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One day there was a crowd of candidates for baptism; each one of them was, as usual, dressed in white, as emblematic of purity. This symbolic dress, made of a suitable material, was a present from the Church to the neophyte, which he had carefully to preserve as an evidence of his conversion.
Now, on that day, all the available robes had been given away, when one more candidate for baptism presented himself; the priest found at last a robe of light color, but unfortunately in wretched condition.
“What do you mean?” exclaimed the neophyte, angrily drawing back; “have I not a right to claim a white robe as well as the others, and one of fine wool?” and looking furiously at the priest he added: “Do you think I am a man to be takenin? This is the twentieth time that I am baptized, and I have never been offered such rags before!”
The naïve candor of this good Teuton could make me almost believe that he misunderstood the nature of the ceremony altogether, and looked upon it only as a gratuitous distribution of wearing apparel.
Other more painful mistakes were made when the Christian missionaries, crossing rivers and seas at the risk of their lives, went to the uttermost confines of Germany, and there encountered half savage nations who were still worshipping the Scandinavian gods.
The patient zeal, the gentleness, and the eloquence of these holy men, succeeded finally in overcoming the convictions of these barbarians, and in introducing among them not only the Gospel, but also the worship of saints. The people received baptism, and not only welcomed the saints with great eagerness and enthusiasm, but in their desire to do them all the honor in their power, they hastened to turn every one of them into a god! They erected altars to these new gods, and on these altars they offered them human sacrifices.
These same missionaries had been instructed to prohibit the use of horseflesh among the new converts; but they found it very difficult to overcome a custom which at that time was very general.We can hardly, at the present day, understand the importance which the Church attached to this abstinence, since now-a-days the best of people are perfectly willing to allow their horses to be taken from their stables for the purpose of being served up at table!
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The most serious difficulty in all such critical periods is this, that while the true and faithful clergymen by their prodigious labors and admirable self-devotion succeeded in converting and disciplining great multitudes, false priests appeared among them, taking forcible possession of parishes and bishoprics, often without waiting till they became vacant. Pepin of Heristal and Charles Martel, his son, had just compelled the pagan Saxons to take refuge behind the Weser. When the war was over and they proceeded to dismiss the commanders ofthis numerous army till the beginning of another campaign, as was the custom in those days, the majority among them claimed, as a reward for services rendered, the right to exchange the sword for the crozier and the helmet for the mitre. They evidently thought that the profession was an easy one to practice and rich in rewards.
Pepin and Charles resisted, but they had to give way.
To the great disgust of the newly converted populations and to the great injury of the holy cause, which they professed to have served, these warrior-priests brought with them into the Church the manners of the camp and the fortress. They surrounded themselves with squires, falconers, and riding-masters, with horses and hounds; they hawked, they hunted, they lived high, giving themselves up to all kinds of excesses, and drawing the sword against any one who should venture to reproach them.
When war began once more, they almost all returned to arms, without, on that account renouncing their ecclesiastic duties. Gerold, Bishop of Mayence, perished in a battle against the Saxons; his son succeeded him on the episcopal throne, and had hardly been consecrated when he proceeded to avenge his father. He rushes into battle, challenges Gerold’s murderer, kills him, and quietly returns toMayence for the purpose of officiating there at Mass and of returning thanks to God for his success.
Such acts of violence and such worldly enjoyments were incomprehensible to the faithful; gradually the Church of the Apostles began to fear the Church of the Soldiers. The Saxons, having vastly increased their numbers by an alliance with the Scythians and Scandinavians, appeared once more in the field.
“But,” exclaims the reader, whom I fancy I hear at this distance, “but this is history, church history moreover, and you told us you would tell us all about gods!”
I confess I did, sir; and that is the reason why I have traced out, on this historical ground, the narrowest and shortest possible path, on which I can safely return to my own domain.
“Well, then, let us return, my good friend.”
