forehead, the root of his neck, his insteps and the palms of his hands; and such of his kinsmen as are present are similarly marked.^432.3^ Dr. Matthews describes the mode of cure he witnessed among the Navajo Indians of New Mexico. At one stage of the ceremonies the sick woman and a companion were brought into the medicine-lodge and made to sit on the divine portraits in dry pigment which covered the floor. The medicine-man, having made a cold infusion in an earthen bowl, dipped a brush, or sprinkler, made of feathers, in the solution, sprinkled the picture, {433} touched the figure of each divinity on the brow, mouth and chest with the brush, and then administered the contents of the bowl to both women, in two alternate draughts to each. What was left he himself drank, and handed the bowl to the bystanders, “that they might finish the dregs, and let none of the precious stuff go to waste”:^433.1^ a pious economy, the like of which is prescribed to one Christian sect in England by the schedule to an Act of Parliament. In this Navajo ceremony, in addition to the lady-companion and the bystanders, who perhaps were blood-relations of the patient, the shaman himself partook of the sacred beverage. It is not at all impossible, though no stress can be laid upon the conjecture, that he also may have been of the woman’s kin. Many North American tribes attach great importance to the co-operation of kindred in the cure, and that to the exclusion of other persons. The Cherokees, for instance, do not allow a medicine-man to treat his own wife. Nay, they will not permit the husband or wife of any sick person to send for a medicine-man. The call must come from one of the sufferer’s blood-relations, among whom wife or husband could not of course be. Their spells for the treatment of rheumatism—the Crippler, as they appropriately call it—are very elaborate; and in order to success the doctor is subjected to the same taboos as the patient. Neither of them must touch a squirrel, a dog, a cat or a mountain trout. Neither of them, if married, may approach his wife for four nights. And according to another formula, the ceremony must be performed by both shaman and patient fasting.^433.2^

It is, however, unnecessary to suppose that the medicine-man {434} must be a kinsman of the sufferer. His very office brings him for the time into sacramental relations with him, which would be quite sufficient to account for his sharing both the potion and the taboos. A curious parallel to the Navajo rite is found in a leech-book of our Anglo-Saxon forefathers dating from the tenth century. To heal a man of fever certain crosses and letters are directed to be written upon the holy paten, and the opening words of Saint John’s Gospel are to be sung over the writing. It is then to be washed off the paten with holy water into the medicine. The creed, the paternoster, fourteen psalms (including the hundred and nineteenth) and a solemn adjuration of the fever are then to be sung over it. When all this conjuring was finished, the leech and the sick man were each directed to sip thrice of the drink thus sanctified.^434.1^

The rite of healing in which the kin are required to join is found in every quarter of the globe. A common form is the slaughter of a beast or fowl, or perhaps of several, as a sacrifice, followed of course by a feast. Peoples as far apart in locality as they are in race are recorded to have practised this mode of cure. It has been witnessed alike among the Yakuts of Siberia, the Peguenches of Southern Chili, the islanders of Luçon and Mindanos in the East Indies, the heathen Dinkas of Central Africa and the Mohammedan inhabitants of Timbuctoo.^434.2^ At Ballyvorney in county Cork less than two centuries ago an image of wood about two feet high, carved and painted like a woman, was kept by one of the family of the O’Herlehys; and, we are told, “when any one is sick of the small-pox {435} they send for it, sacrifice a sheep to it, and wrap the skin about the sick person, and the family [that is, as I understand it, the family of the sick person] eat the sheep. But this idol hath now much lost its reputation, because two of the O’Herlehys died lately of the small-pox.”^435.1^ An analogous rite is found in China. Ten men of ten different families of the patient’s relatives and friends (formerly, doubtless, of his kin only) become “security” for him. Each family contributes one hundred cash, which go towards the expenses of the feast, the remainder being found by the patient’s own family. The feast is spread in a temple, when the food is first presented to the idol, and the names of the “sureties” are written on a piece of paper and burned before the god. Among other ceremonies, after the feast the representative of the family carries home some of the rice, which is made into congee for the sick man to eat.^435.2^

I have mentioned, in treating of witchcraft, a Dyak practice which exhibits close connection between the house and absent members of the family. It perhaps goes further, and displays the belief that the conduct of a family at home affects an absent member. Similar customs, pointing to such a belief, are recorded of the Thugs.^435.3^ And conversely, a tribesman of Lake Nyassa will eat no salt while on a journey, lest his wife misconduct {436} herself at home.^436.1^ This mysterious effect can be due to nothing less than the essential solidarity of the family. The matter is put plainly by the I li, one of the sacred books of the Chinese, in the declaration that “father and son are only one body, and so are husband and wife, and elder and younger brothers.” And for this reason, we are told, the possessions of a family are held in common^436.2^—a subject on which I have no space to enter.

In strict analogy, it may be remarked, to the human kin is the view entertained in the lower culture of the kinship of some orders of brutes. Every species is a kindred united by a bond as close as that which binds a human clan, so that sorcery may be wrought on all the members by operating on one or two specimens. Is a garden in Hesse infested with caterpillars, it suffices to go round it and crush a caterpillar at each of three corners. From the fourth corner another is taken and hung up in the chimney to dry in the smoke. As it dries up, the caterpillars in the garden will wither and die.^436.3^ Possibly this mode of treatment only applies to such creatures as it would be difficult to deal with individually. The subject may be worth further inquiry: I can do no more than allude to it here in passing.

Connection as close as that of kindred could not be terminated by death. We have already considered the efforts made to renew by sacramental means the union with the dead. It remains to refer to a superstition which regards the tie as indissoluble even in the grave. Upon the lowest step of civilisation the Ainu of Yezo are very jealous of their burial-places. They hide them in the depths of the forest, or in some other spot, remote, unlikely {437} to be discovered, and difficult to reach. Nothing angers them more than to know that a stranger has been near their tombs.^437.1^ The Tanalas of Madagascar enclose the bodies of their dead in little huts erected in inaccessible parts of the forest, and the living are forbidden to intrude into the thickets where these huts are found.^437.2^ The Haidahs of British Columbia used to cremate their dead, because they feared that their enemies would else get hold of the body and make charms from it.^437.3^ No reason is assigned by the traveller who reports it for the Ainu feeling; none is assigned for the Tanala practice; but we have perhaps the clue to both here, as well as to the oft-sought origin of cremation among the prehistoric tribes of Europe. If the dead man be a part of the whole body of the clan in anything like a material sense, for a foe to obtain possession of any part of the corpse would be a serious danger for the survivors. The belief of the Narrinyeri of Australia was that if a sorcerer obtained a bone of the totem animal of a hostile clan he could afflict the clan with sickness.^437.4^ In the Banks’ Islands burials are often secret, and care is taken to prevent the bones from being dug up for arrows and for charms.^437.5^ In Equatorial Africa the Mpongwe kings are always interred secretly, for fear that other tribes should dig up the head to make a powerful fetish of the brains.^437.6^ The precautions in the last two cases depend, it may be, on the intrinsic value of the relics of an able or powerful man rather than his relation to {438} those who are in terror of the charms that may be made of his corpse. In the higher civilisation of China, however, it is quite clear that the condition of a corpse is of the greatest moment to the health and prosperity of his descendants. Wherefore small iron nails are scattered in the coffin, also hempseeds, peas and millet, and red yeast, to cause the sons and grandsons of the dead to beget numerous sons and become the ancestors of remoter progeny, and to provide them with plenty of food for all time to come. Pith and rice-paper, which will absorb the fluid products of decay, are scattered to cause the descendants to become grand and of high rank. Two pairs of trousers are spread over the corpse, stuffed with ingots of gold- and silver-paper. “These are expected to enormously enrich the dead and his offspring.” On the other hand, metal buttons are avoided on the grave-clothes, because they will injure the body while it is decaying, “and consequently cause great injuries also” to the posterity of the deceased. And while the coffin, having been made and brought to the house, is being prepared for the reception of the body, the mourners abstain from wailing, “because manifestations of woe and distress might cause real woe and distress to be enclosed in the coffin, and so bring bad luck not only on the dead, but also on his descendants, the fate of whom is most intimately bound up with the grave of their ancestor.”^438.1^ More than this, necromancers profess to be able to tell the fortunes of the living by inspection of the bodies of their dead ancestors, which, if not among the Chinese themselves, at all events among certain of the wild tribes, are dug up for the purpose. And it is on record that, in the various revolutions which have from time to time convulsed {439} the country, the imperial mausolea have been broken open “and the entombed corpses mangled and destroyed with the object of bringing ruin on the imperial descendant seated on the tottering throne.” The aboriginal Luh-N’zehtsze believe that health depends on the cleanness of the bones of departed kinsmen. Accordingly, when a man has been in the grave a year he is exhumed and his bones are carefully washed; and whenever any of his family are sick the same operation is at once performed, no matter how long or how short the time since he was buried.^439.1^ Even in Europe we have the well-known superstition that the state and appearance of a corpse before burial indicate whether other deaths in the family are to follow, as if it be limp, or the eyes cannot be closed, and so forth. According to Corean opinion, the prosperity of a dead man’s descendants depends solely on the right choice of the place where he is buried. Hence the utmost care is taken in its selection, and the art of divining the proper spot is a special profession in the country.^439.2^ The Maori sentiment, it may be added, which regards as one of the most frightful insults that can be flung at a man to tell him to cook his great-grandfather, seems to spring from the same root. The Maoris do not eat their relations: hence to bid a man cook his father would be a great curse. But to tell him to cook his great-grandfather would be far worse, because it would include “every individual who has sprung from him.”^439.3^ In other words, a man is looked upon as one with all his {440} descendants. The belief in an indissoluble corporal union must have preceded such an interpretation of language which in terms only mentions the ancestor.

We may now sum up the results of our inquiry into the theory of the Life-token. The length of the investigation is justified by the importance of the subject in the long and wonderful history of civilisation. I do not pretend here to give a complete account of savage philosophy. In spite of the investigations of anthropologists during the last thirty years, we are as yet far from being in a position to form a satisfactory synthesis—a synthesis which will reckon with the many-sided activity of the human mind, even in the lower stages of its development, and will estimate at its due value every influence, material as well as intellectual, which, entering in early times into the stream of culture, deflected its current or added to its volume, until it at last attained that irresistible force whose direction we know though its issue remains dark and uncertain. My own object is much humbler. And if I have succeeded in laying with any measure of clearness before the reader the sacramental conception of life underlying the incident of the Life-token, I must not be supposed to depreciate as factors in savage culture other conceptions with which I am not immediately concerned. I am quite aware, too, that much that I have put forward, in so far as I have put forward anything new, must be considered as yet only tentative and conjectural. Tradition, conservative as it is, is in its nature shifting and liable to endless combinations. It is, therefore, compounded of elements not merely various, but often contradictory. This renders the task of disentangling peculiarly difficult, needing patience that cannot be discouraged, and an insight that long {441} familiarity with the ideas of the uncivilised will not always give.

Starting from his personal consciousness, the savage attributes the like consciousness to everything he sees or feels around him. And holding that outward form is by no means of the essence of existence or of individuality, he looks upon transformation as an ordinary incident, happening to all men at death, happening to many men and other creatures whensoever they will. From the capacity of transformation to the capacity of division the step is not a long one. To be transformed into a pomegranate or a heap of grain is to have one’s life equally diffused through a thousand seeds, each of which is endowed with the powers and possibilities of the whole. Scattered, they may re-unite; and if all but one be destroyed, from that one a new whole can be reproduced, or some other shape may be assumed wherein will reside, undiminished and unobscured, all the consciousness and all the power of the original. But what was regarded as true of one shape was regarded as true of another. It was deemed to be practicable so to sever one’s own personality as to secrete and safeguard one’s life. This severed portion we call—we have no better word—the External Soul. So long as the External Soul was unharmed the man could not be slain. And conversely, its condition would be an index of his. This perhaps is an inconsistency; but logical consistency is not always important to savages. It is evident that if the life be bound up with an object outside the man, the two will decay and die together. The Life-token, therefore, or the External Soul, must be carefully tended and watched, so as to preserve it and promote its growth and prosperity, and through it the growth and prosperity of {442} the person to whom it belongs, and of whom it is a part. Any severed fragment of the substance of a man then assumes importance. Though severed, it is, notwithstanding, inseparably connected with him; and injury inflicted upon it would be felt by him. On the other hand, care bestowed upon it and the promotion of its well-being would redound to his advantage. Hence one of the methods of witchcraft was to injure the severed portion of his substance, and one of the methods of defence, both against witchcraft and more direct attack, was to unite the severed portion with some divinity. But the conception of life which regarded it as severable could not be confined to actual portions of the substance. Whatever was closely bound up with a man’s personality would be looked upon as part of himself. His clothing and weapons, constantly associated with him, would attract a measure of the consideration due to himself, would be deemed fragments of his identity, would be filled with his life. And as his property increased with civilisation it would all be included in the same manner, until at last his mere appointment, the exercise of that will and of that power which had been instrumental in acquiring and guarding his property, became sufficient to create any object his External Soul or Life-token.

Whether observation of the natural phenomenon of birth—the separation of a child from its mother’s body—contributed to the evolution of this train of superstition we do not know. We know, however, that, parallel with the mode of thought which thus represented the personality as divisible, and, so far as we can ascertain, on the same plane of culture with it, a kindred descended in fact or by reputation from a single mother, was held to be, in much more than a metaphorical sense, one body. The kinsmen {443} were one flesh, members one of another, by virtue of their common parent. That parent was, in the lowest stage of civilisation in which we can trace it, generally held to be a brute, a tree or some other vegetable, occasionally one of the heavenly bodies, or even a rock. No difficulty would be felt in this by a people who believed in the doctrine of Transformation. The object so regarded as parent was the name and emblem of the kin. It was sacred; and where, as it usually was, it was fit for food, it was never eaten, save on certain solemn occasions when the kinsmen met to signify and renew their union by partaking of a sacramental meal. When the object was not eatable, it was represented on these occasions by another which could be eaten. As civilisation advanced, the rites of totemism gave place to, or grew into, the worship of anthropomorphic gods, and the sacred ancestral object, or totem as it is called, sank into a symbol, or attendant, or into a special property of the god who had superseded it.

I have endeavoured to trace the conception of the kindred, or clan, as one body in a number of archaic practices. Beginning from the formal reception into the kin by the blood-covenant, which has been fully treated by Professor Robertson Smith, whose untimely death anthropological science will long deplore, and by Dr. Trumbull, we have devoted special attention to sacramental rites of burial and of marriage. Other rites and superstitions have come under notice; nor have we by any means exhausted the subject. We have found the unity of the kin a vital conception penetrating savage life to its core. In the words of Mr. Fison: “To the savage, the whole gens is the individual, and he is full of regard for it. Strike the gens anywhere, and every member of it considers himself {444} struck, and the whole body corporate rises up in arms against the striker. The South Australian savage looks upon the universe as the Great Tribe, to one of whose divisions he himself belongs; and all things, animate and inanimate, which belong to his class are parts of the body corporate whereof he himself is part. They are ‘almost parts of himself,’ as Mr. Stewart shrewdly remarks.”^444.1^ Mr. Stewart would not have erred had he put it more strongly still; and the South Australian savages are only in a stage through which, there is reason to believe, every other people in the world has passed or is passing: so many and so widely scattered are its traces, and so deeply impressed are they upon human institutions and beliefs.

The last part of our inquiry has not been useless to our more immediate subject. It has not only shown us how consonant to other human institutions and human thoughts is the belief in the Life-token and the divisibility of the personality; but it has also furnished us with the reason why the life-token was left behind when the hero started on his adventures, why his brothers followed him, and why in many cases the slaughtered dragon found an avenger. The hero and his brothers were one body. The Medusa-witch, in striking him, struck them; and their plain duty was revenge. So likewise when the hero slew the dragon, the surviving kin of the dragon, whether mother or brother, must in return compass the hero’s death. Moreover, we may see in the same conception of life the reason why the mere appointment by a kinsman is sufficient to create a life-token for the hero. If the kinsman be of one body with the hero, separate yet united, his appointment would be equivalent to that of the hero himself. He could therefore {445} at any time divine with accuracy as to the condition of his absent relative.

It is perhaps hardly necessary to insist on the universality of the chain of beliefs discussed in the present volume. I have tried to put before the reader instances from every quarter of the globe; and though of course I have not literally proved the beliefs to be universal, I think I have shown a distribution so wide and general as to induce a very strong presumption of their existence among tribes that have passed without mention, and even among tribes of whose culture and modes of thought we are as yet ignorant. A conception of life which we know to be held from the shores of the Arctic Ocean to the islands of the Southern Seas we may reasonably believe to be inseparable from human thought, at least until it has reached the highest levels of culture; and we may therefore predicate it with every probability not merely of living races whose traditions have yet to be explored, but also of the prehistoric dead whose barrows, dumb on this question, often betray only that other belief to which human nature clings everywhere so pathetically—the belief in the life after death. That belief, we may be sure, was not held alone. As we find it in man to-day, so doubtless it was to be found ages ago: only one of a cycle of beliefs which we may hope soon to be able to reconstruct, as the geologist builds again a primæval monster from a single bone.

[End of vol. II]

Endnotes

Chapter VIII Notes

^4.1^ Day, 71. Here what is probably the more archaic form of the incident, namely, the gift of the life-token to at least one of the kin, is preserved. The hero of one of Afanasief’s Russian tales gives a cup or basin to his six companions. When the cup fills with blood they are to come in search of him. ii. Rev. Trad. Pop., 376. The gift to other than a kinsman is rare; but it occurs in the story of Prince Lionheart, and in a Karen tale mentioned just below.

^5.1^ Steel and Temple, 47.

^5.2^ Day, 189; Siddhi-Kür, 55; Busk, Sagas, 106.

^5.3^ i. Cosquin, 26, quoting xxxiv. Journ. As. Soc. Bengal, pt. 2, 225. In a Kabyle tale, apparently a variant of that given supra, vol. i. p. 60, the hero plants two rods, telling his half-brother to visit them every day: “if thou find mine dried up, know that I am dead.” De Charencey, Folklore, 142, citing René Basset, in vi. Giornale della Società asiatica italiana.

^5.4^ ii. F.L. Journ., 52.

^5.5^ Curtin, Russians, 239.

^5.6^ i. Cosquin, 220, citing Indian Ant. (1872), 115.

^6.1^ i. Cosquin, 248.

^6.2^ Rodd, 249.

^7.1^ Chatelain, 85, 278.

^7.2^ Legrand, 191.

^7.3^ Schneller, 68, Story No. 26.

^7.4^ Codrington, 401.

^8.1^ ii. F.L. Journ., 130.

^8.2^ Clouston, i. Pop. Tales, 171, citing Wilson’s Descr. Catalogue of Col. Mackenzie’s Oriental MSS.; Swynnerton, Ind. Nights, 336; Spitta Bey, 125.

^8.3^ Early Ideas, 130.

^8.4^ Leskien, 547; Wenzig, 140; Wratislaw, 55 (Story No. 9), from Kulda’s Moravian collection.

^8.5^ Denton, 273.

^8.6^ Jones and Kropf, 257, from Erdélyi.

^9.1^ Köhler, in a note, ii. Gonzenbach, 230, citing Simrock, No. 40.

^9.2^ iii. Suppl. Nights, 510; El Folk-lore Andaluz, 307; Maspons, Cuentos Pop. Cat. 82 (it is here given by an old man, not by the hero); i. Rond., 109; ii. Powell and Magnússon, 431; i. Rivista, 759.

^9.3^ i. Mélusine, 209.

^9.4^ Theal, 77.

^9.5^ ii. Von Hahn, 215.

^9.6^ Spitta Bey, loc. cit.; Maspons, i. Rond., loc. cit.; i. Mélusine, 210, 214; v. Rev. Trad. Pop., 737; Visentini, 206.

^9.7^ Burton, iv. Suppl. Nights, 245; Spitta Bey, loc. cit.

^9.8^ Garnett, i. Wom., 23.

^10.1^ i. Cosquin, 71; Imbriani, 88, 106, 108 (Stories Nos. 6 and 7); i. Comparetti, 27 (i. F.L. Record, 206), 274; Webster, 169; iv. Pitrè, 350. (In the last three cases the ring is the gift of the Beast to Beauty.) Leskien, 548. Clouston also refers to a ballad by Leyden. i. Pop. Tales, 171.

^10.2^ iv. Pitrè, 319 (Story No. 36); Crane, 17.

^10.3^ i. Comparetti, 26; Imbriani, 388; Leskien, 547; Jones and Kropf, 54, from Kriza.

^10.4^ ii. Von Hahn, 45.

^10.5^ Leskien, 372.

^10.6^ Ralston, Russian F.T., 66, from Afanasief.

^11.1^ Leskien, 548, citing Nowosielsky. The dish appears elsewhere in Russian tales for the same purpose in connection with a knife and a handkerchief. One would hardly have given the Russian peasantry credit for being so fastidious; but the explanation must be sought in the beliefs discussed in the following chapters.

^11.2^ Kalevala, runes 12, 15.

^11.3^ Rand, 83.

^11.4^ ii. Von Hahn, 15.

^11.5^ Popol Vuh, 79.

^11.6^ i. Folklore, 65.

^12.1^ Erminnie A. Smith, in ii. Rep. Bur. Ethn., 94.

^12.2^ Von Wlislocki, Armenier, 146.

^12.3^ Ralston, Russian F.T., 89, from Afanasief.

^12.4^ Zingerle, K.- und H.-Märchen, 116. A candle is often found as the life itself. Cf. i. Bib. Trad. Pop. Españ., 176, and a number of tales of Godfather Death.

^13.1^ iv. Pitrè, 329.

^13.2^ Leskien, 548, citing Afanasief, etc.

^13.3^ Leskien, 547.

^13.4^ Denton, 266.

^13.5^ Wardrop, 53.

^14.1^ Featherman, Papuo- and Malayo-Melanesians, 283.

^15.1^ The Fables and Rites of the Yncas, by Christoval de Molina, in Markham, Rites and Laws, 12.

^15.2^ Clouston, Lane’s Squire’s Tale, 299. This book was issued by the Chaucer Society. The Folk-Lore Society has obtained the right of reissuing it, with additions by Mr. Clouston; and it is to be hoped that this will be done ere long. As to modern practices in India, see also Burton, Sindh, 180; i. N. Ind. N. and Q. 85; iv. 51.

^16.1^ Apuleius, Discourse on Magic; Pröhle, Sagen, 232 (Story No. 173); Grimm, Teut. Myth. 1770, 1773, 1774, 1775, quoting Hartlieb’s Book of All Forbidden Arts (1455); Kohlrusch, 260, note, quoting the same. See also Scot, 211; ii. Brand, 604, note; Caxton, ii. Recuyell, 414; Ostermann, 151.

^16.2^ Von Wlislocki, Transs. Zig., 112 (Story No. 47).

^16.3^ Pröhle, Sagen, 32 (Story No. 6). A mirror in a Chinese tale had the property of fixing, or photographing, the face of any woman who looked into it. The image could only be obliterated by another woman, or the same woman in another dress, looking into it. ii. Giles, 32.

^16.4^ Lubbock, 253, quoting De Faira. Compare a Swedish tale in which a lover is shown his sweetheart, by a Lapp magician, in a bucket of water. Thorpe, ii. N. Myth., 55, from Afzelius.

^16.5^ Ellis, i. Polyn. Res., 378.

^17.1^ A. W. Moore, in v. Folklore, 214, citing N. and Q. (1852).

^17.2^ Winwood Reade, 252; Du Chaillu, Ashangoland, 173.

^17.3^ H. Ling Roth, in xxi. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 118.

^17.4^ Brinton, Cakchiquels, 43, 69, 27.

^17.5^ J. G. Bourke, in ix. Rep. Bur. Ethn., 461.

^17.6^ v. Am Urquell, 163; H. Carrington Bolton, in vi. Journ. Am. F.L., 25. Mr. Andrew Lang, in Cock Lane and Common Sense (London, 1894), 212, et sqq., has examined the practice of crystal-gazing. He brings his wide knowledge of savage and other superstitious purposes to bear upon the evidence, and comes to the conclusion that “we can scarcely push scepticism so far as to deny that the facts exist, that hallucinations are actually provoked,” by gazing into a ball of crystal or glass. Indeed, he suggests that something more than hallucination is provoked; but perhaps that is “only his fun.” He does not say it.

^18.1^ i. Comparetti, 269.

^18.2^ ii. Parkinson, 242. The story connected with this belief is, as Mr. Parkinson reproduces it, anything but traditional, and I lay no stress on it.

^18.3^ Pausanias, iii. 25; vii. 21.

^18.4^ Turner, Samoa, 101.

^19.1^ Busk, F.L. Rome, 117.

^19.2^ Cavallius, 81.

^19.3^ i. Crantz, 214.

^19.4^ iv. Rev. Trad. Pop., 287.

^19.5^ Hunt, 290, note, quoting Gilbert, ii. Parochial Hist. of Cornwall, 121. Montluck Well, Logan, and Saint Mary’s Well, Kilmorie, both in Wigtownshire, are resorted to for water for the sick. The waters of both have the property of appearing in abundance if the augury be favourable; if not, of diminishing. R. C. Hope, in xxviii. Antiquary, 68, quoting Symson’s Description of Galloway and iv. Statistical Account of Scotland.

^20.1^ ii. Brand, 263, note, quoting xii. Stat. Acc. Scot., 464. The spirits of wells often appear in animal form. See, for example, Von Wlislocki, Volksgl. Mag., 21. Cf. the water-bull and water-kelpie of Scotland.

^20.2^ ii. Brand, 272, note, quoting The Living Librarie, or Historical Meditations (1621), 284.

^21.1^ Dalyell, 506, quoting Gordon, MS. Notes and Observations.

^21.2^ Lubbock, 244.

^21.3^ Pausanias, vii. 21.

^21.4^ Rodd, 185.

^22.1^ Southey, iv. Commonplace Book, 240, quoting an article in the Monthly Magazine, March 1801, on Cambray’s Voyage dans le Finisterre.

^22.2^ ii. Brand, 267, note.

^22.3^ Drayton, Polyolbion, ix. 90; Sir Philip Sidney, The Seven Wonders of England, in Arber, ii. Eng. Garner, 183. Allusions to it by Burton, Increase Mather, and others, are quoted, v. N. and Q., 8th ser., 408; vi. 54.

^23.1^ Leonard Vair is quoted viii. Rev. Trad. Pop., 122; and Wolf, Nied. Sag., 259 (Story No. 162). Southey, iv. Commonplace Bk., 244, quotes the same story from another writer, doubtless copied from Vair. To dream of a dead fish is in Germany and Austria a presage of death. Compare also with the superstitions mentioned in the above paragraph the parallel superstition, of which effective use is often made in modern literature, and which represents a household clock stopping when the head of the family dies. At Pforzheim it was believed that when the palace clock was out of order one of the reigning family died. Grimm, Teut. Myth., 1756, 1806, 1801.

^23.2^ Grimm, i. D. Sagen, 162.

^23.3^ Von Wlislocki, Volksgl. Mag., 22.

^24.1^ vii. Rev. Trad. Pop., 760, quoting Rev. James Sibree in Proc. R. Geog. Soc. of London, Aug. 1891.

^25.1^ i. Tutinameh, 109.

^25.2^ i. Kathá, 86.

^25.3^ Swynnerton, Ind. Nights, 188.

^25.4^ Arany, cited by Köhler in his notes to Posilecheata, 209.

^25.5^ Rodd, 266.

^26.1^ ii. Risley, 89.

^26.2^ Southey, iv. Commonplace Bk., 244, quoting a note to Boswell’s Shakespeare. The editor, Rev. J. W. Warter, says that the custom was common enough within his recollection in Shropshire and Staffordshire.

^26.3^ Gerv. Tilb., 223, Liebrecht’s Appendix containing extracts from Jean Baptiste Thiers, Traité des Superstitions, 2nd ed., Paris, 1697.

^26.4^ x. Archivio, 30.

^27.1^ i. Child, 187, 201. Both variants of the Scottish ballad of Bonny Bee Horn also include the incident; and in one of them, not only does the ring change colour, but the stone bursts in three. ii. Child, 318.

^27.2^ Thorpe, Yule-tide Stories, 438, from Müllenhoff. It is a German superstition that if a woman lose her garter in the street her husband or lover is untrue. Grimm, Teut. Myth., 1782, 1824. To lose the wedding-ring is a presage of death. Ibid., 1808.

^27.3^ Von Wlislocki, Volksgl. Mag., 19.

^30.1^ Compare Sir John Lubbock’s remarks on the relation between divination and sorcery. Lubbock, 245.

^31.1^ Popol Vuh, 141, 191.

^31.2^ i. Cosquin, 71, citing Guérin, Vies des Saints.

^31.3^ Ellis, iii. Polyn. Res., 107.

^31.4^ Suet., Vesp., 5.

^31.5^ Taylor, 184.

^32.1^ Hooker, recording the evidence of a resident at Waimate, in i. Journ. Ethn. Soc., N.S., 72, 73.

^32.2^ Frazer, ii. Golden Bough, 329, citing Matthes, Bijdragen tot de Ethn. van Zuid-Celebes.

^32.3^ Burton, Wit and Wisd., 411.

^32.4^ Dr. A. Haas, in v. Am Urquell, 253; ii. Bartsch, 43. It seems that according to an old German superstition the water in which a baby is washed for the first time must be poured on trees. In the Canton of Berne it must be poured on a fruitful, or a young, tree; and the person charged with this duty must sing or shout, that the child may learn to sing or shout well. Ploss, i. Kind, 79, citing Rothenbach, Volksthüml. aus d. Canton Berne. A similar practice is found in Austria. Grimm, Teut. Myth., 1807. As a provision against ill-luck and witches among the Magyars, the water is thrown half on a crossway and half on a willow-tree. Von Wlislocki, Volksgl. Mag., 69. The Transylvanian Saxons, on the other hand, will not throw it where it may be trodden on, lest the child die, or at least lose its sleep. The proper place is beneath a tree, that the babe may strengthen. Ibid., Volksgl. Siebenb. Sachs., 154.

^33.1^ ii. Brand, 453, citing Grose.

^33.2^ J. M. Currier, in vi. Journ. Am. F.L., 69.

^34.1^ Ploss, i. Kind, 79, citing Williams and Calvert; Featherman, Papuo-Mel., 204.

^34.2^ Stoll, 68; Dorman, 293.

^34.3^ ii. Bancroft, 276. Was the future battlefield ascertained by divination? Or how could it be known? Or is there some misunderstanding on the part of the reporter? Compare the custom at Tashkend, whereby, at the birth of a boy, the father buries a mutton-bone, or, in the case of a girl, a rag-doll, under the floor of the room where the birth has taken place. Schuyler, i. Turkistan, 140.

^35.1^ ii. L’Anthropologie, 369, citing Jacobs and Meyer, Les Badoujs.

^35.2^ Rev. J. Macdonald, in xx. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 132; Frazer, ii. Golden Bough, 329, citing several authorities. See also Andree, ii. Ethnog. Par., 21.

^35.3^ Sibree, 278.

^36.1^ Quoted by Singer, ii. Zeits. des Vereins, 300.

^36.2^ Featherman, Oceano-Mel., 85.

^36.3^ Ploss, i. Kind, 78, 79, citing Rochholz, Alemann. Kinderlied und Kinderspiel. See also Mannhardt, i. Baumcultus, 49, et seqq. A custom similar to the Piedmontese is practised by the Mohammedans of Malabar, who plant a number of seeds of the Brazil-wood (Cæsalpinia Sappan) at the birth of a daughter, whose dowry the trees become when grown to maturity. Yule, ii. Marco Polo, 315, note.

^37.1^ De Gubernatis, i. Myth. Plantes, xxviii.

^37.2^ Monseur, 37; ii. Bull. de F.L., 148.

^37.3^ Norman G. Mitchell-Innes, in v. F.L. Journ., 223. Compare the related superstition mentioned ante, vol. i., p. 179. We perhaps find in Tirolese folklore a relic of the same superstition in the belief that children are fetched from a sacred tree. Zingerle, Sitten, 2, 100; Sagen, 110. I have already (ante, vol. i., p. 154, note) referred to the English saying that children come out of the parsley-bed, and (ibid., p. 151, note) to the fancy of mothers in the New Hebrides that a child is connected in origin with a cocoa-nut, bread-fruit, or some such object.

^37.4^ Mrs. F. D. Bergen, in iv. Journ. Am. F.L., 152. Mrs. Bergen informs me she obtained this on “the eastern peninsula of Maryland, near Chestertown, opposite Baltimore.”

^38.1^ Leland, Gip. Sorc., 53. Compare a German superstition, Grimm, Teut. Myth., 1818 (956).

^38.2^ Gregor, 148.

^38.3^ The shrubbery grew from a laurel wreath dropped, in a chicken’s beak, by an eagle into Livia’s bosom after her marriage. Suet., Galba, 1.

^38.4^ Yule, i. Marco Polo, 394 (bk. ii., ch. 28).

^39.1^ Bernau, 59.

^39.2^ Mannhardt, i. Baumcultus, 48.

^39.3^ Frazer, ii. Golden Bough, 329. Mr. Frazer also notices that in the Cameroons the life of a person is believed to be sympathetically bound up with that of a tree; but it does not appear how this is believed to arise. Here, perhaps, I may call the attention of students to the following superstitions as yet unexplained. The Makololo of the Zambesi Valley object to plant mangoes, lest they die. (Does the mango in growing absorb the planter’s life?) The native Portuguese of Tette think that a man who plants coffee will never be happy after. Livingstone, Zambesi, 47. In Southern India the person who sows cocoa-nut seed is expected to die when the trees which grow from the seeds he has planted bear fruit. Pandit Natesa Sastri, in i. N. Ind. N. and Q., 101. On Bowditch Island in the South Pacific Ocean cocoa-nuts could only be planted on the king’s death: he who planted them at other times would die. Lister, in xxi. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 54. In Devonshire and Gloucestershire parsley must not be transplanted. Dyer, 3; County F.L., Gloucestershire, 54. I have found the superstition still rife in Gloucestershire.

^39.4^ Featherman, Papuo-Mel., 152.

^40.1^ Von Wlislocki, in iii. Am Urquell, 9.

^40.2^ Ploss, ii. Kind, 221.

^40.3^ Prof. V. M. Mikhailovskii, translated by O. Wardrop, in xxiv. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 83.

^41.1^ ii. Journ. Am. F.L., 187.

^41.2^ v. Records of the Past, N.S., ix. Prof. Sayce has some little doubt about the reading; but the sense appears clear enough.

^41.3^ “The squaws generally agreed that they had discovered life enough in them [the portraits he had painted] to render my medicine too great for the Mandans, saying that such an operation could not be performed without taking away from the original something of his existence, which I put in the picture, and they could see it move, could see it stir.… A great many have become again alarmed, and are unwilling to sit, for fear, as some say, that they will die prematurely if painted; and as others say, that if they are painted the picture will live after they are dead, and they cannot sleep quiet in their graves.” i. Catlin, 107, 109.

^42.1^ ii. Witzschel, 251. Cf. the superstition known from Britain to Transylvania, that if bread in baking start, or a glass in the house break without apparent cause, there will be a death.

^42.2^ Backhouse, 104.

^43.1^ i. Cosquin, 71.

^43.2^ Ostermann, 476.

^43.3^ Jones and Kropf, lxiv.

^43.4^ Tanner, 155.

^44.1^ Miss Owen, Old Rabbit, 178, 169.

^44.2^ i. Giles, 306.

^44.3^ Pliny, Nat. Hist., xxix. 22; Jevons, Plutarch’s Romane Questions, xlvii. See a curious tale pointing to a modern survival of this belief, Pigorini-Beri, 58. In Switzerland at the present day, if a peasant have a son born and a foal or lamb dropped at the same time, the same name is given to both. Ploss, i. Kind, 189. Among the Poles (who have, it may be remarked, a great regard for snakes) a secret connection is believed to exist between cattle and lizards. Every cow is held to have a particular lizard as its guardian. If the lizard be killed, the cow will die, or at least will give blood instead of milk. iii. Am Urquell, 272. This can hardly be said to favour Mr. Frazer’s totemistic theory. See also vii. Rep. Bur. Ethn., 152; Burton, Wit and Wisd., 390. The belief in widely separated countries like Sardinia and India that it is lucky to have a snail in the house appears to be connected with this superstition. See i. Rivista, 221.

^45.1^ Rev. J. Macdonald, in xx. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 131; Lubbock, 245, quoting Arbousset’s Tour to the Cape of Good Hope.

^45.2^ Le Page Renouf, in xi. Proc. Soc. Bibl. Arch., 185, citing Amélineau’s translation. Compare the life-token in the story of The Two Brothers, suprà, vol. i., p. 183.

^46.1^ Prof. Haddon, in xix. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 326.

^46.2^ Le Braz, 6.

^47.1^ Banks, The Albion Queens, quoted by Prof. Dr. George Stephens in ii. F.L. Record, 200; Gregor, 204; Von Wlislocki, Volksgl. Siebenb. Sachs., 190. In an Icelandic tale three drops of blood fall on the knife while eating, to announce a brother’s death. iii. Am Urquell, 5, citing Arnason.

^47.2^ Grimm, Teut. Myth., 1837; Thorpe, ii. Northern Myth., 273: both quoting Thiele.

^47.3^ Grimm, Teut. Myth., 1744, 1745.

^48.1^ Kuhn und Schwartz, 436.

^48.2^ Suffolk County F.L., 30.

^48.3^ Grimm, Teut. Myth., 1788. Compare the Sardinian augury from piles of salt. i. Rivista, 221.

^48.4^ Herrmann, in iv. Zeits. des Vereins, 310, 311.

^48.5^ L. L. Duncan, in v. Folklore, 192; vi. Journ. Am. F.L., 261.

^48.6^ ii. Witzschel, 254. Auguries as to the following harvest are drawn by the Huzules from the burning of fruit with beechen brands on New Year’s Night. Kaindl, 73. As to auguries at a baptism from the putting out of the candle, see xii. Archivio, 530.

^49.1^ Kuhn und Schwartz, 431; Thorpe, iii. N. Myth., 160. At Buvrinner in Hainaut pilgrimages are often made on behalf of the sick. On such an occasion candles are lighted on the altar of the saint invoked. If the flame be steady, it is a good sign; if it be wavering, a bad sign. ix. Rev. Trad. Pop., 489.

^49.2^ Grimm, Teut. Myth., 1790, 1793.

^49.3^ ii. Powell and Magnússon, 641, from Arnason.

^49.4^ Plutarch, Rom. Quest., No. 75.

^49.5^ ii. Witzschel, 226, 231; Grimm, Teut. Myth., 1843, 1794; Finamore, Trad. Pop. Abr., 52; Ostermann, 348, 476; Krauss, Sitte und Brauch, 396; Le Braz, 5. Compare the “wedding candlestick” at an Irish wedding, v. Folklore, 188. In the province of Siena the chances of life are calculated according as the candle in the church gives greater or less light. xiii. Archivio, 412.

^50.1^ Grimm, Teut. Myth., 1835; Thorpe, iii. N. Myth., 271: both quoting Thiele.

^50.2^ Von Wlislocki, Volksgl. Siebenb. Sachs., 56, 75; iv. Zeits. des Vereins, 316.

^50.3^ Taylor, 205 (cf. also, 178); Lubbock, 245, citing Yate’s New Zealand.

^51.1^ Von Wlislocki, Volksgl. Zig., 148.

^51.2^ Moore, 125, 140; v. Folklore, 214.

Chapter IX Notes

^56.1^ ii. Von Hahn, 33, referred to suprà, vol. i., p. 81.

^56.2^ Suprà, vol. i., p. 213; Jülg, 53; Ovid, Metam., viii. 848. So in the island of Florida, when a man sells a pig he takes back its tarunga, or soul, in a dracæna-leaf, which he hangs up in his house, not, however, to recall the identical animal sold, but to animate another pig, when littered. Codrington, 249. This explains a custom in the south of France. When a farmer sells a calf he cuts off a piece of its hair and makes the cow swallow it, “so that she may not regret her calf, and that a better price may be got for it.” ix. Rev. Trad. Pop., 581. The original reason doubtless was that the calf might be born again of her.

^57.1^ See, among others, Schott, 198 (Story No. 18); Pineau, F.L., 145 (Story No. 5); Luzel, ii. Contes Pop., 95 (Story No. 5); Coelho, 33 (Story No. 15); Luzel, Le Magicien, 28, citing Straparola, Night viii., Story 5; Visentini, 37 (Story No. 8).

^57.2^ Steel, 15; Gibb, 255.

^57.3^ Dorsey, Cegiha, 56; Rand, 196, 248; vii. Journ. Am. F.L., 210.

^58.1^ See, among others, Dozon, 89 (Story No. 12); Von Wlislocki, Transs. Zig., 111 (Story No. 47); Volksdicht., 286 (Story No. 44); Romero, 4 (Story No. 1); ii. Stumme, 62 (Story No. 4); Büttner, 122; Georgeakis, 72 (Story No. 11); Wardrop, 30. In many cases the severed member has the power, which would have belonged to its owner, of changing the hero, so long as it is in his possession, into an animal of the same kind. For instance, Wolf, Deutsche Märchen, 88 (Story No. 20); Poestion, 212 (Story No 51); i. Cosquin, 166 (Story No. 15); Carnoy, Contes Franç., 276; i. Comparetti, 240 (Story No. 55); v. Pitrè, 215 (variant of Story No. 81), 386 (Story No. 106); i. Finamore, pt. i., 90 (Story No. 19).

^58.2^ Schneller, 47 (Story No. 21). The spell is more usually performed by the aid of some toy given by the hero, as in iv. Pitrè, 342 (Story No. 38).

^59.1^ Jahn, Volkssagen, 148 (Story No. 182). In a Micmac legend the hero is bidden to take a handful of hair of the moose or any other animal rolled up between fingers and thumb, and blow it away. He will then be able to see all the animals of that kind for a long distance around. Rand, 358.

^60.1^ H. Ling Roth, in xxi. Journ. Anthrop. Inst., 112. The Kayans, one of the peoples of Borneo, employ the teeth of tiger-cats in taking an oath. The person swearing holds the teeth in his hand and calls on them to harm him if he be not speaking the truth. This seems to be another example of the same superstition. C. Hose, in xxiii. ibid., 165.

^60.2^ ii. Grundtvig, 115.

^61.1^ Wratislaw, 115 (Story No. 17), from Glinski.

^61.2^ Woycicki, 128. The story is a fragment. The incident it contains usually forms the opening of the Catskin type of Cinderella stories. See Miss Cox’s Cinderella, passim.

^62.1^ Grimm, i. Tales, 414, 224 (Story No. 56 and variant).

^62.2^ Theal, 123, 118. Compare the power of self-reconstitution from a feather in the Cegiha tale referred to on p. 57.

^62.3^ Dorsey, 18. Parallel with the development of the Life-token, we find the spittle or blood sometimes omitted, and objects, which have never been part of the heroine, endowed at her command with the power of answering in her name. See vii. Rev. Trad. Pop., 29; Rand, 163.

^63.1^ Von Wlislocki, in iii. Am Urquell, 66.

^63.2^ Grimm, ii. Tales, 10 (Story No. 89).

^65.1^ The Earl himself presided at some of the examinations, though it is fair to say that, so far as appears, the charges of bewitching his children were not gone into before him. The British Solomon, his royal master, was not so scrupulous. ii. Nichols, pt. i., App. ix., 70, reprinting a pamphlet of 1619, giving a full report of the case.

^65.2^ G. B. Corsi, in x. Archivio, 30; Leland, Etruscan, 329. An extraordinary ritual for this purpose is quoted by De Mensignac from Éliphas Lévi. De Mensignac, 45. Another prescription quoted by Leland (Etruscan, 241) is for the maiden to take some of her faithless lover’s hair and to invoke the aid of Saint Elisha against him, at midnight in a cellar.

^66.1^ Felicina Giannini-Finucci, in xi. Archivio, 448. It seems enough in Lucca for a deserted girl to wind her own hair round the toad’s legs, or to introduce it into a cigar, in order to cause anguish to her betrayer. Ibid., 453.

^66.2^ xvii. Pitrè, 115. See also Zanetti, 234; i. Rivista, 134, 319; Ostermann, 511; De Mensignac, 48, note; Andree, ii. Ethnog. Par., 11, 12; Grimm, Teut. Myth., 1799, 1836; Zingerle, Sitten, 28.

^66.3^ Leland, Etruscan, 328. (The other substance was illegible in the manuscript charm supplied to Mr. Leland. Compare the Tirolese tale cited above, p. 58.) Ostermann, 517.

^66.4^ Addy, 74. Bodin, 369, relates a curious tale of a lascivious devil who got a girl into his power by inducing her to give him a lock of her hair. Barham has made powerful use of this incident in the Ingoldsby Leg. (“A Passage in the Life of the late H. Harris, D.D.”).

^67.1^ Monseur, 91; i. Mélusine, 79, citing Auguste Hock; E. Polain, in ii. Bull. de F.L., 145; J. B. Andrews, in ix. Rev. Trad. Pop., 256. In the Tirol hairs not spit upon before being thrown away are used by witches in the manufacture of hailstones and storms. Zingerle, Sitten, 28.

^67.2^ O. Schell, in iii. Am Urquell, 211; Von Wlislocki, Volksgl. Siebenb. Sachs., 150.

^67.3^ Schiffer, in iii. Am Urquell, 151, citing Federowski.

^67.4^ Featherman, Turanians, 510.

^68.1^ Von Wlislocki, Volksgl. der Mag., 136; Volksgl. Siebenb. Sachs., 201.

^68.2^ Von Wlislocki, Volksleben Mag., 78.

^68.3^ W. J. Hoffman, M.D., in ii. Journ. Am. F.L., 32.

^68.4^ Kane, 216.

^68.5^ Mrs. S. S. Allison, in xxi. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 314. On the Rio Grande people are warned to burn their hair, and not to throw it in the path of others, lest it do the latter harm, and never to pick up human hair lying in the road, especially women’s. J. G. Bourke, in vii. Journ. Am. F.L., 136. This is an inversion of the ordinary superstition.

^68.6^ Featherman, Aoneo-Mar., 447.

^69.1^ Lieut. Musters, in i. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 197; Featherman, Chiapo-Mar., 499; Bourke, 346.

^69.2^ Von den Steinen, 343.

^69.3^ Andree, ii. Ethnog. Par., 14.

^69.4^ Ellis, i. Polyn. Res., 364.

^69.5^ E. Tregear, in xix. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 116; Featherman, Oceano-Mel., 213.

^70.1^ Rev. Dr. Codrington, in x. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 283.

^70.2^ Codrington, 203; Featherman, Oceano-Mel., 93.

^70.3^ Lubbock, 246, quoting Fiji and the Fijians.

^70.4^ H. O. Forbes, in xiii. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 17.

^71.1^ Dawson 36, 55.

^71.2^ A. W. Howitt, in xvi. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 27; i. Curr, 46; iii. 178, 547; Andree, ii. Ethnog. Par., 14; Roth, 77. Cf. Bourke, 146.

^72.1^ xiii. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 17.

^72.2^ Andree, ii. Ethnog. Par., 13; Wilken, Haaropfer, 80; both citing Riedel.

^72.3^ iv. N. Ind. N. and Q., 35, quoting Settlement Report by Mr. F. C. Channing.

^72.4^ Burton, Sindh, 179.

^72.5^ ix. Rev. Trad. Pop., 252, citing Voyages d’Ali Bey el Abassi.

^72.6^ ii. Risley, 208.

^73.1^ Ellis, Ewe-speaking Peoples, 99.

^73.2^ Livingstone, Zambesi, 46.

^73.3^ Casalis, 292. For similar superstitions see Featherman, Nigr., 185, 475; v. Mélusine, 258; Andree, ii. Ethnog. Par., 13, citing Buchner, Fritsch and Hildebrandt; Du Chaillu, Equat. Afr., 427.

^73.4^ ii. Antigua, 65.

^74.1^ Congress Report (1891), 244, 235.

^74.2^ iii. Am Urquell, 5.

^74.3^ Grimm, Teut. Myth., 1822.

^74.4^ Von Wlislocki, in iv. Am Urquell, 69. In Hungary the sole of the corpse’s left foot must be rubbed with the blood.

^75.1^ A. F. Dörfler, in iv. Am Urquell, 268, 269, 270; Von Wlislocki, Volksleb. Mag., 70, 71.

^75.2^ iv. Folklore, 358, 361.

^75.3^ But why, as in India, should stolen images of gods be held more valuable than any others? See iii. N. Ind. N. and Q., 118.

^76.1^ vii. Rep. Bur. Ethn., 392.

^76.2^ Ensign Niblack, in Rep. Nat. Mus. (1888), 354, quoting Dunn’s History of the Oregon Territory.

^76.3^ See, in addition to cases already cited, Kane, 216; De Mensignac, 47, et seqq.; E. Tregear, in xix. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 123; i. Binger, 113.

^76.4^ Codrington, 203. Even a stone drawn out of a sick man’s body by a medicine-man among the aborigines of Hayti seems to have been regarded in the same magical light. The patient was adjured to “keep it safe.” H. Ling Roth, in xvi. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 254.

^77.1^ Dawson, 12, 54; iii. Curr, 178, 547; Featherman, Oceano-Mel., 93; Papuo-Mel., 479; Ellis, Ewe-speaking Peoples, 99; iii. Am Urquell, 150, 269 (a Magyar belief as to the cause of a woman’s barrenness; see also Von Wlislocki, Volksleb. Mag., 76); iv., 211; Zingerle, Sitten, 73; ii. Witzschel, 270; i. Mélusine, 348; Monseur, 92; Bourke, 146, 153, 378, 390, 465; Von Wlislocki, Volksgl. Siebenb. Sachs., 52; Andree, ii. Ethnog. Par., 11, 16. The same superstition seems referred to in an ancient Egyptian festival song, lii. Archæologia, 408, 471.

^77.2^ F. Bonney, in xiii. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 128.

^78.1^ A. W. Howitt, in xiii. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 456.

^78.2^ E. Polain, in ii. Bulletin de Folklore, 10.

^78.3^ Mrs. Latham, in i. F.L. Record, 44; County F.L., Suffolk, 132.

^78.4^ For a similar reason Pythagoras also directed his disciples on rising from bed to shake out the impress of the body. Clem. Alex., Stromata, v. See also Diog. Laert., Vita Pyth., xvii.

^79.1^ Andree, ii. Ethnog. Par., 8, 9, 11, 12; P. Sartori, in iv. Zeits. des Vereins, 42, 43, citing various authorities; Am Urquell, 289; Grimm, Teut. Myth., 1747, 1798, 1799, 1814, 1819. A horse may be lamed by thrusting a knife or nail into his fresh footprint. Ibid., 1821, 1823.

^79.2^ xii. Archivio, 536; Leland, Etruscan, 301; iv. Zeits. des Vereins, 42, 43. There is a curious Assyrian incantation from Assurbanipal’s collection, the translation of which is uncertain, but which appears to refer to these practices. Lenormant renders the line: “He has torn my garment and dragged it in the dust of my feet.” This is not a sorcerer’s proceeding; and it is of a sorcerer that complaint is made. Dr. Bartels gives, I know not whence, the more probable reading: “He has torn my clothes and mixed his magical herb with the dust of my feet.” Lenormant, 61; Bartels, 34. Dr. Bartels deliberately deprives his works of the greater part of their value by his omission of references.

^80.1^ Von Wlislocki, Volksleb. Mag., 81.

^80.2^ ii. Train, 157.

^80.3^ Moore, 95. Cf. Prof. Rhys, in ii. Folklore, 298.

^80.4^ County F.L., Suffolk, 201.

^80.5^ iv. Journ. Amer. F.L., 254, 152.

^81.1^ J. H. Porter, in vii. Journ. Amer. F.L., 113.

^81.2^ Tylor, Early Hist., 119. They are said also to stick poisoned claws of animals into the footprints. iv. Zeits. des Vereins, 43.

^81.3^ H. Ling Roth, in xxii. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 235, citing A. R. Colquhoun, Amongst the Shans.

^81.4^ Ellis, Ewe-speaking Peoples, 94.

^81.5^ A. W. Howitt, in xvi. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 26.

^81.6^ Dawson, 54.

^82.1^ Hoffman, in vii. Rep. Bur. Ethn., 221.

^82.2^ F. H. Cushing, in ii. Rep. Bur. Ethn., 120.

^82.3^ iv. Zeits. des Vereins, 43.

^82.4^ Von Wlislocki, Volksgl. Sieb. Sachs., 120.

^82.5^ i. Sax. Leechd., 392. The words “into the hoof-track,” are not expressed; but the translator is almost certainly right in supplying them.

^83.1^ Powell, 171.

^83.2^ Codrington, 183, 188; iv. Rep. Austr. Ass., 711. Cf. Codrington, 49, 52 note, 203; B. T. Somerville, in xxiii. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 19.

^84.1^ Codrington, in x. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 309.

^84.2^ See for example Dawson, 54; i. Curr, 46, 49; ii. 245, 247; iii. 547; A. W. Howitt, in xvi. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 29; Featherman, Papuo-Mel., 53, 76, 179, 222; Oceano-Mel., 55, 93, 213; Turner, Polynesia, 89; Ellis, i. Polyn. Res., 364; viii. Rev. Trad. Pop., 59; Andree, ii. Ethnog. Par., 15, 16; Letourneau, L’Év. Rel., 39, citing Taplin; Lubbock, 246, 250. Was not some reason of this kind at the bottom of the taboo mentioned by Lubbock, 453?

^84.3^ Rev. J. Batchelor, in vii. Journ. Am. F.L., 36.

^84.4^ Von Wlislocki, Volksgl. Mag., 84, 88.

^85.1^ i. Zeits. des Vereins, 189.

^85.2^ Knoop, Posen, 88.

^85.3^ Grimm, Teut. Myth., 1784, 1805.

^85.4^ Monseur, 90; Ostermann, 515. Cf. Science of Fairy Tales, 142, et seqq. There is a custom almost universal among the aborigines of America of preserving the bones of animals eaten; but it cannot at present be certainly ascribed to the order of ideas treated of in this chapter. I reserve it, therefore, for further investigation.

^86.1^ viii. Rev. Trad. Pop., 331, quoting Gmelin, Voyage en Sibérie.

^86.2^ Von Wlislocki, Volksgl. Sieb. Sachs., 160.

^86.3^ W. J. Hoffman, M.D., in ii. Journ. Am. F.L., 32.

^86.4^ Andree, ii. Ethnog. Par., 12.

^87.1^ xviii. Pitrè, 129.

^87.2^ J. B. Andrews, in ix. Rev. Trad. Pop., 255.

^87.3^ Leland, Etruscan, 354.

^87.4^ G. Sajaktzis, in iv. Zeits. des Vereins, 142. The Belgian prescription is to throw the babe’s first bathwater on the fire, never into the street or the ordinary sewer, for fear of spells. ii. Bull. de F.L., 144. Cf. the German superstition that to rock an empty cradle deprives the baby of rest. Grimm, Teut. Myth., 1778.

^87.5^ J. Tuchmann, in vi. Mélusine, 108, 115. In Posen a shred of the bedclothes of the supposed witch is hung in the chimney. If a child be the victim, a bit of the witch’s clothing is burnt and the child fumigated with the smoke. Knoop, Posen, 87, 88. In the Abruzzi, a portion of the witch’s dress is simply put on the affected animal. Finamore, Trad. Pop. Abr., 178.

^88.1^ Von Wlislocki, Volksdicht., 154.

^88.2^ Featherman, Nigritians, 347.

^88.3^ Theal, 78.

^88.4^ xvi. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 29; i. Curr, 46; Dawson, 54.

^88.5^ Featherman, Oceano-Mel., 213; Lubbock, 247, quoting Tanner. Similar was the belief of the people of the New Hebrides. xxiii. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 19.

^89.1^ iv. Rep. Austr. Ass., 653.

^89.2^ Featherman, Oceano-Mel., 137.

^89.3^ Countess Martinengo-Cesaresco, 242.

^89.4^ ii. Witzschel, 252, 258, 260; Grimm, Teut. Myth., 1823, 1837; Von Wlislocki, Volksgl. Sieb. Sachs., 196; Strack, 56, quoting Mannhardt. Especially, says Witzschel, if the survivor have perspired in it.

^90.1^ iii. Am Urquell, 53; Töppen, 101.

^90.2^ Von Wlislocki, Volksgl. Sieb. Sachs., 199, 200, 195.

^90.3^ ii. Witzschel, 258.

^90.4^ Featherman, Chiapo-Mar., 277.

^90.5^ Reclus, 103.

^91.1^ Ploss, i. Weib, 504. Compare with this the Austrian superstition that if women come in while another is in labour they shall quickly take their aprons off and tie them round her, or they will be barren themselves. Grimm, Teut. Myth., 1806. That is to say, the aprons will, when restored to their owners, be a bond of connection between them and the child-bearing woman, so as to communicate to them her virtue.

^92.1^ De Acosta, 378.

^92.2^ Ellis, iii. Polyn. Res., 108. Cf. Murdoch, in ix. Rep. Bur. Ethn., 438; Turner, Polynesia, 338; Roth, 76; Bourke, in vii. Journ. Am. F.L., 120.

^93.1^ Featherman, Nigr., 111.

^93.2^ Speke, 531.

^93.3^ Prof. Rhys, in iii. Folklore, 84.

^93.4^ Moore, 82.

^93.5^ Grimm, Teut. Myth., 1830, 1846.

^93.6^ Andree, ii. Ethnog. Par., 11.

^94.1^ Zingerle, Sitten, 73; Featherman, Papuo-Mel., 222. At Mentone, sorcery upon cattle may be counteracted by making the animal eat vegetables stolen from the witch. ix. Rev. Trad. Pop., 255.