I beg your pardon, sir, but before we return, allow me at least to glorify three men, who were called upon at that time to save Christianity, and with it civilization, by the pen, the word, and the sword. These equally great and equally heroic men are now three of our saints.
“Saints again!”
Yes, sir, the first is Pope Gregory, the second Saint Boniface the missionary, and the third the Emperor Charlemagne. Do not be afraid; I shalldo no more than mention them, for fear of going again out of my way and of speaking of forbidden subjects, against which you have warned me. Allow me, however, to add that if the struggle which the great Emperor undertook, was a long and ter-tible one, it was also glorious far beyond all. Was it not marvelous, I ask you, to see this nation of Franks, which but just now consisted of a mixture of barbarians, go forth under the command of their young king, to become the protector of Rome, of civilization, and of Christianity? The mace had become a shield, the siege-ram a wall and a rampart.
“Of course! Everybody knows that!”
But, did you know this, sir: When the Saxons, conquered for the tenth time, had received baptism, together with their king Witikind, when the Rhine, also baptized, had become a French river and a Christian river, when the whole of Germany bowed low before the cross, one of the nations of that country, the Borussians (Pruszi, or Prussians), refused to give up their old gods, and continued to refuse for several centuries to come? And yet it was so. The proscribed gods, finding a refuge on the banks of the Oder and the Spree, paid frequent visits, as was quite natural, to their former followers. It was thus that the old pagan creed was long preserved in the remote regions of Germany. You see, sir, I have returned to my subject.Let us rapidly conclude this first part of our task, so as to reach at last the modern gods, who were as popular as the others, and in their way neither less strange nor less curious.
During the time of the Middle Ages, Germany had been filling up with towns and castles, feudal dungeons bearing aloft a helmet and a cross. The cross arose wherever two streets met in a city and at every cross-road in the country; the most beautiful cathedrals in the world and the most magnificent monasteries were reflected in her broad river; and still, in field and forest, in city and country, and along the banks of the Rhine, the false gods were worshipped in secret.
As the church taught that they were to be looked upon as demons, the people dared not treat them badly. Demons are not guests to be turned out rudely.
“From the eighth century of our Christian era,” says one of our erudite authorities, “the Saxons and Sarmatians heard the Christian missionaries speak so continually of the formidable power of Satan, that they thought it best to worship him secretly in order to disarm his wrath and perhaps to win his favor. They called him the Black God orTybilinus; the Germans call him, even now,Dibel or Teufel.”
This Black God now became for all the Germannations the army leader of their proscribed gods, an army which was presently to be largely increased.
The princes and knights, followed by their vassals, departed in large numbers, on the Crusades, but they brought back from the Crusades, together with holy relics, traditions of Gnomes, Peris, and Undines.
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The Rhine, disgusted at the loss of his royal dignity, and determined to take his vengeance on the warrior-bishops, received these last arrivals as he had those who came before. In his healing waters the Undines mingled with the Tritons and the Naiads; the Gnomes found shelter under the rocks, where they were hospitably received by the Dwarfs, and in the evening twilight the Nymphs, the Elves, and the Dryads danced once more merrily in company with Sylphs, Fairies, and Peris.
No doubt Christian Germany looked afterwards at all this more in the light of food for the imagination than of trouble for the conscience, but in that happy land, where people believe and dreamat the same time, and where the words of the poet are as true as the Gospel, the imagination easily gets the better of conscience. Thus the search after the little blue flower led many a learned man astray, far off into half satanic paths. Besides, it lies in the nature of the German mind, which has always a tendency towards idealism, its magnetic pole, to oppose to the orthodox religion another more secret and more mysterious creed.
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This was the case already in the fourteenth andfifteenth century; it is the case still in this, the nineteenth century, especially among the country people, who have passed through the age of witchcraft in which the Black God ruled supreme, and, completely modifying their pagan notions, have transferred their Olympus to the Brocken, the mountain of the Witches’ Sabbath.
Let us now see what the dwellers on the banks of the Rhine have done with all their old gods and demi-gods of every denomination.