^94.2^ Bartels, 31.

^94.3^ Roth, in xxii. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 56.

^95.1^ i. Brand, 11, note; Henderson, 74; Prof. Haddon, in iv. Folklore, 357; ii. Witzschel, 278; Grimm, Teut. Myth., 1781, 1798, 1812; Töppen, 72, 91; Wolf, Niederl. Sag., 475 (Story No. 391). Illustrations might be multiplied indefinitely.

^95.2^ i. Crantz, 215.

^95.3^ Chandra Roy’s English translation of the Mahabh., quoted by Clouston, iv. Folklore, 256.

^95.4^ Turner, Polynesia, 319.

^96.1^ iii. Bancroft, 507.

^96.2^ i. Garcilasso, 220.

^96.3^ Dr. Meyners d’Estrey, in iv. L’Anthropologie, 625, citing and reviewing Baron van Hœvell, Todjo, Posso, et Saousou.

^96.4^ Josh. vii. 24-26.

^97.1^ i. De Groot, 60.

^97.2^ Grimm, Teut. Myth., 1780, 1782, 1803, 1806.

^99.1^ Ellis, Ewe-speaking Peoples, 95, 98.

^99.2^ Lubbock, 246, quoting Pinkerton.

^99.3^ Ibid., citing Williams, Fiji and the Fijians.

^99.4^ ii. Rep. Austr. Assn., 341.

^100.1^ xvii. Pitrè, 129.

^100.2^ Dr. Krauss, in iii. Am Urquell, 174. The words of the spell indicate a wider object than the specific one mentioned.

^101.1^ Bodin, 337, 367, citing Saint Jerome’s Life of Saint Hilarion. Concerning Hilarion’s sense of smell, see Middleton, 89.

^101.2^ Turner, Polynesia, 394.

^101.3^ i. Macdonald, 204.

^101.4^ Von Wlislocki, Volksgl. Sieb. Sachs., 118.

^101.5^ B. W. Schiffer, in iii. Am Urquell, 200.

^102.1^ Töppen, 101.

^102.2^ vii. Rev. Trad. Pop., 617.

^103.1^ Henderson, 223, 175. See also Addy, 73, 79, 80, for analogous examples in this country.

^103.2^ Scot, 219.

^104.1^ Quoted by Liebrecht, Gerv. Tilb., 119, 220, from Jean Bapt. Thiers, Traité des Superstitions, 1697. Modern examples may be found in iii. Am Urquell, 84; Von Wlislocki, Volksgl. Mag., 75; vi. Mélusine, 32. The psalm is cix. in our Bibles.

^105.1^ I have given two versions of this legend, vi. F.L. Journal, 125. See also iv. Mélusine, 122; Sauvé, 238; Thorpe, iii. N. Myth., 9, from Müllenhoff; Müller, Siebenb. Sagen, 148.

^105.2^ Knoop, in iii. Zeits. des Volksk., 233.

^107.1^ Emma Altmann, in iv. Zeits. f. Volksk., 271.

^107.2^ Thorpe, ii. N. Myth., 189, from Thiele. An analogous case is given by Ostermann, 515, as occurring at Friuli.

^107.3^ ii. Folklore, 292.

^107.4^ Ellis, Ewe-speaking Peoples, 51.

^108.1^ C. A. Frazer, in vi. Journ. Am. F.L., 191.

^108.2^ ii. Witzschel, 267; Wolf, Nied. Sagen, 343; Grimm, Teut. Myth., 1803. The superstition has been carried in this form by Germans across the Atlantic. iv. Journ. Am. F.L., 324; vii. 114.

^108.3^ Von Wlislocki, Volksgl. Zig., 111.

^109.1^ County F.L., Suffolk, 190, quoting Zincke’s Materials for the History of Wherstead.

^109.2^ Edward Peacock, in ii. F.L. Journ., 122, quoting Drakard’s Stamford News for 15th Oct. 1833.

^110.1^ vi. N. and Q., 8th ser., 6, quoting letter from Mr. W. H. Berry in the Diss Express of 23rd March 1894.

^110.2^ Grimm, Teut. Myth., 1800, 1803.

^110.3^ J. Tuchmann, in iv. Mélusine, 320, citing Wuttke.

^110.4^ Ibid., citing a variety of cases; Monseur, 92; Liebrecht, Gerv. Tilb., 219, quoting Thiers, Traité des Superstitions; ii. Witzschel, 270; Grimm, Teut. Myth., 1805, 1824; Atkinson, 104; Henderson, 218, 221; F. Starr, in iv. Journ. Am. F.L., 324; J. H. Porter, in vii. ibid., 116. Cf. Knoop, Posen, 79.

^111.1^ Scot, 230, quoting M. Mal. Bodin gives from Spranger substantially the same account. Bodin, 334. See also iv. Mélusine, 320.

^111.2^ vi. Mélusine, 229; Von Wlislocki, Volksgl. Mag., 156; ii. Witzschel, 270; iii. Am Urquell, 238. Cf. a weird story, ibid., 317.

^111.3^ Tuchmann, in vi. Mélusine, 229.

^111.4^ iv. Mélusine, 320; vi. 89; ii. Witzschel, 265; iv. Journ. Am. F.L., 126.

^112.1^ iv. Journ. Am. F.L., 126; vi. 70; Bodin, 333; vi. Mélusine, 228.

^112.2^ ii. Dobrizhoffer, 267.

^112.3^ Töppen, 35.

^112.4^ Henderson, 187.

^112.5^ County F.L., Suffolk, 192, 202. See an elaborate spell, Henderson, 220.

^113.1^ Nichols, loc. cit.

^113.2^ Wolf, Nied. Sagen, 376, quoting De Lancre, Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et démons (Paris, 1613), 348.

^113.3^ iv. Zeits. f. Volksk. 257.

^114.1^ R. Scot, 66; Wolf, Nied. Sagen, 346; Monseur, 92; Harou, 54; Tuchmann, in vi. Mélusine, 89; iv., 320; C. Dirksen, in iv. Zeits. des Vereins, 324. An Italian woman whose milk was deficient enclosed a drop or two in a nutshell, with similar results on the witch. Ostermann, 376.

^114.2^ Georgeakis, 342.

^114.3^ i. Rivista, 386, 462, 935; vi. Mélusine, 108.

^115.1^ Leland, Etruscan, 360, quoting the Secolo of Milan for 3rd March 1891. See also ibid., 282, 359, 361; Ostermann, 519. Midnight is in general the proper time for performing the ceremony of boiling.

Chapter X Notes

^118.1^ Von Wlislocki, Volksgl. Zig., 134.

^118.2^ ii. Laisnel de la Salle, 24.

^118.3^ H. Prahn, in i. Zeits. des Vereins, 182.

^119.1^ Von Wlislocki, Volksgl. Zig., 134.

^119.2^ Ibid., Volksleb. Mag., 34; iv. Kobert, 82.

^119.3^ Wilken, Haaropfer, 80. For the Wendish maiden an alternative is “eine unpaarige Zahl Haare vom Gemächte ganz klein zu schneiden, dass sie nicht mehr sichtbar sind, und in Kartoffelen den Geliebten genieszen zu lassen.” Conversely, “wenn bei den Wenden ein Bursche von einem Mädchen geliebt sein will, so soll er sich Haare von ihrem Gemächte verschaffen, sie in eine Nähnadel einfädeln und so bei sich tragen.” Ibid.

^119.4^ Von Wlislocki, Siebenb. Sachs., 57.

^119.5^ Bourke, 219, quoting a story from Paullini, Dreck Apotheke (Frankfort, 1696).

^120.1^ Von Wlislocki, Volksgl. Zig., 82, 203. The last seems also a Transylvanian Saxon charm. Ibid., Siebenb. Sachs., 203.

^120.2^ Ibid., Volksleb. Mag., 78; ii. Brand, 605, quoting The Comical Pilgrim’s Pilgrimage into Ireland.

^121.1^ A. F. Dörfler, in iii. Am Urquell, 269. A still more repulsive Gipsy charm is reported by Dr. von Wlislocki, in which the hair, saliva, blood, nail-parings, etc., of the man are worked up into a dough and formed into a rough figure supposed to represent him. The treatment of the figure is analogous to the other cases cited. Volksgl. Zig., 104.

^121.2^ Leland, Gip. Sorc., 134. I have not traced the authority for this: probably it is Dr. von Wlislocki.

^121.3^ Wilken, Haaropfer, 79, citing Von Schulenburg, Wendisches Volksthum.

^121.4^ F. Starr, in iv. Journ. Am. F.L., 323.

^121.5^ Apuleius, Golden Ass, iii.

^122.1^ Wilken, Haaropfer, 79, citing Wuttke. Wilken also mentions, but does not detail, a hair-philtre among the Alfurs of Buru, in the East Indies.

^122.2^ Krauss, Sitte und Brauch, 168, citing Vuk.

^122.3^ Julie Filippi, in ix. Rev. Trad. Pop., 462. The same tale is told at Friuli concerning the amours of a Benedictine monk of the abbey of Moggio. Ostermann, 317. See also supra, p. 66.

^122.4^ i. Mannhardt, 48.

^122.5^ Von den Steinen, 558.

^123.1^ Wilken, Haaropfer, 80 notes, citing Wuttke.

^123.2^ Gregor, 86; Monseur, 34; ii. Witzschel, 286; Prahn, in i. Zeits. des Vereins, 182; iii. Am Urquell, 59; v., 81; Von Wlislocki, Volksleb. Mag. 76; Bourke, 216.

^123.3^ Von Wlislocki, Volksleb. Mag., 34.

^123.4^ Tuchmann in vi. Mélusine, 110.

^123.5^ Bourke, 223.

^124.1^ Grimm, Teut. Myth., 1747; W. R. Paton, in v. Folklore, 277, citing three MSS. in his own possession. Aubrey (Gentilisme, 43) conjectures with plausibility that the sport called cocklebread is a relic of this.

^124.2^ Owen, 142; Harou, 17.

^124.3^ Feilberg, in iii. Am Urquell, 4.

^124.4^ Von Wlislocki, Siebenb. Sachs., 57; iii. Am Urquell, 62.

^124.5^ Wolf, Nied. Sagen, 367; Ostermann, 310.

^125.1^ Von Wlislocki, Volksgl. Zig., 134; Volksdicht., 150; iii. Am Urquell, 12, 62, 93.

^125.2^ Dörfler, in iii. Am Urquell, 269, 270. Cf. ibid., 3.

^125.3^ Von Wlislocki, Volksleb. Mag., 141. Cf. Ostermann, 316.

^125.4^ Von Henrici, in iv. Kobert, 92, 96; iii. Am Urquell, 4, 12, 13; iv., 98; Von Wlislocki, Volksleb. Mag., 69, 70, 71; Volksgl. Zig., 133; Volksgl. Mag., 142; Siebenb. Sachs., 203; Felicina Giannini-Finucci, in xi. Archivio, 453; Ostermann, 310; Rev. W. Gregor in letter to me dated 8th Sept. 1893; Bourke, 217, 218; i. Sax. Leechd., xlv., quoting the Italian philosopher Cæsalpinus; Strack, 8, 15, 17, quoting a medical work of the seventeenth century and other authorities; Leland, Etr. Rom., 294; v. Folklore, 277; Von den Steinen, 558. An analogous superstition at Siena, see G. B. Corsi, in xiii. Archivio, 475.

^125.5^ i. Sax. Leechd., xlv., quoting the Shrift-book of Ecgbert, Archbishop of York; Strack, 15, quoting that of Theodore of Canterbury; Bourke, 217, 219, citing various authors; iii. Am Urquell, 268, 269; Von Wlislocki, Volksleb. Mag., 71; Rev. W. Gregor, in the above-cited letter, explains that this is the philtre referred to by him, op. cit., 86.

^126.1^ Scot, 63; Bourke, 216, 217, citing various authors; vii. Journ. Am. F.L., 133; Krauss, Sitte und Brauch, 167; Von Wlislocki, Volksgl. Zig., 82, 104. Aubrey (Gentilisme, 44) notices in Burchard’s Decrees a reference to a custom on the part of women for the purpose of awakening love, analogous to the nasty Annamite story (Landes, 150) cited suprà, vol. i., p. 76. Among the authorities cited in this and preceding notes may also be found details of the means of destroying the charms by burning, treading out, and otherwise treating the substances referred to.

^126.2^ Von Wlislocki, Volksleb. Mag., 76.

^126.3^ Von Wlislocki, in iii. Am Urquell, 12.

^126.4^ Von Wlislocki, Volksgl. Zig., 132.

^126.5^ Liebrecht, Gerv. Tilb., 72 note, apparently quoting Fin Magnussen; De Mensignac, 19.

^127.1^ Gigli, 83.

^127.2^ vii. Rep. Bur. Ethn., 380. A similar ceremony with different words, ibid., 383.

^127.3^ Aug. Baumgart, in iv. Zeits. des Vereins, 83; Pigorini-Beri, 64.

^127.4^ Similarly for a cat. Finamore, Trad. Pop. Abr., 231, 232; De Mensignac, 76.

^127.5^ Grimm, Teut. Myth., 1785.

^128.1^ Grimm, Teut. Myth., 1828; Thorpe, ii. N. Myth., 108.

^128.2^ iii. L’Anthropologie, 194. Another food-philtre is mentioned by Von den Steinen, 558.

^128.3^ Dörfler, in iii. Am Urquell, 268.

^128.4^ Von Wlislocki, iii. Am Urquell, 12. Another Gipsy charm applied to clothing is given by Dr. von Wlislocki, Volkgsl. Zig., 134. I need not detail it. In a Chaldean incantation already quoted, the victim complains: “He has taken the enchanted philtre and has soiled my garment with it.” Lenormant, 61. We may surmise that it consisted of some of the nasty compounds referred to in previous paragraphs; but the translation is too uncertain to lay any stress on it.

^129.1^ iv. Zeits des Vereins, 159, citing Wuttke.

^129.2^ Lucian, Hetairai, Dial. iv.

^129.3^ P. Sartori, in iv. Zeits. des Vereins, 159.

^129.4^ Von Wlislocki, Siebenb. Sachs., 77.

^130.1^ Garnett, ii. Wom. Turk., 237.

^130.2^ Mrs. French-Sheldon, in xxi. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 364. The power of a white man is especially dreaded; but, as I understand Mrs. French-Sheldon, the objection to part with the cloth applies to all men, irrespective of colour.

^130.3^ Von Wlislocki, Volksgl. Zig., 133.

^131.1^ Von Wlislocki, Siebenb. Sachs., 75, 203.

^131.2^ Von Wlislocki, Volksleb. Mag., 34.

^131.3^ Krauss, Sitte und Brauch, 165.

^132.1^ vi. Journ. Am. F.L., 69.

^132.2^ Mrs. Latham, in i. F.L. Record, 44; Roth, in xxii. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 235. Elsewhere in England you are advised to burn your hair when cut off, lest the birds carry it away; but what the result of their doing so would be I do not know. Addy, 142.

^132.3^ Grimm, Teut. Myth., 1804, 1822.

^132.4^ Zingerle, Sitten, 28.

^133.1^ Liebrecht, 333.

^133.2^ Mrs. Fanny D. Bergen, in iv. Journ. Am. F.L., 153. Brain fever was even feared in Massachusetts. Sarah B. Farmer, in vii. Journ. Am. F.L., 252.

^133.3^ Von Wlislocki, Volksgl. Zig., 81. This is the belief concerning birds in Swabia. Grimm, Teut. Myth., 1804.

^133.4^ xxii. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 42, 116.

^133.5^ i. Binger, 371.

^133.6^ vi. Mélusine, 46.

^133.7^ Bent, 274.

^134.1^ Whymper, in viii. Trans. Ethn. Soc., N.S., 174.

^134.2^ i. Mélusine, 583, quoting Le Tour du Monde.

^134.3^ Von den Steinen, 558.

^134.4^ Taylor, 206 note, 207.

^134.5^ ii. Mélusine, 360.

^134.6^ B. W. Schiffer. in iv. Am Urquell, 74.

^134.7^ Hershon, Talmudic Miscellany (Boston, 1880), quoted by Bourke, 347. Compare the reason for the Australian native’s objection to passing under a leaning tree, or to being stepped over, when lying down, by a woman. iii. Curr, 179; ii. 301.

^135.1^ Aulus Gellius, x. 15.

^135.2^ iv. Sacred Books of the East, 186.

^136.1^ xxx. Sacred Bks., 164, 62. Cf. iii. N. Ind. N. and Q., 190.

^136.2^ i. N. Ind. N. and Q., 76.

^136.3^ ii. Mitford, 266. So, too, in Korea, “old gentlemen keep a little bag in which they assiduously collect the combings of their hair, the strokings of their beard, and parings of their nails, in order that all that belongs to them may be duly placed in their coffin at death.” Griffis, 271.

^137.1^ Wilken, Haaropfer, 52, 50, 51.

^137.2^ De Mensignac, 9, citing Anne Raffenel, Nouveau Voyage dans les Pays des Nègres, and Hovelacque, Les Nègres de l’Afrique sus-Equatoriale. Mungo Park, 246, also describes the ceremony, but does not mention the special point now under consideration.

^137.3^ Dorsey, Omaha Sociology, 249.

^138.1^ i. Mélusine, 549; i. Kirby, 91.

^138.2^ Webster, 71.

^138.3^ Arnason, ii. Sagen, 250.

^139.1^ Hillner, 21.

^139.2^ Ostermann, 375.

^139.3^ Zanetti, 145; Finamore, Trad. Pop. Abr., 69, 161, 163; ii. De Nino, 29. On the other hand, if a suckling woman give bread to a she-goat and eat what the latter leaves, the milk passes from the goat to her. Finamore, op. cit., 167.

^139.4^ ii. De Nino, 30; Zanetti, 148; Ostermann, 378.

^140.1^ Von Wlislocki, Volksleben Mag., 81.

^140.2^ Timmins, 213; Featherman, Nigritians, 364; Speke, 163, 205; Moore, Africa, 35.

^140.3^ Kohlrusch, 340.

^140.4^ Liebrecht, in Gerv. Tilb., 240, quoting Thiers.

^140.5^ Grimm, Teut. Myth., 1795.

^140.6^ Temme, Volkss. Altm., 77.

^141.1^ iii. Am Urquell, 55, 212; iv., 274. Hot embers on other excreta cause diarrhœa, in Italy at least. Zanetti, 58.

^141.2^ De Mensignac, 110.

^141.3^ Schiffer, in iii. Am Urquell, 53; Spiess, Obererz., 38.

^141.4^ viii. Rev. Trad. Pop., 546.

^141.5^ Addy, 125. The same superstition has recently been reported in the case of an old woman who died a few years ago at Mawgan in Cornwall. v. Folklore, 343. Compare the mythological reasons as to nail-parings, suprà, p. 138, as to hair, p. 133, and the Korean practice, p. 136, note.

^141.6^ J. B. Andrews, in ix. Rev. Trad. Pop., 113.

^142.1^ M. Angelini, in xiii. Archivio, 21; Finamore, Trad. Pop. Abr., 129.

^142.2^ Krauss, Sitte und Brauch, 546. At Lesbos he throws it behind the oven, and asks the oven for an iron tooth to crunch marbles and eat biscuits. Georgeakis, 331. To the same order of ideas belongs the custom, said to prevail among the Hindus, of throwing their milk-teeth into a dung-pit and praying that their new teeth may grow as fast as a dung-heap does. i. N. Ind. N. and Q., 102, citing G. T. Lushington, in Journ. As. Soc. Bengal, 1833.

^142.3^ Grimm, Teut. Myth., 1797.

^143.1^ iii. Am Urquell, 198, from the collection of Dr. Colerus of Berlin. The same remedy is prescribed by Etmuller (Opera, Lyons, 1690), quoted Bourke, 412. It is also mentioned by Pettigrew, 97.

^144.1^ Liebrecht, in Gerv. Tilb., 245, quoting Thiers; vii. N. and Q., 8th ser., 6.

^144.2^ ii. Brand, 589, citing Shaw, History of the Province of Moray.

^144.3^ Tuchmann, in vi. Mélusine, 86.

^144.4^ Ploss, ii. Kind, 221.

^144.5^ Von Wlislocki, Siebenb. Sachs., 85.

^144.6^ iii. Am Urquell, 198.

^145.1^ i. Sax. Leechd., 333.

^145.2^ Bourke, 425, 421. For further examples, see Ploss, ii. Kind, 221; Black, 39; Tylor, ii. Prim. Cul., 364. In reference to the case, cited from Bastian by Dr. Tylor, of the ceremony in Malabar for expelling a demon by flogging the patient to a tree, nailing him there by the hair, and then cutting him loose, it may be interesting to mention that, at a recent meeting of the Folklore Society, a nail with hair still attached was exhibited from Ceylon; and it was stated by the exhibitor that the usual practice was to tear the patient loose.

^146.1^ Bourke, 413. A similar prescription used by the Transylvanian Saxons. Von Wlislocki, Siebenb. Sachs., 86.

^146.2^ Pliny, Nat. Hist., xxviii. 23.

^146.3^ ii. Witzschel, 273.

^147.1^ Marcellus, xxxiii. 26. I have thought it needless to discuss the rite at length, as it is well known. In England, the tree usually chosen is an ash. The best account of the rite that I know is given by Gaidoz, Vieux Rite, 15. See also White, Nat. Hist. Selborne, letter xxviii. to Daines Barrington; Kuhn und Schwartz, 443; County Folklore, Suffolk, 26; Ploss, ii. Kind, 221; ii. Brand, 590. It is also in use for sick sheep. Grimm, Teut. Myth., 1816.

^148.1^ A. F. Dörfler, in iii. Am Urquell, 269; Von Wlislocki, Volksgl. Mag., 140.

^148.2^ A. F. Dörfler, in iii. Am Urquell, 269. A parallel remedy is prescribed to heal a man of impotence. Von Wlislocki, Volksgl. Mag., 140. The strength of the dead man is here probably intended to pass into the living.

^148.3^ Von Wlislocki, Siebenb. Sachs., 85, 97.

^149.1^ Von Wlislocki, in iii. Am Urquell, 11.

^149.2^ R. Scot, 222. Scot suggests, in one of his sarcastic asides, that Saint Mary “perhaps hath the curing thereof by patent.”

^150.1^ Von Wlislocki, in iii. Am Urquell, 11.

^150.2^ iii. Am Urquell, 197; i., 19; ii., 27; Töppen, 45; Strack, 25; ii. Witzschel, 283; Grimm, Teut. Myth., 1802. In Alabama, the splinters are buried at the foot of the tree. v. Journ. Am. F.L., 21.

^151.1^ ii. Bull. de F.L., 8.

^151.2^ Aubrey, Miscellanies, 138. Compare the direction in Maine, New England, to cure a wart by crossing it with a knife until the blood comes, and then cross the bark of an apple-tree with the bloody knife. v. Journ. Am. F.L., 320.

^151.3^ Black, 39. He notes a further modern degradation of the rite in Scotland, where it was not thought necessary even to touch the tooth with the nail. Compare the practice with regard to warts. Northall, 139.

^151.4^ Kuhn, Märkische Sagen, 384.

^151.5^ ii. Bull. de F.L., 7; Harou, 32.

^151.6^ Grimm, Teut. Myth., 1802.

^152.1^ Von Wlislocki, Siebenb. Sachs., 107.

^152.2^ H. Volksmann, in iv. Am Urquell, 278.

^152.3^ Prof. Haddon, in iv. Folklore, 351, 356; L. L. Duncan, in v. ibid., 199.

^153.1^ i. N. Ind. N. and Q., 70; iv., 78.

^153.2^ Krauss, Sitte und Brauch, 547.

^153.3^ J. G. Owens, in iv. Journ. Am. F.L., 124.

^154.1^ Strack, 88.

^154.2^ Leland, Etr. Rom., 287.

^154.3^ Marcellus, ix. 106; xxvi. 129; xxxvi. 28; xvi. 88. Plenty of such prescriptions are to be found in Marcellus. Prescriptions like the first are common in folk-medicine, and have been gravely prescribed by physicians of repute. The earliest example is found in Herod. ii. 111, prescribed by an oracle.

^155.1^ Liebrecht, Gerv. Tilb., 245, quoting Thiers; Black, 35; Marcellus, xii. 24.

^156.1^ Bourke, 412, et seqq.; Strack, 88; Sauvé, 271; Pettigrew, 75, 76; Ploss, ii. Kind, 221; Liebrecht, in Gerv. Tilb., 242, 243, quoting Thiers; De Gubernatis, Trad. Pop., 27; Zanetti, 59, 63; i. Laisnel, 155; Von Wlislocki, Siebenb. Sachs., 86, 91, 95; iv. Am Urquell, 141; i. F.L. Record, 49; x. Archivio, 411 (cf. Zanetti, 58; iii. Am Urquell, 247); Finamore, Trad. Pop. Abruz., 160; Zingerle, Sagen, 470; Ostermann, 439; Pluquet, 43; ix. Rev. Trad. Pop., 708.

^156.2^ Grimm, Teut. Myth., 1813; Von Wlislocki, in iv. Am Urquell, 70; iii., 11; Siebenb. Sachs., 67, 86, 201; Volksgl. Mag., 140; Krauss, Sitte und Brauch, 534. The German settlers in the Land beyond the Forest forbid a child’s bath-water to be thrown out of doors at night; nor may it be thrown where it may be trodden on, else the child will lose its sleep, or, as some say, die. Nor must it have been boiled, else the child will get pimples. Hillner, 51, 52. Why must water that has been used for bathing the feet, in the west of Ireland, be put outside the door at night “for fear of the fairies”? Prof. Haddon, in iv. Folklore, 351. Apparently the fairies here are the house-spirits. Might they otherwise tumble in? Is the water to be thrown away or put outside in the tub?

^156.3^ Von Wlislocki, Volksleb. Mag., 138.

^157.1^ Kuhn und Schwartz, 443.

^157.2^ Von Wlislocki, Volksdicht., 152.

^157.3^ Black, 37, quoting Salmuth.

^157.4^ A. Baumgart, in iv. Zeits. des Vereins, 85.

^158.1^ Töppen, 44.

^158.2^ Hillner, 26, note, quoting J. W. Wolf, Beiträge.

^158.3^ Ostermann, 469.

^159.1^ Von Wlislocki, Siebenb. Sachs., 95.

^159.2^ B. W. Schiffer, in iv. Am Urquell, 170, 171.

^159.3^ Finamore, Trad. Pop. Abr., 78; De Gubernatis, Trad. Pop., 24.

^159.4^ Schiffer, in iv. Am Urquell, 272.

^160.1^ Zanetti, 96, 97.

^160.2^ Prof. Haddon, in iv. Folklore, 351.

^160.3^ Liebrecht, in Gerv. Tilb., 243, 244, quoting Thiers.

^160.4^ ii. Brand, 598, note, quoting Lupton, Second Book of Notable Things (1660).

^160.5^ Von Wlislocki, Siebenb. Sachs., 96.

^161.1^ ii. Witzschel, 289.

^161.2^ xxx. Sacred Bks., 270.

^161.3^ Northall, 137, quoting the Norfolk Garland.

^161.4^ Schiffer, in iv. Am Urquell, 273.

^162.1^ Liebrecht, in Gerv. Tilb., 236, 237, 244.

^163.1^ Berliner Tageblatt, 18th Sept. 1892, quoted on the cover of iv. Am Urquell, No. 12. For similar prescriptions, chiefly German, see Strack, 34, 84. Pettigrew, 80, quotes Sir Thomas Browne, but omits the reference.

^164.1^ This is a mere suggestion, of the value of which I am doubtful. Tertullian, retorting against the heathen the charge of blood, speaks of the drinking for epilepsy of the fresh blood of criminals killed in the arena at gladiatorial shows. Apol., ix. Perhaps, therefore, belief in the power of the blood of criminals, as such, may go back to an earlier date.

^165.1^ Von Wlislocki, Siebenb. Sachs., 201.

^165.2^ Schiffer, in iii. Am Urquell, 200; Töppen, 102. In Transylvania, by a complementary belief akin to those discussed in the next paragraph, to lay a flower on the dead causes the stalk whence it has been plucked to wither. iv. Am Urquell, 52.

^165.3^ Rev. C. J. Branch, in Contemp. Rev., Oct. 1875, 761.

^165.4^ Finamore, Trad. Pop. Abr., 201, 85, 135.

^165.5^ Baumgart, in iv. Zeits. des Vereins, 83.

^166.1^ Thorpe, iii. N. Myth., 329, quoting Wolf, Wodana; E. Polain, in ii. Bull. de F.L., 7.

^166.2^ Töppen, 98; Strack, 34, quoting Frischbier, who also notes the remedy as in use for tetters and moles.

^166.3^ Liebrecht, in Gerv. Tilb., 236, 237, 241, 244, 245, quoting Thiers. One is reminded of the Irish phrase meaning that a man is dead: He hasn’t got the toothache. A similar prescription for toothache in the old collection from the Mark of Brandenburg, iii. Am Urquell, 197. And see antè, p. 148.

^166.4^ Emma Altmann, in iv. Zeits. f. Volksk., 270; Grimm, Teut. Myth., 1822, 1800.

^167.1^ Dr. Krauss, in iii. Am Urquell, 303.

^167.2^ iv. Kobert, 193.

^167.3^ Prof. Rhys, in iii. Folklore, 82.

^167.4^ F. J. Bigger, in iii. Proc. Belfast Nat. Field Club, 3rd ser. (1892-3), 545.

^167.5^ G. W. Wood, in v. Folklore, 232.

^168.1^ Dyer, 171. His authority is not given.

^168.2^ Grimm, Teut. Myth., 1819.

^168.3^ Krauss, Sitte und Brauch, 545.

^168.4^ Karl Knauthe, in v. Am Urquell, 34.

^168.5^ N. C. Hoke, in v. Journ. Am. F.L., 114.

^168.6^ Von Wlislocki, Siebenb. Sachs., 95.

^168.7^ iii. Am Urquell, 247; Mrs. Latham, in i. F.L. Record, 49.

^169.1^ Prof. Haddon, in iv. Folklore, 355. Analogous prescriptions are given from various sources, Black, 43. See also Grimm, Teut. Myth., 1809.

^169.2^ Spiess, Obererz., 27.

^169.3^ Thorpe, iii. N. Myth., 328, quoting Wolf.

^169.4^ Schiffer, in iii. Am Urquell, 200.

^170.1^ Mrs. Latham, in i. F.L. Record, 43.

^170.2^ Suffolk County F.L., 25, 132.

^170.3^ Mary H. Skeel, in iv. Journ. Am. F.L., 165.

^170.4^ Kohlrusch, 340.

^170.5^ Zingerle, Sitten, 103.

^170.6^ T. Nencini, in i. Rivista, 887.

^170.7^ iv. Kobert, 208.

^171.1^ Schiffer, in iv. Am Urquell, 170.

^171.2^ Dr. A. F. Chamberlain, in iv. Am Urquell, 65, quoting Boas.

^172.1^ Codrington, 310, 205.

^172.2^ vi. Rev. Trad. Pop., 185, quoting Conte d’Hérisson, Le Prince Imperial.

^172.3^ Finamore, Trad. Pop. Abr., 182.

^172.4^ S. Raccuglia, in i. Rivista, 727.

^172.5^ Miss Gordon-Cumming, in Nineteenth Century, June 1887, 917.

^173.1^ Harou, 17.

^173.2^ H. G. Prendergast, in i. N. Ind. N. and Q., 104.

Chapter XI Notes

^176.1^ Transactions of the Liverpool Welsh National Society, 8th session (1892-3), 93.

^177.1^ iv. Folklore, 55. Sikes, 351 et seqq., mentions several other Welsh examples; but they present no special features.

^178.1^ See a number of examples referred to in Gomme, Ethn., 83 et seqq. Also the case of Saint Oswald’s Well, referred to, antè, p. 22.

^178.2^ Athenæum, 1st April 1893, 415.

^178.3^ Proc. Roy. Ir. Acad. (1892), 818.

^179.1^ W. Gray, in iv. Proc. Belfast Nat. Field Club, 2d ser., 94.

^179.2^ Gomme, Ethn., 91 et seqq. See also vi. N. and Q., 8th ser., 113.

^179.3^ iv. N. and Q., 8th ser., 246.

^179.4^ Prof. Rhys, in iii. Folklore, 75. Mr. Moore is quoted as giving a slightly different version of the ritual. I think his version probably describes a more recent and degraded form of the ceremony. In any case, the rag had to be wetted with water from the well. Other Manx wells are discussed by Mr. Moore in an article on “Water and Well-worship in Man,” v. Folklore, 212. See particularly pp. 217, 219, 222, 224, 226.

^180.1^ x. Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot., 606.

^180.2^ iii. Folklore, 69.

^181.1^ ii. Brand, 269 note, 268 note, 270 note, quoting xviii. Statistical Account of Scotland, 630, Macaulay, Hist. St. Kilda, 95, and Martin, Western Islands, 140. A similar account is given of a well in the island of Islay.

^181.2^ xxvi. Antiquary, 30.

^181.3^ iii. Folklore, 67.

^182.1^ Miss Godden, in iv. Folklore, 399; Sir Arthur Mitchell, in vi. Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot., 253.

^183.1^ Bartsch, ii. Sagen, 104.

^184.1^ Wallonia, No. 3, 1893.

^184.2^ E. Monseur, in i. Bull. de F.L., 250, citing Van Bastelaer.

^184.3^ Sébillot, Coutumes, 96. According to M. Certeux, the pins are to be thrown through a hole in the window into the chapel. ix. Rev. Trad. Pop., 288.

^185.1^ Sébillot, Coutumes, 97, quoting Fouquet, Légendes du Morbihan. As to St. Guirec’s shrine, see also ii. Arch. Camb., 5th ser., 175.

^185.2^ E. Monseur, in i. Bull. de F.L., 250, citing Van Bastelaer.

^186.1^ G. Le Calvez, in vii. Rev. Trad. Pop., 92.

^186.2^ Gaidoz, in vi. Rev. de l’Hist. des Rel., 10, 12. See also iv. N. and Q., 8th ser., 186.

^187.1^ Volkov, in viii. Rev. Trad. Pop., 448.

^187.2^ Gaidoz, Vieux Rite, 29, quoting Clos, Mémoires de la Soc. des Antiquaires de France. The same is done at the well of Saint Gobrien at Camors. ix. Rev. Trad. Pop., 490.

^187.3^ Gaidoz, Vieux Rite, 41, quoting Mémoires de la Soc. Archéologique de Bordeaux.

^187.4^ i. Bartsch, 418.

^188.1^ Liebrecht, Gerv. Tilb., 244, quoting Thiers, Traité des Superstitions. See also Scot, 165, quoting Martin of Arles.

^188.2^ G. Amalfi, in i. Rivista, 294.

^188.3^ Finamore, Trad. Pop. Abr., 147.

^188.4^ Preller, i. Röm. Myth., 258.

^189.1^ Gaidoz, in vii. Rev. de l’Hist. des Rel., 9.

^189.2^ Grabowsky, in Globus lxvii. No. 1. I am indebted to M. Schmeltz for this reference.

^189.3^ Rodd, 165, 176.

^190.1^ i. Bull. F.L., 228, citing the Ἐφημερὶς ἀρχαιολογική.

^190.2^ Aristophanes, Plut., 840, 937. Initiates at the Mysteries, explains the scholiast on the former passage, consecrated at some shrine the garments they had worn during the ceremony. And see Anrich, 211.

^190.3^ Lucan, Phars., i. 135; Vergil, Æn., xii. 766. Bötticher, 62, et seqq., mentions other instances, and in his illustrations gives several figures showing the custom.

^191.1^ Georgeakis, 348, 349.

^191.2^ Andree, i. Ethnog. Par., 29.

^191.3^ vii. Rev. Trad. Pop., 56, citing Boijdowsky, Kievskaïa Starina.

^192.1^ Von Wlislocki, Volksgl. Mag., 22, 70.

^192.2^ H. H. Wilson, ii. Works, 169.

^193.1^ Andree, i. Ethnog. Par., 50, 61; Burton, Sindh, 177; i. N. Ind. N. and Q., 39, 88, 174; Dalpatrám Dayá, 19, 20; i. Hanway, 260; Yule, i. Marco Polo, 128; i. Ouseley, 313, 369, et seqq., ii. 83; iii. 532. The Turks tear off strips of their robes and tie them to the railing surrounding a saint’s tomb. Featherman, Turanians, 398.

^193.2^ Robertson Smith, Rel. Sem., 170; Andree, i. Ethnog. Par., 60, 34.

^193.3^ Rodd, 167, quoting Kamporoglou, Hist. Ath.

^194.1^ Andree, i. Ethnog. Par., 52.

^194.2^ Cooper, 275.

^195.1^ i. N. Ind. N. and Q., 76, quoting Moorcroft and Trebeck, Trav. in the Himalayas.

^195.2^ Lewin, 232.

^195.3^ Georgi, 25, 156.

^195.4^ ii. Erman, 409.

^196.1^ vii. Mélusine, 135.

^196.2^ Andree, i. Ethnog. Par., 61.

^196.3^ i. Schuyler, 138; ii. 113.

^196.4^ A. H. Savage Landor, in Fortnightly Rev., Aug. 1894, 186.

^196.5^ H. S. Sanderson, in xxiv. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 311.

^197.1^ Campbell, i. Circular Notes, 350.

^197.2^ vi. Mélusine, 154, 155, quoting the Temps. I have referred to these performances by women in an earlier chapter, and compared them with a similar practice in Glamorganshire. Perhaps I may be allowed to refer to the case of St. Oswald’s Well at Oswestry, where the wish is to be obtained by flinging on a certain stone the remainder of the water in one’s hand after drinking. It must be done at midnight. Burne, 428. The Japanese practice is also referred to by Chamberlain, xxii. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 357. Compare with the rite at Penvenan, suprà, p. 186.

^197.3^ xxii. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 359. See also 356. “In some of the Louisiade group there are certain very large well-known trees under which” the natives “have their feasts. These trees appear to be credited with possessing souls, as a portion of the feast is set aside for them, and bones, both pigs’ and human, are everywhere deeply imbedded in their branches.” Report of Special Commission for 1887 on British New Guinea, quoted in iii. Arch. Rev., 416. This custom, though not precisely the one now under discussion, is closely related.

^198.1^ Andree, i. Ethnog. Par., 61, 60; vii. Internat. Archiv., 145. Crooke, 105, describing several rag-shrines in India, notes that they are generally called “Our Lady of Tatters.” One in Berár is called “The Lord of Tatters.”

^198.2^ Andree, i. Ethnog. Par., 60.

^199.1^ Mungo Park, 38.

^199.2^ Gaidoz, in vii. Rev. de l’hist. des Rel., 7, quoting Charles de Rouvre, Bull. de la Soc. de Géog., Oct. 1880. M. Schmeltz has figured in vii. Internat. Archiv, 144, two specimens of the n’doké from the Congo and the Cameroon now in the National Museum of Ethnography at Leiden. They are stuck with pins and pieces of iron. Another from West Africa covered with nails may be seen in the British Museum. See also Herbert Ward, in xxiv. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 288.

^200.1^ i. Binger, 212. See also Mungo Park, 250.

^200.2^ Darwin, Journ., 68.

^203.1^ ii. Brand, 268 note, quoting Statistical Account.

^204.1^ xxvii. Antiquary, 169. Heron (Journey through the Western Counties of Scotland, 282) gives a less complete account of the practices at Strathfillan. In his time (1792) the offerings consisted of clothes, or a small bunch of heath. He asserts, I know not on what authority, that “more precious offerings used once to be brought. But these being never left long in the unmolested possession of the saint, it has become customary to make him presents which may afford no temptation to theft.”

^204.2^ At a sacred cave in Kumaon is a pool where the worshipper must bathe with his clothes on, and then leave them for the priest. iii. N. Ind. N. and Q., 147. An instance is recorded of a spring in Italy where it was believed that a child bathed before its seventh year would be healed of all diseases. The parents left the child’s clothes to be distributed among the poor. A bishop, however, positively put an end to the superstition; and the spring has since been called “Acqua Scommunicata.” Ramage, 274. This bishop was perhaps eccentric. The bishop of Girgenti does not seem to have prohibited the practice, at the church of San Calogero in that city, of bringing children, stripping them naked in pursuance of a vow, and leaving their best clothes hung on a stick before the altar. i. Rivista, 790.

^205.1^ Gen. xxxi. 44.

^206.1^ Livingstone, Zambesi, 229.

^206.2^ Darwin, Journ., 46.

^206.3^ Josh. vii. 25; 2 Sam. xviii. 17.

^207.1^ Andree, i. Ethnog. Par., 46, 47, 49, 50, 55, quoting various writers; De Gubernatis, i. Myth. Plantes, 160 note, citing Mantegazza; Finamore, Trad. Pop. Abr., 100; v. Am Urquell, 235; Georgeakis, 323; i. Rep. Bur. Ethn., 132; xiii. Archivio, 260; Le Braz, 230, 307; Thomas, Prob. Ohio Mounds, 12, citing Smith’s History of Wisconsin; Featherman, Chiapo-Mar., 495.

^207.2^ Hahn, Tsuni-ǁgoam, 45, 46, 47, 52, 56, 69, quoting various writers.

^207.3^ i. N. Ind. N. and Q., 40; Dalpatrám Dayá, 19, 20.

^209.1^ Andree, i. Ethnog. Par., 46, 49, 55. Cf. with the Dyak custom that of the Esthonians on the island of Oesel. Ibid., 47. As to the Peruvian rite, i. Garcilasso, 131. Compare with it a Malabar custom of taking a shred from the clothes and presenting it to the new moon when first seen. i. N. Ind. N. and Q., 88.

^209.2^ Proc. Roy. Ir. Acad. (1892), 819.

^209.3^ Athenæum, 1st April 1893, 415.

^209.4^ Casalis, 287. A parallel practice would seem to be that of putting mud in a niche above the well at the Chapel of the Seven Saints, Plédran, Côtes-du-Nord—not on the child—to cure the mumps. Dr. Aubry, in vii. Rev. Trad. Pop., 599.

^210.1^ W. A. Craigie, in iv. Folklore, 223, quoting the Landnámabók. Cf. the custom in the Louisiade Islands cited antè, p. 197, note, and several African customs also cited above.

^211.1^ i. Bull. F.L., 250.

^212.1^ vi. Mélusine, 155.

^213.1^ It is fair to M. Monseur to say that he recognises expressly (loc. cit.) the priority of trees as objects of worship, in point of time, to fetishes of wood; and M. Gaidoz, of course, would admit the same. But I do not think this affects my criticism. Elsewhere the former refers to two cases, which by no means stand alone, as instances of maltreated divinities. The remedy prescribed for toothache at Warnaut and Bioulx, in the province of Namur, is to bite, as noted in the last chapter, one of the crosses placed on the wayside in memory of persons who have died violent deaths in the neighbourhood. And at Herve, a girl who desires to be married goes to pray at Saint Joseph’s Chapel. She must bite the iron trellis-work around the saint’s statue—of course, because she cannot get at the saint himself. ii. Bull. F.L., 7, 56. It seems to me, however, that the object is, in both cases, to bring the sufferer or suppliant into union with the deceased or with the saint. So, to cure the fever, we find among the French superstitions of the seventeenth century the prescription to bind the patient for a while with a cord, or fasten him with wood or straw to a certain tree; and it was the opinion of some that it must be done early in the morning, that the patient must be fasting and must bite the bark of the tree before being released. Liebrecht, in Gerv. Tilb., 238, quoting Thiers. In Transylvania, one who suffers from toothache bites the bell-rope while the church-bells are ringing, saying:—

“The free masses are sung, The bells have rung, The Gospel is read, The worm in my teeth shall be dead.”

Von Wlislocki, Siebenb. Sachs., 106. This is neither Transplantation nor the ill-using of a god.

^216.1^ Pausanias, ii. 11. A representation of the dedicated lock was sometimes carved in stone upon a tablet and presented to the shrine. In the Mausoleum Room of the British Museum is a marble slab found in Thessaly, whereon are carved two tresses offered to Poseidon. I am indebted to Mr. W. H. D. Rouse for drawing my attention to this.

^217.1^ As to the dedication of hair, see Bötticher, 92 et seqq., to which I am indebted for most of the above illustrations.

^217.2^ Wilken, Haaropfer, 39, 40, 56; Robertson Smith, Rel. Sem., 305.

^217.3^ Andree, i. Ethnog. Par., 150.

^217.4^ Zingerle, Sagen, 470.

^218.1^ Knoop, Sagen aus Posen, 182. According to another story, this wonderful hair was the gift of a noble lady as the most beautiful thing she had.

^218.2^ Gaidoz, in vii. Mélusine, 84, quoting M. Auricoste de Lazarque, an eye-witness.

^219.1^ i. De Nino, 49.

^219.2^ Scot, 165 (l. xi., c. 15).

^219.3^ Pettigrew, 40.

^219.4^ Von Wlislocki, Volksgl. Mag., 22.

^219.5^ Garnett, i. Wom., 73.

^220.1^ i. Ainsworth, 260.

^220.2^ De Gubernatis, i. Myth. Plantes, 160 note.

^220.3^ Crooke, 231, quoting Col. Tod’s Annals.

^220.4^ Wilken, Haaropfer, 55, citing Sir Monier Williams, Religious Life and Thought in India, 375.

^220.5^ Featherman, Turanians, 269.

^220.6^ Ellis, Tour, 325.

^221.1^ i. Macdonald, 109, 111.

^221.2^ Featherman, Nigr., 162.

^221.3^ i. Rep. Bur. Ethn., 159.

^221.4^ Andree, i. Ethnog. Par., 151, 152; i. Rep. Bur. Ethn., passim.

^222.1^ Browning, Artemis Prologizes.

^224.1^ Ploss, i. Kind, 15, citing Mörenhout.

^224.2^ ii. Bartsch, 45; ii. Witzschel, 249.

^224.3^ Scot, 165, quoting, apparently, Martin of Arles. Compare the Bosnian customs, mentioned suprà, vol. i. p. 152.

^224.4^ Dr. Paul Aubry, in vii. Rev. Trad. Pop., 599.

^224.5^ Liebrecht, in Gerv. Tilb., 240, quoting Thiers.

^224.6^ v. Journ. Am. F.L., 108, 242; ix. Rep. Bur. Ethn., 572.

^225.1^ ii. Zeits. des Vereins, 168. See the monkish MS. of the miracles of Simon de Montfort, printed by the Camden Soc., passim.

^225.2^ C. A. White, in vii. N. and Q., 8th ser., 6, quoting a book the authorship and bibliography of which are still to seek.

^225.3^ Grimm, Teut. Myth., 1757. A votive offering still not uncommon is a candle of the size or weight of the person who, or on whose behalf, the vow is made. See for example i. Rivista, 790.

^225.4^ B. H. Chamberlain, in xxii. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 364.

^226.1^ i. Doolittle, 115.

^226.2^ Capt. Bourke, in ix. Rep. Bur. Ethn., 556, quoting several authorities.

^226.3^ Ibid., 572. Saint Francis’ is not the only image thus made useful. See v. Journ. Am. F.L., 242; vii. 135.

^226.4^ Pineau, 508. In Brittany, bread rubbed on the statue of Saint Gildas is given to cattle and horses, and even eaten by human beings as a preventive against the bites of mad dogs. Le Calvez, in vii. Rev. Trad. Pop., 93.

^226.5^ Casalis, 267.

^227.1^ Von Wlislocki, Volksgl. Mag., 22.

^227.2^ Journal of Thomas Dineley, in i. Journ. Kilk. Arch. Soc., N.S., 180.

^227.3^ Miss Godden, in iv. Folklore, 502, quoting Dr. Reeves. In Iceland, a preventive of sea-sickness is a sod from the churchyard worn in the shoe. ii. Powell and Magnússon, 644; ii. Lehmann-Filhés, 252; both from Arnason.

^227.4^ v. Rep. Bur. Ethn., 426; ix. 473; ii. Folklore, 442. Compare the Apache use of hoddentin, the pollen of the tule-rush. ix. Rep. Bur. Ethn., 500, et seqq. Compare also the consecration of the Hindu votaries of Devi, by the smearing of their foreheads with a portion of the red powder which has marked an earthenware pitcher containing water and other things infused, by means of mantrás, with the spirit of the goddess. iv, N. Ind. N. and Q., 19.

^228.1^ This intention, however, is by no means universal. Some instances to the contrary have already been given. I may add to them that in Belgium, in spite of certain examples like that of Saint Etto’s Cross, it seems to be believed that a nail found, especially in a tree, brings good luck. i. Bull. de F.L., 250. In such a case there can be no transfer of disease.

^229.1^ Kolbe, 163.

^230.1^ My authority for this statement is a paper read by Professor Kovalevsky at the British Association meeting at Oxford, August 1894, and not yet printed.

^230.2^ G. Ferraro, in xiii. Archivio, 3.

^231.1^ ii. F.L. Journ., 349.

^231.2^ Addy, 115.

Chapter XII Notes

^239.1^ On the blood-covenant, the three chief authorities are Robertson Smith, Kinship; and Rel. Sem.; Trumbull; and Strack. Prof. Robertson Smith and Dr. Trumbull, approaching the subject from different points of view, arrived at similar conclusions independently and simultaneously. I have a long list of examples not mentioned by these writers; but I forbear to load the page with them, as they add nothing to the ample proofs of the meaning, and but little to those of the wide distribution, of the rite. By far the most exhaustive examination of totemism is that of Mr. Frazer in his book on the subject, an expansion of his article in the Encyclopædia Britannica.

^241.1^ Stoll, 47; iii. Bancroft, 486, citing Carta; Trumbull, 90, citing various authorities. Similarly, De Acosta describes the practice when at a funeral human beings were sacrificed to the dead to be their slaves in the other world; the victim’s blood was smeared on the corpse’s face from ear to ear. De Acosta, 314. A writer of the last century describes the Nogats of the Bouraits and other peoples of Eastern Siberia as idoles en peinture, representing the contour of a naked human figure, six to eight inches long, painted with the heart’s blood of the victims, or with some other red material. Georgi, 150.

^241.2^ Tibullus, i. Eleg., vi. 45.

^242.1^ i. Heimskringla, 165.

^242.2^ i. Risley, 504, 535, and other places. The daubing of the wooden casing of the well with red lead is one of the village ceremonies at the Sarhúl festival. iii. N. Ind. N. and Q., 180, quoting L. R. Forbes’ Report.

^243.1^ J. B. Andrews, in ix. Rev. Trad. Pop., 115.

^243.2^ P. Sébillot, in ix. Rev. Trad. Pop., 170.

^244.1^ Arnason, i. Sagen, 192. Feilberg, in iii. Am Urquell, 5, quotes it as menstrual blood. Very likely this is correct; but the German version, to which alone I have access, does not specify it.

^244.2^ Von Wlislocki, Volksgl. Zig., 110, 123, 124; Schiffer, in iii. Am Urquell, 200, citing Rulikowski; viii. Rev. Trad. Pop., 487.

^244.3^ Strack, 51, quoting Mannhardt.

^244.4^ Grimm, Teut. Myth., 1833 (a Swedish prescription from Hülphers, given in English by Thorpe, ii. N. Myth., 113). Several modern English cases given by Henderson, 181.

^245.1^ Von Wlislocki, in iii. Am Urquell, 64.

^245.2^ Featherman, Aoneo-Mar., 60.

^245.3^ Featherman, Chiapo-Mar., 355.

^245.4^ Powell, 92. Cf. the Australian custom. ii. Curr, 52.

^245.5^ H. Vos, in iii. Internat. Arch., 72.

^245.6^ i. Crantz, 193.

^245.7^ Dr. M. Pasquarelli, in i. Rivista, 640, citing several cases.

^246.1^ Du Chaillu, Ashango-land, 199, 201.

^246.2^ Von Wlislocki, in iii. Am Urquell, 64.

^247.1^ Arnason, i. Sagen, 20.

^247.2^ Mr. Paton, in letter to me dated 25th May 1894.

^250.1^ ii. Risley, 41.

^250.2^ ii. Risley, 49.

^251.1^ Featherman, Papuo-Mel., 333.

^251.2^ Herod. iii. 11.

^251.3^ Diodorus, xxii.

^252.1^ i. Panjab N. and Q., 122.

^252.2^ Markham, Rites and Laws, 25, 28.

^252.3^ Burton, Wit and Wisd., 450.

^252.4^ Von Wlislocki, Volksdicht., 250.

^252.5^ v. L’Anthropologie, 352, citing and reviewing E. C. Taintor, Les aborigènes du nord de Formose.

^253.1^ Krauss, Sitte und Brauch, 630. The old Norsemen seem to have made leagues by drinking together. See Morris, ii. Heimskringla, 105.

^253.2^ i. Casati, 217.

^253.3^ Saxo, 23; Elton’s version, xxxiii and 28; Du Chaillu, ii. Viking Age, 64, quoting the saga of Egil and Asmund.

^253.4^ Herod. iii. 8. It may be observed, in reference to Herodotus’ identification of Alilat with Urania, that Allatu (? = Alilat) appears to be the more correct transliteration of the name of the Babylonian goddess of the Underworld, given by Smith (Chald. Gen., 230) as Ninkigal. Jeremias, Höllenfahrt, passim.

^254.1^ Robertson Smith, Rel. Sem., 297.

^255.1^ Livingstone, Miss. Travels, 489.

^255.2^ Kuno Meyer, in i. Arch. Rev., 304, translating the saga.

^255.3^ Finamore, Trad. Pop. Abr., 172.

^256.1^ i. Bancroft, 636, citing Father Joseph Arlegui.

^256.2^ Featherman, Papuo-Mel., 281.

^256.3^ Lewin, 228, 315, 322.

^256.4^ vii. Mélusine, 76, quoting Annales Apostoliques, July 1894.

^256.5^ i. Risley, lviii. ii. 16, 111.

^257.1^ Caroline Islanders, Featherman, Oceano-Mel., 348; La Pérouse Islanders, Ibid., Papuo-Mel., 95.

^257.2^ i. De Nino, 51. As to the blood-rite in modern Italy, see Strack, 12; Finamore, Trad. Pop. Abruz., 101.

^258.1^ Krauss, Sitte und Brauch, 633.

^259.1^ Congress Report (1891), 249, et seqq. Cf. the Apache ceremony of spitting in a hole made in the ground at concluding a peace. iii. Journ. Am. F.L., 54. I add a few references here in support of the opinion that the saliva contains the life, and the recipient’s life is enhanced by a portion of the giver’s. The examples given subsequently in the text are directed to the further point raised in the following paragraph. iii. Am Urquell, 9, 54, 56, 58; iv. 170, 274; v. 20; Krauss, Sitte und Brauch, 548; vi. Mélusine, 251; Blunt, 166; Marcellus, viii. 166, 172, 191; ix. 107; xxxvi. 70; Finamore, Trad. Pop. Abruz., 79, 135, 170, 191, 203; De Mensignac, 80, et seqq.; iv. Zeits. des Vereins, 84; i. Rivista, 222. (Cf. Zanetti, 59, 63; Von den Steinen, 335; Hodgkinson, 227.)

^261.1^ Mrs. F. D. Bergen, in iii. Journ. Am. F.L., 51.

^262.1^ Persius, Sat. ii. 31. Lustration with spittle was also part of the rites of purification in the Mysteries. Anrich, 211.

^262.2^ Von Wlislocki, Siebenb. Sachs., 144.

^262.3^ De Mensignac, 59, 61, 58; Garnett, ii. Wom., 475; Hillner, 21; Kaindl, 5; Sajaktis, in iv. Zeits. des Vereins, 139.

^262.4^ Extracts from the Journal of Thomas Dineley, Esq., in i. Journ. Kilk. Arch. Soc., N.S., 182; Prof. Haddon, in iv. Folklore, 361, 358; Dr. C. R. Browne, in iii. Proc. Roy. Ir. Ac., 3rd Ser., 358.

^263.1^ iv. Folklore, 357.

^263.2^ iii. Am Urquell, 55.

^263.3^ Ockley, 351.

^263.4^ Mungo Park, 246; De Mensignac, 10, citing Anne Raffenel, Nouveau Voyage, and Abel Houvelacque, Les Nègres.

^263.5^ Winwood Reade, 46.

^263.6^ Burton, i. Gelele, 259.

^264.1^ De Mensignac, 12, quoting Anne Raffenel. Mr. Crombie cites from Burckhardt, a similar custom among the Bedouin. If a thief be caught and abused by the man he has wronged, and can manage to spit on another, the latter must defend him, even against a fellow-tribesman, and may kill the assailant in his defence. Congress Report (1891), 257.

^264.2^ De Mensignac, 22. A similar record by Peters is quoted by W. Simpson, Sikh Initiation, 5.

^264.3^ Paulitschke, 246. Cf. the Pueblo story of the reason why all the Hano can talk Hopí and none of the Hopitah can talk Hano. viii. Rep. Bur. Ethn., 36. The language of some of the lower animals is acquired in folktales elsewhere by the creature spitting into the hero’s mouth. In Ashango-land guests are given red powder to rub themselves with. Du Chaillu, Ashango-land, 341. This appears to be a modified form of the blood-covenant.

^265.1^ Paulitschke, 206.

^265.2^ De Mensignac, 9.

^265.3^ Casalis, 306.

^265.4^ Addy, 59.

^265.5^ De Mensignac, 12, citing Réville. I have mislaid a reference to a more direct authority. Cf. the practice in the Cordilleras mentioned on p. 208.

^266.1^ ii. Brand, 572 note. The practice is a very familiar one. A variant practice is to spit on the first money received in the New Year. This is also practised in France. De Mensignac, 69.