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Elementary Spirits of Air, Fire, and Water.—Sylphs, their Amusements and Domestic Arrangements.—Little Queen Mab. —Will-o’-the-Wisps.—White Elves and Black Elves.—True Causes of Natural Somnambulism.—The Wind’s Betrothed.—Fire-damp.—Master Haemmerling.—The Last of the Gnomes.
The reader is requested to recall what I have said before, that in Germany manners, customs, and creeds, matters of prejudice as well as matters of art, and even of science, may have a beginning,but never have an end. In that ancient home of mysticism and of philosophy, everything is permanently rooted, everything is made for eternity, like those old oak trees of the Hercynia of antiquity: when the parent tree is cut down, and has no longer a trunk to bear boughs and branches, it sends forth new shoots from the roots. Druidism also has become permanent there. We have seen it fight against the gods of the Romans; it fought in like manner against Christianity under Witikind; it was kept alive, though in concealment, by the first iconoclasts or image breakers, and when that whole vast country was at last conquered and became wholly devoted to Catholicism, it broke forth once more quite unexpectedly in the first days of the Reformation. Luther was a Druid still.
Thanks to this tenacity of life which characterizes creeds, and thanks to the prolific nature of that soil, whatever seems to have disappeared, rises again, under new forms, and whatever has perished is recalled to life in some way or other. Let us prove this.
Among all those gods which we have mentioned before, none surely would seem to have been more readily forgotten, swept away by the wind, which they claimed to render useless, or buried in the dust with which they seemed to compete, than those tiny, microscopic deities, called Monads.And yet this was by no means the case. Did they not, in fact, represent the elementary spirits? And the worship of the elements continued in spite of all other creeds which tried to suppress it forever.
Only these atomic deities, still quite small, exceedingly small, had increased in the most astonishing manner, when compared with their original diminutiveness. They had even assumed a form and a body, a visible body and a shape by no means void of grace.
They had become Alps or Alfs, better known afterwards under their Eastern designation of Sylphs.
It happened occasionally that a belated traveller, a peasant or a charcoal burner, returning homeward from a wedding towards the beginning of night, would be fortunate enough to meet at a clearing in the woods or on the banks of a brook with a band of little goblins, who were making merry in the dim twilight.
These were Sylphs, a little people flying in swarms through the air, making their nest in a flower or building one with a few bits of grass at the foot of a broom-sedge, and going out only in the evening to pay visits and as good neighbors to perform their social duties.
If the traveller, the peasant, or the charcoal burnerhad walked softly on the fine sand of the brook or on a grass-grown path on which his steps could not be heard, and if he had then stopped in time so as to be able to see without being seen, he might witness their gambols and ascertain the secrets of their private life, without running any risk.
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Have you, dear reader, have you heard Mercutio, in Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” relate how Queen Mab came, and say:—
“Oh, then, I see, Queen Mab hath been with you.....Her wagon spokes made of long spinners’ legs,The cover of the wings of grasshoppers,The traces of the smallest spider’s web,The collars of the moonshine’s watery beams,Her whip of cricket’s bone, the lash of film,Her wagoner, a small, gray-coated gnat!”
Well, the peasant, the traveller, or the charcoal burner, enjoyed a sight which was by no means less curious.
Some of his Sylphs, suspending a thread of gossamer from one blade of grass to another, made a delightful swing for their amusement, or took a spiders web to supply them with a hammock. Others danced wildly about in the air, beating their tiny wings with harmonious accuracy and furnishing thus an orchestra for the aerial ball.
Not far from them some little sylph ladies, no doubt excellent housekeepers, were washing their linen in the beams of the moon, or preparing a feast.
The provisions consisted of a mixture of honey with the nectar of flowers, a few drops of milk which the hanging udders of young heifers had left on the high grass, and a few pearls of that precious dew which aromatic plants secrete; this mixture was used as a seasoning for some butterfly-eggs beaten up white as snow.