^266.2^ Monseur, 90.

^266.3^ Lubbock, 97, citing Franklin; Addy, 94.

^266.4^ Von Wlislocki, Siebenb. Sachs., 159.

^266.5^ Grimm, Teut. Myth., 1847.

^267.1^ De Mensignac, 66.

^267.2^ Tuchmann, in vi. Mélusine, 231.

^267.3^ De Mensignac, 66.

^267.4^ vi. Rep. Bur. Ethn., 374.

^267.5^ De Mensignac, 77.

^267.6^ iii. Am Urquell, 55, 56.

^267.7^ De Mensignac, 54, 69.

^268.1^ Du Chaillu, Equatorial Africa, 430. Blowing alone appears in the Bakalai ceremony. Ibid., 393. Blowing here, as in other cases, seems a substitute for spitting.

^268.2^ ix. Rep. Bur. Ethn., 574, quoting Major Cornwallis Harris.

^268.3^ Anrich, 210.

^269.1^ Kane, 407. Cf. the charms for rendering dogs faithful given ante, pp. 124, 127.

^269.2^ Winwood Reade, 131.

^269.3^ iii. Am Urquell, 57.

^270.1^ v. Journ. Am. F.L., 183.

^270.2^ Scot, 219; iii. Am Urquell, 56; Liebrecht, in Gerv. Tilb. 220; Pliny, xxviii. 7.

^270.3^ i. Binger, 194.

^270.4^ Kane, 216.

^270.5^ Theocritus, xx. Cf. vi., where the object is expressly to ward off the Evil Eye.

^271.1^ Pliny, xxviii. 7. Cf. the Italian custom mentioned by De Mensignac, 56.

^271.2^ ii. Brand, 573 note. See ante, pp. 67, 132.

^271.3^ i. Rivista, 618; ii. 155.

^271.4^ iii. Am Urquell, 57. The Girondins also spit on the wads of their wooden shoes before flinging them out, to avoid the fourcat, a kind of corn which grows in the fork of the great toe. De Mensignac, 54.

^271.5^ Von Wlislocki, Siebenb. Sachs., 110, 116.

^271.6^ iii. Am Urquell, 108.

^272.1^ Georgeakis, 343.

^272.2^ v. Journ. Am. F.L., 63.

^272.3^ Pliny, xxviii. 7; xvii. Pitrè, 243; xv. 136.

^272.4^ De Mensignac, 61.

^272.5^ Tuchmann, in vi. Mélusine, 86.

^273.1^ iii. Am Urquell, 57; De Mensignac, 54; Pliny, xxviii. 7. An elaborate counter-spell to the Evil Eye still extant in Calabria is detailed by Sig. A. Renda, in i. Rivista, 290.

^273.2^ Haddon and Browne, in ii. Proc. Roy. Ir. Ac., 3rd ser., 819.

^273.3^ vii. Journ. Am. F.L., 126.

^273.4^ Pigorini-Beri, 40; Tuchmann, in vi. Mélusine, 108.

^274.1^ Prof. Mikhailovskii, translated by O. Wardrop, in xxiv. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 97.

^274.2^ Emil Hassler, in Mem. Cong. Anthr., 356.

^274.3^ S. K. Kusnezow, in viii. Internat. Arch., 21.

^274.4^ F. H. Wells, in v. Rep. Austr. Ass., 518.

^274.5^ Suetonius, Vit. Vesp., vii.; Tacitus, Hist., iv. 81.

^274.6^ Dalyell, 76, citing St. Jerome’s Life of Saint Hilarion.

^275.1^ ii. Doolittle, 373, 374.

^275.2^ Campbell, Khondistan, 112.

^275.3^ Simpson, Sikh Initiation, 5, quoting Wolf. Dr. Karl Piehl gives two curious extracts from the inscription on the tomb of Pepi II., an Egyptian monarch of the sixth dynasty, xv. Proc. Soc. Bibl. Arch., 250. They appear to belong to the order of thought under discussion; but in the absence of the context it is impossible to determine their exact meaning. Spitting is mentioned as a charm against rain in the Obererzgebirge, Spiess, Obererz., 34. It is probably an extension of the idea of spitting on a witch.

Chapter XIII Notes

^280.1^ Herod., iii. 38, 99.

^280.2^ Ibid., i. 216; iv. 26. Father Favre identifies the Padaioi with the Battas of Sumatra (Favre, Wild Tribes, 5), and Major Rennell the Issedones with the Oigurs or Eluths, a Mongol tribe conquered in the last century by the Chinese (G. Busk in ii. Journ. Ethn. Soc., N.S., 80, citing Rennell’s Geographical System of Herodotus). These identifications, however, must be regarded as doubtful.

^281.1^ Strabo, xi. 11, § 8; iv. 5, § 4.

^281.2^ Marco Polo, lxi.

^281.3^ Marco Polo, clxxvi.

^282.1^ Maundeville, xviii., xix., xxxi.

^282.2^ iii. Mélusine, 505, citing Friar Jean du Plan de Carpin and others; Vos, in iii. Internat. Archiv, 70, citing Plan de Carpin and another Franciscan, W. Rubruk.

^282.3^ In Asia. Certain tribes of the interior of Siam, Barbosa, 190; the Birhors of Chutia Nágpúr (Bengal), Dalton, 158, 220; iii. Mélusine, 409; the Gonds, Featherman, Tur., 117 note, citing Rowney’s Wild Tribes of India; the Samoyeds of Siberia, iii. Internat. Arch., 71.

In the East Indian Islands. Sumatra, the Battas, Favre, Wild Tribes, 5; viii. Mélusine, 410; ii. Churchill’s Voyages, 180; Featherman, Papuo-Mel., 336 note (Marsden, however, says nothing about it, and the most recent traveller denies it. Modigliani, Batacchi, 152, 181); Philippine Islands, the Montescos, Featherman, ibid., 499; Floris, the Rakka, ii. Journ. Ind. Arch., 174 (these statements are discredited in a note by the editor of the Journ. Ind. Arch., I do not know on what ground); ii. Yule, 236, 240, citing various authorities.

In Australia. Dawson, 67; iii. Journ. Ethn. Soc., 29; ii. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 179; xiii. ibid., 135, 298; xxiv. 171, 182; iii. Trans. Ethn. Soc., N.S., 248; Featherman, Papuo-Mel., 157, 160 note, 161; Letourneau, L’Év. Rel., 35, citing Taplin; ii. Curr, 18, 63, 119, 331, 341, 346, 361, 367, 404, 432, 449; iii. 21, 138, 147, 159.

In Africa. Congo tribes, iii. Mélusine, 433; Maniana, Winwood Reade, 160, citing Mollien; Manyuema, Andree, Anthropophagie, 41, citing Wissmann.

In South America. Various tribes in Brazil, ii. Churchill’s Voy., 133, 135; ii. Dobrizhoffer, 271; iii. Mélusine, 459; Featherman, Chiapo-Mar., 332, 344, 348, 355; xxiv. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 248, 249, 253; of Peru, i. Garcilasso, 56; ii. 274; i. Anthr. Rev., 38; Brinton, Amer. Race, 290; Featherman, Chiapo-Mar., 423; of Guiana, Featherman, ibid., 221.

There is a Gipsy tradition of a supernatural race of cannibals of this kind, where the habit may be a trait borrowed from some tribe with which they have actually come into contact in their wanderings. Von Wlislocki, Volksgl. Zig., 31.

Let me add an observation here. Among many savage nations it is not usual to wait the convenience of the aged before dining off their bodies. They are slain for the purpose. Relics of the custom of putting the aged to death are still found in Europe. It is remarkable that in Scandinavia, as witnessed by Du Chaillu, the displacement of the old man in favour of his son takes place at the table. This, though not a funeral rite, points to cannibalism of the kind discussed in the text. Du Chaillu, i. Midnight Sun, 393. See also Gomme, in i. Folklore, 197; vii. Rev. Trad. Pop., 153, 287; xii. Archivio, 504; i. N. Ind. N. and Q., 205.

^284.1^ Featherman, Chiapo-Mar., 31, 417. Mr. Featherman throws doubt on this latter instance, because it “is reported by a Jesuit missionary.” Surely this is carrying scepticism to an unwarranted length. The report of an objective fact like this by no means stands on the same footing as another, by apparently the same missionary, that “the Ucayali Indians believe in a creator of the universe,” to which he takes exception, probably with greater justice. In neither case is there, so far as I know, any reason to suspect that the missionary is intentionally misleading his readers.

^285.1^ iii. Bancroft, 414, citing various authorities; 297 et seqq., quoting Torquemada.

^285.2^ Winwood Reade, 160; Featherman, Nigritians, 260, 262; Du Chaillu, Eq. Africa, 84, 88.

^286.1^ Schneider, 135, apparently quoting the report of an English engineer, not named, from Das Ausland, 1888.

^286.2^ Featherman, Oceano-Mel., 243.

^286.3^ Featherman, Chiapo-Mar., 355.

^286.4^ Powers, 181.

^287.1^ Wallace, 346. See also Brinton, Amer. Race, 267; Müller, Amer. Urrel., 289; iii. Trans. Ethn. Soc., N.S., 158, 193.

^287.2^ i. Bancroft, 76.

^287.3^ Codrington, 221; x. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 285; F. Bonney, in xiii. ibid., 135; A. W. Howitt, in xvi. ibid., 30, 35. The Koniaga practice also perhaps has its basis in magic.

^287.4^ Featherman, Papuo-Mel., 74.

^288.1^ Garnett, ii. Women, 263.

^288.2^ Statements of Miss Garnett and the Rev. Dr. Gaster, cited iii. Folklore, 154.

^288.3^ Mr. W. R. Paton in a letter to me dated 17th June 1892. As to repetition of the Kólyva cakes, see Rodd, 126; Garnett, i. Wom., 99. The times of the commemorative repetition vary a little in different places. Compare with this the Sicilian custom of eating on the second of November (the festival of All Souls) sweetmeats impressed with images of skulls, bones, skeletons, souls in Purgatory and the like. This is called eating the dead. i. Rivista, 239. A similar custom at Perugia. Ibid., 322.

^289.1^ Plutarch, Rom. Quest., 65; Jevons, xci.; De Gubernatis, ii. Myth. Plantes, 134; Pliny, xviii. 30.

^289.2^ ii. Laisnel de la Salle, 83.

^289.3^ ii. Rivista, 65.

^289.4^ Ostermann, 489, 482.

^290.1^ C. Guerrieri, in i. Rivista, 314. A plateful is set aside for the dead, and afterwards eaten by one of the family.

^290.2^ Monseur, 41. My knowledge of the Welsh custom depends on the statement of a Radnorshire woman to my brother-in-law, the Rev. W. E. T. Morgan, Vicar of Llanigon. It perhaps requires confirmation.

^290.3^ O. Nemi, in i. Rivista, 959.

^290.4^ Garnett, ii. Women, 496.

^290.5^ Featherman, Tur., 205.

^290.6^ Codrington, 272.

^290.7^ Featherman, Aram., 621. In Barbary cooked food is distributed among the poor on the evening of the burial. This is called the supper of the grave. Ibid., 511.

^291.1^ Featherman, Tur., 540. To these we may perhaps add the Patagonian custom of killing the horses of the deceased and distributing their flesh among his relations. Ibid., Chiapo-Mar., 495.

^291.2^ Atkinson, 227; iii. Arch. Cambr., 4th ser., 332; Gent. Mag. Lib. (Manners and Cust.), 70; ii. Cymru Fu N. and Q., 271, 275. See also ii. Antigua, 188, where “dyer bread” and “biscuit cakes” (species of pastry) are said to have been formerly handed round at Negro funerals on the island, enveloped in white paper and sealed with black wax.

^292.1^ iv. Folklore, 392.

^293.1^ iii. Pennant, 150.

^293.2^ Aubrey, Remaines, 23, 24.

^294.1^ Aubrey, Remaines, 35. Ellis reprints from Leland’s Collectanea a letter from a Mr. Bagford, dated 1st Feb. 1714-15, giving a slightly varied account, also professedly derived from Aubrey, of the rite as practised in Shropshire. The fee is stated as a groat. ii. Brand, 155.

^294.2^ iii. Arch. Cambr., N.S., 330. Traces of a similar custom are found in Derbyshire. There no wine is drunk at a funeral until after the party has returned from the church. Wine is then offered first to the bearers. This order is strictly observed; and it is believed that “every drop that you drink is a sin which the deceased has committed. You thereby take away the dead man’s sins and bear them yourself.” Addy, 123, 124.

^296.1^ Burton, Sindh, 350, 354.

^296.2^ iii. Mélusine, 409, quoting M. Dubois’ work as cited in the Annales de la Propagation de la Foi for 1830. Mr. Frazer cites this case (ii. Golden Bough, 155) and some others from India, all of which I believe are referable to the same origin, though he interprets them by reference to the idea expressed in the Mosaic Scapegoat. His attention probably had not been drawn to the parallel cases I cite above and below.

^297.1^ Dr. M. Hoefler, in ii. Am Urquell, 101. In an article on the Sin-eater in iii. Folklore, 150, I quoted Wilkie’s description of the Lowland Scottish rite called Dishaloof, and expressed the opinion that it belonged to the same order of thought as the rites now under discussion. Though I adhere to that opinion, I have not met with any thing which illustrates the mysterious details of the rite; and I have, therefore, thought it well to avoid burdening these pages with particulars that I cannot correlate. Mrs. Gomme has exhaustively analysed a children’s game called Green Grass, apparently connected with the Lowland rite; but the results attained do not help here. i. Traditional Games, 153. See Henderson, 53.

^298.1^ Quoted in ii. Brand, 153 note.

^299.1^ Denis H. Kelly, in i. Journ. Kilkenny Arch. Soc., N.S., 31 note. Smoking round the corpse was a part of the ceremony in North Wales in the last century. Owen, Crosses, 56.

^299.2^ Mr. W. R. Paton, in letters to me as before, and in letter dated 25th May 1894. Bread or money is distributed by the beadle at the gate of the cemetery on the island of Lesbos. Georgeakis, 321. In Sardinia grain or money is given to the poor who assist at the funeral mass. G. Calvia, in i. Rivista, 953.

^299.3^ Guhl and Koner, 594.

^300.1^ Possibly this is because no fire is lighted in the house of death, as in Calabria, where all food for this reason is provided by the relations and friends for a whole month, i. Rivista, 383.

^300.2^ i. De Nino, 130; Finamore, Trad. Pop., 94. In country-places of Sanseverino, when the relatives and neighbours have wept over the body, as soon as it is taken out of the house they sit down to table, talking the while of the virtues and defects of the dead. i. Rivista, 79.

^301.1^ Töppen, 95, 103.

^302.1^ ii. Laisnel de la Salle, 81, 82.

^305.1^ Featherman, Turanians, 520.

^305.2^ i. Hanway, 101.

^305.3^ Batchelor, 205.

^306.1^ i. De Groot, 115, 197, 227, 229; i. Doolittle, 180.

^306.2^ ii. Doolittle, passim.

^306.3^ F. Grabowsky, in ii. Internat. Archiv, 180; iii. Journ. Ind. Arch., 150.

^306.4^ Von Wlislocki, Volksgl. Zig., 99.

^306.5^ Sibree, 240, quoting Rev. R. T. Batchelor, in Antananarivo Annual.

^307.1^ Featherman, Tur., 108.

^307.2^ Codrington, 255, 259, 271, 284.

^307.3^ i. Macdonald, 111.

^307.4^ Featherman, Nigr., 375. Why the fowl should be spared if it refuse to eat I do not quite understand. Compare, however, similar divination in India. Crooke, 164; i. N. Ind. N. and Q., 33.

^307.5^ ii. Rep. Austr. Ass., 322.

^308.1^ Featherman, Papuo-Mel., 34.

^308.2^ Prof. Haddon, in xix. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 421.

^309.1^ F. Fawcett, in v. Folklore, 30.

^309.2^ Featherman, Tur., 506 note, quoting Fahne’s Livland; ibid., 459. The Koraiks of Siberia also kill and eat the reindeer which have drawn the body to the funeral pile, throwing the remains of the repast into the fire. Georgi, 99.

^309.3^ Featherman, Chiapo-Mar., 461.

^309.4^ vi. Rep. Bur. Ethn., 614, quoting Hall.

^310.1^ Tanner, 288, 293.

^310.2^ Featherman, Tur., 541.

^310.3^ Featherman, Papuo-Mel., 399.

^310.4^ Featherman, Tur., 230, 244.

^310.5^ Julian Ralph, in lxxxiv. Harper’s Mag., 176.

^311.1^ Ellis, Yoruba, 159.

^311.2^ Georgi, 92.

^311.3^ Featherman, Tur., 265.

^311.4^ Sir J. Lubbock, in iii. Trans. Ethn. Soc., N.S., 318; Canon Greenwell, in lii. Archæologia, passim.

^311.5^ Featherman, Nigr., 694.

^311.6^ Ellis, Yoruba, 158.

^312.1^ Marshall, 177, 185.

^313.1^ i. Rep. Bur. Ethn., 145, 200.

^313.2^ Featherman, Oceano-Mel., 406.

^313.3^ Featherman, Nigr., 291; Sibree, 241, quoting Guillain, Documents sur la partie occid. de Madagascar; Bourke, 263, quoting Smyth, Aborig. of Victoria; ii. Rep. Austr. Ass., 322; xxi. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 484, 356, 316; Fison and Howitt, 243.

^314.1^ Codrington, 268; iii. L’Anthropologie, 349, citing and reviewing Van Hoevell in the Tijdschrift voor indische taal-land- en volkenkunde; Modigliani, 281, citing Rosenberg and quoting Piepers.

^314.2^ Backhouse, 105.

^314.3^ Dr. Sims in Anthropologia, 213; i. Bancroft, 347; i. Rep. Bur. Ethn., 151.

^314.4^ Stevens, 373 note, citing Bull. Amer. Ethnol. Soc.

^314.5^ i. Bancroft, 76.

^315.1^ A. Skrzyncki, in v. Am Urquell, 208.

^315.2^ F. Grabowsky, in ii. Internat. Arch., 199, citing several authorities.

^315.3^ i. Bancroft, 731, 744.

^316.1^ A. W. Howitt, in xiii. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 190.

^316.2^ Fison and Howitt, 244. Other Australian examples may be found in i. Curr, 89, 272; ii. 249, 476; iii. 22, 28, 65, 79, 147, 273; xxiv. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 182, 185, 195.

^316.3^ xxi. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 482, citing a Government despatch.

^316.4^ Mouat, 327.

^316.5^ Dawson, 65, 63.

^316.6^ Kane, 243; i. Journ. Ethn. Soc., 249; i. Bancroft, 126; i. Rep. Bur. Ethn., 145.

^317.1^ Mouat, 327; E. H. Man, in xii. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 86, 142, 401, 402; Prof. Owen, in ii. Trans. Ethn. Soc., N.S., 37; E. Palmer, in xiii. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 298; Prof. Haddon, in v. Folklore, 320, citing Annals de la Propag. de la Foi; ix. Rep. Bur. Ethn., 485, citing Smyth; Dawson, 65; Featherman, Papuo-Mel., 157, 162; Roth, 76; Backhouse, 84; ii. Rep. Austr. Ass., 605; Featherman, Oceano-Mel., 193. The widow of an Uraba preserved the hinder part of his skull; but did she wear it? i. Bancroft, 783. In the same way Speke, 500, leaves us in doubt whether the lower jaw of a chief of the Wahuma, and the finger-bones and hair of an officer of state, were worn by anybody. Probably the former was, as it was adorned with beads. M. Du Chatellier gives an account of a skull of the bronze age unearthed in Brittany, from which a considerable piece had been cut after death on the right side. E. Cartailhac, in v. L’Anthropologie, 266, citing and reviewing an article by the learned Breton antiquary. This is not quite a singular case, and probably points to the antiquity of the practice under discussion.

^317.2^ Issedones, Herod. iv. 26. Krumen of the Grain Coast, W. Africa, Featherman, Nigr., 291. Andaman Islanders, ii. Trans. Ethn. Soc., N.S., 37. Dorah Papuans, Featherman, Papuo-Mel., 34. Islanders of New Britain and adjacent islands, Powell, 10, 165, 251. Torres Straits Islanders, Prof. Haddon, in xix. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 307, 405, 416, 421, 422, and vi. Internat. Arch., 153, 159, 161; Fur. Corresp., April 1891, 198. Admiralty Islanders, xxi. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 5. Philippine Islanders, Featherman, Papuo-Mel., 475. Santa Cruz Islanders, Codrington, 264. Banks’ Islanders, ibid., 267. Solomon Islanders, ibid., 254, 257, 262. People of Ambrym, New Hebrides, ibid., 288 note. Loyalty Islanders, Turner, Nineteen Years, 400, 463. New Caledonians, ibid., 425. Maories, Featherman, Oceano-Mel., 194. Gilbert Islanders, ii. Internat. Arch., 43. Tahitians, Ellis, i. Pol. Res., 401, 406, 270, 272. Sandwich Islanders, Ellis, iv. ibid., 359. Mosquito Indians, Featherman, Chiapo-Mar., 154. Caribs, ibid., 277; Sir R. Schomburgk, in i. Journ. Ethn. Soc., 276. Orinoco tribes, Featherman, Chiapo-Mar., 301. Vancouver Islanders, Bogg, in iii. Mem. Anthr. Soc., 265. Congarees of South Carolina, i. Rep. Bur. Ethn., 132, citing Schoolcraft. Iroquois, ibid., 169, citing Morgan.

^318.1^ Herod. iii. 24; Strabo, xvii. 11, § 5; v. Wilkinson, 389; i. De Groot, 127; Codrington, 262, 268, 288 note; Ellis, Yoruba, 161.

^318.2^ i. Risley, 331; ii. 71; Dalton, in vi. Trans. Ethn. Soc., N.S., 37; Featherman, Tur., 42, 89.

^318.3^ Wissmann, 275.

^318.4^ Julian Ralph in lxxxiv. Harper’s Mag., 177.

^319.1^ iii. Internat. Arch., 70, citing Rubruk and Plan Carpin; iii. Journ. Ethn. Soc., 29; ix. Rep. Bur. Ethn., 485, citing Smyth, Aborigines of Victoria; i. Curr, 89, 272; xxiv. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 186.

^319.2^ C. J. Branch, in xxvi. Contemp. Rev., 761, 762. A few references follow, but many might be added. Featherman, Nigr., 345, 358; Oceano-Mel., 65, 306, 393; Papuo-Mel., 71, 157; Chiapo-Mar., 277; i. Rep. Bur. Ethn., 108; i. Macdonald, 228; Ellis, iv. Pol. Res., 178; Codrington, 262; Speke, 500; vi. Internat. Arch., 129 note, quoting Wilson, A Missionary Voyage; vii. ibid., 228 note; i. Doolittle, 175; Dr. J. Shortt, in vii. Trans. Ethn. Soc., N.S., 244; Turner, Nineteen Years, 338, 400, 425, 463. “In the island of Soa near Skye, it was customary when the head of a family died to have a large lock of hair cut off his head and nailed fast to the door-lintel, to keep off the fairies.” Mackenzie, 131. Was this the true reason? A handful of earth from the grave is prescribed, among the Negroes of South Carolina, to prevent being haunted by the spirit. vii. Journ. Am. F.L., 318. And the same in Tashkend to assuage grief. i. Schuyler, 151.

^321.1^ Deut. xiv. 1.

^321.2^ Wilken, Haaropfer, 19, citing Tijdschr. v. h. Aardrijksk. Gen., and Tijdschr. v. Ind. T. L. en Vk.

^321.3^ Andree, i. Ethn. Par., 148; Ellis, i. Pol. Res., 407, 410.

^322.1^ Featherman, Papuo-Mel., 155, 157; i. Curr, 272; ii. 179, 203, 249, 346, 443; iii. 21, 29, 165, 549; xxiv. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 178, 181, 185, 187, 195.

^322.2^ Featherman, Chiapo-Mar., 153.

^322.3^ Von den Steinen, 507.

^322.4^ Letourneau, L’Év. Rel., 187, citing the Dix-neuvième Siècle for 26th Dec. 1890.

^323.1^ i. Rep. Bur. Ethn., 190, 124, 100, 109, 112, 143, 159, 164, 183.

^323.2^ Wilken, Haaropfer, 19, citing Francis, Herinneringen uit den levensloop van een Indisch Ambtenaar.

^323.3^ Featherman, Aram., 620.

^323.4^ Powers, 181. The Greeks also scratched their faces until they bled, as a token of mourning. Robertson Smith, Rel. Sem., 304.

^324.1^ Andree, i. Ethn. Par., 150. Other instances of similar mutilation are given by Andree.

^324.2^ Tylor, ii. Prim. Cult., 364. The evolution of sacrifices from gifts upwards is treated by Dr. Tylor in the context.

^326.1^ Burton, Sindh, 281.

^327.1^ i. Crawfurd, 97.

^327.2^ Burton, Sindh, 281; Bellew, 226.

^327.3^ Dr. Daniell, in iv. Journ. Ethn. Soc., 19.

^327.4^ Brinton, Lenâpe, 54, 23.

^328.1^ Cyrus Thomas, Ohio Mounds, 11, 19, 22; i. Rep. Bur. Ethn., 127, 169, 170.

^328.2^ Turner, Nineteen Years, 230.

^328.3^ Featherman, Nigr., 694.

^328.4^ Rodd, 127. Mr. Rodd goes on to notice “that MM. Pottier and Reinach in their work on The Necropolis of Myrina draw attention to the fact that in the course of their excavations they came upon a number of skeletons in which the skull was absent, while in certain cases both the skull and the feet were missing”; and they conclude that the graves in question “are those of strangers, and that the missing bones, like those of the Albanians of to-day, had been restored to the countries of their origin.” This may be so, though the absence of these bones may point to other customs, such as I have already discussed in this chapter. General Pitt-Rivers reported to the British Association at Oxford last year (1894) that he had also found bodies buried without the head at Cranborne Chase.

^329.1^ Cicero, Leg. ii. 24, 60.

^329.2^ i. N. Ind. N. and Q., 45, quoting ii. Calcutta Review, 419.

^330.1^ Hunter, Rur. Bengal, 153, 210; and the authors cited above, p. 318.

^330.2^ i. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 131.

^330.3^ Featherman, Tur., 88.

^330.4^ i. Risley, 125.

^331.1^ Daily News, 20th Feb. 1892.

^331.2^ Burton, ii. Gelele, 78 note; Ellis, Ewe, 159; Yoruba, 163.

^331.3^ ii. Internat. Arch., 181.

^332.1^ i. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 183.

^332.2^ i. Gray, 295.

^332.3^ Rev. S. Ella, in iv. Rep. Aust. Ass., 641.

Chapter XIV Notes

^335.1^ Dalton, 160, 216, 252, 273, 317, 321; Risley, passim.

^335.2^ Hunter, Rur. Bengal, 188. No one reading the Indian evidence can be left in any uncertainty as to the meaning of the red lead. See Crooke, 197, 294; N. Ind. N. and Q., passim.

^336.1^ i. Risley, 243; ii. 96, 222, 263. Cf. i. N. Ind. N. and Q., 152.

^336.2^ i. Doolittle, 67-105; i. Gray, 193-209.

^336.3^ Th. Volkov, in iii. L’Anthropologie, 541, 544, 545. A red cloth hung on a girl’s tent constitutes an offer of marriage among the Transylvanian Gipsies. Von Wlislocki, Volksdicht., 351.

^336.4^ Dalton, 220; i. Risley, 138.

^336.5^ i. Risley, 449, 450.

^337.1^ i. Risley, 456, citing Grierson’s Behar Peasant Life.

^337.2^ ii. Risley, 189.

^337.3^ i. Risley, 475.

^337.4^ Ibid. 532.

^337.5^ ii. Risley, 201.

^338.1^ i. Risley, 532.

^339.1^ Featherman, Papuo-Mel., 32.

^339.2^ The Weekly Sun, 28 Jan. 1893, quoting from Mr. Creagh’s notes of his visit contributed to a newspaper published in British North Borneo. I am indebted to Mr. Edward Clodd for calling my attention to this. Zipporah’s expression in Exodus iv. 25, 26, points to a similar ceremony among the early Hebrews. See Trumbull, 222.

^340.1^ Landes, Contes Annam., 207 (Story No. 84).

^340.2^ Codrington, 395 note.

^341.1^ H. F. Feilberg, in iii. Am Urquell, 3, citing Haukenaes.

^342.1^ Castrén, Vorlesungen, 323.

^342.2^ Antè, p. 247. In a Lapp story the hero, betrothed to the sun’s sister and separated from her, goes in search of her. When he finds her she is at the point of death from sorrow. He pricks her in the hand, and sucks her blood; whereupon she revives, and they are happily married. Poestion, 233. In Bret Harte’s story of Sally Dows, the heroine sucks the hero’s blood from a snake-wound, and is told by an old Negress that this has bound them together, so that she can marry nobody else. We cannot doubt that the author found this in Negro superstitions. Contrast, however, the effect of this incident with that of the Irish tale of The Wooing of Emer, already referred to, p. 255.

^342.3^ De Mensignac, 21, quoting Arago’s Voyage autour du Monde. As to the use of red paint, meaning blood, by Australian natives, see decisive examples in ii. Curr, 36; xxiv. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 171.

^343.1^ Featherman, Chiapo-Mar., 267.

^343.2^ F. Fawcett, in v. Folklore, 24; ii. Journ. Ind. Arch., 358.

^344.1^ Dalton, 216.

^344.2^ Lewin, 129, 177.

^345.1^ iii. Trans. Ethn. Soc., N.S., 81.

^345.2^ xxx. Sacred Bks., 49.

^345.3^ Dr. Leitner, in v. Asiatic Q. Rev., 2d ser., 153.

^345.4^ Paulitschke, 248, citing Massaja.

^345.5^ Dorsey, Cegiha Lang., 342.

^346.1^ ii. Rep. Austr. Ass., 330.

^346.2^ ii. Rep. Austr. Ass., 314, 319; Featherman, Papuo-Mel., 32, 33.

^346.3^ Krauss, Sitte und Brauch, 275-6, 459.

^346.4^ A. G. Contis, in iv. Mélusine, 125.

^346.5^ Rodd, 105; Schroeder, 83.

^346.6^ ii. Witzschel, 235; Spiess, Obererz., 37.

^346.7^ Bérenger-Féraud, 195; Schroeder, 82, 235.

^347.1^ ii. Laisnel de la Salle, 46.

^347.2^ Monseur, 36.

^347.3^ vii. Rev. Trad. Pop., 682, citing Manuel des Cérémonies (1494); Schroeder, 83.

^347.4^ Featherman, Aram., 62, 75.

^348.1^ Schroeder, 82; Pigorini-Beri, 14; Ralston, Songs, 269; vii. Mélusine, 4; viii. Rev. Trad. Pop., 542; iii. Zeits. des Vereins, 267; Krauss, Sitte und Brauch, 356, 386; Trumbull, 73; Kolbe, 171; Töppen, 81; ii. Heimskringla, 153.

^349.1^ Kolbe, 147; Winternitz, in Congress (1891) Report, 281, quoting Romanoff, Rites of the Greek Church; Odd Ways, 82, 87, 102, 108.

^349.2^ See an account of an Armenian wedding in London, according to the rites of the Armenian National Church, Daily News, 28 Jan. 1892.

^349.3^ Bellew, 222.

^349.4^ Dalton, 193; i. Risley, 325. Among some allied tribes, when the bride is conducted to her husband’s dwelling she is seated on a pile of unhusked rice. Oil is then poured over her head, and she is presented with some boiled rice and meat cooked in her new home. This she simply touches with her hand, and declares herself to belong to her husband’s kili. Featherman, Tur., 60. The touching is doubtless the simplified equivalent of tasting, the simplification being accompanied by words explanatory of the intention of the rite. Compare the Abruzzian ceremony, ii. De Nino, 10.

^350.1^ ii. Risley, 8.

^350.2^ Lewin, 202.

^350.3^ G. Dumoutier, in viii. Rev. Trad. Pop., 405.

^350.4^ xxvii. Sacred Bks., 441; xxviii. 429.

^350.5^ i. Doolittle, 86.

^350.6^ Griffis, 249. This does not appear to be now, at all events, the operative part of the ceremony. Similar variations have affected the ceremony elsewhere.

^351.1^ vi. Trans. Ethn. Soc., N.S., 26; iii. Journ. Ind. Arch., 490; iv. 431; iii. L’Anthropologie, 193; Trumbull, 192, 193; ii. Risley, 325.

^351.2^ iv. Rev. Trad. Pop., 362.

^351.3^ Schroeder, 235.

^352.1^ Th. Volkov, in ii. L’Anthropologie, 558.

^352.2^ A. de Lazarque, in ix. Rev. Trad. Pop., 580.

^352.3^ F. Pulci, in xiii. Archivio, 417.

^353.1^ Featherman, Tur., 88.

^353.2^ R. Parkinson, in ii. Internat. Archiv., 38.

^354.1^ Burton, Sindh, 345.

^354.2^ Featherman, Tur., 30; i. Risley, 497; Hodgson, 178. So among the Mussulman Malabars of Ceylon the bridegroom’s sister ties a consecrated cord around the bride’s neck. Featherman, Tur., 203.

^354.3^ Hunter, Rur. Bengal, 207.

^354.4^ ii. Risley, 69.

^354.5^ Lubbock, 84, citing Hale’s United States Exploring Exped. Compare the Kewat ceremony, i. Risley, 456.

^355.1^ Ellis, i. Polyn. Res., 272.

^355.2^ R. Parkinson, in ii. Internat. Archiv, 39; Hertz, 38 note, citing Abel Rémusat.

^355.3^ Dr. W. Svoboda, in v. Internat. Arch., 193, citing the Jesuit Barbe.

^355.4^ F. Fawcett, in v. Folklore, 23.

^356.1^ Featherman, Tur., 490.

^356.2^ O. Knoop, in iii. Zeits. f. Volksk., 230.

^356.3^ Du Chaillu, ii. Midnight Sun, 240.

^356.4^ Zingerle, Sagen, 457; Töppen, 76; A. Herrmann, in v. Am Urquell, 110.

^356.5^ Schwela, in iii. Zeits. f. Volksk., 478.

^356.6^ Rogers, 112.

^357.1^ Gregor, 95.

^357.2^ ii. Laisnel de la Salle, 66, 50. At Nagialmagy, in Hungary, young married women assemble on Saint Joseph’s day and the day following, on the market-place and sell their kisses to all comers. ix. Rev. Trad. Pop., 359.

^358.1^ Filippo Seves, in xii. Archivio, 527.

^358.2^ Ostermann, 347; i. Rivista, 560.

^358.3^ Bérenger-Féraud, 200, 194. A species of bride-dance seems to be practised at Heideboden, in Hungary, and perhaps also in various places of Italy and Greece. De Gubernatis, Usi Nuz., 189.

^358.4^ Herod. iv. 172; Lubbock, 535, quoting Mela; Diodorus Sic. v. 1.

^359.1^ Fison and Howitt, 201-5. The punishment for a guilty wife among some of the North American tribes was similar to that of the Kurnai. See Featherman, Aoneo-Mar., 161. Cf. Robertson Smith, Kinship, 137. Other traces of the Nasamonian rite are to be found among the North American Indians. See, for example, a curious Ponka legend given by Dorsey, Cegiha, 616.

^362.1^ ii. Garcilasso, 442. Elsewhere (i. 59) he speaks of the participants as “the nearest relations of the bride and her most intimate friends.” He only refers vaguely to the peoples addicted to this form of the rite, and cites Pedro de Cieza as making the same assertion. I have not seen De Cieza’s work; but Mr. Markham observes that he refers to New Granada, not Peru. I am strongly inclined to suspect, on more grounds than one, that Garcilasso’s information is not to be relied on; and that, wherever the custom was followed, it was the bridegroom’s rather than the bride’s relations who took part. Did a somewhat similar custom obtain in Paraguay? See Featherman, Chiapo-Mar., 435. It is to be distinguished from a well-known East Indian custom which springs from a different motive. See Hertz, 41.

^362.2^ Mrs. French Sheldon, in xxi. Journ. Anthrop. Inst., 365. A relic of the same custom is found in Guatemala, where the marriage is consummated, not by the bridegroom, but by a kinsman, to whom the bride is brought by the bridegroom’s mother for the purpose. Stoll, 8.

^363.1^ Capt. J. S. King, in vi. F.L. Journ., 124.

^363.2^ Krauss, Sitte und Brauch, 382, 456, 608.

^365.1^ iv. Rep. Austr. Ass., 672. See Morgan, Anc. Soc., 424.

^366.1^ Featherman, Aram., 75.

^366.2^ Volkov, in ii. L’Anthropologie, 538, 539 note, quoting several authorities.

^367.1^ Macpherson, 133. Cf. the customs of other tribes, i. N. Ind. N. and Q., 124, 139, 177.

^367.2^ Marsden, 256.

^367.3^ Codrington, 238.

^367.4^ Casalis, 207; Featherman, Nigr., 642.

^367.5^ Featherman, Chiapo-Mar., 472, 459.

^367.6^ Stoll, 8. See note, ante, p. 362.

^368.1^ i. Bancroft, 411.

^370.1^ See Lubbock, 131, 535; MacLennan, 341; Westermarck, 72. An exception must be made for the Babylonian and similar cases which do not appear referable to the exercise of communal marriage-rights.

^371.1^ i. Risley, 229.

^371.2^ i. Risley, 231. A similar distinction of guilt is drawn by the Dhánuks (i. ibid., 221), the Ghasiyas of South Mirzapur (i. N. Ind. N. and Q., 167), the Dusadhs (ii. ibid., 32), the Kharwars (ii. ibid., 34), the Bhuts, though nominally Mohammedan (ii. ibid., 50), and other tribes. So also in Ladák, iii. N. Ind. N. and Q., 168.

^371.3^ i. N. Ind. N. and Q., 168.

^371.4^ Featherman, Drav., 184.

^372.1^ Featherman, Aoneo-Mar., 590.

^372.2^ Herod. i. 216.

^372.3^ Forbes, in xiii. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 426; Trumbull, 54.

^373.1^ Robertson Smith, Kinship, 137.

^373.2^ Risley, passim. So also the Chukmas of the Chittagong Hills; Lewin, 187. And the Chinese; i. Gray, 219.

^373.3^ Gen. xxxviii. 8; Deut. xxv. 5.

^373.4^ B. W. Schiffer, in v. Am Urquell, 224: Dalyell, 313, citing Leo of Modena.

^374.1^ Sacred Bks., xxv., 337, 361, 365; ii., 164.

^374.2^ Sibree, 246.

^374.3^ Casalis, 199.

^375.1^ Risley, passim; Dalton, 16, 63, 138, 273, 321.

^375.2^ Elliot, i. N.-W. Prov., 136. See also, ibid., 5, 121, 274, 326; N. Ind. N. and Q., passim.

^375.3^ ii. N. Ind. N. and Q., 24.

^375.4^ i. Ibid. 157.

^376.1^ i. N. Ind. N. and Q., 84.

^376.2^ Biddulph, 76, 82; iii. N. Ind. N. and Q., 168.

^376.3^ Fosberry, in i. Journ. Ethn. Soc., N.S., 189.

^376.4^ Featherman, Drav., 558, 244. See Marco Polo, li., as to another Tartar tribe.

^376.5^ Marsden, 220, 228. Cf. ii. L’Anthropologie, 257.

^376.6^ Modigliani, 553.

^377.1^ Modigliani, Isola delle Donne, 212, 215.

^377.2^ Parkinson, in ii. Internat. Arch., 39.

^377.3^ Man, in xii. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 139, 141.

^377.4^ Featherman, Oceano-Mel., 308.

^377.5^ Featherman, Nigr., 288, 290, 596, 762; Paulitschke, 205.

^378.1^ Ellis, Yoruba, 185.

^378.2^ Westermarck, 513, 514, quoting Shooter.

^378.3^ Featherman, Aoneo-Mar., 390. This liability is perhaps annexed to the inheritance; but it is certainly regarded as a liability rather than a right. Rep. Nat. Mus. (1888), 254.

^378.4^ Stoll, 7.

^378.5^ Featherman, Aoneo-Mar., 319.

^378.6^ Grinnell, Blackfeet L.T., 218; Dorsey, Omaha Soc., 258, 367.

^379.1^ i. Rep. Bur. Ethn., 184, 185.

^379.2^ Powers, 356.

^379.3^ Featherman, Chiapo-Mar., 100.

^379.4^ Turner, Samoa, 98; iv. Rep. Austr. Ass., 642.

^379.5^ Featherman, Papuo-Mel., 87.

^379.6^ iv. Rep. Austr. Ass., 628.

^379.7^ ii. Rep. Austr. Ass., 601.

^379.8^ Rev. B. Danks, in xviii. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 292.

^379.9^ Boas, in vi. Rep. Bur. Ethn., 615, quoting Lyon.

^380.1^ Dawson, 7, 27. See as to the natives of Northern Queensland, xiii. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 298; as to various tribes of South Australia and its northern territory, xxiv. ibid., 170, 178, 181, 194; as to other tribes, ii. Curr, 197, 425, 474; iii. 21, 546.

^380.2^ Garnett, ii. Wom., 234.

^380.3^ Saxo, 87; Elton’s version, 106; i. Corp. Poet. Bor., 105. These mythological cases as testimony to an obsolete custom of polyandry may be compared with similar references in ancient Hindu writings quoted by Westermarck, 457.

^381.1^ ii. Rep. Austr. Ass., 314, 320; vi. Journ. Ind. Arch., 319.

^381.2^ iii. N. Ind. N. and Q., 168.

^381.3^ i. Bancroft, 731.

^381.4^ Cooper, 153.

^382.1^ Grinnell, Blackfeet L.T., 217.

^382.2^ Featherman, Aoneo-Mar., 213, 175, 274, 308, 319; Chiapo-Mar., 268, 16, 168; Brinton, Amer. Race, 96.

^382.3^ Dorsey, Omaha Soc., 261.

^382.4^ Fisher, in i. Journ. Ethn. Soc., N.S., 286. As to the Walla-Wallas, see Kane, 267, 270.

^382.5^ Brinton, Amer. Race, 48.

^383.1^ iv. L’Anthropologie, 641.

^383.2^ i. Risley, 6, 17, 32, 135, 170, 192, 268, 307, 416; ii., 65, 69, 96, 186, 229, 293.

^383.3^ Shortt, in vii. Trans. Ethn. Soc., N.S., 240.

^383.4^ Featherman, Tur., 558.

^383.5^ xxv. Sacred Bks., 291.

^383.6^ Paulitschke, 204.

^383.7^ Chatelain, 119.

^384.1^ Lev. xviii. 18.

^384.2^ Featherman, Oceano-Mel., 297, 406.

^384.3^ Rev. S. Ella, in iv. Rep. Austr. Ass., 628.

^384.4^ ii. Rep. Austr. Ass., 331.

^385.1^ Volkov, in ii. L’Anthropologie, 568.

^386.1^ i. De Groot, 3; xxviii. Sacred Bks., 238, 264; xxvii. 442.

^386.2^ Robertson Smith, Kinship, 148, 176; cf. 66.

^387.1^ MacLennan, Studies, 103, citing Latham’s Descriptive Ethnology.

^387.2^ ii. L’Anthropologie, 117, quoting a communication by M. Crampe to the Société de Géographie. Cf. the customs of giving up a child or paying for him mentioned by Paulitschke, 202; xxiii. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 4.

^389.1^ i. Risley, 150.

^389.2^ Marsden, 225, 236, 262; Modigliani, Batacchi, 35.

^390.1^ Featherman, Tur., 63.

^390.2^ ii. Risley, 282.

^390.3^ iii. Zeits. f. Volksk., 391, 479.

^390.4^ xxvii. Sac. Bks., 77; xxviii., 299. In case of divorce, however, she returns to the parental home, ii. De Groot, 507.

^391.1^ ii. Risley, 80; App., 97.

^391.2^ i. N. Ind. N. and Q., 132.

^391.3^ Lev. xxi. 1-4; xxii. 10-13.

^391.4^ Aulus Gellius, xiii. 10.

^393.1^ Featherman, Tur., 107.

^394.1^ Featherman, Tur., 263.

^394.2^ Ibid., Tur., 283.

^395.1^ iii. Zeits. f. Volksk., 433.

^395.2^ Volkov, in ii. L’Anthropologie, 553.

^396.1^ Krauss, Sitte und Brauch, 278, 275, 277.

^396.2^ Codrington, 237.

^396.3^ Burton, Sindh, 272.

^396.4^ Smith, Guinea, 144.

^397.1^ ii. Kerr, 237.

^397.2^ Featherman, Aram., 422.

^397.3^ Hickson, 282.

Chapter XV Notes

^401.1^ On the Couvade generally the reader may consult Tylor, Early Hist., 291; H. Ling Roth, in xxii. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 204; Ploss, i. Kind, 143; Von Dargun, 18; and the correspondence in The Academy for 29th Oct., 5th, 12th, 19th Nov., 10th, 17th Dec. 1892.

^404.1^ Modigliani, 555; Ploss, i. Kind, 36.

^404.2^ Codrington, 228.

^405.1^ Von den Steinen, 334, 338, 503, 434.

^406.1^ Addy, 91. Compare the tale, cited suprà, p. 11, of the mother whose digging-stick broke when her child was taken away. In a Chinese tale a grown-up son feels pain when his mother bites her finger. i. Doolittle, 454.

^407.1^ Tylor, Early Hist., 292, quoting Du Tertre.

^408.1^ Featherman, Papuo-Mel., 64.

^411.1^ Grimm, Teut. Myth., 1845.

^411.2^ Temme, Altmark, 87, 78.

^411.3^ ii. Am Urquell, 123.

^411.4^ De Zmidgrodzki, in vi. Rev. Trad. Pop., 40; Temme, Altmark, 88.

^411.5^ i. Kohlrusch, 340.

^411.6^ Temme, Altmark, 74.

^411.7^ Schiffer, in iv. Am Urquell, 170.

^412.1^ Tylor, Early Hist., 304, citing Wuttke.

^412.2^ Grimm, Teut. Myth., 1796; ii. Witzschel, 249. Other German examples will be found in Grimm, Teut. Myth., 1779, 1786, 1799, 1845; Temme, Altmark, 74, 88; ii. Witzschel, 244, 250; Ploss, i. Kind, 213, 216; Von Wlislocki, Siebenb. Sachs., 152; Hillner, 38; vi. Am Urquell, 93; Spiess, Obererz., 36.

^412.3^ ii. Am Urquell, 198.

^413.1^ Ploss, i. Kind, 216.

^413.2^ Knoop, Posen, 116.

^413.3^ Kaindl, 6.

^413.4^ Marchesa di Villamarina, in i. Rivista, 72.

^414.1^ Bérenger-Féraud, 171; i. Strackerjan, 48; vi. Am Urquell, 93; ii. Bull. de F.L., 151.

^414.2^ ii. Laisnel de la Salle, 9.

^414.3^ Julie Filippi, in ix. Rev. Trad. Pop., 465.

^414.4^ Ostermann, 381.

^414.5^ viii. Journ. Am. F.L., 22.

^414.6^ ii. Bull. de F.L., 152.

^414.7^ Lady Vere de Vere, in i. Rivista, 447.

^415.1^ Ostermann, 381; i. Rivista, 635; ii. 45.

^415.2^ Von Wlislocki, in iii. Am Urquell, 93.

^416.1^ Dr. Krauss, in vii. Internat. Archiv, 168, 188, 191, 193, 196. See also Wilken, ii. Haaropfer, 68, quoting Grimm.

^417.1^ Kaindl, 25, 40.

^417.2^ Pigorini-Beri, 287.

^418.1^ ii. Laisnel de la Salle, 9.

^419.1^ Diod. Sic., iv. The Roman form seems to have been similar; Lubbock, 96, citing Müller, Das Mutterrecht.

^420.1^ Krauss, Sitte und Brauch, 600, quoting Jukic; 599.

^420.2^ ii. Laisnel de la Salle, 13, 39; Kolbe, 176.

^420.3^ Brayley, 36. A Swedish superstition requires a mother of a child begotten before marriage, herself to hold the child at the font, otherwise it will not be legitimate. Grimm, Teut. Myth., 1830, quoting Fernow’s Beskrifning öfver Wärmeland.

^421.1^ A. Weidemann, in iii. Am Urquell, 259.

^421.2^ Girald. Cambr., Topog. xxiii.; Saxo, 82, 200; Elton’s version, 99, 245.

^421.3^ Paulitschke, 193, citing Abbadie, Géog. de l’Ethiopie.

^421.4^ Lubbock, 97, quoting Parkyn.

^421.5^ Hearn, 105.

^421.6^ xxv. Sac. Bks. 352.

^422.1^ As to adoption generally, in addition to the citations above, see, among others, Paulitschke, 209; Robertson Smith, Kinship, 44, 149; Aulus Gellius, v. 19; Hunter, Captivity, 19, 35, 249; ii. Domenech, 324, 350; Featherman, Aoneo-Mar., 184, 310, 320; Chiapo-Mar., 274; Codrington, 42; Marsden, 229; vi. Rep. Bur. Ethn., 580; ix., 419; i. Crantz, 165; i. N. Ind. N. and Q., 152, 204; D’Arbois, i. Droit Celt., 251; Kaindl, 26. Biddulph, 82, describes fosterage in the Hindoo Koosh. Mr. Parkinson, in ii. Internat. Arch., 33, speaks of adoptive parents and children in the Kingsmill Islands. Adoption, however, seems there rather of the nature of sponsorship. It creates rights and duties, but does not involve detachment from the family of birth. A similar custom appears elsewhere in Polynesia.

^424.1^ Ramage, 241. Mr. Ramage’s journey took place in 1828, and the incident referred to occurred at some previous date not indicated. May we hope the Italian peasant knows better by this time?

^425.1^ Strack, 86, citing The Book of the Pious.

^425.2^ L. F. Sauvé, in ii. Mélusine, 254; Le Braz, 231; A. de Cock, in x. Rev. Trad. Pop., 249.

^425.3^ Callaway, Tales, 284.

^426.1^ Daily News, 14th July 1894.

^427.1^ Ellis, Ewe-speaking Peoples, 208; Yoruba, 176, 300.

^429.1^ Dalton, 64.

^429.2^ ii. Binger, 260; Ellis, Yoruba, 299.

^429.3^ Fison and Howitt, 157 note.

^430.1^ i. N. Ind. N. and Q., 82.

^430.2^ The provisions of the Irish laws are carefully analysed, D’Arbois, i. Droit Celt.

^430.3^ Professor Kovalevsky, in the interesting paper mentioned ante, p. 230 note, which he read to the British Association at Oxford last year, gave some account of the Lex Barbarorum of Daghestan, a code written down in the last century, but embodying the ancient customs of the Chevsurs, Pschavs and Touchains of Daghestan, who speak a dialect of Georgian. The population is organised in gentes, called touchoum; and every touchoum incurs joint responsibility for the acts of its members. “Consanguinity,” says the professor, “to the remotest degree makes a man jointly responsible.… In case of murder or wounding, not only the trespasser but each one of the members of his touchoum, or gens, has to expect vengeance on the part of the touchoum to which the victim belonged. The same mutual responsibility exists in the case of forcible entry.” It is noteworthy that each touchoum claims descent from some mythical ancestor.

^431.1^ Bartels, 205, quoting some writer I have not traced. The want of exact references is too frequently a serious blot on German scholarship. Dr. Bartels is shamefully guilty in this respect.

^432.1^ Dyer, 171, quoting a paper by Mr. Chanter in ii. Report and Transactions of the Devonshire Association (1867), 39.

^432.2^ Prof. Mikhailovskii, in xxiv. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 126.

^432.3^ Featherman, Nigr., 134, citing A Walk across Africa, by J. A. Grant (1803).

^433.1^ v. Rep. Bur. Ethn., 426.

^433.2^ vii. Rep. Bur. Ethn., 338, 350, 346.

^434.1^ ii. Sax. Leechd., 136.

^434.2^ Featherman, Drav., 246; Chiapo-Mar., 464; Papuo-Mel., 502; Nigr., 36, 750; xxiv. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 66.

^435.1^ Richardson, The Folly of Pilgrimages, 70.

^435.2^ i. Doolittle, 149. In Sardinia it is a common remedy, not merely in cases of bite by the famous spider, but for other diseases also, to bury the sick man up to his neck in earth, and to cause seven maidens, seven wives or seven widows, according as he is a bachelor, a married man or a widower, to dance round him. F. Valla, in xiv. Archivio, 40, 49. This seems referable to the same order of ideas.

^435.3^ Suprà, p. 94; i. N. Ind. N. and Q., 6.

^436.1^ E. Regàlia, in xiii. Archivio, 489.

^436.2^ ii. De Groot, 507, 621.

^436.3^ Andree, ii. Ethnog. Par., 11, citing Wuttke.

^437.1^ Landor, 225, 227. See Batchelor, 211, as to other Ainu tribes.

^437.2^ Anthony Jully, in v. L’Anthropologie, 400.

^437.3^ Julian Ralph, in lxxxiv. Harper’s New Monthly Mag., 177.

^437.4^ Featherman, Papuo-Mel., 179.

^437.5^ Codrington, 269.

^437.6^ Du Chaillu, Eq. Afr., 18.

^438.1^ i. De Groot, 90, 93, 64, 89.

^439.1^ ii. De Groot, 441; ii. Gray, 25, 305.

^439.2^ iv. Internat. Arch., 9. The Hawaiian practice of flinging the dead into a volcano or into the sea perhaps belongs to the class of superstitions dealt with in the above paragraph. Ellis, Hawaii, 336.

^439.3^ Taylor, 208.

^444.1^ Fison and Howitt, 170.

Errata

[Copied from volume III in the series]

p. 147, note, after letter xxviii. insert to Daines Barrington

p. 271, note 4, for 68 read 57.

Volume III — Andromeda and Medusa

Dedication

TO
DAVID BRYNMÔR JONES, Q.C., M.P.

If any worth be found within these pages, If any skill, however poor, have traced Man’s thoughts and purposes down the long ages Where thought is dim and purpose half-effaced— To you the opportunity be reckon’d, To you the worth. You flung the portals wide Which guard enchanted palaces, and beckon’d To new adventures life had else denied— Enchanted palaces, where gods forgotten Dream through an afternoon of endless years; Adventures follow’d, far from fields erst foughten, ’Neath wilder heav’ns, aflame with mightier spheres. Yours be the spoils, then, from that realm of glamour; At least some gracious memories they will bring, When husht the forum, husht is party clamour, And you can listen to their whispering.

Note

This volume contains, in addition to the final instalment of the inquiry sketched at the beginning of the first volume, a Supplementary List of Works referred to in volumes ii. and iii., and the Dedication and General Index for the whole.

Since the publication of the second volume local inquiries have satisfied me that the account of the ceremony at Market Drayton (or rather at Wollerton, near that town), mentioned on p. 292 of the volume in question, is inaccurate. The wine and biscuits were handed to the bearers, but not across the coffin; and the minister merely reprobated in general terms the custom of drinking at funerals.

Corrigenda of a minor character are, in volume i. p. 57, note 1, for 217 read 178, and p. 61, last line but one, for fisherman read merchant; in volume ii. p. 147, note, after letter xxviii. insert to Daines Barrington, and p. 271, note 4, for 68 read 57.

I cannot lay down the pen without reiterating my very inadequate thanks to Mr. Rouse and Mr. Alfred Nutt for the unstinted and invaluable aid I have received in various ways from them: aid which, beginning with the opening chapter, has been continued to the latest pages of this effort to solve the problem of the Legend of Perseus.

Highgarth, Gloucester,
June 1896.

CHAPTER XVI. THE RESCUE OF ANDROMEDA IN MÄRCHEN

We have traced the incidents of the Supernatural Birth and the Life-token throughout the world: the two remaining incidents of the Rescue of Andromeda and the Medusa-witch have a more restricted range. For though traditions of a fight with a monster and of human beings turned to stone, the germs of the incidents in question, are almost universal, yet the special forms evolved from these germs in the Perseus saga seem to be confined to the Eastern Continent, save where immigrant peoples have taken them in modern times to the New World and given them in some rare instances currency there among the aboriginal tribes.

Of these incidents, the first with which we are concerned is that of the Rescue of Andromeda. Its popularity in Europe is hardly exceeded by that of any incident in traditional fiction, while it is known to story-tellers over vast spaces of the Orient and of Africa. The simplest form of the incident is found in a Berber märchen preserved in a manuscript at the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris, and translated some years ago by M. René Basset. In this tale a youth, whose earlier experiences vividly recall those of Joseph down to his temptation in Potiphar’s house, is {2} more leniently treated than the Hebrew patriarch, being simply expelled from his master’s family. He wanders away and reaches a fountain inhabited by a serpent, which allows no water to be drawn, save in return for the sacrifice of a woman. That day it was the king’s daughter’s turn to be devoured. The youth, finding her at the spring, inquires why she weeps, and undertakes her deliverance. The snake appears to have had more than one head, though how many is not recorded. At all events the hero beat them one after another, as they were stretched forth to seize the prey, until the serpent died. The water was then free to everybody; and when the king inquired whose doing it was, the stranger youth was led before him and frankly owned his exploit. It is hardly necessary to say that he was rewarded with the hand of the young lady he had saved, and was named the king’s vicegerent. The wedding festivities, we are told, lasted seven days.^2.1^

Sometimes the hero is possessed of extraordinary strength, which enables him to overcome his foe. An example is found on the island of Syra, where a tale is told of an ogre who was in the habit of eating anybody who came in his way. Strong Jack fights and kills him, thus delivering a king’s daughter, whom he marries. But she is afterwards carried off by a monster, a half-man with only one eye, one hand, and one foot. Her husband, strong as he is, attacks the half-man in vain. He cannot be killed, for his external soul consists of two doves in the belly of a certain wild sow. To such a monster the hero falls an easy prey; but he is restored to life, and in due time has his revenge.^2.2^ In another story, from Agia Anna, the ogre is a female {3} called the Krikeça, who eats a maiden daily. Though already a married man, the hero undertakes the adventure; and the maiden on whose behalf he fights brings him food enough to quell his craving—a difficult task, for these strong heroes are enormous eaters—and so supplies him with a continuance of strength to conquer the Krikeça. The latter begs for life and becomes a converted character.^3.1^ So, in an Armenian tale from the Land beyond the Forest, does a wild sow who has fallen into the same vicious habit of devouring maidens, and who turns out to be an enchanted youth whom the hero frees from his spell.^3.2^

These tales are closely allied with a type of which, with one exception, I have not found any variants outside the Celtic and Basque populations of the west of Europe. It may be called The Herdsman type. Lod, the farmer’s son, in an Argyllshire tale, is unusually strong. He takes service as herd with a king; and in the course of his day’s work at different times encounters and puts to death two giants and their mother, bringing home his cattle safe and sound as no herd had done before him. A big giant then comes for the king’s daughter, whom a squint-eyed, red-haired cook undertakes to save, his price being the maiden in marriage. The cook hides behind a stone and covers himself with sea-weed. Lod comes upon the scene and meets the heroine weeping. He comforts her, and lying down with his head on her knee he begs her to relieve him of the vermin. If he fell asleep under the lulling influences of this operation she was to waken him by cutting off the point of his little finger. On the giant’s appearance the princess wakens him. He springs up, draws his club, {4} sweeps off the giant’s three heads and throws them contemptuously at the cook, who takes them and the king’s daughter home, as if he himself were the deliverer. A day is appointed for the wedding; but the heroine identifies Lod as the man, and proves it by the point of his finger, which she produces from her pocket. She marries him accordingly, and the cook is burnt to death.^4.1^ The same story in effect is given by Campbell as a variant of The Sea Maiden, cited in an earlier chapter.^4.2^ In Ireland the tale appears as that of The Thirteenth Son of the King of Erin. The king having thirteen sons is advised to give one to fate. The eldest is the one on whom the lot falls. His father dismisses him with the gift of a steed of supernatural fleetness; and he hires himself as cowherd to another king. He slays three giants and takes possession of their castles and wealth, among which are a black, a brown, and a red horse. The king’s daughter is to be devoured by “an urfeist, a great serpent of the sea, a monster which must get a king’s daughter to devour every seven years.” Hundreds and hundreds of kings’ sons and champions were anxious to save her, but were so frightened at the terrible urfeist that they would not go near her when she was conducted to the beach in readiness for her death. The hero rides down on the black horse, clad in the black gear he has found in the first giant’s castle. Dismounting, he lays his head in the maiden’s lap and falls asleep, waiting for the monster. While he slept she took three hairs from his head and hid them in her bosom. With his sword of light he took off the serpent’s head, but it rushed back to its place and grew on again. The serpent, however, declined to fight any more that day. In a twinkle it {5} returned to the sea, saying: “I’ll be here again to-morrow, and swallow the whole world before me as I come.” Undaunted by this threat, the hero appeared on the morrow in the blue dress of the second giant and mounted on his brown horse. He laid his head on the lady’s lap and slept as before; and she, taking out the three hairs, compared them with his head, and said to herself: “You are the man who was here yesterday.” He cut the monster in two, but the halves rushed together and were one as before. “All the champions on earth won’t save her from me to-morrow,” cried the urfeist as he plunged into the sea again. The third day the hero donned the third giant’s dress. It had as many colours as there are in the sky, and his boots were of blue glass. The giant’s housekeeper gave him a brown apple, with instructions to throw it into the serpent’s open mouth. The princess identified him as before; and when the urfeist came up out of the sea, “enormous, terrible to look at, with a mouth big enough to swallow the world, and three sharp swords coming out of it, Sean Ruadh threw the apple into his mouth, and the beast fell helpless on the strand, flattened out and melted away to a dirty jelly on the shore.” The red steed bore the victor away from the maiden, though she tried to cling to him and stay him: she only succeeded in retaining one of his blue-glass boots. Then a proclamation was made for all men to come and try on the boot. Sean Ruadh tried to evade the proof. In vain: by his old blind sage’s advice, the king sent men, twenty at a time, to fetch him; but he bound them twenty in a bundle, and the bundles together. At last the king himself went and, kneeling, prayed him to come; and the boot sprang through the air to him and fitted itself on his foot. The princess was downstairs in a twinkle, and in {6} the arms of Sean Ruadh. He put all the other claimants to death without more ado, and wedded her.^6.1^ This tale, with unimportant variations, has been found more than once during recent years in the west of Ireland. It has been recovered also in Brittany, where one of the variants takes the following form. A noble maiden disguised as a youth becomes page to the queen of France, who falls in love with her, and, being repulsed, sickens and dies. The page’s real sex is disclosed to the king in consequence of a false accusation affecting one of the maids of honour. The king marries her, and she bears him a son. A strange animal appears, called a murlu, is caught and caged, but released by the king’s son, who is, in consequence, compelled to flee from his father’s wrath. The murlu befriends the youth, and takes him to the palace of the King of Naples, where he is engaged as herd. With the murlu’s aid he satisfactorily performs his duties, and overcomes a giant, whose wealth he obtains. The murlu transforms itself into a magical steed, and helps him to conquer in a two days’ fight the seven-headed serpent to which the king’s daughter was to be sacrificed. The herd cuts out the seven tongues and goes away, leaving the heads on the ground. They are carried off by a charcoal-burner, who professes to be the princess’ deliverer. The king is about to give the maiden in marriage, in spite of her protests, to the pretender, when the herd presents himself and, by means of the seven tongues, proves himself the true victor. The charcoal-burner undergoes the usual penalty of his falsehood; and on the occasion of the hero’s {7} wedding the murlu appears, declares itself the King of France’s first wife, condemned for her sin in attempting the page’s virtue to this transformation. The conditions of her punishment are now fulfilled and her expiation complete.^7.1^

In one of the Basque variants the mysterious animal is called a Tartaro. The youth is called Petit Yorge, which causes Mr. Webster to suspect that the tale is borrowed from the French; though the identification of Saint George with the slayer of the dragon, not unknown in märchen, and more fully developed, as we shall hereafter see, in the sagas, may suggest a different explanation. He takes service as gardener. With a horse, a handsome dress, and a sword, furnished by the friendly Tartaro, he fights the dragon on behalf of the king, his master’s, youngest daughter. The fight lasts three days. A charcoal-burner is the impostor. As the lady declines to marry him a proclamation is issued for all the young men to ride under a bell, and whoever can carry off on the point of his sword a diamond ring suspended from the bell shall wed her. The hero succeeds and rides away; but as he does so the king hurls his lance at him and wounds him in the leg. He is thus identified, and then produces the serpent’s tongues and forty-two pieces of silk he has cut from the damsel’s dresses.^7.2^ The other Basque variants are less elaborate, and perhaps represent more nearly the original tale. The hero is the youngest of three sons. In one of the variants, the two elder, sallying {8} forth successively, refuse a morsel of cake to an old woman and are eaten by a bear. The youngest, more charitable, is rewarded by the hag with a magical stick, the touch whereof kills seven bears that attack him, one after the other; and he obtains their palace and riches. He takes service as shepherd, and with his stick slays the seven-headed serpent, cutting out its tongues and also a little piece of silk from each of the seven robes worn by the princess. The usual charcoal-burner takes the heads and claims the reward, but is confuted by means of the tongues and the silk.^8.1^ In the other variant, the youth on setting forth buys a pack of cards and a formidable mace armed with teeth. He hires himself as cowherd; and when the kine, having broken into the forbidden pastures, as in most of the variants, draw down the wrath of the Tartaro who owns the pastures, the youth challenges the monster to a game of cards. The Tartaro was not unaccustomed to play with his adversaries; and his trick was to drop a card, ask his opponent to pick it up, and kill him while he was politely complying. But now he has met his match. The youth tells him to pick up the card himself. As he stoops for the purpose a blow from the mace puts an end to him. Three Tartaros are thus overcome; and their mansion passes into the possession of the hero. The combat with the triple serpent lasts two days. The victor returns to the Tartaro’s palace, merely taking the seven tongues and the seven pieces of silk, and thus enabling the charcoal-burner to make his false claim. The king in his joy gives a dinner to his friends, to which of course the hero is not invited. The Tartaros owned three olanos, ogre-dogs. One of these is sent by the hero to fetch him a dish from {9} the banquet. This of course leads to his discovery, and to the establishment of his right to the king’s daughter.^9.1^

The single variant of this type found elsewhere than in Celtic and Basque lands comes from the Odenwald. In it the widowed King of Orange falls in love with the portrait of the daughter of the King of Septentrion, but is daunted by the dangers of the way. His only son, Ferdinand, seeing the portrait, then attempts the adventure. A mannikin directs him to dig at the first crossway, where he will find a can of strength-giving wine and a magical sword and whistle. He slays in fight eight giants, and makes his way to the realm of Septentrion, taking possession, ere he reaches the capital, of a magnificent palace, gaily furnished, having many fine horses in the stable, but void of human inhabitants. Then he enters the king’s service as fowl-herd. Clad in three different suits of armour from his palace, he fights the dragon on three successive days, and cuts off his three heads, disappearing after each combat, so that nobody knows who the princess’ saviour is. In the same armour he takes part in a three days’ tournament for the maiden’s hand. It is necessary to run full tilt with his spear at a ring suspended from a beam, to carry it off, and to hang it up again in returning. He succeeds where all others have failed, and again makes off; but on the third day he is wounded in the leg by one of the king’s men as he escapes. By this token he is recognised; he marries the princess and becomes King of Septentrion. The horses in his palace turn out to be enchanted men, whose spell is dissolved by his success.^9.2^ This tale seems to bear traces of literary influence; and in any case it is obviously of a less barbarous character than the others. Probably it is not {10} indigenous to Germany, but has been carried thither from the west, and has suffered some change in the transmission. The indications point to a Celtic or Iberian population as the originators of the Herdsman type.

At the same time stories found among other nations represent the hero as a herd or a menial servant. In a Swabian märchen already cited he is a shepherd.^10.1^ A Norwegian tale, bearing some markedly Norse characteristics, also comprises a similar incident. Here Osborn Boots is the youngest of three brothers, who successively hire themselves to a king. The two elder had been dismissed with three stripes cut out of their backs, and the wounds rubbed with salt or hot embers. Boots shares his food with an old hag he meets on the way, and receives in return an old key, which has the property of showing him, when he looks through the ring, whatever he wishes to see. With the help of this and of his own shrewdness, he drives off a troll from the king’s mill-dam, and on another occasion saves the king’s sheep from him. But one day the king, when hunting, trod by chance upon wild grass and lost his way in the wood. The troll met him and offered to let him go home in consideration of having the first thing the king set eyes on when he got to his own land. The victim proved to be his eldest daughter. A man called Glibtongue accompanied her to the spot where the troll was to meet and fetch her. He turned out to be a coward; and Boots, opportunely appearing, overcame the monster by trickery, but spared his life on condition of his restoring the king’s younger daughter, whom he had stolen before. The maiden thus rescued gives him a ring; but Glibtongue of course takes the credit of the deed, and is to be married to {11} her. The troll then stops the springs, so that there is no water to boil the bridal brose. Boots to the rescue again; and now he is identified by the ring, which is seen glistening in his hair. Glibtongue is thrown into a pit full of snakes; the troll is slain; Boots weds the younger princess, and with her receives half the kingdom.^11.1^ The hero of a Negro tale from the Bahamas, is a boy who is first a shepherd and then a horse-herd or stable-boy. His master had every year to give one of his daughters in exchange for water. The last daughter he had was about to be thus bartered. Her coachman declined to allow the stable-boy to accompany him when he took the maiden to exchange her, but set him a task instead. The boy performs the task by magical power, obtains horse, carriage, and armour, and follows. By the utterance of a wish he sets two boar-lizards fighting; and while they fight the water is obtained and brought back with the lady. The next day the adventure is repeated, with the variation that it is two cocks which fight. The boy stains his handkerchief red and passes it to the girl. Her father offers her in marriage, with a dowry of two thousand dollars, to any one who can take the stain out of the handkerchief. “All on ’em was tryin’, dey couldn’ git it out. This fellah haxed dem to let ’im try it. Fathe’ told ’im, ‘All right, ’e could try it.’ ’E rolled up ’is sleeve; spread the handke’-chief over ’is harm; then ’e spit on it, taken ’is hand and rubbed over it. The stain went out. Her fathe’ give ’er to ’im to wife, and ’is two thousan’ dollahs. Dat en’s de hold story.”^11.2^ A Portuguese tale from Brazil begins with the barter by a fisherman of his son, born unknown to him, {12} for a catch of fish. It belongs to the Forbidden Chamber cycle. After flying from the ogre the hero takes service as under-gardener to a king. The youngest princess penetrates his disguise. The king offers his eldest daughter to him who would slay a seven-headed beast which was devastating the realm. The under-gardener performs the feat and takes the tips of the beast’s tongues. As nobody appeared to claim the reward, the king decided to marry all his daughters. The youngest refuses to marry anybody but the under-gardener. The prince who is to marry the eldest claims to have slain the beast, and the bridegroom of the second sister claims another achievement of the hero; but the latter at the wedding-feast puts them to open shame.^12.1^

There is one characteristic, however, which is common to a vast number of variants belonging to almost every type, and which, in the story from the Odenwald, stands out in full relief. If it be not a savage characteristic, at least it is not in accordance with the etiquette of civilisation in the nineteenth century for the hero to persist in such unaccountable modesty, that, having slain the monster and won the princess, he must be pursued like a criminal flying from justice, and compelled to confess and claim his reward. When at last he is made known, and the impostors, whom his want of gallantry and overload of humility had encouraged, if not instigated, are convicted of their fraud, he indulges in a savage revenge. Burning alive, indeed, is in harmony with a certain kind of civilisation, such as that of Saint Dominic or Bloody Mary; and the punishments the peasantry delight to recount in these tales are an index of their culture. The hero is deterred no more {13} than the most bigoted fanatic by any considerations of humanity, or even of kinship. As a single example of the disregard of kinship, take the story of The King of Al-Yaman and his three Sons, found in some versions of the Arabian Nights. There the king’s youngest son, disliked by his father and despised by his two brethren, picks up a string of pearls and emeralds, and is deprived of it by the elder sons, who pretend themselves to have found it. Their father lays upon them the injunction to bring him the wearer. After they have set out, the youngest goes forth too, and delivers a princess from the scourge of her father’s city, a monstrous lion, to which a maiden is offered by lot every year. He refuses in the usual way to return with her, and is only discovered by means of a proclamation requiring all the men in the city to defile before the palace. He is married to her; but, arising before day, while she is still asleep, he exchanges rings with her and writes upon her hand his name, Aláeddín, his parentage and a request, if she love him truly, to come and seek him at his father’s capital of Al-Hind. He departs, and repeats the adventure, slaying this time an elephant. Afterwards he continues his quest, and succeeds in obtaining the enchanting bird Philomelet, the wearer of the necklace, while its mistress, a princess, is sleeping. He writes his name on the palm of her hand also, and a similar request to seek him at home. As he returns his brothers fall in with him, rob him of the bird, and carry it to their father as their own prize. The three princesses, each with her father and an army, go after him and meet together. They of course reject the two elder brothers as impostors, and Aláeddín is at last vindicated. He then, having put his brothers to shame, falls upon them, and with a single blow {14} of his sword despatches them both; nor is it without difficulty that he is restrained from putting his father to death too. He adds to the number of his wives the princess to whom the bird Philomelet belonged, and lives happy ever after.^14.1^ The vengeance in the Arab tale, reported from a region where no reminiscences of the auto-da-fé linger, shows to advantage in comparison with the cruelties in which the tales of the peasantry of Christian Europe rejoice. And if the hero spare not his own flesh and blood, it must be remembered that he is only the half-brother of the impostors, and that both he and his mother have suffered great personal wrong at their hands and those of his father. In a variant of the story, cited from the same source in a previous chapter, the hero even intercedes with his father for his brothers’ lives.^14.2^ Happily in western stories he does not always visit their sins on their heads. In the Shetlandic story, originally from Scandinavia, Assipattle is treated with contempt by his six elder brothers. But he had a fast friend in his only sister, who was taken to court to be the king’s daughter’s maid. The Mester Stoorworm, a terrific sea-monster in which we have a reminiscence of the Midgard Snake, threatened the land. By a mighty sorcerer’s counsel, every Saturday seven damsels were bound upon a rock and delivered to him, to glut his maw and save the kingdom. The only way to get rid of the scourge, the sorcerer declared, was to deliver Gemdelovely, the princess, to be devoured. All the champions who volunteered to save her shrank from the task when they beheld the grisly foe. Assipattle alone had the courage to get a boat and go out to meet the worm, whose horrid length stretched half across the world. {15} He allowed himself to be swallowed, boat and all; and once inside the cavernous throat he “waded and ran, and better ran, till he came to the enormous liver of the monster.” Then he cut a hole in it and placed a live peat, which he had brought for the purpose, in the hole and “blew till he thought his lips would crack.” By and bye “the peat began to flame; the flame caught the oil of the liver, and in a minute there was a stately euse. In troth, I think it gave the Stoorworm a hot harskit.” Hurrying into his boat again, Assipattle was spewed out by the monster’s dying spasms, and thrown high and dry on the land. Of course he married the princess; and the vengeance, without which the story would not be complete, fell not on his brothers for their ill treatment of him, but on the sorcerer, who it turned out was the queen’s lover.^15.1^

The conquest of the dragon by attacking it from the inside carries us back to Herakles’ deliverance of Hesione. The incident, rare in modern folklore, is also found in a Gipsy tale from Transylvania; but there, as might be anticipated, there is no question of a sea-monster. Radu, a young Gipsy of the Kukuya stock, driven to desperation by his shrewish wife, cleaves her head with a hatchet and flees for his life from his tribal brethren. In the forest he finds a large horse’s head lying under a tree. It bids him creep into its left ear; and he becomes so small as to do it easily. There he lies hidden safely until all pursuit is over, when he creeps out again through the right ear, returning at once to his proper size. He takes the head with him, for it tells him it will protect him; and when he longs for a horse he is met by two cavaliers who direct him to make water into the head, which will immediately change into a {16} steed, red in the morning, white at noon, and black at night. Mounted on this mysterious animal he reaches a town hung with black, because a ninety-nine-headed dragon, living on the Glass Mountain, has carried off the king’s daughter and will eat her on the morrow. The next day, having taken his horse’s advice, he rides at morning, at noon, and at evening once up and down the mountain, daunting the dragon by the belief that he has three champions to contend with. He again rides to the hill, alights, makes water thrice over the steed, and thus changes it back into a horse’s head. Creeping into the left ear, he is swallowed by the serpent. Once in the serpent’s body, he crawls out of the skull, and, tearing off his clothes, he sets fire to them. The dragon bursts; the Glass Mountain disappears; Radu finds himself in the arms of the princess, whom he soon weds; and as it is recorded that he lived with his second wife in joy and happiness, we may indulge the pleasing thought that she lacked the exasperating tongue of the first.^16.1^

In an earlier chapter I have abstracted a Lithuanian tale where the hero, having taken charge of a sister, is betrayed by her to a robber. This is quite a common incident in Slav märchen, not always found in connection with the Rescue of Andromeda. Another Lithuanian tale presents {17} a brother and sister, turned out of doors by their father for bad conduct, arriving at a robber’s dwelling. Before leaving home, the youth had possessed himself of his father’s magical staff, which paralysed opponents. Aided by this he slays eleven of the twelve robbers, and severely wounds the twelfth. Having thrown their corpses into a Bluebeard’s chamber, already used for a similar purpose by the robbers themselves, he gives the keys of the house to his sister, forbidding her to enter the room where the bodies lie. She naturally disobeys, and is seized by the still living robber and compelled to bring him certain healing plants, which are hanging from the ceiling. The robber makes love to her, not without success, and persuades her to feign illness, and get her brother to procure, first, wolf’s milk, and then lioness’ milk, wherewith the wounded man is completely restored to health. When this is effected he comes forth, attacks the brother and threatens him with death. But in procuring the milk the hero has also won the favour of the she-wolf and lioness, as well as of a hare, for sparing their lives; and they have given him each a whistle to be blown when he is in need of help. He now blows; and immediately the grateful beasts rush to his help, tearing the robber and his paramour to pieces. Setting out with the animals, he comes to a town where the king’s last daughter is about to be given to a nine-headed dragon. His conquest of the dragon follows, and the cutting out of its nine tongues; after which he and his beasts lie down and fall asleep with utter weariness. While he sleeps, the princess puts her ring on his finger. She has hardly done so when some servants of the king, her father, come to the place, kill and bury him, and oblige her to take an oath to recognise their chief as her deliverer and bridegroom. On awaking, the {18} hero’s animals miss their master and disperse, to meet again at the same spot three years later, in accordance with a tryst given them by him before lying down to sleep. The bear smells the corpse; the lion and wolf dig it up; and the hare fetches some leaves of a herb used by two snakes they have seen in combat at an earlier stage of their adventures. With these he restores the hero to life; and they all return to the town, as luck will have it, on the day of the wedding. The hare carries a letter to the princess, who induces her father to invite the stranger to the festivities. There he inquires what token of victory over the dragon the bridegroom had produced; and when the heads are shown him he draws the tongues out of his pocket, fits them into the throats and adds as a proof of his own identity the princess’ ring. The pretender is torn to pieces by oxen, and the hero happily married to the princess.^18.1^ Variants of the story are well known in Italy. It is found in Brittany and Andalucia, and has even crossed the Atlantic with the Portuguese to Brazil.^18.2^ None of these need be mentioned now, save a Piedmontese version, which accounts for the hero’s refusal to claim his bride as soon as he has won her, by the excuse that he was in mourning for his sister, slain by his dogs for her treachery, together with her paramour.^18.3^ In variants from Bohemia and Transylvania, the sister is, after her lover’s death, shut up by her brother for her misconduct, and left when he goes abroad on his travels. When he is married he releases her and takes her to live in {19} the palace. But she sticks in his bed a knife which pierces and kills him. He is brought to life again by his hounds, and his sister receives the reward of her double guilt.^19.1^ In these two, as well as in a Sienese variant, the dogs are enchanted men who regain their true form after the hero is finally settled in life.

A type of the story found in Italy opens with the search made by a brother for a sister who had been carried off by an ogre. According to the Venetian tale he meets a priest, who bestows on him three dogs, called Rend-iron, Seize-all, and Now’s-the-time-to-help-me. With their assistance he slays the ogre; and then, leaving his sister in possession of the ogre’s palace and magical wand, he sets out for further adventures. The dogs at his command slay the seven-headed beast and bring him the heads. He will not return with the king’s daughter; but cutting out the beast’s tongues he puts them in a box, gives a ring to the lady as a pledge that he will return, and goes back with the good news to his sister. On the way he stops at an inn, and there meets a chimney-sweeper—a new and more modern shape of our old acquaintance, the charcoal-burner. Imprudently he shows the tongues to his new acquaintance, who robs him of them, and boldly claims the princess. The hero, however, gets wind of the wedding, and, breaking into the festivities, demands permission to speak. He cross-examines the bridegroom: “Are you the bridegroom?” “Yes.” “How did you manage to deliver this maiden?” The chimney-sweeper shuffled: “How did I do it? Look, here are the seven tongues!” “I ask you, How did you manage to deliver her? I will have an answer.” “With those three dogs.” “Good! Since you {20} managed to deliver her by the help of those three dogs, in the presence of this noble company call the dogs by their names.” The impostor was confounded, dumb. Then the youth turned to the company and told his story, adding sarcastically: “And this gentleman here is he who stole the box.” The gentleman denied it. Like a trained advocate, the hero calls as a witness the innkeeper, who saw him showing the tongues to the chimney-sweeper, and confronts him with the bridegroom. The king is convinced; and the hero gets permission to do as he likes with his opponent. “Rend-iron, Seize-all, Now’s-the-time-to-help-me, eat him up.” And in the presence of the assembled guests, the chimney-sweeper was eaten up accordingly. The wedding then proceeded with a new bridegroom.^20.1^

This dramatic solution combines ancient and modern elements in an unexpected and interesting manner. A variant current in Sicily returns to the usual proof of the deliverer’s identity by means of the tongues. He slays the dragon with a magical sword belonging to the giant who has carried off his sister, and heals the wound he and his horse have received in the combat by means of a salve he has extracted from the giant’s head after putting him to death.^20.2^ In a Georgian tale the hero is not born until after his sister has been carried away by a hundred-headed monster, and her three elder brothers, in attempting to rescue her, have been slain. Their desolate mother is given by a stranger an apple to eat, whence she bears a son called Asphurtzela. He conquers the monster, opens his breast and brings out the dead bodies of his brothers, {21} restoring them to life by means of an enchanted handkerchief, also found in the monster’s breast. On the way home the ungrateful brothers tie him to a tree and leave him; but he succeeds in escaping. He cannot, however, remain at home after their evil conduct. So he sets forth again, and picks up two companions of supernatural power, with whose aid he liberates three fair maidens about to be married to three ogres. One ogre is left. He cozens the hero’s companions, one after the other, out of the food being prepared for their supper. Asphurtzela shoots the ogre and cuts him in two. The head rolls into a hole, wherein they find three lovely maidens. The two companions attempt successively to rescue them, but on letting them down their courage fails and they call out to be drawn up again. Asphurtzela descends and sends up the damsels. His companions close the hole and leave him to his fate. Wandering about in the lower regions he rescues a king’s daughter from a dragon, and sets free the water withheld by the monster. The king offers him presents, which he rejects, only asking to be sent back to his own land of light. Ultimately he finds a dragon attacking a griffin’s nest and shoots it. The griffin in gratitude carries him up to the surface of the earth. But to give her strength for the purpose it is necessary that she should be constantly supplied with food. When the provisions he has taken run short he cuts a piece off his own leg and throws it into her mouth. She restores it to him on arriving at the top, and heals the wound. He finds his two companions about to marry the maidens rescued from the hole and slays them, afterwards wedding the youngest maiden, and giving the two elder ones to his brothers.^21.1^

Here we find what we may call the Stolen Sister type, combined with another. The Underworld type, as it may be named, is somewhat more fertile in variants. Among Galland’s manuscripts is a tale he obtained from a Christian Maronite of Aleppo, named Hanna—that is, John. It concerns the three sons of the Sultan of Samarcand, who built a house for Rostam, his eldest son, unwittingly just above the underground dwelling of the eldest daughter of the genius Morhagian. The genius destroys it, and, when pursued by the prince, disappears in a well. The sultan then builds a similar house for his second son above the dwelling of Morhagian’s second daughter, with the same result. The house intended for the third son, Badialzaman, is built over the genius’ third daughter’s palace. It is destroyed like the others; but Badialzaman succeeds in wounding the genius thrice ere he reaches the well, and persuades his brothers to join him in pursuing the foe down into the well. Of course Badialzaman is the only one of the three who has the courage to be let down to the bottom. There he is entertained for forty days, first by one and then by another of Morhagian’s beautiful daughters, of whom the youngest is the loveliest. He announces his intention of taking vengeance on their father. Each of them endeavours to dissuade him, but in vain; and the youngest warns him that he has no chance against the genius, who will simply take his head in one hand and his feet in the other and rend him in twain. As she has foretold, so it happens. The pieces, however, are brought to the lady by two of her women; and when she has put them together she revives the hero by applying the Water of Life to his wounds. Having then made him swear to wed her, she teaches him how he may kill her father, by {23} attacking him asleep and giving him one blow—no more—with his own sword, which will be found hanging above his head. The treachery of his brothers in drawing up the three maidens and leaving Badialzaman in the pit, his conquest of the monster, deliverance of the princess and release of the water, and finally his conveyance to the upper world by a grateful rokh whose young he had saved from a serpent, follow the course of the Georgian tale. Before the three maidens were sent up they had reduced their palaces to the size of three balls, which they had put into his care; and by the advice of the youngest he had cut some hair from the tail of Morhagian’s magical steed. A little of the hair had only to be burnt to bring the steed to him. With the help of these things, having taken service with a tailor, he prepares a robe for the youngest maiden on the occasion of her marriage to his brother Rostam, and attending the festival he slays the bridegroom with Morhagian’s sword. Then he disappears; but three months afterwards, when the same damsel is to be married to his second brother, he repeats the performance. Poetical justice is completed by his marriage with the lady; and her sisters are given to two other princes.^23.1^

The tale is current in Italy, and is widely spread in the Levant. As it is told at Lesbos, the cause of the hero’s descent into the lower world is the robbery every year by a monster of the three golden apples growing on a tree in a king’s garden. The youngest brother succeeds in wounding the thief and tracking him to a pit. He slays the monster and delivers three maidens, whom he sends up to his brothers above. His brothers’ treachery and all the other incidents follow. Here he has to prove against other pretenders {24} that it is he who has put the dragon to death. This he does in the ordinary way by means of his tongues. He rejects the king’s treasures, the half of his kingdom, and even his lovely daughter, and will only accept the provisions necessary for the eagle which is to carry him up to this world again. His father having awarded the youngest maiden to his eldest brother, she demands three dresses representing, one, the heaven with all its stars, another, the earth with all her trees and flowers, and the third, the sea with all the fishes that dwell therein. These, of course, can only be furnished by the hero from three walnuts handed by her to him before parting. When they have been obtained the master-tailor is summoned and compelled to declare whence he got them. The hero is recognised; but his vengeance on his brothers is limited to banishing them from the realm.^24.1^

In a story of the Avares of the Caucasus the hero is the offspring of a king’s daughter by a bear, and is called Bear’s-Ears from a peculiarity which he owes to his parentage. His companions are not his brothers, but two heroes like himself, of extraordinary strength, who, however, are successively robbed of their food by a dwarf. Bear’s-Ears catches the dwarf, cleaves a plane-tree and fastens him by the beard in the cleft. The dwarf uproots the plane-tree and escapes into a pit. Bear’s-Ears liberates only one princess from the dwarf. The dragon has nine heads; and the hero, cutting off his ears, carries them to the king.^24.2^ In this tale there seem no impostors. As the Nubians tell it, an ogre obtains {25} the food of the hero and his companions, of whom there are four; and here again only one lady is delivered from the pit. When he is left at the bottom by his treacherous friends, he rescues a king’s daughter from a crocodile that stops the river. Then dipping his fingers in its blood he marks the damsel’s thigh; and this serves as the proof when others claim to have performed the deed of valour.^25.1^ Among the Vlachs we return to the dwarf; but there is no lady to be rescued from his power. Peter Firitschell, as the hero is called, however, makes friends with a blind old woman, who is captive to certain dragons. He slays the dragons and restores the woman’s sight. He then acquires three Helpful Beasts, a fox, a wolf, and a bear. The monster to whom the princess is to be given has twelve heads, and dwells in a marsh outside the city. Peter lies down to sleep in the maiden’s lap while he is waiting for the monster, and she abstracts one of his twelve arrows. With the rest he shoots off eleven of the monster’s heads, and borrows of her a pin to shoot the twelfth. He cuts out the tongues, and lies down again to sleep. A Gipsy strikes his head off, takes the dragon’s twelve heads and claims the victory. Peter is brought to life again by his faithful animals, and is in time to prevent the Gipsy’s marriage to the king’s daughter. Wallachia being a Christian country, the punishment inflicted on the impostor is merely that of being rolled down a hill in a barrel studded inside with spikes. Peter then weds the lady and remains in the Underworld, where he succeeds in due time to her father’s throne.^25.2^

Nearly related to the Underworld type is that of Fearless Johnny. A Breton story, obtained by M. Sébillot at Dourdain in the department of Ille et Vilaine, has also lately been given by a contributor to the Rivista delle Tradizioni Popolari Italiane, as coming from Cagliari, so nearly in the same words as to lead to the conclusion that it must have been in very recent years carried directly from Brittany to Sardinia, or vice versâ. It relates that Johnny, being a lad of noted courage, discovers a practical joke played upon him by some of his companions with the object of frightening him by the apparition of a pretended corpse. He then sets out to learn what fear is, and rescues the souls of some robbers who have been hanged, by finding the treasure they have stolen from a church and restoring it to the priest, from whom he will take no reward except his consecrated stole—a magical article of considerable value in the legends of Roman Catholic lands. With this stole he delivers a house from a devil that haunts it, and afterwards kills the dragon, taking its tongues, with which he proves himself the victor. A swallow scratches up a little earth over his face as he lies asleep on the ground weary from his combat; and awaking he cries: “Ah! I did not know till now whether Fear was furred or feathered; now I see that it is feathered.” That was the only time he ever experienced even the beginning of fear; and then he was more than half asleep.^26.1^

It will have been observed that a common opening of stories which culminate in the incident of the Rescue is the hero’s acquisition of Helpful Animals. Sometimes, as in a tale from Oldenburg, it is the only other incident.^26.2^ More {27} often it forms part of a larger series of adventures. Occasionally the hero obtains the power of transformation instead of the personal service of the beasts. Thus, in a Norwegian tale he divides a dead horse between a lion, a falcon, and an ant, and in return for the service they confer on him this power. It enables him to get into a princess’ chamber and secretly make love to her; and it stands him in good stead when he goes to fight the dragon. This dragon was a less delicate feeder than some, for he only demanded a tax of pigs, not maidens. The king had promised his daughter to the deliverer; but before the wedding could take place she was stolen by a hill-ogre, whose life was bound up with a grain of sand under the ninth tongue of the ninth head of the slaughtered dragon. Here, again, the power of transformation enables the lad to triumph.^27.1^

There remain one or two types of a more abnormal kind briefly to mention. A märchen of the Gipsies of Southern Hungary speaks of a dragon which threatened a certain city with destruction, unless in ten years the king’s fair daughter were given to him. In the interval she marries a man who wins the favour of a Keshalyi (a forest-fairy, or Fate) by kindly combing her hair. The Keshalyi’s hairs, as we have already seen, are powerful talismans, identified in Gipsy superstitions with the floating cobwebs of autumn. He obtains one of them, and by this means is able to take from the horns of the moon-king’s black cattle a gold ring, a similar ring from the horns of the sun-king’s white cattle, and one from the horns of the cloud-king’s yellow cattle. These he gives to his bride. Their virtue causes her to give birth successively to three heroes, of whom one is so strong he can throw high into the air a stone which ten horses cannot {28} move, another can by blowing burn everything around him to ashes, and the third can spit balls from his mouth farther and truer than the best guns can carry. When, at the appointed time, the great dragon comes for her, sons like these prove invaluable. Though the very houses shook with the monster’s voice, the youths quickly riddled his skin with balls, buried him beneath great rocks, and burnt him up.^28.1^

Another Gipsy tale concerns a youth who piped so well for the dancing of a silver-clad river-nymph, daughter of the moon-king, that she gave him a silver sickle and prayed him to come again on the morrow and she would give him yet fairer gifts. But he is late for the tryst, and finds her dead on the ground, heart-broken at his breach of faith; for these ladies’ hearts are very fragile. Her sister appears from the river and curses him, if a man, to become a woman, if a woman, to become a man. She then carries the dead nymph back into the river, and, as it seems, there restores her to life; for immediately afterwards a magnificent black steed stands before the desolate youth (now become a girl) and declares that he is sent by the deceased maiden to bear him where his fortune blossoms. Mounted on the steed, he is borne through the air like lightning to the aid of a king’s daughter, given to a dragon who dwells in a fountain and requires a maid once a year for dinner. He slays the dragon with the sickle; and the king in his joy gives him his daughter to wife. He accepted the lady amid the general excitement, without thinking that he was no longer a man but a woman. This was awkward. The bride complained to her father, who was afraid to attempt {29} his life by direct means. Wherefore he sent him instead to rob the cloud-king of three golden apples which had the property, one of them of making wealthy, another of making lucky, and the third of making healthy. His steed helps him to accomplish the task. But when the monster, half-man, half-dog, that guards the apples, finds that he has been cozened, he flings the curse after the robber: “If a man, become woman; if a woman, become man.” The curse sets matters right again. “I don’t know what has happened, dearest father,” says the bride to the king, “but my husband is a man after all.”^29.1^ In an Albanian variant the dragon-slayer is born a girl. She kills a lamia to whom the king has given his son, and is rewarded with a magical steed. Later on she wins another king’s daughter in marriage by a feat of athletics, and, as in the last tale, is guilty of the thoughtlessness of taking the bride. Being prescribed a series of tasks by the king with the same object of getting rid of her, she at last is cursed by some serpents with the requisite change of sex.^29.2^

In this tale it is no longer Andromeda who is rescued, but a young man. The variation is doubtless due to Oriental influence, conveyed through a Mohammedan channel. At least, all the variants of this form with which I am acquainted are of Arab or Indian provenience. In a story from the Panjáb the hero is the younger of two brothers, princes, the elder of whom has eaten a parrot and the other a starling. Now the fate of these birds {30} was that whoever ate the parrot would become a king, and whoever ate the starling a prime minister. The elder brother received his kingdom; but the younger is slain by a snake-demon and afterwards restored to life. Coming into a strange town, he takes shelter with an old woman whose turn it is to provide the victim for an ogre who daily eats a young man, a goat and a wheaten cake. She has no difficulty about the goat and the cake; and the prince volunteers to take the place of the human victim, in order to kill the ogre. He is successful; and then, cutting off the monster’s head, he ties it up in a handkerchief and falls asleep. An impostor in the shape of a scavenger finds him, buries him in a clay-pit and, taking the ogre’s head, claims from the king half the kingdom and his daughter in marriage, as a reward for overcoming the monster. We should expect the end to be the impostor’s conviction and the hero’s wedding. However, the further adventures of the latter result in his obtaining a different wife. With self-denial unusual in polygamous countries, he finds one enough; so he makes the princess over to his brother.^30.1^ It would seem as though we had here a relic of an earlier form of the tale wherein it is a maiden who is rescued. Another tale, also from the Panjáb, countenances the supposition.^30.2^ As given in the Siddhi-Kür, on the other hand, there is no reference to a lady. Two dragon-frogs who dwell at the source of a river and can withhold the water, demand every year a human being to eat. The lot falls on the khan himself; and no one but his son will go in his stead. The son is accompanied by a poor man’s son, who is his friend and will not quit his side. They overhear the frogs incautiously talking, after the manner {31} of supernatural beings in fairy tales, and telling one another how they may be subdued. Thus they succeed in ridding the land of the pest; and further, by eating the frogs’ heads, the one acquires the power of spitting gold and the other of spitting emeralds—an endowment which develops the plot in a new direction.^31.1^ It would be strange if the endless adventures of the favourite Arab hero, Hatim Taï, did not include the incident. Accordingly, we learn that Hatim reaches a village where a giant devours one of the villagers every week. That week the lot has fallen upon the chief’s son. Hatim rescues him from his impending fate by causing a mirror to be prepared and set up in the monster’s path. When the giant beholds his own ugliness he bursts with rage in the most natural but horrible manner. Substantial rewards are offered to the deliverer. He rejects them, however, and goes about his business as if nothing had happened.^31.2^

A Sanskrit story found in one of the manuscripts of the Twenty-five Tales of a Demon relates that a certain king had had a quarrel with some demons about a lady, whom he had taken to wife, whereas they had intended her for their son. Peace was established on the terms of making over to them daily a human victim. When it came to the turn of the king’s own son he was fortunately rescued by a stranger-prince, named Mahâbala. The demon, who expected a good meal, was overcome and made to swear that he would henceforth protect brahmans and never again set foot in the city. In contrast, however, to the generous Hatim Taï, Mahâbala was dissatisfied with the rewards offered him, and allowed the demon to return to his evil {32} ways. This of course resulted in a fresh application to the deliverer, who made the monster renew his oath. He had no cause for dissatisfaction a second time.^32.1^

It will have been observed that the stories cited in the present chapter, like those mentioned in the first volume as embodying more complete versions of the Perseus legend, present in the majority of cases the curious incident of the impostor. Concerning this personage I shall have more to say hereafter. We have found him in the story, from Quilimane, of Rombao and Antonyo. He is equally popular among the Omahas and Ponkas of North America, where the tale of the Rescue is so thoroughly domesticated, as to be considered by authorities familiar with the customs and modes of thought of the aborigines as for the most part “of Indian origin.” Two versions have been recorded differing only in details. An outline of one of them will enable the reader to judge of their “Indian origin.” An orphan, we are told, who lives with his grandmother, is possessed of a gun of unerring aim. He exchanges it for a magical sword and two hounds which always find and kill game at their master’s command. The villagers are heard lamenting; and the old woman tells him it is because the water-monster with seven heads has asked for the chief’s daughter, and in case of refusal has threatened to devour the whole tribe. The orphan determines to deliver her. He finds her bound by the stream, unties her and sends her home. With his dogs and sword he overcomes {33} the monster, cuts off his heads and takes the tongues. A black man finds the heads, pretends to be the victor and claims the chief’s daughter in marriage, in accordance with an offer her father has previously made. The maiden denied that he was her deliverer; but the chief decided against her and “they cooked for the marriage.” The orphan became aware by supernatural consciousness of what was going on. He sent one of his dogs to steal one of the best slices of the meat. The dog was pursued, and the orphan discovered. He justifies having sent the dog, for he it is who has killed the water-monster and taken his tongues. On this being reported to the chief he sends for the orphan and confronts him with the black man. After the orphan has told his story, “Come, black man, confess!” he says. “ ‘Hold on! I wish to go outside,’ said the black man. ‘Take hold of him,’ said the orphan. The black man did not tell the truth, therefore they burnt him. And thus, after all, the orphan married the chief’s daughter.”^33.1^

The most hardened believer in the possibility of the independent origin of folktales having a similar plot will scarcely refuse to admit that this tale at least must have come to the Sioux from a European source—probably through French trappers or missionaries. It may be true, as the translator tells us, that only two words in it (namely, those for gun and sword) are of foreign origin. This is a fact of no importance against the multifarious coincidences of plot and idea with those of the Old World summarised in the present and previous chapters: it is only an additional testimony to the completeness with which the mind of the barbarous Ponka has absorbed the story. When an alien people thus receives and assimilates a tale, {34} it is because the tale is suited to the alien digestion. The mental growth it indicates is the same on the part of the people giving and the people acquiring it. It satisfies the imaginative instincts of both. But though accepted among the traditions of the Cegiha-speaking tribes, the tale of the Rescue has not received that final seal of adoption which identifies the action, or some of the actors, with the mythical history of the race: it has not attained to the dignity of a saga, such as we are about to examine in the next chapter.

In the Ponka and Omaha variants the black man is burnt in accordance with Christian precedents; and this is one of the notes of their European origin. A Tuscan story, linked to the ancient mythology by the use of what seems to be a veritable tree-spirit who has survived in rustic belief to the present day, confers a very different reward on the impostor. A poor but handsome youth goes to cut wood. To him appears Vira, the forest-sprite, and comforts him. If he will do as she tells him he need not despair of making his fortune. She directs him to a district near Benevento, whose king has a daughter. This damsel has been given to a seven-headed ogre to devour; and the king has offered her in marriage to any one who will slay the ogre and bring him his heads. Signore Slaniani has conquered the monster and put his heads on a wagon to carry them to the king. But the reward is not for him. When the wagon was being loaded Vira secretly took the tongues, and she now gives them to the youth. “Carry these tongues to the king, and say that thou didst slay the ogre, and that thou dost wish for his daughter.” The tale is told with snatches of verse, which are some evidence of its antiquity. The youth readily falls into the plot.

“And thus did Vira; The youth was clad in splendid attire, He too was very beautiful, Boldly he went to the king, Boldly he claimed to have slain, Single-handed, the ogre, And asked for the beautiful princess As a reward for his valour. ‘It may not be,’ said the king; ‘He who slew the monster Has brought with him its heads, No better proof can be found.’ ‘A better proof is the tongues,’ Answered the youth, undaunted, ‘And I can show all the seven.’ ”

To the amazement of the true victor, who had never let the heads go out of his sight, the tongues are no longer in them.

“Therefore it came to pass That the poor youth who was favoured By the help of the fairy Carried away the reward. So it often goes in this world— He who does the hard work Often misses his pay, When some one more favoured by fortune Steps in and secures the prize. Higher beings than man Play with us like toys. The youth was as nothing in this; All that he won he owed To the loving spirit Vira.”^35.1^

A moral amply justified, no doubt, by the Italian peasant’s experience of life.

Chapter XVII. the Rescue of Andromeda in Sagas

How far the tale of the loving spirit, Vira, is accepted by the Tuscan peasant as a recital of facts may be disputed. We have little but internal evidence to guide us; and that hardly seems conclusive. It may perhaps be regarded as a saga once inspired by faith in the powers of a supernatural being, but now the subject of more or less scepticism. The effect of doubt on a story would be to sever its moorings and set it free on the vague waters of tradition, unhampered by any names of known persons or places, or to which a serious credit is intended to be attached. The tale, as it was found by Mr. Leland, had not yet reached entire freedom. It is therefore a convenient link between the true märchen and the true saga,—neither wholly believed, nor recognised as merely told for pleasure.

That the story of the conquered dragon was believed, at least in classical times, we have already seen. Perseus, the slayer of the dragon and of Medusa, was one of the minor divinities of Greece; and the rescue of Hesione by Herakles seems to have been admitted among the achievements of a personage even more renowned and more generally worshipped than Perseus. Nor were these heroes alone in ancient Hellas. The Athenians honoured Theseus for a similar {37} deed. Minos, who reigned at Gnossos in Crete, having desolated Attica with war to avenge the treacherous death of his son Androgeos, made peace at last for an annual tribute of seven young men and seven virgins, chosen from the most illustrious families of Athens, to be thrown as victims to the Minotaur, a monster half-bull and half-man, the issue of Pasiphae, the queen of Crete. Theseus volunteered as one of the victims. When the devoted band arrived at Crete, Ariadne, Minos’ daughter, fell in love with Theseus, and furnished him with a sword to kill the monster, and a clew of thread to enable him to find his way out of the labyrinth wherein it was kept. The city of Thespia at the foot of Mount Helicon rejoiced in a legend which bears a somewhat closer resemblance to Herakles’ adventure. By command of Zeus certain youths were every year exposed to a dragon. The lot fell on one occasion on Kleostratos. Clad in brazen armour set with hooks he went boldly forth; and though he lost his own life, he proved the monster’s bane.^37.1^

In later times the most famous name to which the exploit has been attributed is that of Saint George. Some versions of the legend reproduce one or other of the classical stories with more or less fidelity. Saint George is one of that numerous class of saints about whom nothing whatever authentic is known. It is indeed “very improbable that such a person ever lived.”^38.1^ So much the greater scope has there been for the exercise of the pious imagination. The horrible details of his martyrdom, a subject on which ecclesiastical writers have expatiated with congenial extravagance and delight, have been grafted on those of the Rescue of Andromeda; and the Church may be congratulated on having converted and baptized the pagan hero, Perseus. The story of his fight with the dragon, as found at large in the Golden Legend of Jacob à Voragine, relates that a great swamp or pool near the town of Silena in Libya, was the lurking-place of a dragon, against which the people had often taken arms, only to be driven back. When it approached the city walls its pestiferous breath poisoned every one. Rather than suffer these visits, the citizens gave two sheep every day to appease it. After a while their flocks began to fail; and to meet the deficiency it was determined to offer for the future one sheep and a human being. The children, sons and daughters of the citizens, were chosen for the purpose by lot, and none were exempted from the chance. Almost all had been thus sacrificed when the lot fell upon the king’s only daughter. Her afflicted father offered his treasures of gold and silver and half his {39} kingdom to purchase her exemption from so terrible a death. In vain. The people angrily, though justly, replied: “Thou thyself, O king, didst issue this edict; and now all our children are dead, and dost thou wish thy daughter to be saved? Unless thou obey the commands thou hast enforced upon others, we will deliver thee and thy house to the flames.” A delay of eight days, on the pretext of lamenting her fate, was all the monarch was able to obtain. At the end of that time the populace returned and said: “Why lose thy subjects for the sake of thy daughter? Lo! we are all dying from the breath of the dragon.” Then the king, seeing that there was no escape, caused the maiden to be clad in royal garments, and, folding her in his arms, bewailed her fate. At last, kissing her, he sobbed: “Would, my daughter, that I had died before thee, rather than to have lost thee thus!” She fell at his feet and besought his blessing, which, when he had bestowed amid his tears, she rose and went forth to the lake. Now it happened that the blessed George, a Cappadocian by birth, and a tribune, was passing by at that very time, and seeing her weeping he stopped and asked what was the matter. She replied: “Good youth, mount thy horse quickly and fly, lest thou die as well as I.” But the stranger answered: “Fear not, maiden, but tell me what thou awaitest here, with all the people looking on.” And she: “Thou hast a noble heart, good youth, I see, but why wilt thou die with me? Flee quickly.” “I will not stir a step,” quoth George, “until thou tell me what is the matter.” Then she explained it all to him. “Fear not, maiden,” he cried, “for in Christ’s name I will help thee.” “Good soldier, save thyself rather, lest thou perish too. Enough that I perish alone; for thou canst not deliver me—thou wouldst only die with me.” While they were thus {40} talking, the dragon, approaching, lifted his head above the water. The maiden, trembling, cried: “Fly, sir, fly quickly!” But George mounted his horse, and, fortifying himself with the sign of the cross, he boldly advanced to meet the monster. Brandishing his lance, and commending himself to God, he pierced it with a mighty wound and threw it to the ground. Then he called to the damsel: “Pass thy girdle round its neck, nothing doubting.” When she had done so the dragon followed her like a gentle hound; and she led it to the city. The people fled in terror; but the blessed George signalled to them to stop, saying: “Fear not, for the Lord sent me unto you for this very thing, that I should deliver you from the torment of the dragon. Wherefore believe in Christ, and let every one of you be baptized, and I will slay the monster.” Then the king and all the people were baptized, to the number of twenty thousand men, beside women and children. The blessed George unsheathed his sword, slew the dragon; and four pairs of oxen were required to take it out of the city. The king built in honour of the blessed Mary and the blessed George a great church, from beneath whose altar a living fountain flowed for the healing of all who were sick. Moreover the king offered the victor an immense sum of money; but he commanded it to be given to the poor, and instructed the king in these four precepts (and here comes the moral), namely, to take care of the Church, to honour the priests, diligently to attend divine worship, and to be ever mindful of the poor. Then, having embraced the monarch, he departed.^40.1^

Such is the legend in its ecclesiastical shape; and in this edifying guise (though not to the same length) it seems to {41} have been given, at least in England, together with some equally valuable details of the saint’s martyrdom, every year by the priest at the proper moment during divine service, on the Sunday preceding the saint’s festival, as part of the notice of the feast. It thus came to the people stamped with the authority of the Church.^41.1^ The Christian nations of the Balkan peninsula have preserved it in popular tradition, with some circumstances which more nearly recall the classic saga. The name of the city desolated by the dragon is given as Troyan. Its inhabitants were given up to various kinds of sin. The blessed Virgin, having paid a visit to the place, returns to heaven bathed in tears, and recites in an assembly of the saints a dreadful catalogue of iniquities whereof she declares the inhabitants are guilty. The thundering Elijah advises that God send them terrible maladies, the plague, the typhus and the small-pox, to convert them from their evil ways. After seven years, however, they are still unconverted. Unseasonable and severe frost and snow are then tried for seven years, and after that seven years of drought; but all in vain. Then God made a lake beside the city; and in it He placed an insatiable dragon, which entered the town thrice a day, and devoured on every visit three hundred of the people. Over and above these hearty meals the monster every night exacted a fair maiden from the white city of Troyan; and soon the whole place was depopulated. The turn of Sava, the king’s daughter, came at last. She was conducted by the nobility of Troyan to the cold waters of the lake, and there abandoned to her fate. Suddenly a youth appeared {42} upon a dappled courser, brandishing his mortal lance. Advancing to the shore, he greeted the maiden with the name of God; and she politely returned the salutation: “Life and health to thee, O hero on the dappled steed!” He goes on to inquire what she is doing there alone by the water; and she tells him her story. Then he catechises her as to her morals. Has her heart been always pure? Has she always been obedient to her parents? Has she ever adored the god of silver, or the god of gold, to which her people are in the habit of bowing down? When this highly orthodox knight has been satisfied on these points, he dismounts from his dappled steed, plants his lance in the grass, and says to the princess: “Pray examine my head a little, for I feel strangely sleepy.” Whereupon he lays his head in her lap, and she proceeds to perform for him a service doubtless highly appreciated by the peasants who sing the ballad. Under the soothing influence of her gentle fingers he falls asleep; and while he rests the lake rises in waves and the dragon emerges. The bashful maid was ashamed to awaken her deliverer; but her tears rolled down upon his face, and he leaped up like one possessed. He tore out the lance from the earth, and pricking his steed forward until it stood up to its knees in the lake, struck the monster in the jaw with his lance, dragged it ashore, bound it with a silken girdle, and put the girdle into the princess’ hand. He directed her to conduct it through the city, in the hope that the sight would at last convert the inhabitants, that they might desist from their infinite wickednesses, destroy the god of silver, worship the true God, and venerate himself, Saint George, as their patron. “If they will not be converted, set free,” he says, “the insatiable dragon, and he will devour the people of Troyan.” {43} The argument thus presented on his behalf by the princess was irresistible. The city was converted, and its harvests of corn and wine thenceforward prospered. Its patron, Saint George, became an object of reverence, as he is to this day; but whether the dragon also became a reformed character, or was put to death, the ballad omits to inform us.^43.1^

The Bosnian folk-song I have here summarised reappears with little change, both in Servia and in Bulgaria.^43.2^ In the island of Lesbos, on the other hand, it has greater affinities to the märchen discussed in previous chapters. A monster, having established himself near a fountain, is propitiated with a human being every morning and evening, otherwise he would stop the flow of water. The lot fell in due course on the king’s daughter. On one side wept the king; on the other wept the queen. They wept and cried: “Alas, our only daughter!” Saint George heard their lamentations, and drew nigh to save her. He did not stop to put her through her catechism; but having learnt in the briefest words from the maiden that the dragon was to eat her, he hurriedly called to her: “Come here, my dear; sit down and louse me; and when the water foams, then awaken me!” The abrupt transitions of a traditional ballad do not enable us to judge whether the damsel was long occupied in removing the consequences of his saintly disregard of cleanliness; for her next exclamation is: “Rise up, rise up, O conqueror! The water foams, and the dragon is sharpening his teeth for me!” Her tears flowed like an impetuous river, and wetted the saint in his {44} armour of gold. He sprang at the winged monster, and with a thrust of his javelin stretched him dead. The king in his gratitude offered him his daughter in marriage. “Instead of marrying thy daughter,” the holy and unambitious man replied, “instead of calling me thy son-in-law, build a church in the name of Christ. In the midst of the church erect a knight; write on the knight this one word: Saint George, that all the world may come and pay him homage.”^44.1^

The name and legend of Saint George are known in Abyssinia, where the story is perhaps told in a fashion as pious as the foregoing. Unfortunately I am unable to give the edifying details. But at the Exhibition at Palermo a few years ago, some pictures were shown as specimens of native art. One of them represented Saint George on horseback, and another was thus described by an interpreter: “There was a dragon that slew all the virgins; Saint George killed it. Near the place where the dragon died was a euphorbia tree, wherein a virgin who was afraid of the beast had taken refuge. The virgin did not believe that the dragon was dead, and Saint George gave her the cord, saying: ‘Pull it, and thou wilt see that it does not move.’ ”^44.2^

We are not immediately concerned with the revolting legend of the saint’s martyrdom. It may be well, however, to point out that this appears to be the oldest part of the story. Mr. Baring-Gould, indeed, conjectures that the incident of the Rescue of Andromeda attached itself to his name in consequence of a misunderstanding—on whose part he does not specify—of the concluding words of {45} an encomium on the saint made by Metaphrastes, a Byzantine writer of the early part of the tenth century, in which he ascribes to his hero the feat of confounding and making a mock of the cunning dragon, meaning of course the Devil.^45.1^ Such misunderstandings are not unknown in the legends of the saints. M. Maury enumerates forty-two saints, not including Saint George, to whom a victory over a dragon has been ascribed by a similar blunder; and it {46} would not be surprising to find that his list is far from complete.^46.1^ Whatever may have been the cause of the appropriation of the incident to Saint George, it is certain that the belief in the story is to be found everywhere in Europe. In some places it has even been localised, as at Mansfeld, where the saint is declared to have been a knight named George, who was Count of Mansfeld, and whose own daughter was the damsel rescued from the maw of the dragon. His statue as he slew the monster stands over the church-door; and there can be little doubt that the statue, whether intended for Saint George or any other person, has caused the localisation of the tradition.^46.2^

The islanders of Sardinia have a Saint George of their own, who was bishop of Suelli. In the commune of Sant’ Andrea Frius, a village in the province of Cagliari, is a {47} tract called “the Plain of Blood,” where grew a reddish plant, said to have been tinged by the blood of the dragon, whom this very saint slew there.^47.1^ This is an instance in which coincidence of name has been the cause of confusion.