If during the repast darkness fell upon them andsuddenly covered the guests with its sombre cloak, other hobgoblins, the Will-o’-the-Wisps, with wings of fire, came and took seats at the hospitable table, paying for their entertainment by diffusing a pleasant light all over the place.
The principal occupation of these elves consisted in walking before the wanderer who had lost his way so as to lead him back again into the right path.
Such were some of the harmless spirits of Air and Fire. Everything has, however, been changed in these two elements. The Will-o’-the-Wisps especially, angry at the reports of wicked people, that they are nothing more than the products of burning hydrogen, or at best phosphorus in a volatile form floating above damp places, have conceived a veritable hatred against men and now only appear when they wish to tempt travellers into marshes and deep ravines.
As to the Sylphs, they also seem to have heard similar stories which have been told about them, or they may have been irritated by the chemist Liebig, who in his “Treatise on the Composition of the Air,” absolutely denies their existence, having found in his apparatus neither Sylphs nor Sylphides.
They have changed into faithless Elves, hostile to men, like the other Gnomes.
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The Fairies of our day are divided into two formidable classes.
The White Fairies are damsels who wander about on meadows and in woods, like the Willis of the Slaves, and lie in wait for inexperienced young men, whom they persuade to join in their dances and keep dancing, till they lose their breath and generally fall to the ground never to rise again. German stories are full of such wicked tricks. The place where they perform their diabolic dances, becomes quite silvery under their feet. The shepherds can thus at once recognize the place where they have been, and are sure to hasten away at once with their flocks.
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The Black Fairies personify Nightmare and Somnambulism, but only Natural Somnambulism, it must be borne in mind.When men fall into this state, the Black Elf directs all the motions of the sleeper; he lives in him, thinks and acts for him, makes him get upon the furniture and climb upon roofs, and keeps him from falling, unless... Poor sleeper, he allowed them breath enough to swell the sails of a vessel or to chase the clouds from one end of the heavens to another.
Among the Celts all magicians had been able to command the winds and the tempests at will; even now certain men in Norway and in Lapland will sell you, for a small price, the wind you desire to carry you home.
Careful! The Black Fairies are treacherous and cruel; the Fairy who controls you for the moment may at any moment take a fancy to throw you from your height.
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The Alfs, who have thus become Elves or Fairies, are of course not the only Spirits of the Air; their fragile and delicate structure would never have been inGermany, on the contrary, the wind was looked upon as an elementary power. It was not deified, as in Rome, where there was a whole windy family of gods, like Eurus, Æolus, Boreas, and Favonius, but it was an important personage, with a will of his own and independent action. The poets did their part to give importance toMaster Wind.
I have in my hand a ballad, which will enable the reader to judge for himself:—
“Gretchen, the pretty miller’s daughter, was courted by the son of the king. Her father, the miller, knowing that kings’ sons are not apt to marry, had chosen her a husband, a young flour merchant from Rotterdam.
“The Dutchman was on his way up the Rhine; that very evening he was expected to arrive, to make his proposals.
“Gretchen called upon Master Wind to help her; he came in by the window, but not without breaking a number of panes.
“‘What do you wish me to do?’
“‘A man wants to marry me, against my will; he is coming in a sail boat; contrive it so that he cannot land at Bingen.’
“The wind blew, and blew so well that the boat, instead of coming up to Bingen, was driven back again as far as Rotterdam."At Rotterdam also it could not make land; it was driven into the North Sea, and there the Dutchman is perhaps still sailing about at this day.
“But Master Wind had made his conditions before he went to work blowing so well; and the pretty miller’s daughter had agreed to them without hearing them, for all around her the furniture, the doors, and the blinds were shaking and rattling furiously, thanks to her visitor. Thus it came about that poor Gretchen found herself betrothed to Master Wind, which made her very sad, for now she had less hope than ever of marrying the king’s son.
“However, Master Wind was as gallant towards his fair betrothed as he could be. Every morning, when she opened her window, he would throw her in beautiful bouquets of flowers which he had torn off in the neighboring gardens.