Outside the legends of the saints, the deliverance of a maiden is, with one exception, hardly found in modern Europe. Tales of the conquest of a dragon or other monster are common enough, both in this island and on the Continent; but since there is no lady in the case it is needless to refer here more particularly to any save the remarkable story of the Pollard Worm. The tradition is that long ago a huge and savage wild boar—not a serpent—infested the woods of Bishop Auckland, and every effort to destroy it failed, the adventurers who had undertaken the achievement having all perished in the attempt. At length both the king and the prince-bishop of Durham, whose favourite residence was at Auckland Castle, offered rewards for its destruction. A member of the Pollard family, already an honourable and ancient one, rode forth in search of the monster, and after a desperate struggle succeeded in severing its head from the trunk. Having done this he cut out the tongue, which he placed in his wallet, and then, overcome with weariness (for he seems to have fought during the night), he stretched himself on the ground and fell fast asleep. Now the terms of the king’s proclamation were such that the reward was due to any one who would bring him the boar’s head to his palace at Westminster. While the victor slept, the lord of Mitford Castle, near Morpeth, {48} rode by on his way to London, and seeing the slaughtered boar and the sleeping man, he could not be in any doubt as to what had happened. So he played the charcoal-burner’s part, and stealthily dismounting took up the head, slung it at his saddle-bow, leapt again upon his steed, and made all haste to London, where he showed the head and won the reward. When Pollard awoke, to his dismay the head had disappeared. However, he made the best of his way to Auckland Castle, where he arrived at an unseasonable moment, for the bishop was just sitting down to dinner. When the message was brought to his lordship, he “sent the champion word that he might take for his guerdon as much land as he could ride round during the hour of dinner. Weary as he was, Pollard had all his wits about him. He turned his horse’s head and rode round Auckland Castle, thus making it, and all it contained, his own. The bishop could not but acknowledge his claim, and gladly redeemed castle, goods, and chattels on the best terms he could. He granted the champion a freehold estate, still known as Pollard’s Lands, with this condition annexed: the possessor was to meet every bishop of Durham on his first coming to Auckland Castle, and to present him with a falchion, saying, ‘My lord, I, on behalf of myself, as well as several others, possessors of Pollard’s lands, do humbly present your lordship with this falchion at your first coming here, wherewith as the tradition goeth he slew of old a mighty boar which did much harm to man and beast, and by performing this service we hold our lands.’ It may be added that the crest of the Pollard family is an arm holding a falchion.” Pollard’s next business was to go to London and urge his claims there. He pleaded that the head Mitford had brought was without {49} a tongue, but to no purpose. Mitford had fulfilled the terms of the royal proclamation, and to Mitford the reward had already been given.^49.1^

Before leaving the subject of European sagas one important Rescue story must, however, be mentioned. It forms part of the Irish tale of The Wooing of Emer, and is to this effect: Cuchulainn, coming to the house of Ruad, king of the Isles, on Samuin night (Hallowe’en), hears wailing in the dun of the king. Inquiring the cause of the lamentations, he is told that Devorgoil, the king’s daughter, has been taken as tribute to the Fomori, a monster race dwelling beneath the sea, and she is exposed on the sea-shore that they may fetch her. He goes down to the strand and there finds the maiden. “He asked tidings of her. The maiden told him fully. ‘Whence do the men come?’ said he. ‘From that distant island yonder,’ said she; ‘be not here in sight of the robbers.’ He remained there awaiting them and killed the three Fomori in single combat. But the last man wounded him at the wrist. The maiden gave him a strip from her garment round his wound. He then went away without making himself known to the maiden. The maiden came to the dun and told her father the whole story.… Many in the dun boasted of having killed the Fomori, but the maiden did not believe them.” So the king prepared a bath, to which every one was brought separately. Cuchulainn came, like everybody else, and the maiden {50} recognised him—doubtless by the strip of her garment on his wound. The king offered him the damsel to wife, but he said: “Not so. Let her come this day year to Erinn after me, if it be pleasant to her, and she will find me there.” “He ought of course to have married her,” as Mr. Nutt, commenting on the story, remarks; “but this would have conflicted with the purpose of the tale… which is to celebrate the heroic loves of Cuchullainn and Emer.” So the marriage is prevented by a device mentioned in one of our earlier chapters. Devorgoil came with her handmaid in bird-form, and Cuchulainn, not recognising her, struck her with a stone from his sling, which he afterwards sucked from the wound, thereby becoming her blood-brother.^50.1^ Here it is plain, as has been noted by both Professor Rhys and Mr. Nutt, that we have a variant of the incident under consideration. The manuscript containing the story was compiled in A.D. 1300; and there are reasons for thinking that in its present form the story is at least as old as the early part of the eleventh century. It is probable that the incident is “a folktale arbitrarily altered in order to be introduced into the” saga of Cuchulainn. This at least is Mr. Nutt’s acute conjecture; and I scarcely know how else to account for the resemblance the incident bears to that found in stories of the Herdsman type. The Herdsman type, as we have seen, appears to have originated among the Celts, or rather perhaps among that Iberian race which overspread in far prehistoric times the whole of the west of Europe, and after the Celtic conquest of these islands formed the substratum of the population. We shall hereafter see the bearing of this fact on the question of origin. Meanwhile, we may turn to other variants.

The tale of the Rescue of Andromeda is known to the farthest limits of Asia. Mr. J. F. Campbell describes a picture he saw in a temple at Shimonoshua in Japan. “A man with long black hair and a hooked nose, and a long straight sword, loose red trousers, a flowered white cloak, and curled-up shoes, like those of the Mikado and Laplanders. Eight round China vases, breaking waves and the sea; a weird tree, and a storm of wind and rain driving at the man; eight heads, like the head of the dragon of the fountain [previously described]. A woman crouched in a cago, behind the warrior, dressed in Japanese draperies; a great deal of unpainted wood to make the background of this curious old sketch by a very clever hand; a lot of Japanese writing, and a black frame which had remnants of gilding. That was the picture. The whole was much weathered and battered and in a bad light. It is at least three hundred years old.”^51.1^ Mr. Campbell was not the man to look at such a picture without having his curiosity aroused to know its meaning; and he learned from Massanao, his youthful squire at Shimonoshua, a story substantially identical with the account I follow derived from a different source. Susa No, the tricksy son of Isanagi, the Japanese Creator, being forbidden to return to heaven after his exploits there, and reluctant to turn his steps to the Underworld, which he had of his own free choice inherited as his abode, wandered through the earth. From Corea he crossed the strait and landed at Idzumo in Japan. As he trod the shore eager to know who dwelt in that strange country he heard the sound of weeping and wailing. Passing onwards in the direction of the sound, he beheld in a little glen an old man and woman, and {52} between them was seated a lovely maiden whose bitter sighing and tears they were striving in vain to still. Susa No quickened his steps towards the group, and gently inquired the reason of this grief. “I am Ashinadzutchi, the god of this country,” said the old man, rising and bowing low before the stranger. “Peacefully I and mine tend the cultivation of rice; and there were nothing left for us to wish if only we were freed from one frightful, indescribably cruel calamity. Seven daughters have already been devoured by a hideous sea-monster. The creature came hither when my daughters were in the very flower of their beauty. It was incapable of compassion; it regarded not their screams of agony, but devoured them. This is the last of our daughters, our beautiful and good Inada; and of her too the monster will rob us; we know it only too well; and that is why we are mourning and weeping with our dear child.” The astounded Susa No inquired more particularly about the monster, and learned that it was a terrible dragon with eight heads, whose glowing eyes shone afar and were red as red berries. Its back was overgrown with downright forests; its belly was blood-red, and continually bedabbled in blood; its whole coiling length was as long as some winding valley. Undaunted, however, he promised help against the oppressor; only he prayed the old man and his wife to give him the fair Inada to wife if he succeeded in rescuing her from the dragon’s maw. His measures were soon taken. He requested Ashinadzutchi to prepare a great quantity of saki. He himself the while built eight small rooms or enclosures, open above; and in each room he put a large vat of saki. When the monster drew nigh he threw a woman’s robe around him and placed himself so that his reflection fell into the first vat. The hungry {53} dragon, seeing it, plunged its first head into the vat, deeming that its prey was there. With headlong speed it drained the saki to reach the maiden, but found her not. Her image was shimmering and beckoning from the second vat; and rashly and greedily it plunged another head into that. In vain it emptied the second vat; in vain it pursued the same false image into the depths of the remaining vats one after the other. By the time the eight vats were emptied the monster rolled over on the earth in a drunken sleep. Then Susa No stepped forward, flung off his disguise, drew his sword, smote off the heads of the ungainly brute, and hewed his mighty body into small pieces. But when he came to the tail his good sword was notched and blunted with the blows. Then he discovered in the dragon’s tail a sword even better than his own. He took the prize, called it Cloud-sword, because the dragon was ever girt with dense clouds, and sent it as a gift to his sister Amaterasu, the sun-goddess, up yonder in heaven. She held it ever in high esteem, and in after-days gave it to her grandson, the ancestor of the Mikado. By him it was bequeathed to his descendants, and it is still, if report lie not, among the most precious treasures of the imperial crown. Inada was not unwilling to be bestowed upon a wooer who had won her so nobly. They dwelt long and happily together in Idzumo, and became the parents of a race of heroes and rulers renowned in story. And Susa No made upon his conquest of the dragon and his marriage the oldest poem in the Japanese tongue, whence he is honoured as the inventor of the art of poetry.^53.1^

I may pause here to observe that the device of rendering the dragon torpid by gorging it is not unknown in Western tales. To give a single example, it shall be one that Sir Robert Atkyns turns aside from his dreary genealogies and heraldic studies to mention, because the hero was the traditional founder of one of those innumerable county families whose exciting chronicle of births, marriages, and deaths is of such vast importance to the local historian, and of none whatever to the rest of the world. The story is that the neighbourhood of Deerhurst, in Gloucestershire, was plagued by “a serpent of prodigious bigness,” which poisoned the inhabitants and slew their cattle. The people petitioned the king; and a proclamation was issued in response, offering an estate, then belonging to the Crown, on Walton Hill in the parish of Deerhurst to any one who should kill the serpent. This was accomplished by one John Smith, “a labourer.” He put a quantity of milk in a place frequented by the monster; and the brute, having swallowed the whole, “lay down in the sun with his scales ruffled up. Seeing him in this situation, Smith advanced, and striking between the scales with his axe, took off his head. The family of the Smiths enjoyed the estate when Sir Robert compiled this account, and Mr. Lane, who married a widow of that family, had then the axe in his possession.”^54.1^ Here for saki we have milk; and the Mikado’s sword is replaced by Mr. Lane’s axe. The church {55} at Deerhurst is one of the most ancient in the country. Its tower in particular is of singular interest; and it has been assigned to a date as early as the eighth century. Beyond doubt it witnessed the Norman Conquest, and was probably by no means a new building then. Immediately over the door projects a broken stone, roughly carved into the shape of a dragon’s head; and above a window higher up is a second stone of a similar form. It is quite likely that, as in the case of the statue at Mansfeld, so here, the carving on the church has caused the localisation of the legend.^55.1^

These examples stand by no means alone. The carving at Brent Pelham, referred to in a note on a previous page, appears to be the origin of a similar story. In the church of Mordiford, in Herefordshire, is a painting representing a winged serpent about twelve feet long, with a large head and open mouth. The tradition is that a dragon infested {56} the neighbourhood, and a condemned malefactor was promised pardon if he would destroy the creature. He fought and killed it in the river Lug, but fell a victim to the poison of its breath. Here again the representation probably suggested the tradition as a special appurtenance of the village; and among others of which we may suspect the same are the famous worms of Lambton in Durham, and Linton in Roxburghshire.^56.1^ The dragon held a prominent place in the mythology of the northern nations, as it has done in many others, and was a favourite subject of both Teutonic and Celtic Art. To trace its somewhat complex artistic history is foreign to my purpose; but the briefest notice of local traditions could hardly be considered complete without some mention of the influence of sculptures and pictures whose meaning had been lost.

We may now return to sagas more properly coming within our ken. From Candahar is reported a Mussulman legend, which relates that in pagan times the king of Candahar found himself compelled to promise a young girl every day to a dragon. Accordingly a maiden mounted on a camel was daily sent to the monster. As soon as the camel arrived within a certain distance of the cavern where the dragon dwelt, the latter inhaled its breath with such force that its prey was inevitably drawn into its throat. One day the lot fell on the fairest maid of Candahar, when Ali, “the sword of the faith,” happened to pass through the country, and saw the victim in tears. Learning the cause of her distress, he placed himself in her stead on the camel, and at the moment of being drawn into the monster’s throat he cut off its head with his irresistible blade.^56.2^ In Abyssinia {57} the tale is told with variations, due to Christian and Jewish influences. Axum, we learn, was the seat of a serpent-king, for whose appetite a virgin was daily provided. When it came to the turn of Saba, a virgin of high birth and pure spirit, she was rescued by a “celestial warrior in earthly form,” but not before the serpent’s saliva had fallen on her foot, causing her thereafter incurable ulcers and lameness. She was acclaimed queen; but her disease marred her joy. Wherefore she crossed the seas to seek for healing at the hands of the renowned King Solomon, from whom she obtained not only restoration to health but also a son, born after her return to Abyssinia. He was named Menelek, and to him the kings of Gondar have ever since traced their ancestry.^57.1^ In the basin of the Upper Niger, the story concerns not the beginnings of a royal race but the destruction of a kingdom—that of the Bakiris whose capital was called Wagadu. It was said to be colossally rich; the kings possessed an immense treasure; but they owed their fortune to the protection of a serpent which dwelt within a well near the king’s village. Every year, by lot, one of the loveliest maidens of the country was chosen, and, arrayed like a bride, she was conducted to the well, when the serpent would come forth and, rolling his scaly folds around her, would carry her off to his den. Now, one year the lot fell on a damsel betrothed to the bravest warrior of the land, who, besides, was the king’s cousin. He swore to save her, and mounted on his steed, which he had tethered near the well, he awaited the dragon’s coming. Twice the serpent put forth his head, and twice drew back. {58} But the third time, the moment he stretched out to seize the prey the warrior lunged forward, cut the brute in two with a single blow of his sabre; and seizing his beloved he carried her off with all the speed of his courser, which no horse has ever surpassed. As he disappeared, a voice was heard from the well denouncing seven years of drought and every evil a country could suffer. The king sought his cousin and would have put him to death; but he could not be caught. Soon the predicted woes were accomplished; and forced by drought and sickness the population deserted the capital in a body for other lands. It is even said that the king, unable to carry off his riches, buried them, and that no man since has been able to find them, for the soil burns and bursts into flame beneath the hardy treasure-seeker. Certain it is that scourges of various kinds, which transformed the country into desert, caused the emigration of a once numerous people.^58.1^

Variants in east and west represent the maiden as her own deliverer. In the Golden Legend of à Voragine we read that Saint Margaret was flung into a dungeon, after tortures of the kind that churchmen, with equal piety and delight, ascribed to their martyrs and inflicted on their opponents. In her cell she prayed to the Lord that the Enemy with whom she was fighting might appear to her in visible form. A huge dragon instantly assailed and attempted to devour her; but she made the sign of the cross, and it vanished. It is elsewhere stated, we are told, that the dragon had actually got her into its mouth and was about to swallow her, when she fortified herself with the sign of the cross: the dragon forthwith burst asunder {59} and the virgin came forth unharmed. Here, however, the pious author becomes critical. It was not incredible that the Devil should come in the shape of a dragon and should seek to devour her, nor that she should repulse him unaided save by the sign of the cross. But that he should have got her between his jaws, and that he should have burst asunder, was apocryphal and frivolous.^59.1^ Obviously it would never have done to let people believe that the Devil had come to an end in this way: it would be killing the goose that laid the golden eggs.

In Germany the maiden’s victory is localised on the far-famed Drachenfels. While Rome was yet mistress of the left bank of the Rhine, and Christianity under her power had established itself there, the heathen hordes on the right bank continued to assert their independence, and made constant raids on the opposite side. On one of these freebooting excursions they captured a Christian king’s daughter. The son of the ruler of the Löwenburg fell in love with her, and would have wedded her had she not refused to give her hand to a worshipper of false gods. Whereupon it was decreed in a council of the chiefs that the damsel should be offered up to a ferocious dragon dwelling in a cave on that one of the Seven Mountains whose steep top looked down into the green waves of the surging Rhine. Early on the morrow, while the dragon yet slept, she was accordingly dragged up the rock and fettered to a tree near the cavern. At the foot of the mountain gathered an expectant crowd—among them her {60} heathen lover, who longed to hasten up and shield the maiden’s life with his own; but she was condemned to death by the nobles, and he durst not interfere. Meanwhile she stood unterrified; and as she quietly awaited the dragon, she drew from her bosom a crucifix and fixed her trustful gaze upon it. Out came the monster from his hole, and, catching sight of the sacrifice provided for him, he rushed upon her. The crucifix, however, proved too much for him. When he beheld it in her hands terror and stupefaction seized him; he fell down in the most natural way and rolled from the precipitous cliff right into the foaming flood below, there to find a watery grave. Nothing more of course was wanted to convert the heathen; and the legend winds up, in a manner somewhat more idyllic than orthodox, with the wedding of the pious maiden to the king’s son after he had received “the bath of regeneration.”^60.1^ The story has clearly been provided with a religious and literary gloss; but there is no reason why in substance it may not be of traditional origin, and the conclusion indicates a strong probability that as originally told it was the king’s son who effected the maiden’s deliverance. The Kwang-po-wu-chih, a compilation of the end of the sixteenth century, furnishes a Chinese version also literary in appearance, the popular provenience of which cannot be doubted. “In the eastern regions of Yueh Min (the present Fuhkien) there exists a range of mountains called the Yung Ling, many tens of li in height, in the north-western recesses of which there abode a mighty serpent, seven or eight chang (seventy or eighty feet) in length and ten feet in circumference, which was held in great awe by the people of the country. At a certain time it signified, {61} either to some person in a dream or to those versed in the art of divination, that it lusted to devour a maiden of the age of twelve or thirteen; and the governors and men in authority of that region, equally alarmed respecting the monster, sought out female bond-servants and the daughters of criminals to satisfy the serpent’s appetite. In the morning of the day in the eighth moon, after offering sacrifices, the victim was taken to the mouth of the serpent’s cavern, and at night the serpent suddenly issued forth and devoured its prey. Year after year this happened, until at length nine maidens in all had been offered up; and a fresh demand was being made but no victim could be obtained. At this time Li Tan, Magistrate of Tsing Lo, had six daughters and no sons. His youngest daughter, named Ki, responded to the call and was ready to proceed (to the cavern), but her parents refused consent. She urged, however, that she was unable to be of use to her parents, as was Ti Ying (the faithful daughter of olden times), and being a mere source of useless expense might as well bring her life to a speedy close, and only requested to be supplied with a good sword and a dog that would bite at snakes. In the morning of the day of the eighth month she visited the Temple with the sword beside her and the dog provided. She had also previously prepared several measures of boiled rice mixed with honey, which she placed at the mouth of the cavern. At night the serpent came forth, its head as large as a rice stock and its eyes like mirrors two feet across—when, perceiving the aroma of the mess of rice, it began to devour it. Ki forthwith let loose her dog which seized the serpent in its teeth, and the maiden hereupon hacked the monster from behind, so that after dragging itself to the mouth of its cave it died. The {62} maiden entered the cavern and recovered the skeletons of the nine previous victims, whose untimely fate she bewailed. After this she leisurely returned home, and the Prince of Sueh, hearing of her exploit, raised her to be his Queen.”^62.1^

In the last chapter I summarised several märchen wherein Andromeda was replaced by a youth of the opposite sex. Such examples are rare among sagas. Beside the cases of Kleostratos and Theseus already cited I am only aware of one other, which indeed appears to be merely one of the märchen from the Panjáb with its hero identified as the celebrated Râjâ Rasâlu. The râjâ comes with his pet parrot of supernatural wisdom to Nîlâ City and finds an old woman, six of whose seven sons have been already sent by the king to feed a certain giant. It is now her seventh son’s turn, and he is to be sent that day for the giant’s dinner, together with a basket of bread and a buffalo. The râjâ offers himself in place of the youth. It turns out that there are in all seven giants, who are fated to be overcome by Râjâ Rasâlu. They candidly tell him, as these stupid monsters are accustomed to do, how to perform the feat. Taught by them, he looses the heel-ropes from his horse and drops the sword out of his hand. The ropes tie up the giants and the sword cuts them in pieces. But this is not enough to satisfy the conditions; and the giants, still living, are obliging enough to put seven frying-pans, one behind the other, and behind the frying-pans to arrange themselves one behind the other, so that their antagonist may conveniently loose an arrow from his bow to pierce them all through the frying-pans, and slay them at one blow in the predestined manner. A giantess, {63} their sister, however, escaped to a cave. The hero pursued her, and placed a statue of himself at the mouth of the cave, so that, being afraid to venture forth again, she was starved to death within.^63.1^

A few variants are also found, in which the maiden is rescued, not from death by the dragon, but only from thraldom. Such is the tale of Ragnar Lodbrog as developed in his Saga. As told by Saxo, Herodd, king of the Swedes, found some snakes in the woods and gave them to his daughter Thora to bring up. They grew and became such a nuisance to the whole country-side that at last the king was forced to issue a proclamation, offering his daughter in marriage to any one who would remove the pest. Ragnar procured a woollen mantle and thigh-pieces thick with hair that would protect him from snake-bites. To make assurance doubly sure he plunged into water on a frosty night and froze his clothing stiff. Thus defended, and armed with his sword and spear, he attacked and killed two serpents; the courtiers, meanwhile, flying from the struggle and hiding like frightened little girls. After the combat the king, laughing at his uncouth garb, nicknamed him Lodbrog, or Shaggy-brogues.^63.2^ The Saga, however, gives a somewhat different version. It only mentions one worm, found when quite small in a vulture’s egg which Thora’s father had brought to her as a gift from Bjarmeland. She took a fancy to the creature and made a bed of gold for it in a little box. There it grew, and the gold with it, until at length it lay coiled round the house and allowed no one {64} to approach except the man who brought its daily food. The Jarl Herraud was moved to offer his daughter and the dragon’s hoard to any one who would kill it. Ragnar’s shaggy mantle and leggings were boiled in pitch and then rolled in sand. He attacked the monster with his lance early in the morning while all men yet slept, and drove the weapon home. So mighty were the worm’s death-struggles that the building shook with them and Thora was awakened. She cried out, inquiring the hero’s name. He replied by singing some verses in which he hardly gave her more than his age, and hastened away, leaving the iron spear-head imbedded in the carcase, but carrying the shaft with him. The Jarl forthwith summoned an assembly and passed round the spear-head, that it might be found who owned the shaft it would fit and who was entitled to the reward.^64.1^ Note here the inveterate habit of the adventurer in these tales: the habit of running away after performing the deed and thus necessitating his discovery by a token. This is wanting in Saxo’s account; but we cannot infer that it was unknown to him. A careful examination of his narrative shows, in more than one place, evidence of omissions not unconnected, probably, with his purpose of turning popular traditions into serious history.^64.2^

A story of the deliverance of a maiden imprisoned by a dragon, still current in the mouths of the people, places the scene of the captivity on a little island, called Lindwerder, in the Lake of Dratzig, in Pomerania. After many knights had essayed the task in vain one came who, with a song, {65} threw a spell over the monster and slew him. The lady, however, refused marriage with her deliverer, having vowed her life to God; and she became a nun.^65.1^ I might refer to other cases of rescue from the toils of a serpent or some such monster, but it is needless to pursue this form of the tale, since it seems connected rather with the myth of the Enchanted Princess, which I have studied elsewhere,^65.2^ than with that of Perseus and Andromeda.

Chapter XVIII. the Rescue of Andromeda: Its Relation to Human Sacrifices

Popular as the story of the rescue of the devoted maiden is, and appealing as it does to the imagination, it is not a little remarkable that it appears to be indigenous only in the Old World. Legends of the slaughter of a destructive monster are by no means so confined in their range, where there is no specific human being to deliver; and not infrequently they form part of the cosmogony of peoples alien in race and occupying distant portions of the globe. Few of them exhibit any details in common with those of the Perseus cycle. I have already mentioned some, and to others I shall have occasion to refer hereafter. The rest it would little avail us to analyse. Enough to note that the thought underlying them all is that the monster slain is preternatural and hostile to mankind. The suggestion has often been made that these stories are traditions of the saurians which abounded in geologic times. Of this, not a particle of evidence has been adduced; and it is in itself so wildly improbable as hardly to deserve notice. None of the giant reptiles of the secondary period were contemporary with man. The process of evolution was still far short of that consummation. And when man {67} appeared in the Quaternary, or perhaps at an advanced stage of the Tertiary, period, the remains of iguanodons and pterodactyles had long been peacefully fossilised beyond his reach. It is true that he made war on the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros; but these could have furnished no hints for the construction of the winged dragon or the lindwurm. We may indeed reasonably ask what hints were needed beyond the existence of snakes and birds or bats? The conscious weakness of humanity, the mystery of serpentine motions, the magnifying, the combining and the distorting powers of human imagination, amply account for the result. The hero who is believed to have succeeded in vanquishing a monster thus created, is regarded as somewhat more than man; he is frequently worshipped as a god. This, however, we know, was comparatively late in civilisation. There was a time when gods, in the sense of beings distinct from and above man, though human in their passions, and more or less human in their proper form, did not exist in the belief of mankind. The worship of confessedly human ancestors, totemism, and other and ruder superstitions preceded them. Science has not yet determined the exact relations of ancestor-worship and totemism. But it is at least certain that the dead were constantly held to assume animal shape. Multitudes of the lower animals—even noxious and repulsive creatures like snakes—were venerated as totems. Veneration grows easily into worship; the totem-feast develops into what we understand by a sacrifice. That many of the classical deities themselves emerged into anthropomorphism from an earlier and less advanced existence is probable from the tales which represented them on various occasions and for various purposes “disguised in brutish forms,” and from {68} the wolves, the horses, the swine, the dogs, the mice and even the flies associated with them, or dedicated to them in the ordinary offerings of the temples or in the more secret and solemn cult of the Mysteries. Egypt, down to the latest moment of its independence, in spite of the political vicissitudes of its long and splendid history, and the consequent evolution of its manifold religious faith, never got beyond its zoomorphic deities. The crocodile and the goose, the ibis and the ram, the jackal, the cat and the bull, decorated with divine names, received in their proper bestial persons the adoration of their worshippers. To living gods like these food was a daily necessity; and for such as were carnivorous flesh, doubtless part of the daily sacrifices, must have been provided. A savage nation on days of festival, or under stress of some great impending calamity, would not hesitate to give human flesh. If, by the concurrence of an advance in civilisation and a political revolution, the worship of any such divinity were suppressed, he would become in tradition a deadly monster; and the milder divinity who succeeded to his place in popular regard would be credited with his conquest and destruction.

The hypothesis I venture to put forward to explain the incident of the Rescue of Andromeda is, that it is the record of some such religious reformation. In dealing with the previous incidents I was able to show that they were founded on beliefs, which, if we may not call them primitive, at least go down very deep into savage life. Here it is different. Considerable progress in civilisation must have been made before such a reformation could have been effected, though it would still be compatible with the continuance of a vast amount of wilful and deliberate {69} cruelty constantly inflicted on human beings in the service of the gods. The Church, that zealously propagated the legend of Saint George, regarded the tortures inflicted on the hero as highly improper for an orthodox knight, but quite suitable for a heretic. Even the polished Greeks occasionally offered human sacrifices—if we may trust some of the reports, with torments which would have done no dishonour to the genius of Saint Dominic or the most amiable of his “sons.” But the practice of presenting such offerings to wild beasts in their capacity as gods had been abandoned; and the story of the Slaughter of the Dragon would seem to be the mode wherein tradition preserved the effect upon the collective mind, not indeed of a specific event, so much as of the total result. Tradition loves to be pictorial, dramatic. While its presentations are usually wide of the actual series of occurrences, they often embody in imaginative shape some genuine memory; and it is the task of the historian or the scientific student to bid them render up the secrets they enclose.

The traces of human sacrifice among the Egyptians are faint and uncertain. Classical writers, indeed, alleged it; but they brought forward hardly any tangible evidence, beyond the statement of Plutarch—and that at second-hand—that the engraving on the seals of the Sphragistai, whose business it was to seal the beasts intended for the offerings, was a man bound and kneeling, with a knife at his throat.^69.1^ Nor is there reason to suppose that in any case men or women were given during historical times to their sacred animals. We must turn to a lower range of culture for such a custom. At Bonny, on the West Coast of Africa, a virgin was bound to a stake on the sea-shore at the first {70} low water of every spring-tide, and left there as a sacrifice to the shark-god.^70.1^ In the East Indies we find many traditions of such practices. “It has been somewhere related that the Rájá of Kupang, on the island of Timor, formerly sacrificed a young virgin of royal descent to the Alligator, by throwing her into the sea in order to be swallowed by that monster.”^70.2^ Dr. Pleyte, the friend and pupil of the late Professor Wilken, relates “how in Boeroe at sunset, after the day’s work, the notables of the island would gather round him [Professor Wilken] and go down to the cool sea-shore, where he would sit on a rock in the midst of an improvised assembly, and the old men would tell traditions of past glories in the days when every year a maiden, chosen for her beauty, was led down to the sea as a sacrifice to the crocodile-god for the prosperity of the people.”^70.3^ In the seventeenth century, Gautier Schouten, a medical man in the service of the Dutch East India Company, heard a story on the same island, which discloses a somewhat different motive for the sacrifice. A holy crocodile, it runs, having fallen in love with one of the daughters of the king of the island, who was very beautiful, ravaged the coast every day, carrying off and devouring men, women, and children. The inhabitants assembled in arms to surprise the brute and to kill it. The crocodile was prepared for this, and cried out to them in their own tongue that they should beware of insulting him, for he was mighty enough to destroy them and all their island; and that he would do so unless they delivered up to him the {71} king’s daughter; but, on the other hand, if they did this he would become the protector of the island and would load it with benefits. The islanders could not resist these promises and threats. They led the princess to the beach, and bound her to a pillar, whence the crocodile carried her off in due course, and by her became the parent of all crocodiles; on which account they are honoured as gods.^71.1^ If Archdeacon Gray’s information is to be trusted, the Shurii-Kia-Miau, one of the aboriginal tribes of China, still offer human sacrifices to their canine deity, though not exactly to a living dog. They possess a large temple in which is an idol in the form of a dog. There they hold an annual religious festival, when the wealthy members of the tribe “entertain their poorer brethren at a banquet given in honour of one who has agreed, for a sum of money paid to his family, to allow himself to be offered as a sacrifice on the altar of the dog idol. At the end of the banquet, the victim, having drunk wine freely, is put to death before the idol.” And the people “believe that, were they to neglect this rite, they would be visited with pestilence, famine, or the sword.”^71.2^ Among the South Sea Islanders, themselves cannibals, human offerings were frequent. Their idols, it is true, were roughly human in form; yet the divinities often took the shape of other animals. Ellis relates that “birds resorting to the temple were said to feed upon the bodies of the human sacrifices, and it was imagined that {72} the god approached the temple in the birds, and thus devoured the victims placed upon the altar. In some of the islands ‘man-eater’ was an epithet of the principal deities.” To the king, who was a sacred being descended from the gods, and who often personated the god, the eye, as the most precious part of the victim, the organ or emblem of power, was presented. He feigned to eat it; the simulation being, there can be little doubt, a relic of a former period when he actually did eat the eye and probably other parts of the body. Portions of some of the victims were also eaten by the priests, who of course were also representatives of the gods.^72.1^ The legends of the Greeks and Romans afford us glimpses of a belief like that of the Polynesians. How else may we interpret the stories, reported by Plutarch, of Helena, a noble virgin of Lacedæmon, who, in obedience to an oracle, was prepared for sacrifice, but was saved by an eagle carrying away the sword and laying it upon a heifer; and of Valeria Luperca, a maiden of Falerii to whom a similar adventure happened—an adventure commemorated still by a yearly ceremony in the days of Plutarch, or at least of Aristides, the author whom he cites?^72.2^ The tradition of Lycaon points in the same direction. He, having offered an infant to Zeus, was changed into a wolf; and it was believed that any one who imitated his example would share his fate, though with the chance of regaining his own form if for ten years he abstained from human flesh.^72.3^

Several of the foregoing examples exhibit the being to whom the sacrifice is offered as a crocodile, or some analogous inhabitant of the waters. Nor will it pass unnoticed that many of the tales of the Rescue of Andromeda represent the dragon as inhabiting a spring or lake, or keeping the waters and giving them only in exchange for the victim. A shark- or crocodile-god has, it would seem, a natural tendency to pass into a purely mythical being. Such is Ju-ju, an object of worship in the delta of the Niger, to which a young girl is commonly sacrificed in the way already described as customary at Bonny in sacrificing to the shark-god.^73.1^ To this origin we may probably ascribe the numerous Eastern tales of dragons and evil spirits taking possession of rivers, lakes and tanks, and demanding sacrifices to induce them to release the water. The Chinese annals of Khotan, a city in Cashgar, have preserved a legend concerning a river that dried up, to the injury of the inhabitants of the city. The king, having consulted his ecclesiastical advisers, was informed that the river-dragon had interrupted the current, and advised to mollify him by a sacrifice. No sooner was the sacrifice offered than a lady came (so we are told, if the translation be accurate) out of the waters, though it is hard to know how she could do this when the river-bed was dry. But whencesoever she may have come, she declared that her husband had prematurely died, and that his demise had stopped the flow. And she required of the monarch one of his grandees as a new husband, so that the stream might resume its course. One of the nobles, named Mieou, offered himself to supply the place of the late lamented he-dragon. Mounted on a white steed, he rode into the river-bottom, {74} and boldly advanced till he met the returning waters. Nor then did he hesitate, but opening a passage amid them with his whip, he entered and was seen no more. The horse in a short time reappeared, on his back a drum of sandalwood and a letter assuring the king that Mieou had been elevated to the rank of a god, and would thenceforth watch over the prosperity of the realm. Meanwhile, the new deity begged his majesty’s acceptance of the accompanying magical drum, which, if suspended at the south-eastern gate of the city, would give warning in case of any hostile attack. Since that time the people of the city have had no cause to complain of deficiency in their water-supply.^74.1^ A somewhat different cause for the human sacrifice is alleged in the following Hindu story. The Talao Lake was made by a Bargújar rajah named Menh or Mehan. When it was finished the water all became blood-red. The pandits, consulted by the rajah, declared that the water had become impure, because the work had been done by low-caste labourers; and the only way of purifying it was by sacrificing the rajah’s son, Chattar-bhuj, with his wife, his horse, and his servants, in the lake. With the consent of the principal victim the foul water was drained off, and a room was built in the floor of the lake for the reception of Chattar-bhuj and his household. They accordingly entered it, provided with six months’ food. The room was then closed, and a temple built over it. The result was satisfactory, for when the pool was filled at the next rainy season the water remained pure. “It is the universal belief that whenever the lake overflows,” the rajah’s son “is seen by night riding down the hill from the {75} highest point on a blue horse. Some say that two torches are carried before him, and that his servants follow behind, until all disappear into the lake. Others say that his appearance on the blue horse precedes the fall of rain.”^75.1^ Both these cases look like legends which have grown up, in consequence of a change of population or religion, to account for an ancient worship, and for a divinity still believed to haunt the spot, and still regarded with awe, though no longer the object of the special honours at one time rendered to him.^75.2^ In the latter story, as it reaches us, there is no mention of a dragon or other supernatural being. It would seem, however, to be implied in the sacrifice, as well as in the temple erected by the rajah.

But, though this may be a true explanation of the story of the Talao Lake, it will generally be agreed that the legend could not have assumed its present form had not human sacrifices to water and water-gods been familiar to the natives of India. The sacred books of the Aryans prescribe human sacrifices on divers occasions to various deities; and it is doubtful whether even yet British rule has entirely extinguished them. Among the aboriginal tribes they have been put down with extreme difficulty. All over India the folktales are full of them; and many are the sagas relating to the consecration of tanks in this way. I need only add two instances. “At Ahmadábád, by the advice of a Brahman, a childless Ványa was induced to dig a tank to appease the goddess Sítalá. The water refused to enter it without the sacrifice of a man. As soon as the victim’s blood fell on the ground the tank filled, and the {76} goddess came down from heaven to rescue the victim. The Vadála lake in Bombay likewise refused to hold water till the local spirit was appeased by the sacrifice of the daughter of the village headman.”^76.1^ Among the records of actual sacrifices to water, the author of the treatise on the names of rivers and mountains attributed to Plutarch cites Archelaus (a philosopher of the fifth century before Christ, whose works have perished) for the statement that virgins were nailed to wooden crosses and flung into the Hydaspes, one of the five great rivers (tributaries of the Indus) from which the Panjáb takes its name. These offerings were accompanied by hymns addressed to a goddess called by the writer Aphrodite—probably Párvatí, to whom in her character of Kálí there is reason to suspect that human victims are still presented in remote places.^76.2^ As Párvatí, however, she is still, with her husband Siva, the joint object of an instructive rite in the Kánagrá district during some part of March and April. The girls of the village procure two clay images, the one of Siva and the other of Párvatí, which they marry together with full ceremonial. A feast follows; and on the Sankránt of Baisákh (in April) “they all go together to the riverside, throw the images into a deep pool, and weep over the place, as though they were performing funeral obsequies. The boys of the neighbourhood often annoy them by diving after the images, bringing them up, and waving them about while the girls are crying over them.” The custom is called Ralí Ka melá or the Fair of Ralí, “the Ralí being a small painted earthen image of Siva or Párvatí”; and its object is said to be to {77} secure good husbands.^77.1^ “Until the beginning of the present century,” says Mr. Crooke, “the custom of offering a first-born child to the Ganges was common”; and he goes on to suggest that “akin to this is the Gangá Játra, or murder of sick relatives on the bank of the sacred river, of which a case occurred quite recently at Calcutta.” However this may be, the natives are still suspicious when a bridge is built. “The Narbadá, it was believed, would never allow herself to be bridged until she carried away part of the superstructure and caused the loss of lives as a sacrifice.” And the rumours that a victim was required when the Hooghly Bridge at Calcutta was built, and when the waterworks of Benares were constructed, point to a wide prevalence of the superstition that these and other great public works demand a human sacrifice.^77.2^

On the western continent there lingers among the Zuñi, one of the four stocks of Pueblo Indians in Arizona and New Mexico, a tradition pointing to the prevalence at one time of human sacrifices to water. Zuñi is built upon a knoll in a broad valley walled by picturesque mesas or tablelands, of red and white sandstone. The waters of the valley once rose in a flood and compelled the inhabitants to flee to a mesa several hundred feet high for safety. And {78} still the waters rose, threatening to submerge the mesa itself, until the priests determined to sacrifice a youth and a maiden to propitiate them. The two were dressed in their most beautiful clothes, adorned with many necklaces of turquoise and other precious beads, and cast into the flood. The offering stayed the calamity; and the victims, turned to stone, are yet to be seen in a columnar rock broken near the top into two parts, which are capped with head-like forms and called by the people the father and mother rocks.^78.1^

Europe furnishes numerous remains of human sacrifice to water. At Rome, during historical times, the Vestal Virgins threw from the Sublician bridge into the Tiber, every year on the Ides of May, thirty human effigies formed of rushes. We cannot doubt that at an earlier period living men were hurled into the flood. This was the opinion entertained by the Romans themselves, who held that it was Hercules who first substituted images of straw.^78.2^ A similar substitution is practised in India by the Gonds in their offerings to Burha deo; and, we are told, they find it answers the purpose;^78.3^ as did the Romans.

Human sacrifices to water were certainly not unknown among the ancient Greeks. I need not cite more than two examples. Athenæus quotes Anticlides, an Athenian writer, as recording that certain colonists of Lesbos were directed {79} by an oracle to throw a virgin into the sea as an offering to Poseidon. This was accordingly done; but Enalos, one of the chiefs of the expedition, being in love with the maiden, leaped after her to save her, and disappeared with her in the depths. The colonists founded Methymna; and in later years when the town had grown populous he was said to have shown himself to them again, swimming to land on a great wave with a wondrous cup of gold in his hand, and to have related that the lady was dwelling beneath the sea with the Nereids, while he himself had become Master of the Horse to Poseidon.^79.1^ Such a legend as this could only have arisen where sacrifices of the kind had been practised. In historical times the Greeks performed the rites of Adonis, originally, it would seem, a Semitic cult. Adonis, the beloved of Aphrodite, according to his story, was slain by a boar. “His death was annually lamented with bitter wailing, chiefly by women; images of him, dressed to resemble corpses, were carried out as to burial, and then thrown into the sea or into springs; and in some places his revival was celebrated on the following day.”^79.2^ If not in Greece, at all events in Syria, whence perhaps it was borrowed, the ceremony here described was doubtless performed with a human being. Mr. Frazer, from whom I take the foregoing description, has made a large collection of cases in which an effigy is prepared and, after the performance of certain rites, is slain and buried, or thrown into the water. We may put aside the instances of burial, only noting them as evidence that the intention is to put some living victim, represented by the effigy, to death. At Altdorf and Weingarten, {80} villages of Swabia, a straw man is made on Ash Wednesday and called the “Carnival Fool.” He is carried round and then thrown with mournful music into the water.^80.1^ At Balwe, in Westphalia, on the contrary, the straw-man is thrown into the river Hönne with shouts of joy on Shrove Tuesday. In both instances the ceremony is called “burying the Carnival.”^80.2^ In the Thuringian villages of Oberhain and Maukenbach the children used to “carry out Death” in the shape of a puppet of birchen twigs, on Mid-Lent Sunday, and throw it into a pool.^80.3^ “At Tabor, in Bohemia, the figure of Death is carried out of the town and flung from a high rock into the water, while” the following song is sung:

“Death swims on the water, Summer will soon be here, We have carried Death away for you, We have brought the Summer. And do thou, O holy Marketa Give us a good year For wheat and for rye.”^80.4^

Passing over a number of similar observances in German and Slavonic lands, I need only mention the “Funeral of Kostroma” as celebrated in Russia on Saint Peter’s day, the 29th June. “In the Murom district, Kostroma was represented by a straw figure dressed in woman’s clothes and flowers. This was laid in a trough and carried with songs to the bank of a lake or river. Here the crowd divided into two sides, of which the one attacked and the other defended the figure. At last the assailants gained the day, stripped the figure of its dress and ornaments, trod the straw of which it was made under foot, and flung it into {81} the stream, while the defenders of the figure hid their faces in their hands, and pretended to bewail the death of Kostroma.” Elsewhere a maiden plays the part of Kostroma. She is treated with reverence, carried to the brink of a stream and there bathed.^81.1^ In some Swabian villages, where the Carnival Fool is represented by a living man, he is treated less gently, being at last thrown into the water.^81.2^

All these customs are perfectly unambiguous. Whatever their agricultural significance (and I see no reason to doubt that the sense attached to them by Mannhardt and Frazer is accurate) they are unquestionably relics of human sacrifice to water. The victim may have been identified with the spirit of vegetation or with some more concrete expression of the same idea, and the ceremonies themselves may have been dramatic in character; but that is in no way inconsistent with their being also sacrificial. Moreover, we have other traces of the same kind of oblation, in the superstition so widely prevalent in this island, as well as in Germany, of the periodical victim demanded by a river or lake. On the banks of the Saal in Thuringia, especially among the fisher-folk of Jena, it is even yet believed that the Saal-nixe requires a sacrifice every year; and the lake at Salzungen boils with rage unless it obtain its yearly offering.^81.3^ On the island of Rügen there is a vague tradition of a lake which would rise and overwhelm the entire {82} country, unless a maiden were offered to it every year. At Trampke in Pomerania a peasant was once ploughing near the Lake of Madüe, when he heard a voice out of the pool cry: “Now, come! Now is the time!” He looked around him puzzled, and again the voice exclaimed in more imperious tones: “Now, come! Now is the time!” Thereupon, mastered by an uncontrollable impulse, he left the plough, rushed to the mere and flung himself in. His farm-servant, who was spreading manure, ran to his assistance and drew him out of the water; but an instant later he plunged in again and was dragged by the water-maiden down to the bottom.^82.1^ Always before anybody is drowned in the Lahn near Giessen there is heard—the millers and bleachers engaged on the river are ready to vouch for it—between eleven and twelve o’clock in the day a loud cry: “The time is here, the hour is here; where is the man?” It is said that two lads were one evening by the Mümmling, not far from Michelstadt, when a voice called from under the bridge: “The hour is here, but not the man!” At that moment a man hurried down the hill and was about to jump into the river. The lads caught him, held him back, and spoke to him; but he answered never a word. They took him to the inn and pressed some wine upon him. His head, however, sank forward on the table; and he was dead. Among other German rivers which demand an annual human victim are the Fulda and the Neckar.^82.2^ The Lorelei is a nixe of the Rhine, famous for the number of her slain. Nor is she alone in her misdeeds; but the legends of sirens haunting German rivers are too numerous and too well known to require illustration. {83} An old spring at Friedberg used every year to require an offering, and if it happened that no one fell in during the year, it cried out: “Come down, come down!” and anybody who was in the neighbourhood and heard the voice would be irresistibly drawn into the fountain.^83.1^ The Drome in Normandy, according to a local proverb, has every year horse or man.^83.2^ Peg Powler, Nanny Powler, Peg o’ Nell, and Jenny Greenteeth, are spirits that haunt various rivers and pools in the north of England; and they are not less bloodthirsty;^83.3^ while in Scotland, the kelpie and his congeners are familiar.

Among Europeans the superstition seems in this form to belong especially to Teutonic peoples. In other parts of the world, however, not a few examples are to be gleaned. The Indians of Guiana “firmly believe in the reality of” certain “mermaids, or ‘water māmās,’ as they are called in Dutch-creole; and where they are supposed to have their caves or nests, there great danger awaits the traveller. Some are related to be extremely beautiful and possessing long golden hair, like the Lorelei, and whoever casts his eye on them is seized with madness, jumps into the deep water, and never returns. Others are hideous, snakes being twined about them, and with their long white talons they drag boats under the surface and devour their occupants. On the Orinoco and Amazon similar creatures are supposed to exist; but these are capable of drawing their prey into their mouths at a distance of a hundred yards. In order to avoid such a calamity, the natives always blow a horn before entering a creek or lagoon in {84} which one of these monsters may be living; if it happens to be there, it will immediately answer the horn, and thus give warning to the intruder.”^84.1^ The people of Guiana having come under the influence of the Dutch, may be supposed to have learned the superstition from them; but this can hardly be thought of the natives of the banks of the Orinoco and the Amazons. In like manner the belief in South Africa that rivers call their victims, who cannot resist the fascination, may be attributed to the Dutch colonists. Here again the ascription of such an origin must be very doubtful, though it is perhaps right to take note of the same intrusive Teutons. The Rev. James Macdonald, who laboured for twelve years among various Bantu tribes, says that “to the Bathlapin the crocodile is sacred, and by all it is revered, but rather under the form of fear than affection”; and he regards the superstition (which reigns even where there are no crocodiles) as “the survival of an ancient recollection of the time when the ancestors of the present Kaffirs dwelt on the margin of rivers infested by these murderous brutes, and where they often saw their women drawn underneath when going to the river to fetch water.”^84.2^ There may be some reason for this conjecture. It probably expresses, however, only half the truth, since if the crocodile were revered, offerings would naturally be made to it, as in fact we have seen to be the case in other parts of Africa. In Senegal the water-spirits {85} appear in crocodile form. A legend is told of a girl to whom the spirit presented himself as a fair youth; but when she listened to his overtures he turned into a horrible cayman.^85.1^ The Bantu tribes are believers also in a mysterious being called an “incanti” which often inhabits rivers, and whose glance is fatal. “While we were living at Duff,” says the writer just cited, “a man was found dead one morning close by the river’s bank, not far from the mission. It was clearly a case of suicide by poisoning, but our native neighbours regarded it as a case of having seen an incanti, and no one would approach the spot for months. The pools were bewitched, haunted, bedevilled.”^85.2^ The Zulus tell of a bloated, squatting, bearded monster dwelling in rivers. It steals the clothing and ornaments of girls who come to bathe, and is capable of swallowing men and beasts. Happily, however, it is amenable to prayers.^85.3^ Another “imaginary amphibious creature, mostly abiding in the deep portions of the rivers,” is the subject of Zulu superstition. It is universally believed that “aided by some mysterious and evil influence, the nature of which no one can define or explain, bad persons may enter into a league with” it, as they can also with {86} wolves, baboons, and jackals.^86.1^ On the whole it is impossible in the present state of our knowledge to lay much emphasis on the superstitions mentioned in the present paragraph, since we lack the independent evidence which we have concerning the Teutons and Slavs, of customs pointing to human sacrifices to water.

The ancient Mexicans, however, were innocent of Dutch influence. Yet, if we may believe Sahagun, they had their water-monsters as malignant as those of the Bantus. Among these monsters, and by no means the only one, was the Ahuizotl, pictorially represented as a smooth, rat-like animal with a long prehensile tail, accompanied by the sign for water. The tail was believed to be furnished at its extremity with a hand, wherewith it dragged down into the depths of the pool where it abode any person who approached the banks. A few days afterwards, the body was cast up again, and then found to be deprived of eyes, teeth, and nails. No one dared to touch it, but the priests, who, when informed of its presence, would fetch it “on a litter with great reverence and bury it in one of the oratories called Ayauhcalco—literally house in, or surrounded by, water. For it was said that the Tlalocs (or rain-gods) had sent his soul to the terrestrial paradise. They adorned the litter with mace-reeds, and it was preceded by musicians playing on flutes.” The reasons assigned for such a death were that “either the deceased had been very good, and therefore the rain-gods desired his company in the terrestrial paradise; or he had perchance certain precious stones in his possession. This would give offence to the rain-gods, who do not wish that persons should {87} possess precious stones, and for this reason they may have killed him in anger, but nevertheless taken him to the terrestrial paradise.” His relatives found consolation, not merely in the belief that he was with the gods in paradise, but also that through him they themselves would become rich and prosperous.^87.1^ Here the sacred character of the corpse, its place and manner of burial, and the superstitions concerning the departed point with tolerable certainty to a religious offering; and the conclusion is altogether in harmony with what we know of the bloodthirsty Aztec rites.

Passing with these illustrations away from sacrifices to water, and from legends of water-monsters, we may note that another object with which the sagas of dragons are connected is a hill, often shown as the creature’s resting-place. He lies curled upon it, or around it, or dwells in a cave or den. Thus the Lambton Worm lay coiled thrice about the base of an oval hill on the northern bank of the Wear. I am not aware what this oval hill may be; but some of the hills mentioned in these stories are prehistoric barrows. Mr. Andrew Lang published some years ago a story from Galloway of a snake that used to lie twined round the tumulus at Dalry. “In colour it was snow-white, and the thickest part of its body was as thick as three bags of meal. This creature was a terror to all the neighbourhood, as it not only destroyed cattle and men, but had an ugly habit of going at night to the neighbouring churchyard, digging up coffins with its claws, and devouring the newly dead.” The Lord of Galloway offered a reward for its destruction. But one of his knights was swallowed up by the serpent, horse and armour and all; and another was {88} deterred by evil omens. The adventure was then undertaken, as at Deerhurst, by a smith, who devised a suit of armour for himself covered with long sharp spikes which could be drawn in or thrust out at the wearer’s will. Scarcely was his armour completed when the smith’s young and beautiful wife died, and was buried in the churchyard. The night after the funeral the smith came upon the brute scraping the earth from the newly-made grave, and attacked it vigorously. The snake swallowed him whole; but as he slipped down its throat he suddenly shot out his spikes, rolling about violently inside. This was more than the creature had bargained for; and in a short time the smith by strenuous efforts tore his way through his enemy’s carcase. There lay the serpent quite dead, and for three days following the river Ken ran red with its blood. “Here,” says Mr. Andrew Lang, “the story should properly end; but a later and more romantic fancy has added that at the very moment of victory the second knight arrived on the spot, and, in a fury of disappointed ambition, attacked the smith, who of course was as victorious in the second fight as he had been in the first.”^88.1^ With all deference to Mr. Lang’s great authority, I venture to think that the second knight’s attack was part of the original story, embodying as it seems to do the germ of the Impostor incident so common in Rescue tales. Be this, however, as it may, the point whereto I desire to direct attention is that the connection of the snake with a prehistoric tumulus, and that of other dragons with hills or mounds, both in this country and on the Continent, is probably not without its significance. {89} There, if anywhere, sacrifices would have been offered in early times; and their memory, transformed by the popular imagination into the form of a dragon with a propensity for human flesh, may have lingered for many a century after their abolition. But to raise this beyond the value of a conjecture careful inquiry and comparison of instances, for which I have no opportunity at present, would be required. I may point out, however, that the conjecture is countenanced by analogous legends of dragons haunting other sacred spots. At Aarhuus in Denmark, for instance, bodies placed overnight for the funeral solemnities in the cathedral frequently disappeared by the morning. A dragon whose lair was near the cathedral had eaten them. At length a strolling glazier devised a coffin of mirrors, pierced by one hole just large enough to thrust a sword through; and he caused himself to be laid within it in the cathedral. Around the coffin stood four tapers, which he lighted at midnight. When the prowling dragon beheld its reflection in the mirrors it drew nigh, deeming the image to be its mate. The glazier instantly thrust his sword through the hole of the coffin into his enemy’s throat; but he himself perished in the floods of blood and venom that spouted from the body of the dying monster. An ancient image in the church is said to preserve the memory of the heroic act, as at Mansfeld, Deerhurst, and elsewhere.^89.1^

It is hardly necessary for the completion of the argument to enumerate any stories of rescue of human sacrifices to beings confessedly worshipped as divine, or at least superhuman. Yet one or two specimens may not be without interest. They cannot be numerous, because the rescue {90} itself implies an insult to, and almost a denial of, the divinity. Wherefore we must look for them only, or chiefly, among races who practise a tolerant religion like the Buddhist, which whithersoever its conquests extended, permitted the continuance of offerings to the overshadowed and indigenous gods. We will begin with Japan, where we have already found legends corresponding to that of Andromeda. A young warrior wandering in the northern province one evening lost his way in the mountains; and reaching at length a small secluded shrine, where there was only just room for him to lie down, he took shelter within it and soon fell fast asleep. About midnight he was awakened by a noise. Peeping through the interstices of the timber walls of his refuge, he espied a troop of cats engaged in a wild, unnatural dance by the light of the moon, and yelling in fiendish tones. As he kept perfectly still in his hiding-place and listened, he could distinguish, incessantly repeated amid their shrieks, the words: “Don’t tell Shippei Taro! Keep it secret! Don’t tell Shippei Taro!” The midnight hour passed away, and with it the mysterious cats, leaving him in peace for the rest of the night. In the morning he found a path leading to a village. As he drew near he heard a sound of weeping, and entering the nearest hut, he inquired what was the matter. He was told that the mountain-spirit required the sacrifice of a maiden every year, and the very next night was the appointed time. On further inquiry he learnt that the shrine he had just left was the scene of the offering, and that it was customary to place the victim in a cage in the immediate neighbourhood. Recalling the incidents of the past night he next inquired who Shippei Taro was, and was told that Shippei Taro was the name of the great dog belonging {91} to the chief officer of the prince who lived not very far away. To this personage accordingly he went, and asked for the loan of the dog for the following night. After hearing his story the dog’s master consented and handed over Shippei Taro to the stranger. To arrange with the girl’s parents to keep her safely at home, and to put Shippei Taro into the cage in her stead was the next business. Having accomplished these things the youth betook himself to the shrine and awaited what would happen. At midnight when the moon had risen over the mountains the cats returned in full cry led by a gigantic black tom-cat, in whom our adventurer without difficulty recognised the dreaded mountain-spirit. The tom-cat approached the cage with hideous shrieks of delight and danced around it. At length he opened it and peered in, searching for his victim. In an instant Shippei Taro leaped upon him and held him with his teeth, while the warrior with one well-aimed blow put an end to the brute. Turning then on the other cats, hound and man speedily put them to flight and destroyed not a few. The rout was complete; and from that time no more human sacrifices have been offered to the mountain-spirit.^91.1^

One of the aboriginal tribes of India, now Buddhist, has preserved a somewhat similar instance of the abolition of these offerings. “The early religion of Láhaul is still known under the name of Lung pe Chhoi, that is, the religion of the valley. When it was flourishing many bloody, and even human, sacrifices seem to have been regularly offered up to certain Chá, that is, gods or evil spirits residing in or near old pencil cedar-trees, rocks, caves, etc. This cruel custom disappeared gradually after the doctrine of the Buddhists had influenced for a time the minds of the people. There is a story which I shall relate, as it seems to show that this was the case. Near the village of Kailang a large dry pencil cedar-tree was standing till last year, when we felled it for firewood: the story goes that before this tree in ancient times a child of eight years old was annually sacrificed to make the spirit who resided in it well disposed towards the inhabitants of Kailang. The children seem to have been supplied in turn by the different families of the village. It happened one year to be a widow who had to give up an only child of the required age of eight years. The day before her only one was to be taken from her, she was crying loudly, when a travelling Láma from Tibet met her, and asked the cause of her distress. Having heard her story, the Láma said: ‘Well, I will go instead of your child.’ He did so, but did not allow himself to be killed. ‘The spirit must kill me himself if he wants human flesh,’ said he: so saying, he sat down before the tree and waited for a long time, but as the demon made no attack on him he became angry, took down from the tree the signs and effigies, and threw them into the Bhága river, telling the people not to sacrifice any more human beings, which advice was followed from that {93} time forward. The demon fled and settled on the top of the Koko Pass, where it still dwells under the name of Kailang Chá, or god of Kailang, getting now only the annual sacrifice of a sheep supplied by the shepherds.” The writer from whom I quote goes on to state that (contrary to the principles of Buddhism) sheep and goats are yearly killed near not a few villages in Láhaul, and offered up to the Chá, and he hazards the opinion these animals have taken the place of men.^93.1^ I am not aware what evidence there may be for this substitution beyond the foregoing tradition. At Manáli in Kúlú, also in Northern India, is a temple of some antiquity to Manú Rikhi. In front of it stands an altar of stone, supporting a pile of spruce logs, which are replaced, three at a time, every three years. An annual fair is held on the spot, at which a keprá (literally, evil form) or mask of Tundi is carried about. Tundi Bhút was a local dait or demon who conquered the deotas or gods, and demanded one of their sisters in marriage. Manú in turn vanquished him at Khoksar in Lahul and compelled him to marry instead “the daughter of a Tháwi or mason, named Túnar Sháchká, who appears in other stories as a Rakhsháin.” The temple was erected to commemorate Manú’s success; but the tale does not account for the spruce logs. To explain these it is popularly said that Tundi devoured men and that Manú, having conquered him, put the logs into his mouth and killed him.^93.2^ Whatever the real significance of the logs may be, it is probable that we have here a legend of the suppression of human sacrifice. Other stories of substitution have been mentioned in the {94} course of the foregoing pages. And the legend of Abraham, which will occur to every reader, points back to a period when the fathers of the Hebrew nation, in common with the surrounding peoples, practised human sacrifices. But with substitution, as distinguished from rescue, we are hardly concerned.

Still less need we discuss the revolting subject of human sacrifice in general. The stories I have cited (and they could easily be multiplied) are intended to confirm the hypothesis that we have in the incident of the Rescue of Andromeda a reminiscence of the abolition of human sacrifices to deities in the shape of the lower animals. I have shown that in certain stages of civilisation sacrifices of the kind are practised, and that they are frequently offered to water-spirits conceived in animal form. In offerings to water, and in traditions of water-spirits, we have the product of savage animism. And it may, of course, be that the monster sent to devour Andromeda, and that which appears so often in the legend of Saint George, are to be regarded simply as the personification of water, or of specific rivers and pools, in their sinister aspect. Strictly speaking, however, personification belongs to a higher plane of thought than that which finds the spirit embodied as an actual living creature. Moreover, the dragon is by no means invariably connected with water; and in estimating the probability of this explanation we must not overlook the tales which represent it as having its abode on a hill or mound, or in a cave.

CHAPTER XIX. THE MEDUSA-WITCH IN MÄRCHEN

The stories analysed in the first three chapters are abundant evidence that the form assumed by the Quest of the Gorgon’s Head in modern märchen is that of a sojourn in a witch’s dwelling, resulting in death or petrifaction by enchantment, followed by rescue and the annihilation of the witch. This incident is not confined, any more than the others with which we have dealt, to tales of the Perseus cycle—that is, to tales wherein one or more of the other three principal incidents of the Perseus märchen occur. In company with the incident of the Life-token it is frequently found in stories belonging to the type of The Two Sisters who envied their Cadette.^95.1^ From many of such stories, however, the Life-token appears to have dropped. The Greek märchen of The Tzitzinæna is an example. There, as in the Arabian Nights, a king overhears three maidens boasting what they could do if they could only marry the royal confectioner, the royal cook, and the king himself respectively. The boast of the youngest sister is that she would bear her lord three children—Sun, Moon, and Star. The king gratifies their desires, to the annoyance of his mother, who plays the part of the envious sisters in {96} Galland’s tale. She so arranges matters that when the children (two fair boys and a girl) are born they are thrown into the sea; and after the third abortion, as the king is led to believe, the unfortunate queen is shut up in a foul and noisome prison. The children are found by a solitary monk, and brought up until they are old enough to shift for themselves. He then gives them money and sends them into the world. They settle in the town; and there the eldest buys from a Jew a mysterious casket which contains a green, winged horse. The midwife who had been charged with the destruction of the children now discovers them still living; and in order to put an end to them, she excites in the maiden a desire to possess the golden apple watched in a certain garden by forty dragons. With his enchanted horse the eldest brother obtains for her not only the golden apple, but also, on a second journey, a golden bough on which all the birds of the world gather to sing. He is then sent for the Tzitzinæna to explain what the birds say. On arriving at the Tzitzinæna’s house the horse directs him to call it. The creature replies, “Marble”; and the youth is petrified to the knees. The calls are exchanged until he becomes marble to the girdle. He then remembers that on bidding himself and his brother and sister farewell the monk had given him some hairs from his beard, with directions to burn one of them when in need. He burns one accordingly; and the monk appears, and calls the Tzitzinæna, compelling it to bring a bottle of water of immortality and sprinkle the youth and his steed. By the power of this water they are loosed from the spell. But they have not been the Tzitzinæna’s only victims. In obedience to the monk it delivers them all, and among them the hero’s brother, who had been lost. {97} The Tzitzinæna, thus captured, like the Talking Bird, is the means of revealing the truth to the king and restoring to him his wife and children.^97.1^ The story is obviously imperfect, whole episodes, like the loss of one of the brothers, being referred to but not detailed. Hence there can be little doubt that it once contained the Life-token. It is doubtless a waif from the coffee-houses of the Levant stranded on Hellenic shores. In a variant from Epirus the errands are to obtain the Flying Horse of the Plain and the Beauty of the Land. The latter had turned many men into stone; but she goes with the hero, becomes his wife, and contrives the solution of the plot, as in the typical tale.^97.2^

In the former of these two cases the transformation is effected by the witch’s word; in the latter we are left in doubt. A German tale from the Odenwald brings us nearer to Galland’s version in this respect. There, as in the Greek stories, a king, to his mother’s disgust, marries beneath him, with the usual catastrophe. The children are two girls and a boy. A branch of the Tree with Golden Fruits is the object of desire. The hero takes it; but on his way back he hears some one calling him, and turning to reply he is changed into a pillar of salt. This fate also befalls the elder sister on seeking the Talking Bird in the same garden where the Tree grew. The younger, fetching the Leaping Water, resists the temptation, and by sprinkling the water on the two pillars recovers her brother and sister.^97.3^ A Swabian tale belonging to the same cycle presents the task as the disenchantment of a castle in the {98} forest by fetching thence a certain blackbird in a cage. This could only be done between eleven and twelve at noon. The first of the princes having entered the castle allows the precious hour to pass while he is listening to the lovely music that resounds through the ensorcelled chambers. Noon strikes, the doors close, and he is caught fast in the trap. The second prince fares no better; but their sister finds the bird and hastens out before the fatal hour, thus undoing the spell and restoring to their proper human form a lion, a bear, and a number of apes which inhabited the building.^98.1^

The villain of a Catalonian variant is no less a personage than the Devil himself, to whom the heroine had been given by her father. A king found her in the Devil’s den, and stole her away, to marry her. It is the Devil who arranges the catastrophe by means of forged letters to and from her husband when she gives birth to twins, a boy and a girl. The secondary villain is a witch bribed by “the ladies of the people” to excite the maiden’s longing, first, for a tree bearing leaves of all colours, next, for water of all colours, and lastly, for a bird with plumes of all colours, which sings all songs. These are to be found in the garden of the Castle of Go-and-not-return. The maiden’s brother, by the help of the wise Solomon, who dwells in a castle on the way, succeeds in the quest of the first two; but disregarding the counsels which have been given him, he takes the wrong bird on his third journey and remains enchanted at the gate, until rescued by his sister. The bird, here also, once captured, becomes the means of retrieving the happiness of the family.^98.2^

The Kabyle tale of The Children and the Bat makes the {99} villain out of the heroine’s barren fellow-wife. The children are seven sons and a daughter. They are carried by the envious woman into the forest one after another as they are born. An old woman induces the maiden to ask her brothers to get a bat; and an old man directs the brothers one after another to a certain date-palm on the sea-shore. “What wild beast comes here?” asks the bat from the top of the tree. “Go to sleep, old head,” answers the lad. The bat changes the adventurer’s gun into a bit of wood, and renders the adventurer himself “microscopic.” When she has thus lost all her brothers the maiden goes to seek the bat. She does not answer the creature, but waits until it is asleep. Then she climbs the tree, seizes the bat, and compels it to restore her brothers, promising in return to clothe it in silver and gold. The bat conducts the band of children back to their father, saves them from partaking of the poison offered to them by their stepmother, and reunites them to their parents. The stepmother is bound to a horse’s tail and dragged to death, while the bat is returned to its tree and clad in silver and gold.^99.1^ A version from Mirzapur comprises the Supernatural Birth. The children are three in number, two lovely boys and a girl, born of the king’s favourite wife, in consequence of eating three fruits given by a fakir. Their mother’s fellow-wives play the usual treacherous part at their birth. When, years after, the wicked queens find out that the children are still alive and dwelling in a miraculous palace, the gift of the friendly fakir, they send to persuade the maiden (it is always the woman) to ask for a nightingale that dwelt in a certain jungle, could sing a thousand notes, and could talk like a man. The fakir warns the elder brother not to {100} answer when the bird cries out to him, else he will be turned into stone. The youth succeeds; and as in the other variants, the evil devised by the wicked queens recoils on their own heads, for it is by means of the bird that the truth is brought to light and punishment inflicted.^100.1^

A Lesbian tale looks like an ill-remembered variant of the Perseus group. A king, we are told, who had thirty-nine sons, longed for a daughter. A son, however, was born, and at the same time his favourite mare foaled, and the colt was allotted to the boy. When he was sixteen the brothers all set out together to seek their fortune. The youth, while his brothers slept, conquered forty dragons which had come to draw water at a spring where they were reposing. The next night he slays a seven-headed beast at another fountain, and cuts out its tongues. The following day the band of brethren separated, and the youngest pursued his way alone. A sorceress advises him how to pass a monster whom he will meet in the way, and warns him that he will reach the castle of another witch, who will offer him all sorts of fruits, of which he may partake with safety, but he must beware of drinking the wine she will present, otherwise she will petrify him. Instead, he is to give it to his dog, and he will see it instantly changed to marble. The witch, however, will have power to recall the animal to life. The youth follows her directions, and finds his brothers already turned to statues in the witch’s palace. He compels her to restore them as well as his dog, and having put her to death leads his brothers back to their father.^100.2^

We may reasonably suspect that the Life-token has originally been part of all these variants, as in Galland’s {101} tale. It is needless to follow the instances where it still remains an integral portion of the narrative. Another point is worthy of notice. In most cases the object of search is a bird. So in a tale told by the Armenian immigrants of the Land beyond the Forest a king’s three sons set out to obtain a wonderful nightingale, the only thing wanting to complete the beauty of a church that he has built. The eldest son, however, settles down comfortably as the husband of a king’s daughter, and shirks the quest. The second is found by a gigantic Moor stretched at rest in a grassy glade of the forest, and asked: “What do you want here?” On his replying, “Nothing,” the Moor spits upon him and turns him to stone. The youngest son, returning successful with the nightingale, comes to the same spot, and is confronted by the Moor with the same question. He asks in turn, What are all these many stones he sees around him? The Moor answers that they were men whom his spittle had turned into stone, and threatens him with the same fate. Thereupon the nightingale began to sing, and the Moor fell down upon the ground, a heap of ashes. The stones promptly became men once more, the king’s second son among them. It is sad to relate that in the sequel, in spite of this deliverance, the second son joined his elder brother in betraying the youngest, and leaving him to perish in the depths of a fountain, while they hurried home with the prize. Fortunately the youth found his way out, vindicated his claims, married the fairy to whom the nightingale belonged, forgave his brothers, and they all lived happy ever after.^101.1^

In the romance of Hatim Taï the enchantment is caused by failing to kill the bird, and dissolved by its death. The {102} renowned Kaiumarath, when hunting, found a diamond weighing three hundred miskals. To preserve it in safety he founded the bath of Bagdad, where he placed the stone in the body of a caged parrot. On the chair within the hall was laid a bow with arrows. Every visitor was allowed to shoot three arrows at the parrot, and if he hit it right through the head he would break the enchantment; otherwise he would become a marble statue. The mysterious mansion was uninhabited save by those statues; and the foregoing information was conveyed by an inscription over the door. Hatim failed twice, and became stone to his middle. Persevering, however, he put his trust in God, took aim, and shutting his eyes let fly the third arrow. It pierced the parrot’s brain, when the whole enchantment disappeared amid thunder, lightning, and whirlwinds. All the marble statues started into life, and falling at Hatim’s feet, vowed to serve him. He took the diamond, which was the object of his search, and thus accomplished the last of his seven adventures.^102.1^

The search is not always for a bird. The hero of a Gipsy tale from Transylvania undertakes to deliver the daughter of a good urme from a wicked urme who has carried her off. In the wicked urme’s service he has to perform a number of tasks: among them to find a ring which has been dropped into a fountain and hang it up below a round mirror in the large hall. The water in the fountain is boiling hot; but he plunges without harm, having previously bathed in the milk of the urme’s cow. The real danger was a voice that sounded in his ear as he hung up the ring: “Thou art a handsome youth, a handsome youth. Only look in the glass!” Had he complied {103} with this flattering suggestion he would have been turned into stone. He resisted it, however, to encounter the still more flattering offer from the urme to wed him. It was necessary before doing this that he should cut her up and throw the pieces into a Medean kettle, whence she would issue the most beautiful woman on earth, and they would then live happy and contented together. But he had already seen too much of this lady to trust himself with her; so having obeyed her instructions to cut her up, he threw the pieces into the boiling fountain instead of the kettle, thus destroying her and the enchanted castle with her. The maiden whom he came to free drew from her head some hairs, and letting them fly in the wind, she sang:

“Ye who have been changed to stone, Beast or human creature’s son, Hither, hither, every one!”

At once all the stones which had been men and beasts, but had had the misfortune to look in the magical mirror, returned to their proper forms and danced around the maiden for joy. It remained to obviate the only other danger. The urme had left a son, a dragon who was to have wedded the maiden. He was luckily absent; but before he went away his mother had cut his hair and thrown the pieces among the stones. These they gathered up and burnt. The maiden then prevailed on her deliverer to come home with her and be her husband. They therefore all returned to the good urme in the speediest manner by swallowing the ashes of the dragon’s hair and wishing themselves at their destination.^103.1^

This of course is the ordinary bride-quest of fairy tales. {104} The destined lady is in the power of a magician, who may be her father or merely her master. The hero, usually by her help, performs various tasks, which end in his winning her and destroying, or foiling, the magician. The transformation by the magician of his captives is not, perhaps, a very common incident in the plot. More frequently they are slain and their heads adorn in truly savage fashion the palisades of his dwelling. In a story from the neighbourhood of Bologna, they are turned into statues of salt.^104.1^ Elsewhere, as in a Breton tale, they are changed into trees.^104.2^

The incident of the Medusa-witch in the foregoing stories, while in some cases it approaches more closely to the classical saga, lacks the special development gained in the modern Perseus-märchen. Tales, however, are not wanting in European tradition where the incident in that form appears divorced from the other incidents of the complete märchen. The Portuguese tale of The Tower of Ill Luck is an example. A boy sets forth on adventures accompanied by a horse and a lion, and arrives at the Tower of Ill Luck whence no one ever returns. An old woman within tells him to put his animals in the stable, and gives him a fine hair to tie them up with by rolling it round their necks. When he has done this she challenges him to wrestle. Finding himself overpowered he calls his beasts. But the hag cries out: “Be thickened, thin hair, into a strong coil, binding your horse and lion!” Immediately the hair becomes a thick iron chain which effectually prevents the animals from rescuing their master; and he is at length killed. The same result attends the second brother’s venture. The third is too clever. He cuts up the hair {105} into little bits and throws them into the sea. Hence, when he calls, his animals are free to help him. He compels the witch to give him a salve to anoint his brothers’ bodies and a scent for them to smell. The salve and the scent revive them; and they feel no compunction in burying the hag alive.^105.1^ A story obtained in the Orkney Islands gives the three animals as a hound, a hawk, and a horse. The lad finds a castle, blows the horn, and the door opens. He walks in, but meeting with no one, he sits down by the fire and eats a good supper, which is already prepared. At midnight in comes the Dräglin’ Hogney. “He sat down over against the young man and glowered at him. Then said the Dräglin’ Hogney: ‘Does yer horse kick ony?’ ‘Ou ay,’ said the young man. ‘There’s a hair to fling ower him.’ The young man flung it over his horse. ‘Does yer hound bite ony?’ ‘Ou ay,’ said the young man. ‘There’s a hair to fling ower him.’ Again, ‘Does yer hawk pick ony?’ ‘Ay, ay,’ said the young man. ‘There’s a hair to fling ower him.’ With that the Dräglin’ Hogney whiecked (whisked) frae the tae side to the tither, till he fell upon the young man and killed him.” His next brother fares no better. But the third brother throws the hairs on the fire. “What’s that crackin’?” asks the Dräglin’ Hogney each time as he hears the hair in the fire. “It’s the craps o’ the green wud come yer waysay,” replies the lad. When by the help of his animals he has slain the Dräglin’ Hogney he “ransacks the castle, finds the enchanter’s wand, disenchants his two brothers, their horses, hawks and hounds, divides the spoil, sends for their father, and, in the old wind-up of a Scotch fairy tale, they live happy, and dee happy, and never drink {106} out of a dry cappy.”^106.1^ A Slavonic story in which the two elder brothers, serving at a certain castle and warned against entering the forest, successively persist in doing so, seems to belong to this type. Both youths are petrified, with their dogs, but are rescued by their youngest brother.^106.2^

In Buddhist literature the story takes a much more civilised shape. The Bodisat is the eldest of three brothers, sons of Brahmadatta, king of Benares. The mother of the two elder was dead; and the mother of the youngest having plotted to secure the succession for her son, the two elder, by their father’s counsel, withdrew from the city. Their brother, however, joined them, being unwilling to be left behind. In the course of their wanderings they came into the Himalayas. While resting one day the Bodisat sent the youngest down to a pool near at hand for water. “Now that pool had been delivered over to a certain water-sprite by Vessavana, who said to him: ‘With the exception of such as know what is truly godlike, all that go down into this pool are yours to devour. Over those that do not enter the waters, you have no power granted to you.’ And thenceforth the water-sprite used to ask all who went down into the water what was truly godlike, devouring every one who did not know.” He put the question to Prince Sun, the Bodisat’s younger brother, who replied: “The sun and moon.” “You don’t know,” said the monster, and pulled him down into the depths of the water. Prince Moon, the Bodisat’s elder brother, being sent after the first, makes the equally foolish answer: “The four quarters of heaven,” and {107} is likewise imprisoned in the water-sprite’s abode. The Bodisat himself then suspecting the truth, girt with his sword and armed with his bow, tracked his brothers’ footsteps to the water and waited beside the pool. Finding that he did not enter it the demon appeared in the shape of a forester to the Bodisat and inquired why he did not bathe. But the Bodisat recognised him and charged him with seizing his brothers. The demon explained that he had done so because they did not know what was godlike. Subsequently the Bodisat declares that they only are godlike “who shrink from sin, the white-souled, tranquil votaries of Good.” The demon, pleased with this, offers to give up one of his brothers; and the Bodisat chooses the younger. When taken to task for this choice by the ogre, he justifies it on the ground that it was on this boy’s account that they had sought refuge in the forest, and that not a soul would believe him if he were to give out that the child had been devoured by a demon. The water-sprite admits his wisdom; and “in token of his pleasure and approval he brought forth the two brothers and gave them both to the” Bodisat. Then the latter undertook the demon’s conversion, which happily effected, he continued to dwell at that spot under the reformed monster’s protection, until one day he read in the stars (a primitive but accurate kind of court journal) that his father was dead. “Then taking the water-sprite with him, he returned to Benares and took possession of the kingdom, making Prince Moon his viceroy, and Prince Sun his generalissimo. For the water-sprite he made a home in a pleasant spot and took measures to ensure his being provided with the choicest garlands, flowers and food,” so that he was under no temptation to return to his evil courses. The Bodisat {108} “himself ruled in righteousness until he passed away to fare according to his deeds.”^108.1^

It is abundantly clear that the European tales I have cited cannot have been derived from this highly moral Játaka, in which nobody is punished, but on the contrary things are made comfortable all round—even for the demon. The story must have been found in a more savage form, and fashioned by the early teachers—perhaps by Gautama himself—into an apologue that would have done no dishonour to a Christian apostle.

To examine every kind of enchantment current in märchen would be an endless task. In the classical story, as well as in a large number of modern märchen, petrification is the result of the evil spell. This is softened in the Játaka, and in some other tales, to mere imprisonment; while metamorphosis into trees or into brute forms is the result in other cases. Petrifaction, or change into stones or rocks, is a fate whereto not merely human beings are liable at the hands of supernatural powers: with the hero his horse and other animals undergo this misfortune. In a totally different cycle of stories—that of The Magical Steed—petrifaction is occasionally practised on the horse only. It is then done as a means of preservation for use when wanted. In the intervals between the hero’s tasks his enchanted pony vanishes, sometimes of its own accord, sometimes also by the hero’s appointment. “Now,” said the pony in an Irish tale cited in a previous chapter, “strike a blow with your rod of druidism upon me, and make of me a rock of stone, and whatever time at all you are in need of me, you have nothing to do but strike another {109} blow on me, and I am up as I was before.”^109.1^ Everything in the world is according to savage belief subject to the mysterious energies of the wizard. In the remains of prehistoric superstition imbedded in the Irish folktales we get a truer view of Druidism than that conveyed to us by classical writers, who interpreted the religion of the Celts by their own more advanced polytheism. The Druids were in fact shamans, innocent, as I have already pointed out, of any systematic philosophy.

Lastly, we may notice one of the most interesting “properties” possessed by the Medusa-witch, namely, the hair she gives the hero to bind his dogs withal. It appears in many of the tales, though it is not always used in the same way. A Russian story, whether strictly belonging to the Perseus cycle I am not able to say, relates that “Ivan Dévich (Ivan the servant-maid’s son) meets a Baba Yaga, who plucks one of her hairs, gives it to him, and says: ‘Tie three knots and then blow.’ He does so, and both he and his horse turn into stone. The Baba Yaga places them in her mortar, pounds them to bits, and buries their remains under a stone. A little later comes Ivan Dévich’s comrade, Prince Ivan. Him also the Yaga attempts to destroy, but he feigns ignorance, and persuades her to show him how to tie knots and to blow. The result is that she becomes petrified herself. Prince Ivan puts her in her own mortar, and proceeds to pound her therein, until she tells him where the fragments of his comrade are, and what he must do to restore them to life.”^109.2^

In the glorious mabinogi of Kulhwch and Olwen the hair {110} is put to its more ordinary use. Among the tasks laid upon Kulhwch as a condition precedent to his marriage with Olwen, the fair daughter of Yspaddaden Penkawr, is that of procuring a leash made from the beard of Dillus Varvawc, the son of Eurei, for Drudwyn, the cub of Greid, the son of Eri. No other leash in the world would hold the cub; and for this purpose it was to be plucked with wooden tweezers while Dillus Varvawc was yet alive, otherwise it would be brittle. The episode of the quest of this leash furnishes an explanation of a snatch of song, probably an old popular rhyme, imbedded in the tale and attributed to King Arthur.^110.1^ Here it is the supernatural strength of the hair which constitutes its value, as in the stories already passed in review in this and earlier chapters. So too Kerza, in a Slavonic tale, takes a hair from the long white beard of a dwarf magician and therewith binds the magician’s wicked wife, who has taken the form of a wooden pillar the better to carry out her evil ends, and binds her so effectually that she is thenceforth unable to resume her proper shape, or to use her magical powers.^110.2^

A different example of the power of a hair is found in the Arabian Nights, where the king’s daughter in defence of the Second Calendar draws a hair from her head, and waving it in the air mutters over it for a while, until it becomes a trenchant sword-blade, with which to cut in twain the Ifrit.^110.3^ The Princess Labám in a Hindu tale pulls out a hair from her head and gives it to the hero. Her father has imposed on him the task of dividing a thick tree-trunk with a waxen hatchet. “To-morrow,” she said, {111} “when no one is near you, you must say to the tree-trunk, ‘The Princess Labám commands you to let yourself be cut in two by this hair.’ Then stretch the hair down the edge of the wax hatchet’s blade.” And we are told that “the minute the hair that was stretched down the edge of the hatchet blade touched the tree-trunk, it split into two pieces.”^111.1^ A similar quality is that of the hair of the Giant of the Mountain, as related on the island of Zante. By its means, on touching the mountain it opens and admits the Giant into his own kingdom.^111.2^

The hair, of course, in all these tales, though severed from the person of the magician, is still in invisible union with him, and is the depositary of his undivided might. Its relation to its original owner is made clear in another story from Zante where the king’s son finds two hairs from the three-headed snake he is destined to subdue. At the proper moment he binds them on his hands, and they draw him direct to the sea-shore over-against an island on which the monster has made his lair. The youth crosses the water, slays and flays the dragon, and brings its hide and horns to the Lady of Earth and Sea, thus completing his tasks and winning her as his bride: an unhappy match, for the masterful dame ends by calling the waters upon the land and drowning every human creature, while she hovers aloft in the air looking on. She then, by sowing stones, creates a new race of men, whom she rules, mistress of the whole world, from her hereditary throne.^111.3^

Chapter XX. the Medusa-witch in Saga and Superstition

Belief of a more or less serious character in the power of the witch’s hair is one for which readers who have followed the arguments and illustrations of previous chapters will not have been wholly unprepared. If a belief not very often exhibited in sagas, it is yet, as we might anticipate, not wholly absent. The Goodwife of Laggan, a Highland witch, one day showed herself in the form of a shivering, weather-beaten cat to a hunter, who was warming himself during a storm in his hunting-hut, in the forest of Gaick in Badenoch. His hounds were stretched by his side, his only company. As the cat entered they bristled up and rose to attack her. There is no record that the hunter was astonished when the terror-stricken cat addressed him with a human voice and the rhetoric of a century ago: “Great hunter of the hills, I claim your protection. I know your hatred to my craft, and perhaps it is just. Still spare, oh spare a poor jaded wretch, who thus flies to you for protection from the cruelty and oppression of her sisterhood!” On the contrary, he pacified his dogs, and invited her to come forward to the fire and warm herself. “Nay,” she replied, if we are to believe the grandiloquent reporter of the interview, “in the first place you will please bind with {113} this long hair those two furious hounds of yours, for I am afraid they will tear my poor hams to pieces. I pray you, therefore, my dear sir, that you would have the goodness to bind them together by the necks with this long hair.” Here the hunter smelt mischief; so, instead of binding his dogs, he threw the hair across a beam of wood which connected the couple of the bothy. Supposing the dogs bound, the cat then drew near to the fire and sat down to dry herself. In a few minutes she began to grow. “A bad death to you, you nasty beast,” exclaimed the hunter jocosely, “you are getting very large.” “Ay, ay,” answered the cat, “as my hairs imbibe the heat they naturally expand.” But she grew bigger and bigger, until in the twinkling of an eye, she transformed herself into her proper likeness of the Goodwife of Laggan, and thus addressed the man: “Hunter of the hills, your hour of reckoning is arrived. Behold me before you, the avowed champion of my devoted sisterhood, of whom Macgillichallum of Razay and you were always the most relentless of enemies. But Razay is no more. His last breath is fled. He lies a lifeless corpse on the bottom of the main; and now, Hunter of the hills, it is your turn.” With these words the witch made a terrific spring at the hunter; and the dogs in their turn leaped up at her. A tremendous conflict ensued. “Fasten, hair, fasten,” she cried repeatedly, thinking the dogs were bound by it. The hair, obediently coiling round the beam, fastened so effectually that at last it snapt the timber in twain. Finding herself overmatched, she tried to flee. But the hounds had fixed themselves in her breasts; nor did they loose their hold as she trailed them after her, until she had all-to broken every tooth in their heads. Then changing herself into a raven she flew {114} away over the mountains, while the bleeding dogs crept back to their master’s feet to die. When the hunter returned to his home, the Goodwife of Laggan was found sick unto death. I spare my readers the edifying scene wherein she most properly acknowledged her crimes in the presence of the hunter and all her neighbours, before breathing her last. It is written by Mr. Stewart in the purest Johnsonese he could command, together with the further narrative of the apparition which announced that the Evil One had finally seized her soul before it had time to reach the protection of the sacred precincts of the churchyard of Dalarossie.^114.1^

The Eskimo have a tradition pertinent to our present point. Off the southernmost part of Greenland was an island to which many of the inhabitants of the mainland objected, because it cut them off from the open sea. Two of them accordingly went in their kayaks and, fastening a hair from the head of a little child to the far side of the island, pulled away to the north, chanting a magic lay. Another old man, however, desired to retain the island; and he from the main shore held it by a thong of sealskin. The contest lasted for a while; but at length the hair and the magical song prevailed. The island was floated off and planted in front of Ilulissat, where it is now known as Disco Island.^114.2^ Similarly, the people of the Lewis aver that their island once formed part of France. The Wickings having conquered a province of that country determined to carry it to Norway. They, therefore, made a cable of four strands, one of heather, one of hemp, another of wool, and another of woman’s hair, and fixed it to the cliffs. For a time their enterprise promised success. But a large piece, {115} now called Ireland, broke off and sank. A storm came on; and one portion after another broke away to form the Hebrides. By-and-bye their cable itself snapped, and they were forced to leave the Lewis and adjacent islands in the situation they at present occupy. On the western side of the Butt of Lewis is a fine natural arch, called the Suil an Rodh, “the eye of the butt.” This was the hole drilled through the cliff in days of yore by the Wickings to hold their cable; and it is the best proof of the truth of the tradition.^115.1^

Allied to the enchanted hair of these tales is the fetter that binds Fenri the wolf. It is spun from the sound of a cat’s footsteps, a woman’s beard, the roots of a stone, a bear’s sinews, a fish’s breath, and a bird’s spittle; and it is as soft and smooth as a silken string.^115.2^ So likewise when Finn MacCumhail hunted in high Keshcorran, Conaran, son of Imidel, a chief of the Tuatha De Danann, bade his three daughters, that were full of sorcery, take vengeance upon the hero. Accordingly the beldams went and sat in the entrance of a cave. “Upon three crooked and wry sticks of holly they hung as many heathenish bewitched hasps of yarn, which they began to reel off lefthandwise in front of the cave.” The attention of Finn and his companion, Conan Mael MacMorna, was attracted; they approached to view the women, and passed through the hasps; “whereupon a deadly tremor occupied them, and presently they lost their strength, so that by those valiant hags they were fast bound indissolubly. Another pair of the Fianna came, and with them the sons of Nemhuann: through the yarn they passed to where Finn and Conan {116} were; they too lost their power, and by the same hags were lashed down in rigid bonds. These warriors then they carried away into the cave.” Oscar and MacLugach, and in short “the children of Smól and the Fianna all” were drawn to the spot, and when they saw the yarns their pith and valour departed: “there was not in any one man of them all so much as a newly delivered woman’s strength.” Both gentle and simple, they were bound, “so that as helplessly pinioned and tightly tethered culprit-prisoners the hags transported them into black, mysterious holes, into dark, perplexing labyrinths.” When the witches could find no further straggler of the Fianna, they were about to hew their prisoners to pieces. The great-souled Goll MacMorna, however, was yet at large. He attacked and destroyed two of the hags; the third he spared in consideration of her setting the prisoners free. But when another sister appeared to avenge those who were slain, he fought her also, and drove his sword through her heart.^116.1^

The story of the Enchanted Cave of Keshcorran is perhaps dangerously near the border line of sagas and märchen. But it is difficult to say that the Irish had entirely abandoned their belief in the real truth of the adventures attributed to the Fianna. Nations, especially nations involved in a struggle for national existence, do not easily part with a literal interpretation of traditions which are their birthright. The Iroquois likewise held to the actual existence of the supernatural personages of the following tale; but how far they credited the adventures of the human beings may admit of a difference of opinion. Ten brothers whose parents were dead resided with their uncle. One by one the elder ones, going out to hunt, failed to {117} return, until at last only the youngest was left. He and his uncle found in the woods and befriended a strange man, who turned out to be a brother of the Great Head, a creature consisting simply of a head, made terrific with huge eyes and long hair. The Great Head had his home upon a rock over which his hair streamed in shaggy fierceness; and when the hurricane swept across the land it was his voice that was heard howling through it. One day the Great Head came to the lodge. Aided by his brother, the uncle and nephew succeeded in conciliating him, and induced him to take the youth to the witch who had fordone his elders, and revenge their deaths. They heard the witch crooning her magical song. When she uttered the word Schis-t-ki-añ, the objects of her spells turned to dry bones. The Great Head said to the youth: “I will ask the question, ‘How long have you been here?’ and the hair will fall from my head and you must replace it, and it will grow fast; and then I will bite her flesh and pull it from her, and as it comes off you must take it from my mouth and throw it off, saying, ‘Be a fox, a bird, or anything else,’ and it will then run off never to return.” The young man obeyed these instructions; and the witch was soon brought to sue for mercy. But the Great Head replied: “You had no mercy; see the dry bones; you must die.” In this way they slew her; her flesh was turned into beasts and birds and fish; her bones they burnt to ashes. Then they sought for the bones of her victims, and placed together in rows the bones of the nine elder brothers. The Great Head flew over them on a tempest, and called out of the wind to the nine brothers to awake. They heard his voice, and arose to life, shouting for joy at seeing each other and their youngest brother again.^117.1^

The instrument of enchantment in this Iroquoian tradition is not the magical fetter, but the magical word; whereof we seem to find a reminiscence (perhaps of the fetter also) in the sequel of Thorkill’s second voyage as recounted in the veracious pages of Saxo. Gorm Haraldson, king of Denmark, having grown old, was tormented with the question that still troubles mankind of the immortality and fate of the soul. Wherefore he sent Thorkill, who had in former days led him and three hundred of his warriors through mysterious regions, for certain information to Utgard-Loki, his god. On the hero’s return it was prophesied to Gorm that he would suddenly die if he learnt the tidings Thorkill had brought. Men were accordingly hired by the king’s command to put the adventurer to death. But he foiled the design and reproached his master for the ingratitude he displayed. The king, then, overcome by curiosity, bade Thorkill relate in order what had happened to him. Thorkill had such unfavourable revelations to make of Utgard-Loki that Gorm Haraldson could not endure to hear them. “His very life could not brook such words, and he yielded it up in the midst of Thorkill’s narrative. Thus,” piously adds the chronicler, “whilst he was so zealous in the worship of a false god, he came to find where the true prison of sorrows really was. Moreover, the reek of the hair, which Thorkill plucked from the locks of the giant,” and brought back with him, “to testify to the greatness of his own deeds, was exhaled upon the bystanders, so that many perished of it.”^118.1^

The truth is that in the lower stages of culture supernatural power is ascribed, not merely to special words, but {119} to any curses. Illustrations of this attitude of mind are needless; for in the horror with which even the least superstitious of us listen when we are by some accident compelled to hear an outburst of imprecation, we may trace more than mere revulsion from the spirit of vulgar hatred and anger dictating it: our revulsion bears at least a tinge of fear and ghastly anticipation of doom upon him who dares to call down evil, if not upon the object of his wrath. Properly performed, however, by the priest on the first day of Lent, and uttered in merely general terms “gathered out of the seven-and-twentieth chapter of Deuteronomy and other places of Scripture,” we devoutly repeat Amen to every clause, and make believe that we desire to escape “the dreadful judgment hanging over our heads and always ready to fall upon us,” by thus transferring the weight of condemnation to sinners worse than ourselves. Originally special virtue was doubtless attached, as it still is by savages, to the proper sequence of words and the suitable accompaniment of rites. In a Chaldean conjuration the effect is thus described:

“The malicious imprecation acts on man like a wicked demon, the voice which curses has power over him; the voice which curses has power over him; the malicious imprecation is the spell [which produces] the disease of his head. The malicious imprecation slaughters this man like a lamb;… the voice which curses covers him and loads him like a veil.”^119.1^

Nor is it altogether improbable that certain of the Psalms which are such a stumblingblock to Christians may have been held, when correctly chanted, to have a direct influence over the objects of the psalmist’s holy ire? When a {120} native of Borneo has planted fruit-trees, and they are bearing, he places some round stones in cleft sticks near the trees, and then proceeds to curse anybody who may venture to steal the fruit, calling on the stones to witness the anathema. The curse is to this effect: “May whoever steals my fruit suffer from stones in the stomach as large as these stones, and, if necessary, become a figure of stone!” And woe betide the man who in defiance of this curse dares to pluck the fruit!^120.1^

But neither the form of the malediction nor the accurate performance of a ceremony is an invariable requirement. A few illustrations of the petrifying potency of curses, oftentimes the more awful because uttered in mere carelessness or wantonness, may be given from peoples on different levels of civilisation. An Altaic tale relates that Sartaktai was building a stone bridge over the Katunya; and in order to complete it by the following day it was necessary that his son should preserve continence. The young man, however, disregarded his father’s taboo, and frustrated the work. Wherefore the old man cursed his daughter-in-law, so that she stands, a white rock on one side of the river, and cursed and spat upon his son, so that he remained on the other side, the mountain called to-day Täldäkpän.^120.2^ A local legend concerning the fort of Jangada, in India, attributes its erection to Râjâ Kesari, who built it of lac, or sealing-wax, in order that missiles discharged against it should be held by its natural tenacity. The secret was betrayed to a besieging army by an old woman; and the walls began to melt under the power of the fire and bellows she advised the soldiers to use. The râjâ, as he died in the trench with sword in hand, cursed the traitress to be turned into stone. {121} The curse was immediately fulfilled, as witness the satti pillar outside the fort, regarded as her image to this day.^121.1^ At a certain farmhouse in Iceland it befell that several years successively the inmates who were left to take care of the house while their fellows went to church on Christmas Eve were found the next morning either stark mad or dead. Naturally nobody cared to stay in the place; but at last a young girl was found brave enough to do so. During the night something came to the window, and began to praise her hands. She was ready at once with a spirited retort. Her eyes and her feet were then made the subject of eulogy by the mysterious visitor, who got from the maiden each time a proper answer. By-and-bye the creature mentioned the dawn standing ready to appear. “Stand thou, too, and become stone, and hurt no one!” exclaimed the girl. And when the people returned from church in the morning they were astounded to see a big stone standing before the window; and there it remains ever since.^121.2^ There is a hill on the boundary of the manor of Bagdad near Wirsitz, in the province of Posen, surmounted by a great stone of a reddish colour, somewhat in the form of a gravestone. This was formerly a girl who went out with her mother to gather wild strawberries in the pine-wood which then covered the height. The mother wandered off in another direction, and lost her daughter. Not being able to find her, she angrily shouted: “As you are not coming, turn to stone!” Her prayer was instantly answered, as in a similar case at Strelno, in the same province, where a lazy slut going with her pitcher to the spring, and being unconscionably long on the errand, was cursed by a fellow-servant, {122} under whose orders she was, and transformed into stone. The block is shown at the village of Mlyny, near the town; and at a distance it is said to bear some resemblance to a girl with a pitcher. Nor is this the only tale of the kind current in Posen. A great stone, whose top was not unlike a roof, lay several years ago on the boundary between Czempin and Piechanin, and was held to be the roof of a castle, enchanted by a wizard who had begged a night’s lodging there in vain. His curses buried the castle in the earth, and turned its inhabitants and dependants into a number of smaller stones which lay around the large one.^122.1^ Near Gbel, in Bohemia, is a stone called The Enchanted Huntsman. A luckless hunter, we learn, pursued and shot at a roe, which thereupon changed into an old hag, and cried out: “How dare you shoot at me? I am the witch Nera! But you with your pack shall be turned into stone and guarded for ever with invisible flames!” Since that hour none dares to go near the stone at midnight, lest he be consumed by the flames.^122.2^ A witch is likewise the agent of evil in the Rollright legends. The King-stone at Rollright was once a king indeed, who was bent on the conquest of all England. He had got as far as the hill on which Rollright stands when the witch appeared. From the crest of the hill the village of Long Compton is visible in the combe below. The king was approaching the top when the witch addressed him: “Seven long strides shalt thou take, and—

If Long Compton thou canst see, King of England thou shalt be.”

The king, now certain of success, exclaimed:

“Stick, stock, stone, As King of England I shall be known!”

But as he took the seven strides forward there rose before him the long mound of earth which crowns the hill, and prevented him from seeing Long Compton. The witch then cried:

“As Long Compton thou canst not see, King of England thou shalt not be. Rise up, stick, and stand still, stone, For king of England thou shalt be none; Thou and thy men hoar stones shall be, And I myself an eldern-tree.”

Forthwith “the king and his army were turned into stones where they stood, the king on the side of the mound and his army in a circle behind him, while the witch herself became an elder-tree. But some day, they do say, the spell will be broken. The stones will turn into flesh and blood once more, and the king will start as an armed warrior at the head of his army to overcome his enemies and rule over all the land.”^123.1^

In the last tradition the witch’s words fell upon her own head, as well as upon her foes. Incautious or wicked words often have this effect in European folklore; and I strongly suspect they owe their origin to Christian teaching. Tales of imprecations fulfilled upon the perjurer pervade English history from the great, and probably innocent, Earl Godwin downwards. Joan Flower, not more guilty, mentioned in an earlier chapter, is another example. The case of Dorothy Mately of Ashover, related with all circumstance {124} by the master-pen of John Bunyan, is more famous. In fact, the tales are endless; but I must limit my illustrations to two or three of such as account for stones and rocks.

On the island of Sardinia, near the village of Tresnuraghes, in the district of Oristano, are two stones, once a peasant and his ox. This unhappy man was ploughing on the vigil of Saint Mark, and neglected to doff his cap when the saint’s colossal statue was carried by in procession. Being remonstrated with by one of the confraternity, he answered that he did not worship a piece of wood. What could be expected after such profanity, but that he and his ox should be turned to stone? A similar judgment is recorded as the origin of a monolith standing near the church of Saint Constantine, on the side of a hill in the district of Sedilo, on the same island. It is the custom there to perform a ceremony called S’ardia, or the Guard, which consists in a cavalcade of about a hundred persons running at full speed thrice around the church, and then flinging themselves down the valley upon a sacred enclosure containing a cross. This enclosure they encompass in the same manner. The spectacle, considered as a religious rite, is doubtless grotesque enough; and a woman who once witnessed it was profane enough to burst out laughing. She stands there still, never to laugh again.^124.1^ A bridal train on the Frisian island of Sylt once met an old woman who recognised the bride as a witch, and called out to warn the party. The leader replied: “If our bride be a witch, I would that we might all sink down here and rise up again grey stones.” No sooner said than done; and the identical stones were on view up to the early years of {125} this century.^125.1^ So it is related of an unwilling bride from the village of Bonese, in Altmark, that when she arrived with her cavalcade on the boundary of the district of Markau, where she was to wed the son of a rich magistrate, she sprang from her seat after an altercation with her kinsmen and exclaimed: “Rather will I be turned to stone than overstep the boundary of Markau!” and she alighted on the ground a stone. Round that stone at midnight, when the full moon sheds her rays, the many-coloured bridal ribbons gleam even yet.^125.2^ Sometimes the catastrophe is occasioned by the mere breach of a taboo. Such is the case in a story told by the Lapps concerning the origin of the Aniov Islands. Three giants who were shamans determined to cut a piece of land off Norway and bring it away with all its reindeer and other wealth in order to increase their own stores. They succeeded in doing so, and were conveying it round to its destination, when their mother dreamed she saw them returning. She ran out of the hut and, hearing a noise, cried: “See! my children are coming, they bring goods, oxen, reindeer; they spoke truth.” But she thus violated the rule of strict silence during the performance of magical rites, and was punished by being turned, together with the whole parish, into stone, while her sons and the reindeer they had stolen were drowned, and the land they had cut off became two islands.^125.3^ Another woman underwent the like transformation in the island of Coll, off the western coast of Scotland. She was gathering shellfish when the tide rose, and “finding no other means of escape made a last effort by climbing {126} the rocks. When at the top, and almost out of danger, she said: ‘I am safe now, in spite of God and men!’ ” Her blasphemy was immediately avenged by her conversion into a stone, which now forms part of the rock whence the headland of Cailleach Point (the Old Wife’s Headland) takes its name.^126.1^

Often, however, the Deity himself, or some holy man endowed with a portion of divine power, by curses or prayers effects the metamorphosis. Thus, it is believed in Bombay that the moon once became enamoured of Ahalyá, the wife of the Rishi Gautama, and visited her in her husband’s absence. Unluckily the Rishi returned and found the guilty pair together. His wife was turned into stone as the effect of his curses; and the moon bears, and will bear for ever, the black mark of the blow he received from the Rishi’s well-aimed shoe.^126.2^ So, too, when Ino fleeing from Juno’s wrath flung herself into the sea, and was made immortal by Neptune at the prayer of Venus, her attendants, as Ovid tells us, reproaching the vengeful goddess, were metamorphosed. Juno exclaimed: “I will make you terrible monuments of my displeasure.” As she uttered the words, some of the women, attempting to follow their mistress into the water, were stiffened in the various attitudes of the moment into rocks on the shore, while others were transformed into seabirds that now stretch their wings over every wave of the Ionian sea.^126.3^ The kind of superstition here portrayed has of course survived into Christianity. It is partly the superhuman might of the priest as such, and partly the strength of his incantations, which nobody but he knows so well how to perform that {127} gives effect to his words when, like the Cardinal Lord Archbishop of Rheims, and other priests before and since, he calls for his candle, his bell, and his book. It was the superhuman might of the shaman that was acknowledged by Balak in the Hebrew saga, when he sent for Balaam to come and curse Israel; “for I know that he whom thou blessest is blessed, and he whom thou cursest is cursed.” Balaam, indeed, performed his function with due solemnity and order; yet the ceremonies, however valuable in themselves, would hardly have been effectual if performed by a lesser man. This belief has constantly tended, in all religions alike, to invest the lightest word of a saint with efficacy graduated according to his sanctity. Take the following Christian examples out of many. Saint Constant, pursued by a party of heathen up a hill in the neighbourhood of Deonero, in the Italian province of Cuneo, launched his maledictions upon them with such effect that they were changed into stones, many of which are still to be seen on the spot. His potency must have been exhausted by the effort; for he had scarcely reached the top when another band of persecutors seized and put him to death. But the night fell murky and wet; and a labourer, going home after an evening’s enjoyment, beheld the saint toiling up the steep laden with stones. In the morning the Church of Villar San Costanzo stood on the place of the martyrdom, built by the saint’s own hands out of some of the very men whom he had conveniently petrified; and there it is to be seen at the present day. Strangely enough, his holiness did not avail to procure him mortar. Nor was it needful, for the stones, whether naturally or supernaturally fitted together, stand perfectly well without it. When his work was done, his body, which had been left by his murderers {128} where it fell, disappeared. Some say that it was transported by angels into heaven; and there can be no more difficulty in crediting this than the rest of the story.^128.1^ In the Isle of Man Saint Patrick cursed a sea-monster, which was following to devour him, and turned it into a solid rock at the foot of Peel Hill.^128.2^ According to Sardinian belief a greater than Saint Constant, or even Saint Patrick, inflicted the same vengeance for a smaller crime. One day Our Lord and Saint Peter presented themselves at a threshing-floor near Mores, and prayed for alms, but were denied. Thereupon Jesus Christ uttered an imprecation; and in a moment the corn became sand, while the guilty farmer and his innocent workmen were alike transformed into stones.^128.3^ Judging doubtless by their own unhappy experience, the greater the personage the more trifling is the occasion to which the peasants ascribe his wrath. On the right-hand side of the road from Flatow to Lobsens, in the province of Posen, about half a German mile from the latter place, is a great stone, formerly a landed proprietor, who, being out hunting, put his horse to jump a ditch at that spot. The horse refused, perhaps for some similar reason to that which animated Balaam’s talking donkey, since we are told that the Lord flew into a passion and cried, “Become stone!” Forthwith horse and rider were turned into a stone which is alive at this day to testify to the truth of the story, though many have been the attempts to destroy it.^128.4^

So far the power of words. Another magical power {129} which appears in the märchen is that of a blow. Nor is it absent from sagas told to explain the origin of rocks whose form has appealed to the imagination of uncultured peoples. The story of the discovery of Inishbofin, an island off the coast of Galway, relates that two fishermen lost in a fog landed on an unknown shore. When the fog lifted they found themselves on what is now called the north Beach of Inishbofin.

On one side lay the ocean, and on one Lay a great water;

and close at hand they beheld an old woman driving a white cow down to the lake. She drove the cow right into the water, and struck her with a stick, whereupon the cow was metamorphosed into a rock. One of the fishermen got so angry at the sight that he struck the woman; and both he and she were turned into stones. The rock and stones are still to be seen. “The cow used to rise up out of the lake and walk about the island when any great event was about to happen; but it is now more than thirty years since she was last seen.” From this cow the island takes its name (Inis-bo-finne, the Island of the White Cow).^129.1^ In the south-west of Ireland is a cliff called Fail Mahisht, once the daughter of the king of the White Nation and wife of Finn MacCumhail, whom she won by playing at chess with him for a wager. The condition was that he was to be her husband until he had seven shovelfuls of earth put on his head. After various adventures Diarmaid fulfilled the condition, and with a blow of his fist sent the lady spinning through the air until she fell at the water’s edge, where she now stands, and from that day to this gives {130} food to the people of Erin from the limpets and periwinkles that cluster upon her beyond any other cliff in Ireland.^130.1^ The heroic cycle of Ireland as now found in the mouths of the people is full of tales of petrifaction from a blow;^130.2^ but how far they are now believed as records of fact must be regarded as more than doubtful, whatever might have been the case at the time the legend of the Enchanted Cave, already mentioned, was written. No such uncertainty seems to rest on the Sardinian tale concerning a stone on the side of the Montesanto of Mores. It is called Saint Elisha’s Stone, and was once a man whom the saint threw from the top of the mountain and, when he saw him fast below, called out: “Dost thou stand well?” “Yes, sir,” replied the stone; and there it remains immovable.^130.3^

The mixed population of Missouri tell a story, probably of Indian origin, about a beautiful but mysterious witch, who seduced the young braves, and with a touch from her right hand turned their hearts into stone. The people, fearful of attacking her, waited long for vengeance from on high to repay her iniquities. She used to feed on fish that came out of the river in response to her call. One day she went down to the water and summoned the fish in vain. At last, after she had uttered in her rage and impatience words that would dismay devils, there came up a little fish like silver. She essayed to swallow it; but it swelled and {131} stuck in her throat, and at length stiffened into stone. In her agony she clutched her throat and beat her breast with the fatal hand. So now she stands upon, and part of, the rocky bluff on the banks of the Missouri.^131.1^

At Jaunpur, in India, is the shrine of Kerárbír, where a great stone is the object of worship. The stone in question is part of the body of the giant-demon Kerar, slain by Rámchandra for his wickedness.^131.2^ Two rocks observed in descending the pass of Markundi into the valley of the Son, in Mirzapur, are worshipped and connected with the flight of two lovers from a barbarian king who ruled at the fort of Agori. One of these rocks was cloven by a blow of the fugitives’ sword; the other is the pursuer’s elephant, decapitated by the same means.^131.3^

Divine vengeance, without any visible or audible intervention, has often been invoked in various parts of the world to account for the existence of rocks and stones. Niobe, weeping for her children slain by Apollo, was turned to stone, as anybody, says Pausanias, may reasonably be persuaded. She stood, a rock, on Mount Sipylos in Bœotia, and in summer-time was reported to weep.^131.4^ Such, too, was the fate which overtook Lot’s wife. Her legend doubtless grew up to account for some prominent pile on the cliffs overlooking the Dead Sea; and perhaps the archæologists who are now striving to rehabilitate the writings of Moses will point out the crag and prove the truth of the story. Of course they will be equally ready and willing to prove a thousand other tales. Let me mention a few equally authentic.

I pass over instances like those of the Stone-woman near the village of Moras in the department of Isère, France, manifestly a mere transplantation of the Biblical tradition.^132.1^ There are cases, however, in which the crime of looking back in disobedience to an express taboo has been punished by petrifaction, and where the connection with Lot’s wife is by no means so easily proved. Once upon a time the Hindu saint, Sri Dharamnathji, was doing penance in the jungle near Pattan. His disciple Gharibnáthji used to beg alms in the city, but as the people were not charitable he was obliged to maintain himself by carrying bundles of firewood and selling them in the town. From the proceeds he purchased flour, which a shepherd’s wife baked for him, adding a loaf from herself. The sage, “observing the bald patch on his disciple’s head caused by the loads he carried, cursed the city to be swallowed up. He had previously warned the shepherd’s wife to leave the place and not look back. The city was swallowed up; and the woman, disobeying the saint’s command, was turned into a stone.”^132.2^

Here the destruction of the city was caused by niggardliness towards a personage of supernatural power. Another Indian saga shows us this crime punished by petrifaction. Near the village of Dudhi, in South Mirzapur, are two stones, once a bride and bridegroom who were thus transformed by an angry bhút, or malevolent spirit. His proper offerings had been forgotten, and he wrought his vengeance in this way.^132.3^ Sometimes the fault is breach of tribal custom or social convention. When a rajah’s daughter made a rash vow only to wed him who could count the palm-trees {133} within view of her father’s palace, and a low-born wizard fulfilled the condition, the earth herself interfered and, rather than allow so shameful a marriage to be accomplished, she turned the princess into a stone, which now lies within the ruined fort of Rájá Sahay, protected from human touch by a number of enormous snakes.^133.1^ Among the Gonds of Central India, the bride goes in procession to the bridegroom, instead of his coming to her, as is usual among the Hindus. It is intended in this way to prevent the repetition of the catastrophe which overtook a luckless pair who were about to be married in the ordinary way. The youth, borne on his uncle’s shoulders in the procession, came within sight of his bride, and unable to restrain his impatience he leaped to the ground and looked with all his might to the place where he expected to see her. She felt no less eager, and their eyes met. In a moment not only the young couple but also the bridegroom’s uncle were turned into sandstone spires yet visible on the road in descending into the valley of the Narbada over the Vindhyan range from Bhopál.^133.2^ The same cause may perhaps be understood in an Enganese tale accounting for a block of coral and a rock bearing some resemblance to human form off the coast of the island, near the anchorages of Baraháu and Kai-Kokoh. The one represents a husband who was deserting his wife because he found she had a disgusting malady, and the other the deserted wife.^133.3^ It is more obvious in the case of two stones in the tanks near the temples at Arang, in the Ráepur district of India, and at Deobáluda. The erection of the pinnacle of a temple is {134} the act of completion; and it seems that it is necessary to be performed naked. These two temples were built simultaneously. When they were ready to receive their pinnacles the mason and his sister agreed to put them on at the same auspicious moment. Stripping themselves according to custom, they climbed to the top. As they reached it, each could see the other, and each through shame jumped down into the tank beneath and was changed into stone. Both stones are visible in seasons of drought, when the water in the tanks is low.^134.1^

Petrifaction in the traditions of Christian Europe, when directly inflicted by divine intervention, is usually the punishment of a serious infraction of the divine law, often amounting to lèse-majesté. Various stone circles in Cornwall, such as the Hurlers, the Nine Maids and the Merry Maidens, were once human beings transformed for Sabbath-breaking by hurling or dancing.^134.2^ Stories of this kind are commonplace all over Europe. We will be satisfied with the following samples taken from Germany and Bohemia. The legend of the two stone Jews at Ottorowo on the crossroad to Krzeszkowice, in the province of Posen, relates that these culprits suffered metamorphosis for profaning a crucifix.^134.3^ In the neighbourhood of the town of Gabel in Bohemia stand three blocks of stone surmounted by crosses. They were girls who went to work in the fields on Easter Sunday. They carried their disregard of holy things so far as to mock when the sanctus bell sounded at the completion of the sacred rite; and each time it rang they threw up to heaven the sickles they were using to cut the grass. The third time the sickles fell not down again, {135} and the girls were turned into stone. Near Commotau, in the same country, lie seven great stones, once girls who led an evil life, and were therefore transformed.^135.1^ In Styria the same penalty fell on a maiden who would spin on Sundays. A violent storm destroyed the hut wherein she dwelt and transported her to the top of a neighbouring rock, where she stands for ever, a warning against blasphemy and greed.^135.2^ On some pasture lands not far from Jevenstedt stands a stone circle with two larger stones in the midst. These were a bridal party who danced on Sunday during divine service.^135.3^ Bridal parties in the West as in the East seem specially obnoxious to the displeasure of the higher powers. In Altmark, near Dahrendorf, not far from the Hanoverian border, is a large piece of granite surrounded by smaller stones, formerly a bride, named Lene, from the state of Hanover, who with her attendants was changed, no one knows why, into stone. We have already met with several other instances. A circle of stones near Wirchow, in Neumark, was a party of persons who added to their scorn of Whitsunday the shameless eccentricity of dancing naked, and are now called the Adam’s Dance. It has ever been held by the folk a grave misdemeanour to treat with wanton disrespect the necessaries of life; and singular judgments have, both in this country and elsewhere in Europe, fallen on such as have dealt improperly with bread and other common kinds of food. Seven boys were thus turned into stone, and are still to be seen near the little town of Morin in Neumark.^135.4^ Let us hope that the children of the district are duly impressed by their awful doom.