“If any young man of the village, whom she had rejected, passed without saluting her, Master Wind was promptly at hand to carry off his hat and send it up in the air so high, that soon it looked no bigger than a lark. It was well for him that Master Wind did not, with the hat, take his head off at the same time.
“One day (when Master Wind must have been asleep), the king’s son came to the mill, made hisway without difficulty to Gretchen’s chamber, and forthwith desired to kiss her. Gretchen did not object. But at once, and although out of doors all was quiet, the tables and chairs performed a wild dance, and the doors and windows began to slam as if they had been mad.
“Gretchen herself began to twirl around and around in the most unaccountable manner; her hair was loosened by an invisible hand and whisked about her head with strange rustling and dismal whistling.
“Terrified by the sight of a tempest in a close room, the prince cried:—
“‘Ah! accursed one, you are the betrothed of Master Wind!’
“And at the same moment a terrible gust of wind carried off the king’s son, the miller’s daughter, and the mill, and no one ever saw or heard anything more of them.
“Perhaps they went to join the Dutchman, who was all the time sailing about in the North Sea, or the hat, which was still on its way in the clouds.”
The legend does not tell us whether it was before or after this occurrence that Master Wind married Mistress Rain.
So much for the Spirits of the Air.
As for the Spirits of the Fire, it must be rememberedthat the Will-o’-the-Wisps were by no means their only representatives. There were also Salamanders, too well known to be described here; and St. Elmo Fires, near relations of the Will-o’-the-Wisps. But we must pause a moment to speak of the formidable Fire-damp, the miner’s terror. The remarkable feature about it is that it plays so insignificant a part in the popular German myths, although it has destroyed so many victims in all mountainous countries, and above all in the Hartz mountains.
This subterranean lightning, far more fatal than that of the upper regions, is known to the people of the Rhine simply as a tall monk, whom they call Master Haemmerling.
Master Haemmerling visits the mines from time to time in the guise of a harmless amateur, or of an inspector, who is not fond of being hurried. However, on Fridays especially, he is subject to violent attacks of anger. If a laborer handles his pickaxe awkwardly, or if he is insolent to his master, or the master harsh to him and requiring too much, he is, quick as a flash of lightning, between them when they are as yet half way under ground. Then he suddenly draws his long legs together, and between his two knees crushes their heads with as little hesitation and ceremony as a mother would show in destroying between her two thumbs thelittle hateful insect that has troubled her darling child.
Nothing more need be said of the elementary spirits of Air and Fire; but as we have followed Master Haemmerling into the lower depths of the mountains, we might just as well remain there a while and make the acquaintance of the Gnomes, the Spirits of the Earth.
Can you see, through the dense air which fills these immense caverns, the long, gigantic stalactites, reaching from the ceiling to the floor and strongly impregnated with iron? They are the columns of this subterranean palace, and around these stalactites, peaceful, slumbering waters form a kind of little lakes, the shores of which look as if they were covered with rust.
Here and there, in the damp low grounds, half choked with ore and slag of various kinds, dark reeds are growing in the shape of lizards; like lizards they bend backwards, moving their heads from side to side and showing thus the diamond eye which shines brilliantly at the extreme end.
These dark depths seem to teem with fantastic creatures; close by a heap of grains of gold, stands immovable a watchful, silent guardian, a griffin; a pack of black dogs, also guardians of the treasures hid in this world of precious metals andstones, are roaming incessantly along the ceiling. On the sloping sides, dwarfs not larger than grasshoppers, and jumping about like peas in the sieve of the winnower, are gathering right and left the tiny gold and silver spangles which are left at their disposal, while enormous toads are posted about as watchmen.
Finally, far back in the remotest part of these abysses the kings of this empire are moving about; these thick-set men, with stout limbs and monstrous heads, are the Gnomes.