Similar to the fate of the Styrian maiden was that of a pair of lovers in Sardinia, who in consequence of the opposition of their families to their union entered, the one a monastery, and the other a nunnery. But love triumphs over even the vows of celibacy. The young monk escaped from his convent, carried off his sweetheart and lived with her in the wilds. The infraction of their vows could not, however, be passed over. God raised one day an impetuous wind, which transported the lovers to the top of Monte Ruju, where they rest changed into stone.^136.1^

On the western continent are to be found many legends accounting for rocks of peculiar form as human victims of supernatural caprice. The Zuñi tradition mentioned in a previous chapter is but one example of many. Mrs. Stevenson, who reports this tale, also records the tradition of an allied people, the Sia, concerning two brothers of ancient days, the culture-heroes of their tribe, renowned for giant-slaying and other feats. On two occasions they went disguised as poor, dirty, beggar-boys to villages of the Oraibi and the Katsuna where feasts were being held. They were refused food save by one family at each place; and the people were in consequence turned into stone.^136.2^ {137} More frequently, perhaps, in aboriginal folklore the metamorphosis is suffered by a fugitive. In such cases it seems a little doubtful whether the pursuers are thus foiled or satiated of their revenge. The story of the Peruvian goddess, Cavillaca, will be remembered in this connection.^137.1^ “There is a Winnebago tradition that a woman carrying her child was running from her enemies, so she jumped down a steep place and was turned into a rock. And now when they [the Winnebagoes] pass that place they make offerings to her.”^137.2^ A similar saga of the Nasqually Indians of British Columbia is told to account for an isolated rock on the coast.^137.3^ Many other instances are to be found.

Among savages, however, it hardly seems necessary for their fore-elders to render themselves obnoxious to superior beings as a cause of this transformation. The natives of North Australia have tales of persons, some good and others bad, who were turned on death into stones or trees.^137.4^ A Chinese legend, descending doubtless from a more barbarous period, explains the existence of three rocks in the Yang-tsze river and the Poyang lake, through which it runs. A boat containing a man, his wife and their two children was capsized on the river during a storm. The man and woman perished at once; but the lads were assisted by a compassionate frog, which took them on its back and made for their home on the banks of the lake. The younger boy, grieving at his parents’ death, threw himself off and was drowned, reappearing shortly after in the {138} form of a bold limestone rock, now known as the Little Orphan, situate in the middle of the river about twenty miles below the egress of the lake. The surviving orphan held on until the frog had entered the lake, when he fell broken-hearted into the water and became the large rock, surmounted in later ages by a Buddhist monastery and pagoda, and called the Great Orphan. The frog, in the bitterness of grief at his unsuccessful efforts, also yielded up his life, and in due course emerged from the waves as the Frog Rock.^138.1^ In Japan the peasants discern high up on the weatherworn cliffs of Matsura, “the figure of a lady in long trailing court-dress with face and figure eagerly bent over the western waves.” It is Satyohimé, the wife of Saté-hiko, petrified while gazing to catch the last glimpse of the sails that bore her husband away to Corea, as one of the Mikado’s body-guard, sent to assist the Japanese allies at Hiaksai, in the year 536 A.D. Her sad fate has rendered her name the symbol in Japanese literature of devoted love.^138.2^

I have left to the last the Gorgonian power of petrifying with a look. The fatal head was regarded, we know, as the most powerful of Athene’s weapons. As a single illustration we may take a curious case mentioned by Pausanias. Describing the temple of Athene near Coronea, in Bœotia, where the Panbœotian festival was held, he says that a priestess named Iodamia coming into the temple once at night was confronted by the goddess herself armed with Medusa’s head, and was turned into stone. An altar called by the unfortunate priestess’ name seems to have stood in the temple when Pausanias wrote; and a woman daily put fire thereon, saying in the language of the country that {139} Iodamia was living and demanded fire.^139.1^ The memory of Medusa yet lingers, as we have seen, in Seriphos, where her head on the coinage of the island seems to have preserved it. If we may trust mediæval writers like Walter Map, Gervase of Tilbury and Roger of Hoveden, a more definite recollection, though still confused and distorted, formerly remained in the Levant. Gervase tells us that between Rhodes and Cyprus are the Syrtes, commonly called the Gulf of Satalia, where the Gorgon’s head was said to have been thrown into the sea. They are opposite the town of Satalia, claimed by the Sultan of Iconium. The Gorgon was held to have been a prostitute whose beauty drove men out of their wits, until Perseus threw her head into the deep. This of course was a piece of euhemerism on the part of the Marshal of Arles or his informants, whoever they may have been. He goes on, however, to say that the natives report that a soldier fell in love with a certain queen, and not being able to obtain her during her life, he secretly violated her sepulchre. From his posthumous embraces the corpse bore a monstrous head, which, the soldier was warned by a voice in the air at the moment of his crime, would by its mere look destroy all things that it beheld. Accordingly at the proper time he opened the tomb and found the head, carefully averting himself from its gaze. Whenever he exhibited it to his foes they and their cities were destroyed. Afterwards he found another love; and one day, while sailing the sea he was sleeping peacefully in her lap, when she took the opportunity to steal the key and open the casket wherein the head was kept. Her curiosity proved her bane. Her lover awoke and, plunged in grief at the catastrophe, he took out the {140} fatal head, stuck it up and perished with his ship from its glance. Every seven years, it was believed, the head rose to the surface of the sea and imperilled the safety of all who navigated those waters.^140.1^ Map’s account is that the hero was a cordwainer of exceeding great skill, who flourished at Constantinople in the time of Gerbert, that is to say, about a hundred and fifty years before his own time. Falling in love with a noble maiden whose naked foot he had been called upon to clothe in the course of business, he sold everything and took service in the army, in order to rise in the world and become worthy of her. She, however, died in his absence. The violation of her tomb follows. The Gorgonian head is expressly declared to have stiffened the wretches upon whom its gaze was brought to bear. The soldier at length weds the daughter and heiress of the Emperor. She gives him no peace until he tells her the contents of his casket; and having learnt the secret she tries the effect of the head upon her husband as he wakes from sleep. Having thus fordone him by her wiles, she orders his body and the instrument of his enormities to be cast together into the Grecian Sea. A terrific storm arose when her command was fulfilled; and on its subsiding a vast and destructive whirlpool remained ever thereafter, called Satalia, or more commonly, the Gulf of Satalia, from the maiden’s name.^140.2^

More nearly akin to the classical myth is a Danish tradition that in former days a troll who dwelt in the Issefiord was accustomed to stop every passing vessel and take a man by way of toll. At last it became known that the troll’s power would endure until the head of Pope Lucius, {141} who had suffered decapitation in Rome ages before, should be shown him. Some monks were accordingly despatched to Rome for the head. “When the ship returned and was about to run into the fiord the troll made his appearance; but as soon as they held forth the head and the troll got a sight of it, he with a horrid howl transformed himself into a rock.” Representations in Roeskilde Cathedral commemorate the event.^141.1^ One of the commonest of Scandinavian sagas is that which attributes the power of transforming trolls and giants to the sun. The earliest mention of it is in the Helgi poems, which are only known to us in a single manuscript, the Codex Regius at Copenhagen, but which probably date from the tenth century. In one of these poems, Rimegerd, the giantess, whose father Helgi has slain, appears by night and calls on the hero to recompense her for her father’s slaughter. Helgi and Atli his warder detain her in a war of words until the sun rises, when Atli exclaims: “Look eastward now, Rimegerd! Helgi hath stricken thee with the wand of Death.… It is day, Rimegerd! Atli has lured thee to deadly delay. It will be a laughter-moving harbour-mark, methinks, that thou wilt make now thou art turned to stone!” The same catastrophe is implied in the Alvíssmal, also found only in the Codex Regius, but at least as old as the Helgi poems. Allwise the dwarf has come to fetch Freya, whom he has entrapped the Anses into a promise to give him as wife. He comes by night; and one of the Anses detains him with questions calculated to bring out his extensive cosmological knowledge, until the day breaks and the hall is full of sunshine. We are then to understand, from the triumphant expressions of his interlocutor, that the power {142} of the sun effects his petrifaction.^142.1^ In a Norwegian ballad of Hermod the Young the hero rescues a beautiful maiden from a giantess, riding off with her on Christmas Day. The giantess pursues all night, and is on the point of catching the fugitives, when the sun arises and she is changed to a stone.^142.2^ Two tall isolated cliffs lift themselves out of the sound between Eysturoy and Streymoy, two of the Færoe Islands. They were a giant and his wife who had been sent from Iceland to drag the Færoe Islands nearer to that island. It was at night. The giant stood in the sea while the giantess took the other end of the rope, and after an ineffectual attempt made it fast to the top of one of the hills. She saw the glimmering of dawn and hastened down; but too late. Before she and her husband could wade back to Iceland with their charge the sun came up out of the sea and they were instantly turned to stone, to stand there for ever looking northward but unable to move from the spot.^142.3^ These are sufficient as samples of the Scandinavian belief in the transforming influence exercised by the gaze of the sun upon the evil powers of darkness. The incident has passed into a Lapp märchen from Tanen, where a king’s son, by the help of a friendly fox, has stolen a maiden called Evening-glow, the sun’s sister, from some giants who held her captive. The fox leads the pursuing giants astray until the dawn, when he exclaims: “See, there comes the sun’s sister!” They raise their eyes to the morning glow, and are forthwith changed into stone pillars.^142.4^ The incident here probably owes its origin to the adjacent Norsemen; the Quiché {143} saga of the three tribal gods, Tohil, Avilix, and Hacavitz is, however, quite independent. Originally, we learn, there was neither sun, moon, nor star. When for the first time the sun rose, it petrified these and other ferocious deities, but without taking away from them the power of changing their forms and resuming mobility when they pleased.^143.1^ According to the story of the inhabitants of Hispaniola, men came out of two caves. A giant, Machakael, was set to guard these caves and prevent mankind from looking upon the light of the sun. One night he wandered from his post, and could not return before sunrise. The sun rose out of the sea and looked with anger upon the giant, who was forthwith turned into a rock called Kauta.^143.2^

The power of petrification is, however, usually regarded as equivalent to that of striking dead with a glance. This is expressed, as we have already seen,^143.3^ in the case of Balor of Tory Island. A long list of stories wherein a glance is credited with this terrible might could be culled from every nation, beginning with that of Isis punishing at Byblos an unlucky boy who disturbed her in her grief.^143.4^ In some cases, as in a variant of the tale of Balor, the baleful eye not only slays but reduces its victim to ashes.^143.5^ The elephant head of the Hindu god, Ganesa, is a substitute for his original head burned to cinders by the gaze of Sani. Nor is the murderous property confined to supernatural beings. Witches, who of course partake of more than {144} ordinary human qualities, are credited with it. Men of special holiness have sometimes the fatal gift, like Rabbi Juda in rabbinical tradition, who thus killed four-and-twenty of his scholars in a single day;^144.1^ or a Samoan high-priest of the heavenly gods, whose very look was poison; “if he looked at a cocoa-nut tree it died, and if he glanced at a bread-fruit tree it also withered away.”^144.2^ Various writers, classic and mediæval, have told us of the women of a certain Scythian tribe, of the Sardinians, or of a remote island in the ocean, whose glance is death.^144.3^ To such writers we owe the fable of the Catoblepas, or Downlooker, an animal “so wicked and so venomous that no man may behold it right in the face, but he die anon without remedy.” Some of the soldiers of Marius in his expedition against Jugurtha, not knowing the creature and attacking it incautiously, were slain by the eye of this terrible beast.^144.4^ In various parts of Asia and Africa serpents also have naturally been reputed to possess the same horrible gift; while countries like Spain have not yet parted with the belief in the basilisk.^144.5^ Among American tribes the superstition and the stories of the deadly glance are found in similar terms to those of the Old World. I have already mentioned the Quiché gods petrified by the sun. The Cegihas have a tale of a mysterious being called Two Faces that slew every one {145} who looked at it.^145.1^ The Ts’ets’āut of British Columbia account for the prohibition to a man to look at his adult sister by a legend of one of their fore-elders who married his sister. Their brothers were ashamed, tied them together by way of punishment, and deserted them. But the man broke the ropes; and having killed a ram, an ewe and a kid of the mountain-goats, he clad himself, his wife and their child in the skins, and they assumed the shape of goats. “He had acquired the power of killing everything by a glance of his eyes. One day his tribe came up the river for the purpose of hunting, and he killed them. Then he travelled all over the world, leaving signs of his presence everywhere, such as remarkable rocks.”^145.2^ Iroquois traditions tell of an Onondaga chief, named Tododäho, whose head was covered with tangled serpents, and whose angry look sufficed to strike the beholders dead. He submitted, however, to be tamed, and to have the serpents combed out of his locks.^145.3^ But the saga which presents the closest parallel to the incident of the Slaughter of the Gorgon comes to us from Brazil, and comes with every mark of indigenous growth. Some of the Brazilian tribes tell of a bird which kills with a look. The story goes that a hunter succeeded in slaying one, and cut off its head, without the dreadful eye being turned upon him. Like Perseus, he killed his game thenceforward by turning the eye upon it. “His wife, not dreaming of its destructive power, however, once turned it toward her husband and {146} killed him, and then accidentally turned it toward herself and died.”^146.1^

The truth is that we are here in presence of the worldwide belief in the Evil Eye: one more demonstration of the inseparable connection between tale, superstition, and custom. The awful weapon of the mythical Brazilian bird was Medusa’s power, the same as is to-day the terror of the Italian peasant, and is not yet regarded with indifference even in lands, like our own, which boast of being in the van of civilisation. From all parts of the world we read of the superstition that certain persons wield, intentionally or unintentionally—as often the latter as the former—the power of blasting others by their look. This power was dreaded in Palestine from time immemorial. The maxim, “Eat thou not the bread of him that hath an Evil Eye” is found among the Hebrew proverbs; and Jesus Christ alludes to the superstition, though only to warn the Pharisees against “an Evil Eye” as a moral quality proceeding out of the heart.^146.2^ The superstition has left its traces in language. To the ancient Roman “Envy, eldest born of Hell,” was really Invidia, the Evil Eye; and the English rustic still speaks of being “overlooked.” Wizards and witches are thus gifted, of course: the Evil Eye is amongst their mightiest weapons. But it is by no means theirs alone. Innocent women, according to many nations, are periodically cursed with it. In fact, anybody may have an Evil Eye, even without knowing it; the most sacred personages are not exempt. The Samoan high priest and the Rabbi Juda are examples from the opposite ends of the {147} earth. Pius the Ninth, infallible head of the church as he was, vicar of Christ and what not, was afflicted with the Evil Eye. There was nothing so fatal as his blessing; and the flock he tended cowered and quailed before their shepherd’s sight.^147.1^

So much has been written of late on the Evil Eye that it is enough to mention in these general terms a superstition at once much less complex and much more fully known to anthropological students than some of those investigated in other chapters of these volumes. Its origin is doubtless to be sought in the evil passions of which the human countenance is so admirable and so terrible an exponent, striking inevitably with horror and awe even beholders who are not the object of the resentment or the jealousy expressed—much more, fascinating and paralysing with fear the unhappy victims, as a bird is said to be fascinated by a snake.^147.2^

Chapter XXI. the Story as A Whole. the Problem of Its Place of Origin. Conclusion

My task draws towards its close. We have now examined the four leading trains of incident as developed in modern folktales belonging to the Perseus cycle. We have found the Supernatural Birth, the Life-token, and the Medusa-witch founded on superstitions common to all mankind and arising in the depths of savagery. The Rescue of Andromeda, on the other hand, appears to be restricted to nations which have attained a certain grade of civilisation, and to spring out of the suppression of human sacrifices to divinities in bestial form.

We have now to return to the story as an artistic whole, and to inquire where and when it originated.

In seeking the origin of the story as a whole it is well to begin with a caution, to which I have alluded in a note to an earlier chapter, namely, that it is dangerous in these matters to assert that a story or a custom is not found outside a given area. Anthropological research is so modern that much material is certain to have already perished unrecorded, and much that still exists as yet is unrecorded, either because {149} it has been overlooked, or because scientific observers have not yet reached it. All assertions or assumptions, therefore, of a negative character must be taken with the limitations imposed by this condition of things. They can only be provisional, for they may, any of them, be upset by further research. Moreover, the mass of anthropological data is already so great, and is growing with such rapidity, that nothing is easier than for a single inquirer, how diligent soever he may be, to overlook facts duly recorded which may be in conflict with his conclusions. To assert, for example, and to base any portion of an argument upon the assertion, that tales of the group under consideration are not found in Hindustan in anything like the shape wherein we find them in Europe, would be to run the risk of having to revise the argument in the face of new discoveries, or of old records which have not been brought to the writer’s knowledge.

Thus much premised, let us turn to the facts so far as we know them. The geographical boundaries within which the story, as a whole, may be found, are the geographical and ethnical boundaries of that stage of culture which forms the seed-plot of the incident of most restricted range. We can only look for it among nations who have approached and passed the level of barbarism where human sacrifices are offered to brutes; for it is only among such that the Rescue of Andromeda can have been conceived. This excludes races like the Australians, who seem never to have practised sacrifices of the kind referred to, even if their country were infested with beasts or reptiles addicted to such food. It does not exclude peoples like the ancient Quiché, who assuredly offered human sacrifices, and whose legend, partly cited in the last chapter, looks back to a {150} time when such offerings were made to wild animals. Among the ferocious gods petrified by the sun when it rose upon the primeval darkness, we are told, were those “connected with the lion, the tiger, the viper, and other fierce and dangerous animals. Perhaps we should not be alive at this moment,” continues the chronicler, “because of the voracity of these fierce animals, had not the sun caused this petrifaction.” But this did not end the mischief; for these gods could recover life and mobility when they pleased. And the four Quiché patriarchs were impelled, apparently by a supernatural vision, to wet their altars with the blood of human victims. Wherefore they watched in their mountain stronghold for lonely travellers belonging to the neighbouring tribes, and, having seized and overpowered them, slew them for a sacrifice; and wherever the blood of a victim was found, there also were always found the tracks of many tigers. This was the craft—so the tale says—of the priests; but at last the tribes that suffered thus found out that the loss of their friends was due not to attacks of wild animals but to the desire of the Quiché patriarchs to provide offerings for their gods; and they made war upon the aggressors. They were beaten by the aid of a miraculous horde of wasps and hornets; but their lives were spared and they became tributaries to the Quiché for ever.^150.1^ The legend records, in traditional form, the change from the worship of living creatures to that of gods of stone. But it does not record the abandonment of human sacrifices, for that never took place; and being told from the point of view of the conquerors it contains no rescue-incident. What the subject-nations may have had to say upon the matter we do not know. Inasmuch, {151} however, as they probably continued to furnish the victims from time to time, we may assume that no rescue-incident was included in their folklore. At all events the incident has not been recorded among any people on the Western Continent, save in circumstances pointing to importation since the days of Columbus.^151.1^

In the eastern world it is found from Ireland to Japan, from Scandinavia to Quilimane. If we set aside the story from Quilimane^151.2^ as sporadic, and introduced by the Portuguese, the southern limit of the extension of the Perseus group may perhaps be fixed on the shores of the Red Sea, where, Ælian tells us, in ancient times Perseus, the son of Zeus, was honoured, and where we may be allowed to indulge the hope that our archæological explorers will sooner or later recover some trace of the tale. Eastward, a variant embodying the incidents of the Life-token, the Rescue of Andromeda, and the Medusa-witch, has been found in Cambodia; and the Rescue of Andromeda has been found alone in Japan. The area, therefore, within which the place of origin is to be sought may roughly be said to include the whole of Europe and Asia, and the parts of Africa which lie to the north and east of the Great Desert.

Comparing the classical version of the legend, as it has come down to us in the writings chiefly of Ovid and Lucian, with what may be regarded as the typical shape of the {152} modern märchen, we are struck by a number of differences, among which we may reckon the difference in the mode of the supernatural conception; the absence from the ancient tale of the Life-token and of the impostor who pretends to have slain the dragon; the displacement of the incident of the Medusa-witch and its elevation in the classical story to a more prominent position than it usually occupies elsewhere; the substitution in modern tales of the Helpful Beasts for the divine gift of weapons; and lastly the enthralling power of Fate, supplying the artistic motive for the romance of Perseus, but absent from most of the folktales gathered in later times. Some of these differences of detail, however, are more apparent than real. In Phineus, who, according to Ovid, invades the wedding banquet, we have an analogue of the impostor. Too cowardly to fight the monster and save his betrothed, he comes forward with a posse of friends to take her by force from the victor, and is only vanquished when Perseus exhibits the Gorgon’s head. It is tempting to suggest that in the prototype of the story Perseus attacked and slew the monster on his outward journey, that he passed on to the slaughter of Medusa before celebrating his union with Andromeda, and that meanwhile Phineus laid claim to the victory and its guerdon, and was confounded on the hero’s return, either by production of the Gorgon’s head, as in Ovid’s text, or by proof in the shape of the dragon’s head or tongue, as in the more modern tales. This conjecture might be supported by the fact that Perseus is represented by Ovid^152.1^ as using only his sword in the combat with the {153} monster, as well as by the consideration that it supplies a motive for the inexplicable desertion by the victor of the lady whom he has saved from the dragon’s maw, which occurs in so large a number of variants. The order in question does occur, though rarely, in modern stories;^153.1^ but, as we shall see hereafter, there is a decisive reason against supposing it ever to have formed part of the classical legend.

The versions preserved by the author of the Metamorphoses and in a more fragmentary way by Lucian are substantially similar. That other versions were current in antiquity we know from many sources. I have already in the opening chapter given several instances of inconsistent statements pointing unmistakably to this conclusion. The most important of them for this inquiry are derived from Ælian. Writing in the third century after Christ, he tells us of a fish found in the Red Sea and called after Perseus, who was honoured by the Arabs dwelling on the shore. If the modern märchen did not refer to a fish as the source of life of the twin-heroes this would be puzzling, since no reference is made in the classical saga to a fish. But in face of the facts it seems to show, not merely that the literary form of the saga is only one of two or more current in antiquity, but that one at least of the popular and unrecorded variants included a version of the Supernatural Birth which was allied to that in the Breton tale of The King of the Fishes. The same writer in a later passage associates a marine crustacean with Perseus. Many persons abstained from eating it, because they deemed it sacred. This I understand to be an assertion of a practice not {154} confined to the island of Seriphos; whose inhabitants, Ælian goes on to say, if they found it dead would bury it, if they caught it alive would not keep it in their nets, but returned it to the sea. They would even weep over dead specimens, for they held these creatures to be dear to Perseus, the son of Zeus.^154.1^ The custom of solemnly burying, and mourning for, dead animals is very widespread, and is connected with totemism.^154.2^ We are probably right in believing that in the first instance the crustacean referred to was the totem of some of the inhabitants of Seriphos, that the national hero was either identified with it or held to be its offspring, and that in process of time this hero was either accepted and glorified as Perseus, the son of Zeus, by the more polished Greeks of the mainland, or from the similarity of his birth and exploits became merged in the hero of Argos and Mykene. Doubtless in the ruder ages tales common in their origin but independent in their development were told both at Seriphos and on the mainland. As intercourse increased, the tales of Argos and Mykene would become known to the people of Seriphos, and vice versâ, their similarity would be recognised and their heroes identified. If the Seriphiote saga connected its hero with the rock-lobster, which was regarded as a totem, as the triplet boys are connected in the Breton märchen with the King of the Fishes, all the conditions would be fulfilled to account for the Seriphiote practices. We seem here, therefore, to have a third version of the story. The two versions which did not reach literary immortality both brought the hero into close relations with a marine animal. We can hardly doubt that in both {155} cases those relations were such as described in so many of the modern variants.

The next question to consider is that of the relation between the ancient and modern variants of the story. If it were confined to that between the ancient variants and the variants current to-day in Italy and Greece, it would be comparatively simple. The problem is, in fact, much larger; for we have to take into account variants found all over the area, already described, within which the place of origin is to be sought. We cannot conclude, I need hardly say, that the first-recorded version of a tale is the parent of all the rest, or of any of them. Our scepticism must go much further. It often happens that the first-recorded version is one current in a higher grade of civilisation, and therefore more refined and artistic, than a version subsequently gathered from oral tradition. Emphatically is this the case with classical stories and Buddhist parables, as writers on folklore have often observed. But what has not been equally insisted on is, that the reason why these classic stories and Buddhist parables have found their way into literature is because they are the more refined and artistic versions. It is quite certain that if Ovid had had to choose between the picturesque narrative of the shower of gold, with the parentage of the highest god of Olympus, on the one hand, and a totemistic tale about a fish or a rock-lobster on the other hand, he could not have hesitated to which of these sources he should, for literary purposes, assign the begetting of Perseus. So, to take an instance outside the range of the present study, if the compilers of the Jātaka could have chosen between the Tar-baby of Negro story-tellers and the Demon with the matted hair, they would have preserved in their collection the story in {156} the form which actually appears.^156.1^ Probably neither alternative was actually offered, the causes which would have operated in the mind of the poet or the parable-writer having already wrought, less consciously indeed, but not less effectively, in the popular mind, so as to render, by a process, analogous with that of natural selection, which we may call traditional selection, the version that has reached us predominant over all others. For æsthetic and ethical development speedily outstripped that of abstract thought and criticism. Savages often attain a high degree of taste and skill in the production and ornamentation of their utensils and weapons. The beauty of mediæval architecture has rarely been approached and never been surpassed, though the generations which built the great cathedrals of Europe were under bondage to one of the most cruel and extravagant systems of superstition that the wit of man has elaborated. At the same time in many directions, and at all events theoretically, they had attained a comparatively advanced moral elevation. The arts of poetry and story-telling come to maturity later than the material arts, because they are dependent upon the critical sense; but even they are quite compatible with very gross credulity. No people has displayed a finer critical sense than the ancient Greeks; yet no people has told more absurd stories about its divinities or practised sillier customs; and that, even in the age which produced their most finished sculptures and their most exquisite poems. The unbelief of the philosophers was confined to a small class; and the populace that applauded the verses and appreciated the art of Euripides pinned its faith to omens, {157} found presages in the flight of birds, and gave implicit credence to the magical effect of incantations, to say nothing of the ridiculous and impossible tales about the gods which were part of its religious faith, and as such were literally and devoutly accepted. Yet even among these a process of selection was going forward, tending to eliminate the ruder and coarser, preserving and refining, not necessarily the more credible, but the more artistic. From the more cultured cities of Greece a literary and æsthetic influence was diffused throughout all Greek-speaking communities. To this aggressive influence local beliefs and local customs gradually yielded. They were either identified and amalgamated with the beliefs and customs to which it gave a continually wider and wider currency, gaining in the process a less barbarous exterior; or, if too stubborn for identification and amalgamation, they were thrust aside bit by bit and left to rustics and to slaves. The same process, repeated in the modern world, has caused the powers and distinguishing marks of the ancient superseded deities to be attributed to the Madonna and the saints, and many of the heathen shrines and superstitions to be baptized into the Christian Church. The rest have been relegated to the peasantry, and driven into more and more remote districts by the continual pressure, direct and indirect, of the triumphant religion and the increasing civilisation. So it has been everywhere, not only in Europe, but wherever in the whole world a higher has been carried, either by arms, commerce or persuasion, across the frontiers of a lower culture. We may conclude, therefore, that the story of Danae made its way throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, to the disadvantage of the stories told in various places of the birth of a hero similar {158} in the rest of his life to Perseus, because of its own æsthetic qualities, and because it was accepted by the most intellectual peoples of Greece. These two causes, it will be seen, are at bottom one. For it was precisely the intellectual characteristics of the polished peninsular Greeks which had given the tale its artistic form, and thus fitted it for prevailing over its competitors. Traditional selection, first in the inhabitants of Argos and the neighbourhood, and afterwards in all those with whom they and their allies and fellow-countrymen came into contact, determined its shape and secured its victory.

But though Ovid may have been ignorant of other versions of the story, it is manifest that others existed. And here it is material to observe that the incident of the Rescue of Andromeda stands in the poet’s account on a very different footing from that of the remaining incidents. Though it is now (perhaps by virtue of the Christian symbolism read into it from early days of Christianity) the incident which first springs into the mind on mention of the name of Perseus, in the Metamorphoses it is a mere episode, not organically connected with the hero’s story. The encounter with Andromeda is represented as fortuitous. It is not led up to by the previous narrative. It affects the after-incidents in no way. The dragon is not even petrified by the Gorgon’s head. On the other hand, the fatal prophecy is the foundation of all the rest of the saga, from which nothing could be omitted (save, it may be, the visit to Atlas) without impairing the natural, the inevitable, development of the legend as an artistic whole. We must infer that the Rescue is an intrusive episode, and that, as in many modern variants, the tale comprised at first only the other two trains of incident, already characterised as {159} the Birth and the Quest of the Gorgon’s Head. The remaining versions current in antiquity, or some of them, probably omitted Andromeda with all her picturesque possibilities; and it may be permitted to conjecture that the story we regard as classical may have been formed by the imperfect fusion of a legend consisting of the Birth and the Quest of the Gorgon’s Head, with one recognised for some reason as kindred, and consisting only of the Birth and the Rescue of Andromeda. The Albanian märchen, related in our opening chapter, may represent the latter by direct transmission, while the sagas involved in Ælian’s allusions—perchance also as known to Herodotus—may have been guiltless of the fight with the Dragon.

We cannot pursue the conjecture into the region of probabilities, because of the obvious confusion of the Albanian tale, and of the imperfect state of our knowledge with regard to local legends not taken up into Greek and Roman literature, and with regard to Egyptian and Babylonian cults. The Tuscan tale from Pratovecchio^159.1^ seems, however, to have descended in right line from the familiar version of Ovid and Lucian—not, that is to say, from their writings, but from the oral sources whence they drew—though on its way to us it has not passed wholly uncontaminated by other streams. But can we venture to assert the same either of the Irish, German, Swedish, and Russian tales which I have assigned to the Danae type; or of the various modern Italian and Greek stories wherein the hero’s birth is ascribed to entirely different causes? Of the latter, some are perhaps derived from local variants current in antiquity. Yet even to assume this will carry us but a little way towards the solution of the problem {160} of origin of a märchen told as far afield as Ireland and Cambodia.

The legend in classical literature is the product of a comparatively high stage of civilisation. In proof of this, it is only necessary to refer to the divine gift of weapons. The helmet, the shield of metal, brightly polished as a mirror, the sword, are not the weapons of the unsophisticated savage. They are replaced in a large number of modern variants by the gift of Helpful Animals. Now, everywhere in the lowest planes of culture we find stories of birds, beasts, reptiles, and even insects, talking and acting in human fashion, sometimes hostile, more usually perhaps helpful to man. It would seem as though man, at variance with his fellow-man, and therefore having unintermittent reason to suspect him, beset, too, by the awful supernatural powers of his imagination, turned for sympathy, perforce, and consolation to his fellow-creatures of a different shape, whom he credited with ability to aid him in his need. No line was drawn between nature and that which was beyond or above nature. But while he imagined in his own form the powers whose enmity he dreaded, he sought, of necessity, his allies among those of other forms. He observed their characteristics; he experienced their usefulness in supplying his wants; he felt himself akin to them; out of them he framed totems, and ultimately gods. The modern incident, therefore, of the Helpful Animals cannot be derived from the classical gift of weapons; for not only is it utterly different in character, but it comes up from a deeper depth of barbarism. Thus it constitutes a strong presumption that the stories wherein it occurs, however they may have been modified in the course of ages, are not to be traced back to the classic literary saga. Still less can {161} we venture to assert that they are derived from the local variants of antiquity. They would be likely to owe their origin rather to a tale already common property, than to one merely local. And of the local variants we only know that Perseus was connected in one of them with a fish; whereas the corresponding heroes of modern variants are frequently so connected, while they are never connected with a crustacean, but often with other artificial means of generation, not noticed in any of the hints that have reached us from ancient times.

To elucidate the matter, I have compiled and placed in an Appendix tables of the variants accessible to me. I do not, of course, pretend that they are complete. Statistics of the kind never are; and they must not be taken for more than they are worth. Still, I have no reason to think that they would be seriously modified by the addition of other variants. If we glance at Table A we shall see that out of 110 examples (comprising stories properly belonging to the cycle, and also stories wherein the Rescue of Andromeda is the only incident belonging to the Legend of Perseus) forty-four represent the Helpful Beasts as congenital with the heroes, while four others represent some of the Beasts as congenital, the rest of them being obtained in another way. By congenital I mean born of the same material which causes the birth of the heroes, as in the case of the fish, where one part given to the woman originates the children, and another given to a mare or a bitch originates the foals or the puppies. This, the most savage conceit of the manner in which the Helpful Beasts were obtained, is thus found in more than forty-one per cent. of the stories. They are told throughout the whole of Europe, from Donegal to Georgia, from Sweden to Greece. One {162} of them, indeed, has been carried, as we may assume, from Portugal to Quilimane, where the origin of the Helpful Beasts is reproduced by the natives in the most intensely savage form of all; for the woman gives birth not only to the heroes but to their dogs, and even their spears and their guns. In ten cases in the table the Beasts are given by their parent animals, while in ten others (or eleven, if we add, as we probably may, the Servian case^162.1^) they attach themselves to the heroes out of gratitude.^162.2^ The total percentage of stories in which the Beasts attach themselves, or are given by the parent animals out of gratitude, to the heroes is thus nearly twenty. In sixteen cases, less than fifteen per cent., they are obtained by exchange of some other animals, or of arms or corn. In nine cases, or little more than eight per cent., they are acquired from conquered foes; while in only eight cases, a still smaller percentage, they are obtained in the classical way from a mysterious personage. If we add the two classes of exchange and gift by a mysterious personage together, we obtain twenty-four cases, or a little under twenty-two per cent., of which three alone properly belong to the Perseus group: that is, contain more than one of the four chief trains of incident which compose it. One of these three is the Tuscan story I have already indicated as probably a direct descendant of the classical tale. The rest of the twenty-four come from different parts of European Russia, Transylvania, Bohemia, {163} Germany, Italy, the Celtiberian Peninsula, Brittany, and Achill Island, two variants having been carried to North America, possibly by the French.

If we turn to Table B, relating to the Gift of Weapons, we find results not very different. Out of a total number of seventy-two stories, twenty-two (or thirty per cent.) represent the Weapons as congenital. These are all from Central Europe, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, Sicily, Spain and Portugal, including the story from Quilimane; and they all belong to the Perseus group. Then we have twelve, or, if we add the Lithuanian tale in which the Weapons are taken from an uninhabited house, thirteen variants, or eighteen per cent., in which the Weapons are obtained from conquered foes. None of these thirteen stories contain any other of the four chief trains of incident than the Rescue of Andromeda. They are more widely spread than the former, ranging from the west of Ireland to Lithuania and the Levant. There are next seven instances (just under ten per cent.) in which the Weapon is forged to order or bought by the hero. Of these, three come from Scotland, one from Brittany, one is Basque, one is found in the island of Syra, and one in Georgia. Lastly, we have ten cases in which the Weapons are given by a mysterious person without any consideration, two in which they are given to redeem stolen eyes, five in which they are given out of gratitude, two in payment for services rendered or in exchange, and one in which they are given by a fish: in all, twenty cases, or not quite twenty-eight per cent.

This class of stories, embracing nearly one-third of those represented in Table B, is much the most interesting, not only as scattered over a far wider area than the others, but also, made up as it is partly of stories within the true Perseus {164} cycle, and partly of stories beyond it, because several of the stories present problems of difficulty and importance. The direct derivation of the Tuscan tale already referred to from the classical legend may be assumed. In it the mirror, replacing the classical shield, is given by two old women, who are the degraded representatives of the Graiai. The same incident is found in another form in a Norwegian tale given by Asbjörnsen, where the hero steals the single eye of each of three one-eyed hags successively, and thus succeeds in wresting from them a magical sword, a magical ship, and the art, equally magical, of brewing one hundred lasts of malt in one brew. It is curious that this highly barbarous incident has not been recovered elsewhere. We cannot suppose the direct descent of the Norwegian tale from the classical, since the remaining incidents are so different. But it is, of course, possible that during the numerous Norse raids in the Middle Ages the incident may have been picked up by Wicking adventurers, and carried home from the Mediterranean shores with other spoils to Scandinavia, where it became imbedded in a native tale recognised in other respects as similar, and there replaced some equivalent incident. The conjecture cannot be rated very highly; and alternative modes of transmission will naturally present themselves to the reader. On the whole, however, transmission of the incident, not of the entire story, seems best to account for the facts.^164.1^

The only two variants of the Perseus group recovered from the East belong to this class. Somadeva’s tale of Indívarasena has already been abstracted at length.^165.1^ Its divergencies from the type to which it belongs are striking—so striking that we cannot postulate transmission from Europe without conceding such alterations on the way as almost to disguise it out of all recognition. On the other hand, it is even harder to suppose that any European version can derive its origin from either the Kathá-sarit-Ságara or from the oral narrative worked up into Somadeva’s rhetorical periods. Let us examine the other Eastern variant. It is found in Cambodia, and has been published since the first volume of this inquiry was issued. Its heroes are not described as twins, though children of the same parents, and nearly of the same age. From their childhood they were, like the heroes of many Western märchen, incurably idle. To avoid being put to work, they left home together. A magician gives them two enchanted sabres, either of which will vanquish a whole army. Moreover, if one of the youths die, the sabre of the other will rust; and by means of it the dead youth can be brought back to life. These gifts they accept, though almost too lazy to carry them. They reach a city in mourning on account of the depredations of two yaks, winged monsters which have devoured already more than twenty of the king’s children, and have now demanded the last of them, {166} his beautiful daughter, Neang (Miss) Pou. In vain the king had kindly offered them the daughter of one of his subjects in her place. They insisted on having Pou, and threatened terrible misfortunes on both the people and the king if he refused. Compelled by the prayers of his subjects, he had therefore caused poor Pou to be conducted to the house where the ogres were wont to hold their banquets of royal flesh. The brothers, passing through the city, arrived at the yaks’ house, and lay down to sleep away the heat of the day, in spite of the princess’ warnings. While they were talking to her the yaks drew nigh, and the whirr of their enormous wings resounded above the house. The princess fainted from terror, while the brothers addressed themselves to the fight, and with their enchanted weapons speedily laid the monsters low. After the fight they took the trouble to restore the princess to consciousness, but, too lazy to take her home, rambled forth again. The king, meanwhile, sent two officers to gather up her bones for burial. These men, finding the yaks dead, dipped their staves in the blood, reported to their master that they had slain the monsters, and demanded a reward. Two other mandarins were then sent to find the lady’s bones and tresses; and after some search they found her alive, and hidden in the brushwood beside the road. She refused to return to a father who had so cruelly given her up to be eaten, until he went himself mounted on the royal elephant, and forced her into the palanquin he had brought for the purpose. The king then proposed to give her in marriage to one of the mandarins who pretended to have killed the yaks; but when she told her father the facts, he sent to find the brothers, who were her true deliverers. They refused to go back with the messengers; they were too lazy; {167} and, armed as they were, they repudiated allegiance to the king, and laughed at the threat of compulsion. However, the bodies of the yaks were unburied; they poisoned the air; and even a thousand men were unable to remove them. Nay, all the inhabitants were requisitioned, and an attempt with ten thousand proved unsuccessful in stirring one of the corpses. The brothers had not left the country, and they were incommoded by the terrible odour. Wherefore at last they offered their services, which were gladly accepted. A single touch of their sabres made a great hole in the earth, into which they pushed the yaks, and with another touch threw back the soil and covered them over. The elder brother then weds the princess, while the other sets forth on his travels again, taking the precaution, at his brother’s request, to sow along his path the seeds of a certain rare tree, to show the way he has gone. The adventurer arrives at a depopulated city, where he is attacked by a troop of gigantic birds, and overcomes them only after a fearful fight. Then he sat down to rest on a gong which he found lying in an inner court of the palace, and from a hole in which an agreeable perfume arose. He had not sat there more than an instant, when he was pricked from beneath. He jumped up and examined his seat, but could find nothing but the small hole he had noticed before. So he sat down again. Again he was pricked. He jumped up once more, and taking his sabre he clove the gong in two, when to his astonishment a lovely girl emerged, magnificently clad, and shedding around her a delicious perfume. This leads to explanations. She is called the Maiden of the Scented Locks, and is the king’s daughter. The dreadful birds he had slain had devastated the kingdom, and her father had shut her up in the gong to carry {168} her away to a place of safety. She excused herself for pricking her deliverer because he had sat down on the hole which gave her air, and she was being stifled. The people, who had fled away, by-and-by returned—all save the maiden’s father. He had deserved the misfortunes and desolation of the country, and he returned no more. The younger brother accordingly married the Maiden of the Scented Locks, and they became king and queen. One day the queen’s favourite waiting-woman was carried away by the current of the river while bathing. She was not, however, drowned; and ultimately she was made attendant on the leprous king of a neighbouring country. From her the leper learns about her mistress of the Scented Locks. Here we have, in a rationalistic form, the incident familiar to us in the Egyptian tale of The Two Brothers. The leprous king offers to make his attendant (woman though she was) viceroy if she will only get him the Lady of the Scented Locks. The temptation was too great for her. She returned to her former mistress; and, received by her with joy, she watched her opportunity to murder the king by touching him with his own enchanted sabre. To divert the widow from her grief, she induces her to walk along the river-bank, and to board a trading junk for the purpose of looking at the silks and other merchandise it contains. But the trade was a sham; and before she knew it, the hapless queen was far away down the river, in the hands of the servants of the leprous king. All this time the elder brother was often wondering what had become of his cadet since he departed. One day he found the blade of his sabre rusted, and knew that his brother was dead. Setting out in search of him, he soon found his realm and his tomb. With his magical sabre he opened {169} the tomb, and brought his brother back to life. Then both, disguising themselves with long beards and old garments, set out for the capital of the leprous king. Announcing themselves as able to cure leprosy, they are conducted to the monarch. The treacherous favourite has extorted a promise from the widowed Lady of the Scented Locks to yield to the desires of the king if his leprosy be cured; for leprosy is well known to be an incurable disease. By directions of the pretended physicians a house is built right in the middle of the river; and there they induce the king to put himself under a shower-bath, with which they are to mingle some drops from a bottle containing an infallible remedy. Instead of curing him, they scald him to death. They fling off their disguise, deliver the younger brother’s queen, and conquer the kingdom by means of their sabres. The treacherous favourite is not put to death, but simply banished; and the others live happy ever after.^169.1^

This tale presents more than one point of interest. Save that the brothers are two (instead of three, as in so large a number of European variants), and that the magical weapon is a sword, it bears hardly any material resemblance to Somadeva’s tale. It comprises three out of the four cardinal incidents of the cycle (though the Medusa-witch appears much modified), as well as the secondary incidents of the Gift of Weapons and the Impostor; yet without attaining any very close similarity in the manner of its telling to the European tales. To its most striking peculiarity I have already referred, namely, the incorporation of an incident found in the tale of The Two Brothers. The form of the incident in the Cambodian is obviously much later than in {170} the Egyptian story. The comic scene of the Lady in the gong is a tolerably good guarantee that, by whatever route the incident arrived in Cambodia and became annexed to the tale, it was conveyed not by literary means, but by oral tradition. Other parts of the story betray Indian influence;^170.1^ but so far as I know, the Lady of the Scented Locks has never yet been discovered in Hindustan. A near kinsman, however, appears in a märchen told by the Santals, where the hero has hair twelve cubits long. He sat down one day to dress it on the river-bank. “In combing his tangled tresses a quantity was wrenched out; this he wrapped up in a leaf and threw into the stream. It was carried by the current a great distance down to where a raja’s daughter and her companions were bathing. The raja’s daughter saw the leaf floating towards her, and ordered one of her attendants to bring it to her. When the leaf was opened it was found to contain hair twelve cubits in length. Immediately after measuring the hair the raja’s daughter complained of fever, and hasted home to her couch.” The long and short of the matter, of course, was that she had fallen in love with the unseen owner of the hair; and her father was compelled to search all over the world for him that she might marry him.^170.2^ Upon this it is to be observed that the story, {171} of which I have given only a single incident, is, as we should expect, much more savage than the Cambodian tale, and that it could not have influenced the latter. But it points to some such incident as that of the lost lock being, like the lost slipper, part of the story-plasm out of which the folk-tales of the eastern world have been evolved. The special form of the incident in M. Leclère’s tale renders probable its transmission somehow from Egypt—in the absence, that is, of any evidence of a more archaic shape from which alike the Egyptian and the Cambodian incidents with their peculiarities could have been derived. This does not necessarily involve the transmission of the entire story from Egypt, where neither in ancient nor in modern times have we found any variant from which it could have been descended. But it does smooth the way for us to accept the probability that the entire tale was transmitted from the West; and so far as it goes it is evidence against its oriental origin.

Hitherto we have not reached any very definite results in our quest. In Tables A and B I have exhibited the distribution of the stories containing either the Helpful Animals or the Magical Weapons. If these tables establish anything, it is that the greater number of the modern members of the Perseus group are independent of the classical legend. In an overwhelmingly large proportion of cases the Helpful Animals and the Magical Weapons are obtained in some other than the classical way, and usually they are congenital. In the tables account is taken not only of stories including two or more of the chief incidents, and therefore reckoned as properly members of the cycle, but also of those which only contain the incident of the Rescue of Andromeda. If we reckon the former alone, {172} the proportion is greatly increased. The total number of cases in Tables A and B respectively will then be reduced to 65 and 39; while of these, the cases in which the Helpful Animals and the Weapons are respectively congenital will be 42 and 22, or 65 and 56 per cent. Both the Helpful Animals and the Weapons are indeed subordinate incidents in the story; but they are incidents, especially when congenital, which are important enough to influence its entire development. The stories in which horses, dogs, and lances are congenital with the heroes cannot be derived from the classical legend; and although some of the ancient variants are known to connect a fish with the demi-god, Perseus, we have no means of ascertaining whether anything corresponding to these animals and weapons was included in any of them.

The independence of the classical legend and most of the modern variants is confirmed by another test. There is no feature more marked in the modern stories than that of the Impostor and the Tokens. Of the Impostor we find a trace in antiquity, but none of the Tokens. It is true that another classical story, located at Megara, mentions both. It is preserved by the scholiast upon Apollonius Rhodius, who attributes it to Derichidas, the historian of Megara. Alkathoos, the son of Pelops, we are told, having been exiled for the murder of Chrysippe, encountered on the territory of Megara a lion which desolated the country, and which the king had commissioned some of his subjects to destroy. Alkathoos after a fight succeeded in killing the animal. Thereupon he cut out its tongue, which he placed in his wallet, and proceeded to Megara. But the men whom the king had sent against the brute claimed the honour of the victory; nor were they convicted of the imposture {173} until Alkathoos in the king’s presence drew forth the tongue. The king offered the tongue in sacrifice to the gods, and gave his daughter Euaichme in marriage to Alkathoos, who ultimately succeeded him upon the throne.^173.1^ Now it is fairly certain that this striking incident could never have been part of the ancient legend of Perseus, otherwise it would have come down to us in one or other of the classical writers. But not only is it absent from the versions of Ovid and Lucian; another account, mentioned by the mythographer Hyginus, points in a diametrically opposite direction. He calls the betrothed of Andromeda, Agenor, and declares that when Perseus wished to take Andromeda away, her father, Cepheus, and Agenor, attempted secretly to murder him, and were turned with their followers to stone by the exhibition of the Gorgon’s head.^173.2^ This is more inconsistent with the modern variants than Ovid’s narrative.

So far, then, our results are the same; and it can only be claimed that the modern stories are at most (with the exception of a few variants) derived from a common stock with the classical legend. But it may be suggested that the former have been contaminated by the local tradition of Megara. The possibility of such contamination cannot be denied. An examination, however, of Table C fails to disclose any sure ground for believing it probable. For it will be observed that of the stories properly belonging to the cycle, upwards of fifty-two per cent. give the tongues alone {174} as the tokens of identity; while, if we reckon the tales wherein the tongues are found, either alone or in combination with other tokens, we reach more than seventy per cent. And they are by no means confined to countries and nationalities which have come directly under classical influence, but seem to be scattered impartially over the whole of Europe. A less certain mark of contamination, but not without some value, is the character of the impostors. In the Megaran tradition they were the men whom the king had commissioned to slay the lion; therefore of the class of warriors or nobles. In stories properly belonging to the cycle less than thirty-two per cent. of the impostors come under this description, including all cases where vague description may mean any servant of the king other than menial, whereas fifty per cent. are charcoal-burners, coachmen, gipsies, and members of other despised classes. What is most remarkable is that an overwhelming proportion of the cases in which the impostors may be considered as of the class indicated in the Megaran tradition are found in lands beyond the direct classical influence. In the Balkan peninsula and the Greek islands, in Italy, Spain, and France, the all but invariable impulse of the story-teller is to degrade the impostor in rank and to render him physically, as well as morally, repellent. If all the stories, both within the Perseus group and beyond it, be taken into the calculation, the results will not be found very different. It would seem, therefore, that, to whatever cause we must ascribe the remarkable uniformity of the incident in the folk-tales of Europe, the evidence hardly warrants us in attributing it to contamination by the one local legend of Megara.^174.1^

Turning for a moment to the saga forms assumed by the Rescue incident, there is one instance wherein contamination by a local legend may have taken place, though to an altogether smaller extent. All our information points to an eastern origin for the legend of Saint George. I have already discussed the cause of the appropriation of the Rescue incident to the Christian martyr; and I need not repeat what was then said. Mr. Baring-Gould’s theory ascribes the tale to a misunderstanding of the words of a definite hagiologist. Whether we accept that theory or not, the only difference will be one of date at which the legend became current; it will not alter the geographical direction in which we must look for its origin. As preserved in some of the songs and legends of the Balkan peoples, it shows traces of being affected by the story, handed down to us by Diodorus Siculus and by Tzetzes the scholiast, of the Rescue of Hesione by Herakles. “Troyan, the white city” of the Bosnian ballad, inevitably recalls to us the Troy of Laomedon. Diodorus knew nothing of the version preserved by Tzetzes, which represents the slaughter of the monster as effected from the inside; or, if he did, he suppressed it, either as less probable or less artistic. It is clear from the story of Kleostratos recorded by Pausanias, and from the ancient vase referred to in a note on an earlier page,^175.1^ that the incident of a dragon-slaughter was current {176} in antiquity in both forms. It may be suggested that, with growth in civilisation, the fight face to face gradually superseded the ruder notion of the hero being swallowed and fighting his way forth from the serpent’s belly. Probably, therefore, the feat ascribed to Saint George in Bosnian song and Bulgarian legend is that of Herakles, rather than that of Perseus contaminated by that of Herakles. The tale of Troy was, like the story of Perseus, much more than a local legend. It was the common property of the classical world, and may well have formed part of the inheritance of all the Balkan nations. The intrusive barbarians who settled from time to time during the decadence of the empire about the Danube and the Balkans, must also have had their legends of dragon-slaying, whose essential identity with those of the original population would be recognised. The confusion thus caused would render it all the easier to substitute a new hero consecrated by religion, and consequently having claims upon belief which the older heroes had ceased to wield. Yet the previous details would not be all effaced; and in such as were preserved we should find evidence of the double procession. Thus the interference of “the thundering Elijah” bears witness to Slavonic influences, for Elijah as a saint is but a Christian disguise of the pagan Slavonic thunder-god. In the same way the name of Troyan enables us to say which of the classical Rescue legends it is that has been worked up, with the Slavonic tradition, into the ballad of Saint George. The names and special details connected with the feat of Perseus are conspicuously absent.

We need not, however, conclude that everywhere the legends and songs concerning Saint George embodied the saga of Hermione rather than that of Andromeda. The {177} generally accepted ecclesiastical version laid the scene of the conflict at a town of Libya, which would assuredly point to the latter; while the local traditions whereof the martial saint is hero indicate anything but descent from a story told of so famous a city as Troy. Nor must we leave out of view the probability that in antiquity, as in modern times, beside the sagas fitted with names of heroes and of places, there was current a variety of märchen, similar in plot, and to some extent in detail, ready to be adapted to any names which might happen to lay hold of the popular fancy. Such might easily infect the legend of Saint George while it was taking shape among the folk, and as yet no version had acquired preponderant authority, and thus form variants either of local, or, if fortune smiled upon them, of more than local, acceptance.

But this christianised saga was not quite the only form of the Rescue story known during the Middle Ages. Cuchulainn’s fight with the Fomori was told as early as the legend of Saint George, if not indeed earlier. I have already noted its remarkable resemblance to the corresponding incident in märchen of the Herdsman type—a highly specialised type, differing considerably from any form of the classical story, and peculiar to the west of Europe. We have no direct evidence as to the date when the stories of the Herdsman type arose; but it will be recollected that there is reason to think the type belongs to the Celto-Iberian race, and therefore is of prehistoric age. Nor will the reader fail to note that the Rescue of Devorgoil from the Fomori appears to be an offshoot of the same type, that it is found among one of the branches of the same Celto-Iberian race, and that it is one of the oldest—nay, perhaps, the oldest—post-classical variant in Europe of the Perseus {178} group. All these considerations make for its independence of the classical tale; and their cumulative weight may fairly be called decisive.

It has been contended, and it may be thought, that we should look for evidence of transmission rather to the general identity and sequence of the main incidents than to the recurrence of trivial details. An able and well-known writer, criticising M. Bédier’s use of special accessories as a test of transmission, has lately traversed its validity as applied to folklore. “It is obviously derived,” he says, “from considerations current in literary criticism, as might be expected from M. Bédier’s training. His method is exactly the process by which literary critics prove the derivation of one species of mss. from an archetype, or affiliate a translation in one language to its original in another. Minute and unimportant accessories, e.g. the form of a proper name, are just the tests in such cases. But with oral tradition, with transmission in folklore, I would exactly reverse the process and adopt M. Bédier’s test”—namely, similarity in the general idea—“as a proof of such transmission.”^178.1^

If Mr. Jacobs be a disciple of M. Cosquin, he here diverges widely from his master, who has rightly insisted on the value of trivial details in proving the connection between two folktales belonging to the same cycle. His opinions on this point are gathered up in a small compass in a paper contributed to the International Folklore Congress of 1891, where he examines a number of stories of the rescue of a maiden from the monster, with a view to showing the repetition of minute details.^178.2^ One of the most {179} curious and important of these details is the lousing of the hero by the maiden.^179.1^ In Table D I have brought together as many of such tales as I could find. Under the lady’s gentle fingers the hero usually falls asleep; and M. Cosquin points particularly to the fact that when the dragon comes on the scene the deliverer is in many variants aroused by the damsel’s tears. The table shows that this is, in fact, the usual method of awakening him; for it occurs in no fewer than fifty per cent. of the stories. But what will strike the reader is, that with the exception of a Portuguese tale from Brazil, all the stories in which it occurs are found within an area whose salient angles may be placed in Georgia, Nubia, and Bosnia. In only one of the variants from that part of the world can the mode of awakening be definitely said not to be by a tear, while in one other it is left uncertain. Now, it is not expressly said in every instance that the maiden performed the delicate office of lousing the hero; but I think that where this realistic trait has disappeared it has probably dropped out, in M. Cosquin’s phrase, “by an excess of delicacy on the part of the collector.” The trait is unquestionably a savage one. It is also one well known both in real life and in other stories to the peasantry, at all events of southern and eastern Europe, if not elsewhere. Outside the sphere centring in the Levant it is, however, found attached to the Rescue of Andromeda only in the Iberian peninsula, in Scotland, Ireland, and Sweden, the most numerous instances having been recovered in the west of Scotland. There, in four cases out of five, the lady awakens the hero by inflicting personal mutilation or bestowing personal adornments which afterwards serve to identify him, while in the fifth case the mode of awakening is not {180} recorded. The phenomena both in the Levant and in Scotland are thus entirely in favour of the value of similar details as proving transmission. For, as M. Cosquin says, it is evidently impossible to believe that these details have been separately developed. The form under which the savage idea is presented must have been imported already specialised.

We are not, however, left to seek all over the world for the place of origin of either of these two modes of awakening the sleeping deliverer. We are shut up in each case to a fairly defined area within which the detail is found, and within which, therefore, it probably originated. Something of the sort meets us in the case of the Impostor and the Tokens. If we extend our view to include stories which comprise the Rescue of Andromeda alone of the four cardinal incidents of the Perseus group, we appear to find some geographical connection in the tokens. Teeth, for example, are the tokens in Hungary and Oldenburg, ears in the Caucasus and Armenia, mutilations of the hero’s person in the Western Highlands. But we have no such guide where tongues are the tokens; for their distribution, in Europe at all events, is as wide as the story itself. In like manner, if we glance over the other tables, or turn to the distribution of the various types of the story as distinguished in the earlier chapters of this work, we can undoubtedly find geographical limits for many, both of types and of details. To discuss them individually after the examples already given would be tedious; nor would it lead to any more assured result. There are a few cases, like that of the Scented Locks, where we think we can with tolerable certainty trace an accessory back to its source. Even in such cases, however, we have no decisive evidence, as in {181} literary questions, to fix the exact provenience. The peculiarities of a manuscript are not quite parallel with those of a tale. We cannot be positive that the incident in the Cambodian story is derived from the Egyptian. We can only say that its form is later in civilisation, and therefore perhaps in time. For aught we know the incident in the Egyptian märchen may in its turn be derived from an earlier one, which may be the common parent of the incident in the tale of The Two Brothers and in the Cambodian variant of the Perseus group. There is no record which will enable us to pronounce with entire confidence an opinion on the point. Much more then in examples, like those of the Deliverer’s Sleep, where the form discloses no difference in civilisation or in manners, we are at a loss to say whence the detail has come. We can put boundaries within which it has probably arisen; but we have no means of tracing it from Syra to Nubia, or from Nubia to Syra, from Bosnia to Georgia, or from Armenia to Bulgaria. The form of the savage idea may have been imported, as M. Cosquin says, already specialised; but imported whence, imported whither? Those are questions too hard for us with our present means of knowledge. And what is true of the detail is true of the type. We cannot say, in more than a few isolated cases, whether a type has been evolved from another type, either by development or decay. The modern types of the story, we can indeed say, have not been derived from the classical type. It is possible that they may have been derived from some local variant of ancient Greece or the Red Sea shores, of which we have no more than hints in classical writers. It is, at least, equally possible that they and the local variants and the classic legend all alike owe their origin to a common ancestor. Nor can we {182} assign to the modern types any order of precedence among themselves.

Our difficulty in solving these problems arises not merely, or chiefly, from the want of records; still more does it issue from the conditions of oral transmission. Narrative tradition is fluid and changeable. It may be run into any mould, and from one mould to another with equal ease. To change the figure, its constituents are, like chemical elements, found in combinations which are sometimes comparatively stable, at other times tending to change and the formation of new combinations. The permanence of the new combinations depends upon the stability and isolation of the culture-conditions, upon the ability of the storytellers and the customs which bind them, now encouraging invention, and anon imprisoning them with the chains of verbal, if not literal, accuracy. This is not the place to consider the conditions of conservation and of variation. Enough here to draw attention to the reason of the difficulty which lies in the path of him who would trace a folktale to its source.

The truth is that when we speak of a märchen as an artistic whole, we must be careful to guard ourselves against conveying a false impression. Like every human work, there is, of course, a sense in which it is true so to speak of it. Every tale-teller is more or less of an artist, and every tale he tells is a work of art. It is formed of his recollections of other tales told by other tellers, joined and cemented together as best he can by the aid of his own invention. A plot is composed of incidents cohering sometimes more firmly, sometimes less. Often the tale-teller forgets one, patches the story with another from his stock, or inserts an additional incident at pleasure. The new element {183} thus introduced may or may not unite with the old. The character of the tale will be modified, and may be entirely changed, by the substitution or addition. As with the incidents, so with the accessories. Every time the tale is passed through the memory it is exposed to the risk of variation, not only in its main lines, but also, and still more, in its details. Hence we can speak of the story embodied in the Perseus cycle as an abstract ideal whole with even less propriety than we can, by eliminating individual peculiarities from the entire series of pictures of the Annunciation, or the Marriage of the Virgin, from the earliest to the latest, speak of the scene they present with so many variations as one abstract ideal whole. The mediæval painters and the painters of the Renascence developed and modified the traditional scene as they would, or as their skill and circumstances dictated. But the limitations of the limner’s art preserved a certain unity amid all changes. The art of the story-teller is not thus circumscribed. He can run on from one subject to another, as his memory or his imagination may prompt, for the purpose of giving pleasure. He unites the incidents of the Life-token, the Rescue of Andromeda, and the Slaughter of the Gorgon, with that of the Fatal Bird whose flesh gives wealth or exalts its eater to kingship; or he unwinds from the Supernatural Birth the tangled skein of a Bluebeard story. But, save in rare examples, it is impossible to predicate the order of succession, or to say why this line of development has been followed rather than that.

Such may seem an impotent conclusion of the inquiry. Disappointing it must be admitted to be; and, so far as the results of research as to one story may enable us to forecast {184} the results of research as to others, it favours the view of those students who declare that the hope of tracking a folktale to its pristine home is illusory, and the attempt a waste of time. If a story which must have taken up its crucial incident so late in civilisation cannot be assigned to its primitive tellers, how can we hope to find the birth-places of other tales, all whose elements are rooted in a distant and dateless savagery? Henceforth, if it be true, as Mr. Jacobs alleges, that “the problem of diffusion is of prior urgency to that of origin”^184.1^—that is to say, if we cannot employ the tales as evidence of belief until we know whence they come—it seems likely that we shall have to deny ourselves the use of this evidence, and rely wholly upon evidence of a more direct character. But is the contention true? I have elsewhere tried to give some grounds for thinking that we need not wait to know where a tale was first conceived ere we use it as evidence of the belief of the peoples who tell it.^184.2^ And I would fain hope that fresh and more cogent reasons to the same effect may be gathered from the foregoing pages. In this connection I should like to insist on the fact that these evidences of belief are to be found, not in the tale as a whole, but in the separate incidents of which it is composed. To such, and even lesser details, our attention must be directed, if we would avail ourselves of the full advantage which the study of folktales gives us in investigating the early ideas of mankind.

The story of Perseus opens a thousand vistas to the student. In these pages we have been content to follow only a few of them, though there is not one but would have led us upon enchanted ground. It remains to gather {185} up in a few words the results of our inquiry. After reviewing and illustrating the principal types of the story, we took its four leading incidents and sought for their distribution in other combinations, or alone, and for their sources and meaning. The Supernatural Birth we found related in various forms, not merely for amusement, but as sober fact, over so large an area of the world as to justify the belief that it was universal. Every nation has its heroes; and in the popular mind the mightier the hero, the greater the need for providing him with a worthy entrance upon his mortal existence. Nay more. We found that the abnormal means of impregnation, to which the heroes of the stories we examined owed their birth, were, and still are, actually held capable of causing a similar result; therefore were, and are, prescribed for, and used by, women who desire children and are unable to obtain them in the natural way.

The Life-token presented other problems. Both in tale and in custom it is not less generally known than the former incident. Its virtue is derived from the belief that it is part of the substance of the personage whose welfare it indicates. It is the converse and essential correlative of the External Soul. At this point it became necessary, for the elucidation of the idea at the root of both the External Soul and the Life-token, to enter upon a discussion whose length I trust the reader will hold fully excused by the importance of the subject; for it involved nothing less than the savage conception of life in its relation to personality: a conception that permeates savage society; a conception without which it is impossible to understand savage institutions or savage customs; indeed, a conception that underlies much of our modern civilisation, {186} and from which the most sacred act of Christian worship derives its meaning and its virtue.

Like the Supernatural Birth and the Life-token, the Medusa-witch is widely famous, and the superstition out of which the incident of her slaughter—at all events in its classical form—springs is universal. It is that of the Evil Eye. Recent works by other writers rendered it needless to examine this superstition at length.

The incident of the Rescue of Andromeda, though celebrated throughout a large part of the Old World, is more limited in its range than the others. It is based on the change of a horrible custom which has not everywhere been practised, and where it has been practised has not everywhere passed away in such circumstances as to leave behind it the possibility of a Rescue myth. It is therefore the youngest of the four chief incidents of the tale. This limitation of range of the Rescue incident restricts the area within which to seek for the birthplace of the tale as a whole. The search has been interesting; but while it has produced some substantial results, it has failed in its main object. On the causes of failure I have already sufficiently dwelt.

Yet the inquiry has not been wholly in vain, even in regard to storyology pure and simple. We have seen that the classical form of a tale distributed throughout a large part of the Old World owed its peculiar features to the fact of its entrance into the higher literature of the race at a period of relatively advanced civilisation: a traditional selection had been established against the ruder forms of the saga. That ruder forms existed is evident from the hints and allusions preserved by classical writers. The classical form, in spite of its acceptance and {187} of its literary handling by some of the authors of antiquity most widely read, affected to a very slight extent the versions current in tradition. The latter go back in very few instances to the classical form; they frequently contain important incidents—not mere episodes, but incidents of the fibre of the narrative—such as that of the Helpful Beasts, far more barbarous than the classical story; while they are further distinguished by the remarkable peculiarity that they have preserved the cardinal incident of the Life-token, which in the classical saga is entirely wanting. We are bound, therefore, to postulate the existence in Greece, in an earlier and more barbarous age than that which was familiar with the legend in its classical shape, of a folktale substantially similar to that recovered in the last hundred years from all parts of the area I have described. For if the modern form of the tale be not derived from the legend as found in classical literature, neither can it be ascribed to derivation in post-classical days from the special story-store of India. On the contrary, so far as derivation on either side is considered necessary, we are compelled to treat the variants from India and Further India as derivatives, and not as sources. To establish, if not with mathematical, at least with reasonable certainty, the prehistoric age of a famous märchen, as well as the fact that the lower and ruder forms are not killed out by the higher literary forms, but survive them, and to circumscribe the native region of the tale by the limits of Europe, south-western Asia, and northern Africa, may be considered worth the pains spent in the investigation.

I have written of the Legend of Perseus with no polemical object. Yet, valuing the science of folklore, as I do, chiefly for the light it throws on the mental constitution {188} of mankind and the genesis of ideas and of institutions, I cannot hide from myself the important bearing that some of the subjects dealt with in these pages may have upon matters of Christian controversy. Our illustrations of the Supernatural Birth have been drawn entirely from certain forms of the story, to the exclusion of other forms which, interesting as they are in themselves, were for our purpose irrelevant. But sufficient has been said to raise questions which may be summarily stated thus:—If these legends be universal, if they must be rejected in every case but one as the product of an inevitable tendency of human imagination, then why not in that one case also? Assuredly that one case can be regarded as exceptional, only if it stand upon historical evidence totally different in kind from the others, and of inevitable cogency. But can any one who sits down (as it is the duty at least of every educated man to do) calmly and, so far as he can, with scrupulous impartiality to weigh the evidence, say that the testimony of ecclesiastical tradition, or even of our Gospels, is different in kind from, or of greater cogency than, that which we reject, without hesitation, in the case of Sákyamuni, or of Alexander the Great? About ecclesiastical tradition I need say nothing. The records in the two Gospels which bear the names of Saint Matthew and Saint Luke are, carefully considered, irreconcilable. Both Gospels are now admitted to be secondary documents. It is hardly claimed for either of them that it was written less than sixty years after the event. It is by no means certain that they were in existence, as we now have them, when Justin Martyr wrote in the middle of the second century. Outside them there is no record, no unambiguous allusion even, that can be dated within one hundred and ten years {189} of the Birth, and then only if we admit the genuineness of the questionable Epistles of Saint Ignatius, and the earliest possible date for his very doubtful journey. Is this the testimony on which belief in so amazing an event can be safely built?

Our researches into sacramental beliefs and practices, and the ideas underlying them, must have suggested once and again the central rite of Christianity. The institution of the Eucharist is not an event of the same supernatural character as the Birth is alleged to be. Yet if the difficulties of testimony be smaller, those of interpretation are even greater. That sacramental superstitions were rife as well in Judæa as elsewhere in the time of Jesus Christ is certain, though our information concerning them is still lamentably deficient. The influence of the Mysteries upon Christianity has been hitherto little studied. But it is manifest that we cannot appreciate the intention of the rite, or understand the course of its history, without a more extended knowledge of these things.

Doubt is often a more imperative duty than belief. Nor is it the less a duty because it is painful. To the priest, everywhere and in all time, it is the gravest of sins; for the corporate interest of a priesthood adds strength to the sincere belief of the individual, a belief usually founded upon complete ignorance of all but his own side of the question. Priests, therefore, always favour the growth of beliefs of which they are the centre, so leading men deeper and deeper into the slough of superstition. Pleading that it is safer to believe too much than too little, they are not content with a ready-made creed, imperfectly verified, if verified at all. Their inclination and interest alike tend to its enlargement by continual additions, whose only test is {190} consonance with the emotions awakened by something previously accepted. They cannot away with reason, with patient inquiry, and the judicial temper. They seek to prejudice the question before it be tried. Hence they conspire with reactionary statesmen to obtain, or to keep, the control of education. This treachery against civilisation, against the public weal, against truth itself, may succeed for a moment; but only to evoke a retribution which will be strictly measured by its success. It is no light thing to divorce the intellect of a nation from its religion; it is disastrous to attempt to coop the intellect within the bounds of a religion which have become too strait for it.

But abhorrent as doubt and inquiry may be to the priest, they are the means whereby we have gradually reached a more correct and adequate view of the universe, and of human history, than was formerly imposed in the name of divine revelation. He who seeks truth by such means bears a more devoted allegiance to himself and to humanity than he who, for the sake of safety or of ease, flings himself into the lap of a priesthood, which professes to assure to him in the next world eternal salvation, and can certainly bestow upon him, in this, comfort and social consideration and freedom from petty parochial persecution. He will recognise it as a duty to withhold his assent from dogmas, even though the most solemn articles of the Christian faith, until in the open court of reason his objections have been answered and his difficulties solved by sounder arguments and a deeper historical and scientific knowledge than have yet been applied by apologists to the issues.

[The End]

Appendix

Table A. Helpful Animals

• Stories thus marked do not belong to the Perseus cycle though containing the incident of the Slaughter of the Dragon.

Table B. Weapons

• Stories thus marked do not belong to the Perseus cycle, though containing the incident of the Slaughter of the Dragon.

Table C. the Impostor and the Tokens

• Stories thus marked do not belong to the Perseus cycle, though containing the incident of the Slaughter of the Dragon.

Table D. the Deliverer’s Sleep

• Stories thus marked do not belong to the Perseus cycle, though containing the incident of the Slaughter of the Dragon.

Supplementary List of Works Referred To

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Churchill’s Voyages. A Collection of Voyages and Travels, some now first printed from original manuscripts, others now first published in English. In 6 volumes. Third Edition. London, printed by assignment from Messrs. Churchill, 1744.

Clouston, Lands Squire’s Tale. John Lane’s Continuation of Chaucer’s ‘Squire’s Tale.’ Edited from the original MS. by Fred. J. Furnivall, M.A., Hon. Doc. Phil., with notes by W. A. Clouston. London, 1888-90.

——Pop. Tales. Popular Tales and Fictions; their Migrations and Transformations, by W. A. Clouston. 2 vols. Edinburgh, 1887.

Cooper. Travels of a Pioneer of Commerce in Pigtail and Petticoats: or an Overland Journey from China towards India. By T. T. Cooper. London, 1871.

Corp. Poet. Bor. Corpus Poeticum Boreale. The Poetry of the Old Northern Tongue from the earliest times to the thirteenth century. Edited, classified, and translated, with introduction, excursus, and notes by Gudbrand Vigfusson, M.A., and F. York Powell, M.A. 2 vols. Oxford, 1883.

County F. L., Gloucestershire. County Folklore. Printed Extracts, No. I., Gloucestershire. Edited by Edwin Sidney Hartland, F.S.A. London, 1892. [Folklore Soc.]

Crawfurd. History of the Indian Archipelago, by John Crawfurd, F.R.S. 3 vols. Edinburgh, 1820.

Crooke. An Introduction to the Popular Religion and Folk lore of Northern India. By W. Crooke, B.A. Allahabad, 1894.

Curr. The Australian Race: its origin, languages, customs, place of landing in Australia, and the routes by which it spread itself over that continent. By Edward M. Curr. 4 vols. Melbourne, 1886-7.

Curtin, Hero-Tales. Hero-Tales of Ireland, collected by Jeremiah Curtin. London, 1894.

——Ireland. Myths and Folklore of Ireland, by Jeremiah Curtin. London, 1890.

Cymru Fu N. and Q. Cymru Fu: Notes and Queries relating to the past History of Wales and the Border Counties. 2 vols. Cardiff, 1887-90.

Dalpatrám Dayá. Bhut Nibandh: an Essay, descriptive of the Demonology and other Popular Superstitions of Guzerat. By Dalpatrám Dayá. Translated by Alexander Kinloch Forbes. Bombay, N.D.

Dalyell. The Darker Superstitions of Scotland. By John Graham Dalyell, Esq., F.A.S.E. Glasgow, 1835.

D’Arbois, Droit Celt. Études sur le Droit Celtique, par H. D’Arbois de Jubainville, avec la collaboration de Paul Collinet Docteur en Droit. Tome I. Paris, 1895.

Darwin, Journ. Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries visited during the voyage of H.M.S. Beagle [etc.]. By Charles Darwin, M.A., F.R.S. London, 1876.

Dasent, Fjeld. Tales from the Fjeld. A Series of Popular Tales from the Norse of P. Ch. Asbjörnsen, by Sir George Dasent, D.C.L. London, 1896.

Dawson. Australian Aborigines. The Languages and Customs of several tribes of Aborigines in the western district of Victoria, Australia, by James Dawson. Melbourne, 1881.

De Acosta. The Natural and Moral History of the Indies, by Father Joseph De Acosta. Reprinted from the English translated edition of Edward Grimston, 1604. And edited by Clements R. Markham, C.B., F.R.S. 2 vols. [paged continuously]. London, 1880. [Hakluyt Soc.]

De Charencey, Folklore. Comte H. De Charencey. Le Folklore dans les deux Mondes. Paris, 1894.

De Groot. The Religious System of China, its Ancient Forms, Evolution [etc.]. By J. J. M. De Groot, Ph.D. [2 vols. paged continuously, only published yet.] Leyden, 1892-94.

De Gubernatis, Myth. Plantes. La Mythologie des Plantes ou Les Légendes du Règne Végétal par Angelo de Gubernatis. 2 vols. Paris, 1878-82.

——Usi Nuz. A. de Gubernatis. Storia Comparata degli Usi Nuziali in Italia e presso gli altri popoli indo-europei. Milano, 1878.

De Mensignac. Recherches Ethnographiques sur la Salive et le Crachat. Par Camille de Mensignac. Extrait des Bulletins de la Société d’Anthropologie de Bordeaux et du Sud-ouest. Bordeaux, 1892.

Denham Tracts. The Denham Tracts. A Collection of Folklore by Michael Aislabie Denham, and reprinted from the Original Tracts and Pamphlets printed by Mr. Denham between 1846 and 1859. Edited by Dr. James Hardy. 2 vols. London, 1892-95. [Folklore Soc.]

Denton. Serbian Folklore. Popular Tales selected and translated by Madam Csedomille Mijatovics. Edited by the Rev. W. Denton, M.A. London, 1874.

Domenech. Seven Years’ Residence in the Great Deserts of North America, by the Abbé Em. Domenech. 2 vols. London, 1860.

Doolittle. Social Life of the Chinese: with some account of their Religious [etc.] Customs and Opinions. With special but not exclusive reference to Fuhchau. By Rev. Justus Doolittle. 2 vols. London, 1866.

Dobrizhoffer. An Account of the Abipones, an equestrian people of Paraguay. From the Latin of Martin Dobrizhoffer. 3 vols. London, 1822.

Dorsey, Cegiha. The Cegiha Language, by James Owen Dorsey. Washington, 1890.

——Omaha Soc. Omaha Sociology. By J. Owen Dorsey. Washington, 1884.

Douglas. Scottish Fairy and Folk-Tales, selected and edited, with an introduction, by Sir George Douglas, Bart. London, N.D.

Dozon. Contes Albanais recueillis et traduits par Auguste Dozon. Paris, 1881.

Du Chaillu, Ashangoland. A Journey to Ashangoland: and further Penetration into Equatorial Africa. By Paul B. Du Chaillu. London, 1867.

——Equat. Afr. Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa. By Paul B. Du Chaillu. London, 1861.

——Midnight Sun. Land of the Midnight Sun; Summer and Winter Journeys through Sweden, Norway, Lapland, and Northern Finland. By Paul B. Du Chaillu. London, 1881.

——Viking Age. The Viking Age. By Paul B. Du Chaillu. 2 vols. London, 1889.

Dyer. English Folklore. By the Rev. T. F. Thiselton Dyer, M.A. London, 1880.

Early Ideas. Early Ideas. A Group of Hindu Stories. Collected and collated by Anaryan [F. F. Arbuthnot]. London, 1881.

Edwards, Bahama. Bahama Songs and Stories. A Contribution to Folklore. By Charles L. Edwards, Ph.D. Boston, 1895. [Amer. F. L. Soc.]

Ellis, Land of Fetish. The Land of Fetish. By A. B. Ellis. London, 1883.

Ellis, Tour. Narrative of a Tour through Hawaii or Owhyhee; with remarks on the History, Traditions [etc.] of the Inhabitants of the Sandwich Islands. By William Ellis. London, 1826.

Elworthy. The Evil Eye. An Account of this ancient and widespread Superstition. By Frederick Thomas Elworthy. London, 1895.

Erman. Travels in Siberia: including excursions northwards, down the Obi [etc.]. By Adolph Erman. Translated from the German by William Desborough Cooley. 2 vols. London, 1848.

Favre, Wild Tribes. An Account of the Wild Tribes inhabiting the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra, and a few Neighbouring Islands. By the Rev. P. Favre. Singapore, 1848. [Reprinted from the Journ. Ind. Arch.]

Fison and Howitt. Kamilaroi and Kurnai: Group Marriage and Relationship, and Marriage by Elopement. Drawn chiefly from the usage of the Australian Aborigines [etc.]. By Lorimer Fison, M.A., and A. W. Howitt, F.G.S. Melbourne, 1880.

F. L. Andaluz. El Folklore Andaluz. Organo de la Sociedad de este Nombre. 1882 á 1883. Sevilla.

Forsyth. The Highlands of Central India. Notes on their Forests and Wild Tribes, Natural History and Sports. By Captain J. Forsyth. London, 1889.

Frazer, Totemism. Totemism, by J. G. Frazer, M.A. Edinburgh, 1887.

Fur. Corresp. Further Correspondence respecting British New Guinea. Presented to Parliament, April 1891.

Gaidoz, Vieux Rite. Un Vieux Rite Médical. Par Henri Gaidoz. Paris, 1892.

Garcilasso. First Part of the Royal Commentaries of the Yncas, by the Ynca Garcilasso de la Vega. Translated by Clements R. Markham. 2 vols. London, 1869. [Hakluyt Soc.].

Geldart. Folklore of Modern Greece: the Tales of the People. Edited by the Rev. E. M. Geldart, M.A. London, 1884.

Gent. Mag. Lib. The Gentleman’s Magazine Library: being a classified collection of the chief contents of the Gentleman’s Magazine from 1731 to 1868. Edited by George Lawrence Gomme, F.S.A. 20 vols. [not numbered, but distinguished by their contents]. London, 1884-96. [Still proceeding.]

Georgeakis. Le Folklore de Lesbos. Par G. Georgeakis et Léon Pineau. Paris, 1894.

Georgi. Description de toutes les Nations de l’Empire de Russie. Troisième Collection, contenant Les Nations Samoyèdes [etc.]. Traduite de l’Allemand. [By J. Georgi.] St. Petersbourg, 1777.

Gigli. Superstizioni Pregiudizi e Tradizioni in Terra d’Otranto, con un’Aggiunta di Conti e Fiabe Popolari. Per Giuseppe Gigli. Firenze, 1893.

Gomme, Ethn. Ethnology in Folklore. By George Laurence Gomme, F.S.A. London, 1892.

Gomme, Mrs. Traditional Games. The Traditional Games of England, Scotland, and Ireland, with Tunes [etc.]. Collected and annotated by Alice Bertha Gomme. [1 vol. only issued yet.] London, 1894.

Graf, Roma. Roma nella Memoria e nelle Immaginazioni del Medio Evo di Arturo Graf. 2 vols. Torino, 1882-83.

Grässe. Sagenbuch des Preussischen Staats. Von Dr. J. G. Th. Grässe. 2 vols. Glogau, [1867]-1871.

Gray. China. A History of the Laws, Manners, and Customs of the People. By John Henry Gray, M.A., LL.D. Edited by William Gow Gregor. 2 vols. London, 1878.

Gregor. Notes on the Folklore of the North-East of Scotland. By the Rev. Walter Gregor, M.A. London, 1881 [Folklore Soc.]

Griffis. Corea, the Hermit Nation. By William Elliot Griffis. London, 1882.

Grimm, D. Sagen. Deutsche Sagen. Herausgegeben von den Brüdern Grimm. 2 vols. Berlin, 1816-18.

Grohmann. Sagen aus Böhmen. Gesammelt und herausgegeben von Dr. Josef Virgil Grohmann. Prag, 1863.

Guhl and Koner. The Life of the Greeks and Romans described from Antique Monuments. By E. Guhl and W. Koner. Translated from the third German edition by F. Hueffer. London, N.D.

Hansen. Sagen und Erzählungen der Sylter Friesen, nebst einer Beschreibung der Insel Sylt als Einleitung. Von C. P. Hansen. Garding, 1875.

Harou. Le Folklore de Godarville (Hainault). Par Alfred Harou. Anvers, 1893.

Hatim Taï. The Adventures of Hatim Taï, a Romance. Translated from the Persian, by Duncan Forbes, A.M. London, 1830.

Hearn. The Aryan Household, its Structure and its Development. An introduction to Comparative Jurisprudence. By William Edward Hearn, LL.D. London, 1879.

Heimskringla. The Stories of the Kings of Norway, called the Round World (Heimskringla). By Snorri Sturluson. Done into English out of the Icelandic by William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon. [3 vols. only issued yet.] London, 1893-95.

Henderson. Notes on the Folklore of the Northern Counties of England and the Borders. By William Henderson. London, 1879. [Folklore Soc.]

Hickson. A Naturalist in North Celebes. By Sidney J. Hickson, M.A., D.Sc. London, 1889.

Hillner. Volksthümlicher Brauch und Glaube bei Geburt und Taufe in Siebenbürger Sachsenlande. Ein Beitrag zur Culturgeschichte von Johann Hillner. Program des Evang. Gymnasium in Schässburg. 1877.

Hodgkinson. Australia, from Port Macquarie to Moreton Bay; with Descriptions of the Natives, their Manners and Customs [etc.]. By Clement Hodgkinson. London, 1845.

Hodgson. On the Aborigines of India, by B. H. Hodgson, Esq., B.C.S. Essay the First; on the Kocch, Bódo, and Dhimál Tribes. Calcutta, 1847.

Hunt. Popular Romances of the West of England; or, the Drolls, Traditions, and Superstitions of Old Cornwall, collected and edited by Robert Hunt, F.R.S. London, 1881.

Hunter, Captivity. Memoirs of a Captivity among the Indians of North America, from Childhood to the Age of Nineteen [etc.]. By John D. Hunter. London, 1823.

Jahn, Volkssagen. Volkssagen aus Pommern und Rügen. Gesammelt und herausgegeben von Dr. Ulrich Jahn. Stettin, 1886.

Jātaka. The Jātaka; or Stories of the Buddha’s Former Births. Translated from the Pāli by various hands, under the editorship of Professor E. B. Cowell. Vol. I. translated by Robert Chalmers, B.A.; Vol. II. translated by W. H. D. Rouse, M.A. Cambridge, 1895. [Still proceeding.]

Jeremias, Höllenfahrt. Die Höllenfahrt der Istar. Eine altbabylonische Beschwörungslegende. Von Alfred Jeremias. München, 1886.

Jones and Kropf. The Folk-Tales of the Magyars. Collected by Kriza, Erdélyi, Pap, and others. Translated and edited by the Rev. W. Henry Jones and Lewis L. Kropf. London, 1889.

Journ. Ethn. Soc. The Journal of the Ethnological Society of London. 9 vols. London, 1848-56.

Journ. Ind. Arch. The Journal of the Indian Archipelago. 18 vols. Singapore, 1847-59.

Journ. Kilk. Arch. Soc. The Journal of the Kilkenny and South-East of Ireland Archæological Society. New Series. 6 vols., 1856-71. Dublin.

Jülg. See Siddhi-Kür.

Kane. Wanderings of an Artist among the Indians of North America. By Paul Kane. London, 1859.

Karajich. Volksmärchen der Serben. Gesammelt und herausgegeben von Wuk Stephanowitsch Karadschitsch. Ins Deutsche übersetzt von dessen Tochter Wilhelmine. Berlin, 1854.

Kerr. The Far Interior: a Narrative of Travel and Adventure from the Cape of Good Hope across the Zambesi to the Lake Regions of Central Africa. By Walter Montagu Kerr, C.E., F.R.G.S. 2 vols. London, 1887.

Kirby. The Hero of Esthonia, and other Studies in the Romantic Literature of that Country. Compiled from Esthonian and German sources by W. F. Kirby, F.L.S., F.E.S. 2 vols. London, 1895.

Knoop, Posen. Sagen und Erzählungen aus der Provinz Posen. Gesammelt von Otto Knoop. Posen, 1893.

Kobert. Historische Studien aus dem Pharmakologischen Institute der Kaiserlichen Universität Dorpat. Herausgegeben von Dr. Rudolph Kobert. 4 vols. [still proceeding]. Vol. IV. Halle a S., 1894.

Kuhn, Märkische Sagen. Märkische Sagen und Märchen nebst einem Anhange von Gebräuchen und Aberglauben gesammelt und herausgegeben von Adalbert Kuhn. Berlin, 1843.

——Sagen aus Westf. Sagen, Gebräuche, und Märchen aus Westfalen und einigen andern, besonders den angrenzenden Gegenden Nordeutschlands. Gesammelt und herausgegeben von Adalbert Kuhn. 2 vols. Leipzig, 1859.

Laisnel. Croyances et Légendes du Centre de la France. Souvenirs du Vieux Temps. Par Laisnel de la Salle. 2 vols. Paris, 1875.

Landor. Alone with the Hairy Ainu. Or, 3800 Miles on a Pack-Saddle in Yezo and a Cruise to the Kurile Islands. By A. H. Savage Landor. London, 1893.

Lang, Myth R. and R. Myth, Ritual, and Religion. By Andrew Lang. 2 vols. London, 1887.

Larminie. West Irish Folk-Tales and Romances. Collected and Translated by William Larminie. London, 1893.

Leclère. Cambodge. Contes et Légendes, recueillis et publiés en Français par Adhémard Leclère. Paris, 1895.

Lehmann-Filhés. See Arnason.

Leland, Etr. Rom. Etruscan Roman Remains in Popular Tradition. By Charles Godfrey Leland. London, 1892.

Lenormant. Chaldean Magic: Its Origin and Development. Translated from the French. By François Lenormant. London, N.D. [1887. Translated by W. R. Cooper.]

Letourneau, L’Év. Rel. L’Évolution Religieuse dans les diverses races humaines. Par Ch. Letourneau. Paris, 1892.

Lewin. Wild Races of South-Eastern India. By Captain T. H. Lewin. London, 1870.

Livingstone, Miss. Travels. Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa, including a Sketch of Sixteen Years’ Residence in the Interior of Africa [etc.]. By David Livingstone, LL.D., D.C.L. London, 1857.

——Zambesi. Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambesi and its Tributaries; and of the Discovery of Lakes Shirwa and Nyassa. By David and Charles Livingstone. London, 1865.

Lloyd, Report. A Short Account of Further Bushman Material collected. By L. C. Lloyd. London, 1889.

Lubbock. The Origin of Civilisation and the Primitive Condition of Man. Mental and Social Condition of Savages. By Sir John Lubbock, Bart., M.P., F.R.S., D.C.L., LL.D. London, 1889.

Lummis. The Man who Married the Moon, and other Pueblo Indian Folk-Stories. By Charles F. Lummis. New York, 1894.

Luzel, Le Magicien. Le Magicien et son Valet (Métamorphoses). Par F. M. Luzel. Extrait du Bulletin de la Société Archéologique de Finistère. Quimper, 1885.

MacInnes. Waifs and Strays of Celtic Tradition. Argyllshire Series, No. 11. Folk and Hero Tales. Collected, edited and translated by the Rev. D. MacInnes. With notes by the Editor and Alfred Nutt. London, 1890.

Mackenzie. The Prophecies of the Brahan Seer. By Alexander Mackenzie. Inverness, 1878.

MacLennan. Studies in Ancient History, comprising a Reprint of Primitive Marriage: An Inquiry into the Origin of the Form of Capture in Marriage Ceremonies. By the late John Ferguson McLennan. London, 1886. The Second Series, comprising an Inquiry into the Origin of Exogamy. Edited by his Widow and Arthur Platt. London, 1896. 2 vols.

Mage. Voyage dans le Soudan Occidental (Sénégambie-Niger). Par M. E. Mage. Paris, 1868.

Mallet. Northern Antiquities; or, an Historical Account of the Manners, Customs, Religion [etc.] of the Ancient Scandinavians. Translated from the French of M. Mallet by Bishop Percy. New edition, by I. A. Blackwell, Esq. London, 1847.

Mannhardt, Wald- und Feld-Kulte. Wald- und Feld-Kulte. Von Wilhelm Mannhardt. 2 vols. Berlin, 1875-77. Vol. I., Der Baumkultus der Germanen und ihrer Nachbarstämme. Vol. II, Antike Wald- und Feldkulte aus Nordeuropäischer Überlieferung.

Map, De Nug. Cur. Gualteri Mapes De Nugis Curialium Distinctiones Quinque. Edited from the unique manuscript in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, by Thomas Wright, Esq., M.A., F.S.A., etc. London, 1850. [Camden Soc.]

Marcellus. Marcelli de Medicamentis Liber. Edidit Georgius Helmreich. Lipsiae, 1889.

Marshall. A Phrenologist amongst the Todas; or the Study of a Primitive Tribe in South India [etc.]. By William E. Marshall. London, 1873.

Maspons, Cuentos Pop. Cat. Cuentos Populars Catalans. Per lo Dr. D. Francisco de S. Maspons y Labrós. Barcelona, 1885.

Maspons, Rond. Lo Rondallayre. Quentos Populars Catalans. Coleccionats per Francisco Maspons y Labrós. 3 series. Barcelona, 1871-72-74.

Maury, Croy. et Lég. Croyances et Légéndes de l’Antiquité. Par L. F. Alfred Maury. Paris, 1863.

Mem. Cong. Anthr. Memoirs of the International Congress of Anthropology. Edited by C. Staniland Wake, on behalf of the Publication Committee. Chicago, 1894.

Mestres. Folklore Catalá. Volum Primer. Tradicións recullidas y escritas per Apeles Mestres. Barcelona, 1895.

Middleton. A Free Inquiry into the Miraculous Powers which are supposed to have subsisted in the Christian Church, from the Earliest Ages through several successive Centuries [etc.]. By Conyers Middleton, D.D. London, 1749.

Mitford. Tales of Old Japan. By A. B. Mitford. 2 vols. London, 1871.

Modigliani, Batacchi. Fra i Batacchi Indipendenti. Viaggio di Elio Modigliani pubblicato a cura della Società Geografica Italiana. Roma, 1892.

——Isola delle Donne. L’Isola delle Donne. Viagio ad Engano di Elio Modigliani. Milano, 1894.

Monseur. Eugène Monseur. Le Folklore Wallon. Bruxelles, N.D. [1892.]

Moore. The Folklore of the Isle of Man. By A. W. Moore, M.A. London, 1891.

Moore, Africa. Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa. By Francis Moore. London, 1738.

Morgan, Anc. Soc. Ancient Society; or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery, through Barbarism to Civilisation. By Lewis H. Morgan, LL.D. London, 1877.

Mouat. Adventures and Researches among the Andaman Islanders. By Frederic J. Mouat, M.D., F.R.C.S. London, 1863.

Müller, Siebenb. Sagen. Siebenbürgische Sagen. Gesammelt und herausgegeben von Dr. Friedrich Müller. Wien, 1885.

Mythog. Lat. Auctores Mythographi Latini. C. J. Hyginus, F. P. Fulgentius, Lactantius Placidus, Albricus Philosophus cum integris commentariis Jacobi Micylli [etc.]. Curante Augustino van Staveren. Lugd. Bat., 1742.

Nerucci. Sessanta Novelle Popolari Montalesi. Raccolte da Gherardo Nerucci. Firenze, 1880.

Nichols. The History and Antiquities of the County of Leicester. Compiled from the best and most antient Historians; inquisitiones post mortem, and other valuable records [etc.]. By John Nichols, F.S.A. Edinb. and Perth. [4 vols., each in 2 parts.] London, 1795-1811.

N. Ind. N. and Q. North Indian Notes and Queries: a monthly periodical. Edited by William Crooke, B.A. 5 vols. Allahabad, 1891-96. [Still proceeding.]

Northall. English Folk-Rhymes: a Collection of Traditional Verses relating to Places and Persons, Customs, Superstitions, etc. By G. F. Northall. London, 1892.

Ockley. The History of the Saracens, comprising the Lives of Mohammed and his Successors, to the Death of Abdalmelik, the eleventh Caliph. By Simon Ockley, B.D. London, 1847.

Odd Ways. Odd Ways in Olden Days down West; or, Tales of the Reformation in Devon and Cornwall. By Vic. Birmingham, 1892. [Extracts from the registers of the Consistory Court of Exeter, with running comments.]

Ostermann. Prof. V. Ostermann. La Vita in Friuli. Usi, Costumi, Credenzi, Pregiudizî, e Superstizioni Popolari. Udine, 1894.

Ouseley. Travels in various Countries of the East, more particularly Persia. By Sir William Ouseley, Kt. [etc.]. 3 vols. London, 1819-23.

Owen, Crosses. Old Stone Crosses of the Vale of Clwyd and Neighbouring Parishes, together with some Account of the Ancient Manners and Customs and Legendary Lore connected with the Parishes. By the Rev. Elias Owen, M.A. London, N.D.

Owen, Old Rabbit. Old Rabbit, the Voodoo, and other Sorcerers. By Mary Alicia Owen. London, 1893.

Panjáb N. and Q. Panjáb Notes and Queries, a monthly periodical devoted to the systematic collection of authentic notes and scraps of information regarding the country and the people. Edited by Captain R. C. Temple, F.R.G.S., M.R.A.S., M.A.I., etc. 4 vols. Allahabad, 1883-87. [The last volume is entitled “Indian Notes and Queries.”]

Park, Mungo. Travels in the Interior of Africa. By Mungo Park. Edinburgh, 1860.

Parkinson. Yorkshire Legends and Traditions, as told by her Ancient Chroniclers, her Poets and Journalists. By the Rev. Thomas Parkinson, F.R.Hist.S. 2 vols. London, 1889.

Paulitschke. Ethnographie Nordost-Afrikas. Die Materielle Cultur der Danâkil, Galla, und Somâl. Von Dr. Philipp Paulitschke. Berlin, 1893.

Pedroso. Portuguese Folk-Tales collected by Consiglieri Pedroso, and translated from the original MS. by Miss Henriqueta Monteiro. With an Introduction by W. R. S. Ralston, M.A. London, 1882. [Folklore Soc.]

Pennant. Tours in Wales by Thomas Pennant, Esq. With Notes, Preface, and Copious Index, by the Editor, John Rhys, M.A. 3 vols. Carnarvon, 1883.

Pettigrew. On Superstitions connected with the History and Practice of Medicine and Surgery. By Thomas Joseph Pettigrew, F.R.S., F.S.A. London, 1845.

Pineau, F. L. Le Folklore du Poitou. Par Léon Pineau. Paris, 1892.

Plowden. Travels in Abyssinia and the Galla Country, with an Account of a Mission to Ras Ali in 1848. From the MSS. of the late Walter Chichele Plowden. Edited by his brother, Trevor Chichele Plowden. London, 1868.

Pluquet. Contes Populaires, Préjugés [etc.] de l’Arrondissement de Bayeux. Recueillis et publiés par Frédéric Pluquet. Rouen, 1834.

Poestion. Lappländische Märchen, Volkssagen, Räthsel und Sprichwörter. Nach lappländischen, norwegischen, und schwedischen Quellen von J. C. Poestion. Wien, 1886.

Posilecheata. Posilecheata di Pompeo Sarnelli. MDCLXXXIV. Ristampa di 250 esemplari curata da Vittorio Imbriani. Napoli, 1885.

Powell. Wanderings in a Wild Country; or, Three Years amongst the Cannibals of New Britain. By Wilfred Powell, F.R.G.S. London, 1884.

Proc. Belfast Nat. Field Club. Annual Report and Proceedings of the Belfast Naturalists’ Field Club. Belfast.

Proc. Roy. Ir. Ac. Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. Third Series. 3 vols. Dublin, 1888-95. [Still proceeding.]

Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot. Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. 27 vols. Edinburgh, 1855-95. [Still proceeding.]

Pröhle, Sagen. Deutsche Sagen. Herausgegeben von Dr. Heinrich Pröhle. Berlin, 1863.

Ramage. The Nooks and By-ways of Italy. Wanderings in Search of its Ancient Remains and Modern Superstitions. By Craufurd Tait Ramage, LL.D. Liverpool, 1868.

Rand. Legends of the Micmacs. By the Rev. Silas Tertius Rand, D.D., D.C.L., LL.D. New York, 1894.

Reclus. Primitive Folk. Studies in Comparative Ethnology. By Élie Reclus. London, N.D. [1891].

Records of the Past, N.S. Records of the Past; being English Translations of the Ancient Monuments of Egypt and Western Asia. New Series. Edited by A. H. Sayce. 6 vols. London, N.D. [1888-92.]

Rev. de l’Hist. des Rel. Annales du Musée Guimet. Revue de l’Histoire des Religions. vols. Paris, 1880-96. [Still proceeding.]

Richardson, Folly of Pilgrimages. The Great Folly, Superstition, and Idolatry of Pilgrimages in Ireland; especially that to St. Patrick’s Purgatory. By John Richardson. Dublin, 1727.

Riggs, Dakota Grammar. Dakota Grammar, Texts, and Ethnography. By Stephen Return Riggs. Edited by James Owen Dorsey. Washington, 1893.

Rivista. Rivista delle Tradizioni Popolari Italiane diretta da Angelo de Gubernatis. 2 vols. Roma, 1893-94. [Organ of the Società Nazionale per le Tradizione Popolari Italiane.]

Rogers. Scotland Social and Domestic: Memorials of Life and Manners in North Britain. By the Rev. Charles Rogers, LL.D., F.S.A. Scot. London, 1869.

Romero. Contos Populares do Brazil colligidos pelo Dr. Sylvio Roméro. Lisboa, 1855.

Roth. The Aborigines of Tasmania, by H. Ling Roth, assisted by Marion E. Butler. London, 1890.

Roumanian F. T. Roumanian Fairy Tales and Legends. [Preface signed E. B. M.] London, 1881.

Sauvé. Le Folklore des Hautes Vosges par L. F. Sauvé. Paris, 1889.

Schleicher. Litauische Märchen, Sprichworte, Rätsel und Lieder. Gesammelt und übersetzt von August Schleicher. Weimar, 1857.

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Endnotes

Chapter XVI Notes

^2.1^ Basset, 72 (Story No. 35).

^2.2^ ii. Von Hahn, 259 (variant of Story No. 64).

^3.1^ ii. Von Hahn, 262.

^3.2^ Von Wlislocki, Armenier, 3 (Story No. 2).

^4.1^ MacInnes, 279 (Story No. 8).

^4.2^ i. Campbell, 97.

^6.1^ Curtin, Ireland, 157; Larminie, 196; i. F.L. Journ., 54; vi. Folklore, 309. In Larminie’s version, however, a new series of adventures follows the marriage.

^7.1^ Sébillot, in ix. Rev. Trad. Pop., 280; Luzel, ii. Contes Pop., 296.

^7.2^ Webster, 22. The story belongs to the Outcast Child group (see iv. F.L. Journ., 308); and the hero’s reconciliation with his father takes place at the wedding.

^8.1^ Webster, 33.

^9.1^ Vinson, 56.

^9.2^ Wolf, Deutsche Hausm., 369.

^10.1^ Suprà, vol. i. p. 65.

^11.1^ Dasent, Fjeld, 261, from Asbjörnsen. The story is defective.

^11.2^ Edwards, Bahama, 90. This story likewise is the worse for wear.

^12.1^ Romero, 129 (Story No. 38).

^14.1^ Burton, iv. Suppl. Nights, 258.

^14.2^ Burton, iv. Suppl. Nights, 244, cited suprà, vol. i. p. 54.

^15.1^ Douglas, 58.

^16.1^ Von Wlislocki, Volksdicht., 323 (Story No. 55). In savage tales the attack on a monster from the inside is not very uncommon. See, for example, Riggs, Dakota Grammar, 91, 141; Edwards, Bahama, 72. The Quères Pueblos relate that the Coyote swallowed the Horned Toad. After being swallowed, the latter erected its spines, and so killed the Coyote. Lummis, 86. Cf. the story of the Lambton Worm (Henderson, 288), the tale from Galloway given by Mr. Andrew Lang in the Academy, October 1885, the classic Saga of Kleostratos (infra, p. 37), and others.

^18.1^ Schleicher, 54. Compare a tale from Oldenburg, ii. Strackerjan, 333 (variant of Story No. 630).

^18.2^ Pitrè, Toscane, 9 (Story No. 2); F.L. Andaluz, 357; Romero, 83 (Story No. 23).

^18.3^ De Gubernatis, ii. Zool. Myth., 36, note.

^19.1^ Waldau, 468; Haltrich, 101 (Story No. 25).

^20.1^ Bernoni, Fiabe, 50 (Story No. 10). We hear no more of the ring; and the lady plays no part in the final scene.

^20.2^ i. Gonzenbach, 299 (Story No. 44).

^21.1^ Wardrop, 68 (Story No. 12).

^23.1^ Burton, vi. Suppl. Nights, 363.

^24.1^ Carnoy et Nicolaides, 75; Garnett, i. Wom., 165. A shorter version in Georgeakis, 35. Substantially the same story is found in the island of Syra, in the Cyclades. ii. Von Hahn, 49 (Story No. 70).

^24.2^ i. Cosquin, 18, 74, citing Schiefner.

^25.1^ De Rochemonteix, 25 (Story No. 3).

^25.2^ Schott, 135 (Story No. 10). In a Lithuanian variant the maiden sacrificed to the dragon is confounded with one of the princesses carried captive by a dragon into the well. Leskien, 407.

^26.1^ Sébillot, i. Contes Pop., 72 (Story No. 11); ii. Rivista, 109. Two Breton variants, also collected by M. Sébillot, ix. Rev. Trad. Pop., 172, 173.

^26.2^ ii. Strackerjan, 330 (Story No. 630).

^27.1^ Dasent, Fjeld, 237, from Asbjörnsen.

^28.1^ Von Wlislocki, Volksdicht., 198 (Story No. 13). As to the Keshalyi’s hairs, see suprà, vol. i., pp. 124, 155.

^29.1^ Von Wlislocki, Volksdicht., 260 (Story No. 34). Compare the classical legend of Tiresias. In the Hindu mythology, the daughter of Manu changed her sex several times. So did Loki in the Scandinavian mythology. Change of sex is also, as I need hardly remind the reader, found in several classical stories.

^29.2^ Dozon, 109 (Story No. 14).

^30.1^ Steel and Temple, 138.

^30.2^ Ibid., 304.

^31.1^ Siddhi-Kür, 60 (Story No. 2). Miss Busk gives a free rendering, Sagas, 18.

^31.2^ Hatim Taï, 45.

^32.1^ V. Bettei, in xiii. Archivio, 543, translating the story. The incident of binding the dragon, whether by an oath or a more substantial bond, is of extreme rarity in märchen, but is by no means uncommon in sagas, as we shall find in the next chapter. See, however, the Greek märchen cited suprà, p. 3; and a Russian tale, viii. Rev. Trad. Pop., 69.

^33.1^ Dorsey, Cegiha, 114. The other version follows it.

^35.1^ Leland, Etr. Rom., 109.

Chapter XVII Notes

^37.1^ Pausanias, ix. 26. Nor are the cases of Herakles and Kleostratos the only cases in antiquity of what I may call combat with a dragon from the inside. In the Vatican Museum is a beautiful Attic vase found at Caere, and probably imported into Etruria in the fifth century before Christ, which contains a representation of Jason vomited forth from the dragon’s maw. The hero is identified by name; and the Golden Fleece hangs on a tree in the background; while Athene, with owl and spear and Gorgon’s head, superintends the operation. The scene is reproduced by Roscher, Lexikon, s.v. Jason. This version of the story does not seem to have found its way into literature: a sample of the endless number of variants of the classical stories which have perished, or only lived on in tradition to give us at the end of the nineteenth century the chance of recovering them as märchen from the mouths of the peasantry, ere they be finally swept away by the deluge of modern civilisation.

^38.1^ Budge, Saint George, xxxii. Yet the very arm that slew the dragon is preserved at Venice (Graf, ii. Roma, 30 note), and the cave which was the dragon’s lair is shown at Beyrout! Bérenger-Féraud, Superstitions, 216, citing Thévenot.

^40.1^ Leg. Aur., lviii.

^41.1^ Rudder, 461 note, prints the notice from a MS. of the time of Henry VI. I have reproduced it verbatim et literatim in County F.L., Gloucestershire, 48.

^43.1^ Dr. Krauss, in ix. Archivio, 484, translating a Bosnian ballad obtained by him from the mouth of an orthodox peasant at Vukasovci.

^43.2^ Denton, 309; Ralston, Russian F.T., 347.

^44.1^ Georgeakis, 256.

^44.2^ G. Ragusa-Moleti, in x. Archivio, 420.

^45.1^ Baring-Gould, Curious Myths, 301. The whole essay on Saint George ought to be read as an important contribution to the subject; though the sun-myth, by which the author explains the legend, is now as thoroughly exploded as Dr. Heylin’s identification, which he combats, of the saint with the Arian bishop of Alexandria. Mr. Budge, however, says: “The Coptic text shows us clearly that the dragon which George fought and overcame was none other than the impious Dadianus, and it proves, if further proof is needed, that George the martyr and George, the opponent of Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, were two distinct persons; the fact being that Athanasius the Bishop has been confused with Athanasius the sorcerer, whom George the martyr overcame.” Budge, Saint George, xxxi. Mr. Baring-Gould, moreover, is certainly wrong in saying: “Hospinian, relating the sufferings of the martyr, affirms distinctly that his constancy was the occasion of the creation of the legend by Voragine.” Any affirmation by Hospinian on the subject would, of course, be of very little value; but all he says is that the saint’s fortitude and unshaken constancy gave occasion to the story, as it is to be read in Jacob à Voragine and Peter de Natalibus. His own interpretation is that the tale is a form under which the ancients figured the redemption of the human race. Thus, George is Christ, the Dragon is the Devil, the citizens of Silea (sic) are an image of the whole human race, a prey to the Devil, from whom the only power that can deliver them is Christ, for which we owe Him everlasting thanks and worship, etc., etc. De Festis Christianorum, sub die 23rd April. Some countenance is given to the theory of misunderstanding by a Russian song which enumerates the conquests of a fiery dragon among the saint’s trials during his prolonged martyrdom. Ralston, Songs, 232. I do not know whether this occurs elsewhere.

^46.1^ Maury, Légendes Pieuses, 144, 145.

^46.2^ i. Grässe, 460 (Story No. 502). There is a similar statue and tradition, but wanting the maiden, at Helmstedt. Voges, 194 (Story No. 165). A monument in the church at Brent Pelham is thus described by Weever in his Funerall Monuments: “In the wall of this church lieth a most ancient monument: a stone whereon is figured a man, and about him an Eagle, a Lion, and a Bull, all having wings, and a fourth of the shape of an Angell, as if they should represent the four Evangelists: under the feet of the man is a crosse fleurie, and under the crosse a serpent. He is thought to have been some time the lord of an ancient decaied house, well moated, not farre from this place, called O Piers Shoonkes. He flourished Ann. à conquestu vicesimo primo.” In effect there seems to have been a family named Shonke resident at Pelham during the Middle Ages; and there is said to be a traditional tale current concerning the person buried beneath the stone, “which represents him as having so offended the devil by killing a serpent, that his Highness threatened to secure him, whether buried within or without the walls of a church; to avoid which he was deposited in the wall itself.” Gent. Mag. Lib., v. Topography, 223, quoting Weever, Brayley, and others.

^47.1^ i. Rivista, 748. Lilies of the valley which spring from the blood of Saint Leonard, another dragon-slayer, still reveal the scenes of the saint’s combats with the dragon of Saint Leonard’s Forest in Sussex. Henderson, 300.

^49.1^ Henderson, 285, citing a communication from “Col. Johnson, whose family have long been owners of a portion of the Pollard lands.” A similar legend accounts for the armorial bearings of the town of Bradford. ii. Parkinson, 165. Compare, too, the tenure of the manor of Sockburn, also in the bishopric of Durham. Henderson, 284.

^50.1^ Kuno Meyer, in i. Arch. Rev., 303, translating the saga; MacInnes, 477. See also Rhys, Hibbert Lectures, 595.

^51.1^ Campbell, i. Circ. Notes, 326.

^53.1^ Brauns, 112. This should be compared with Campbell’s version, which is more directly from oral tradition, though probably affected by literary influences; and with Mr. Pfoundes’ version referred to further on (p. 91, note).

^54.1^ The Ancient and Present State of Gloucestershire, by Sir Robert Atkyns, knight, 2nd edition, London, 1768 (the original edition bears date 1712), 202; A New History of Gloucestershire, Cirencester: printed by Samuel Rudder (1779), 402. I quote Rudder. Atkyns, who neither describes the ancient nor any other state of Gloucestershire, omits the detail of the milk.

^55.1^ Readers who are unacquainted with this interesting church will pardon my mentioning that, among other curious relics of the past, it preserves the arrangement of seats around the Communion Table in the chancel, which was introduced after the Reformation, but which the reaction under Laud and at the Restoration in most cases destroyed. The Rev. George Butterworth, who was incumbent until three or four years ago, and who has written an excellent little book upon Deerhurst, kept with reverent care in its ancient situation the carved oaken Communion Table. But his successor has removed it as lumber to the north aisle, and replaced it by a brand-new deal altar and super-altar, with all the gewgaws of the present ecclesiastical fashion, to the disgust of his parishioners and of every one who values historical remains. It will hardly be believed that this gentleman bears the name and claims the blood of the antiquary Lysons. Is it not time that the nation took over every church with any pretensions to the character of an historical monument, and forbade under heavy penalties the injuries lately, and still, wrought all over England by fussy parsons and over-zealous architects? Or are we to wait until every genuine record of the past has been effaced?

^56.1^ Ante, p. 16, note; i. Henderson, 298, 292, 296.

^56.2^ i. Cosquin, 75, citing ii. Orient und Occident, 753.

^57.1^ Plowden, 84. The story of Menelek is interesting but irrelevant here. The name of the king’s daughter in the Bosnian ballad cited above (p. 41) is a curious coincidence, if it be nothing more.

^58.1^ Mage, 672. A similar story is told in Senegambia. Bérenger-Féraud, Sénég., 185.

^59.1^ Leg. Aur., xciii. Such tales are told of several female saints. M. Maury mentions Saint Martha, Saint Veneranda and Saint Radegund. Saint Veneranda or Venera (Venus?) is a saint held in high honour in Sicily and Southern Italy. Her legend is given by Wirth, 24.

^60.1^ ii. Grässe, 29, citing Müller, Siegburg und der Siegkreis.

^62.1^ Dennys, 110, quoting translation by W. F. Mayers in i. N. and Q. on China and Japan, 148.

^63.1^ i. Leg. Panjâb, 17; Steel, 258. Compare the märchen related, ante, p. 30. The legend seems to be localised at Poo in the Sutlej valley. Mrs. Murray-Aynsley, in iii. Rev. Trad. Pop., 431.

^63.2^ Saxo, 302; Elton’s version, 364.

^64.1^ Liebrecht, 66, referring to the Saga and some other sources given by Uhland.

^64.2^ Some of these omissions, but not all, are indicated by Prof. York Powell, Elton’s version, xcii.

^65.1^ i. Blätt. f. Pomm. Volksk., 4, citing Dr. Zechlin, who gives it from the narration of a fisherman.

^65.2^ Science of Fairy Tales, 235. M. Teirlinck refers to several dragon-stories current in Flanders, whereof some at least belong to the Enchanted Princess group. The others would seem to be Rescue tales. But he gives no details. i. Teirlinck, 147.

Chapter XVIII Notes

^69.1^ De Iside, 31.

^70.1^ Zélie Colvile, in cliii. Blackwood’s Mag., 375 (March 1893).

^70.2^ ii. Journ. Ind. Arch., 174, translating Tijds. v. Neerl. Ind., 9th Jaarg., 10th Afl.

^70.3^ Dr. Tylor’s Presidential Address in xxi. Journ. Anthr. Inst., 408.

^71.1^ i. Schouten, 115. The islanders were grievously offended when the travellers caught any crocodiles, and attempted to prevent them from doing so. Compare a Tupi custom which, if accurately reported, looks like human sacrifice. Featherman, Chiapo-Mar., 346. I do not feel at liberty to do more than call attention to it here.

^71.2^ ii. Gray, 306.

^72.1^ Ellis, i. Pol. Res., 358, 357.

^72.2^ Plut. Parallels, 35.

^72.3^ Pausanias, viii. 2. See Mr. Lang’s comments, ii. Myth, R. and R., 177. Another Greek vestige of human sacrifice to a bestial god seems to be the ceremony in the temple of Artemis Tauropolos at Halæ, in which blood was drawn from a man’s throat by the edge of a sword. See Lang, ii. Myth, R. and R., 216.

^73.1^ Ellis, Land of Fetish, 122.

^74.1^ ix. Rev. Trad. Pop., 76, quoting Abel Rémusat, Histoire de la ville de Khotan.

^75.1^ ii. N. Ind. N. and Q., 27, quoting Cunningham, Archæol. Rep.

^75.2^ Such legends are common in certain parts of Europe. See Science of F. T., ch. ix., where I have examined a number of them.

^76.1^ Crooke, 297. Compare the legend of the canal of Chamba, iv. Ind. N. and Q., 12; Science of F. T., 82.

^76.2^ Plutarch, Rivers, i.; Crooke, 296.

^77.1^ Frazer, i. Golden Bough, 276, citing Major Temple in xi. Ind. Ant., 297.

^77.2^ Crooke, 295, 297. This belief, Mr. Crooke points out, is among the difficulties constantly recurring at the census. Eusebius tells a curious tale of a victim thrown into a certain spring at Cæsarea Philippi, on the occasion of a festival, and disappearing by the power of the demon, until one day Astyrius, a Roman senator who had been converted to Christianity, was present at the rite and put an end to the pagan miracle by his prayers. But it does not appear that the victim was human. Eusebius, vii. 17.

^78.1^ Matilda C. Stevenson, in Mem. Cong. Anthrop., Chicago, 316.

^78.2^ Ovid, Fasti, v. 621; Dion. Halicarn. i. 38; Lactantius, Inst., i. 12. See Mannhardt, ii. Wald- und Feld-kulte, 265; and Jevons, Plut. R. Q., lxxxi. With the Vestal Virgins were joined in the performance of the rite the Pontifices, the Prætors, and certain other of the citizens; but probably they only assisted in the sense of being present and performing some of the subordinate ceremonies.