But people hardly believe in Gnomes any longer; the hard-working miners who ought to come every day in contact with them, deny their existence, and they have gradually passed into the class of fabulous beings.
Still, I am told that as recently as last year, a pretty peasant girl from the neighborhood of Hamburg appeared on a certain evening at a ball, with a large ruby on her finger. She professed to have received this gem from an Earth Spirit, who had appeared to her at the entrance to the Faunus mines.
The gossips of the village were not satisfied, however, with the account, and suspected the Gnome to have been an English Gnome, who was travelling abroad for his health and courting pretty girls for his amusement. This convictionwas so strong that the poor girl had to leave the country in disgrace.
This is the last Gnome that has been mentioned in that part of Germany.
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Elementary Spirits of the Water.—Petrarch at Cologne.—Divine Judgment by Water.—Nixen and Undines.—A Furlough till Ten o’clock.—The White-footed Undine.—Mysteries on the Rhine.—The Court of the Great Nichus.—Nix-COBT, the Messenger of the Dead.—His Funny Tricks.—I go in Search of an Undine.
After leaving Aix-la-Chapelle, I had stopped at Cologne, on the left bank of the Rhine, which I then found completely covered with several rows of women, a countless and charming multitude....
“Adorned with flowers or aromatic herbs, the sleevespushed up above the elbow, they dipped their soft white hands and arms into the river, murmuring certain mysterious words which I could not understand.
“I questioned some people. They told me it was an ancient custom of the country. Thanks to these ablutions and certain prayers which accompanied them, the river carried down with it all the diseases, which would otherwise have attacked them during the coming year. I answered, smilingly: ‘How happy the people of the Rhine must be if the kind river thus takes all their sufferings to distant countries! The Po or the Tiber have never been able to do as much for us.’”
These are the words which Petrarch wrote in one of his familiar letters, written on St. John’s Eve.
This letter, as precious by its date as by its contents, proves beyond all question, that in the fourteenth century the Rhine was popularly worshipped and adored on the very days on which the summer solstice is celebrated by bonfires after the manner of the old fire worshippers.
Unfortunately the Christians ended by appealing to the elements, to Fire or Water, as to a judicial authority.
The popular notion that the elements were perfectly pure and would hence instinctively reject every impure substance, led naturally to ordealsby water. The accused was undressed; his hands and feet were tied crosswise, the right hand to the left foot and the right foot to the left hand, and thus bound he was thrown into a river or any watercourse that was deep enough. If he floated, he was guilty and instantly burnt; if he sank and remained for some time at the bottom of the water, he was considered innocent—but he was drowned.
Heinrich Heine, at least, tells us that this was the infallible result of justice in the Middle Ages, and the Middle Ages ended in Germany but yesterday.
There was also a trial by bread and cheese (exorcismus panis hordeacei, vel casei, ad probationem veri), but bread and cheese are not elements. Let us return to the elementary spirits of Water.
During the great religious reaction which took place after the days of Charlemagne, all the mythological gods of rivers and streams had gradually returned, more or less successfully, to their former occupations. The great Nix or Nichus, upon whom devolved the rule over all the rivers of Germany, was no other than the ancient Niord, a very important deity and a kind of Northern Neptune. This very weighty discovery is due to the learned Mallet.
No doubt this god Niord was one of those who, on their disastrous flight from Argentoratum, hadfallen into the Rhine. They thought that he was drowned, but he had only taken refuge in one of the lowest, almost unfathomable depths of the river. From this safe retreat the great Nichus had defied the decrees of Councils and the anathemas of the Christians hurled against all elementary spirits alike; there he had summoned the subaltern deities of sources, ponds, lakes, and smaller streams, the nymphs of the banks, and the hideous, scaly monsters which swarmed at the bottom of the river. Organizing all these into a people, an escort, and an army, he had come forth and invaded at the head of his host the banks of the Neckar and the Main, the Moselle and the Meuse, the great tributaries of the Rhine, and governed the inhabitants of the banks by terror. More than once he had extended his ravages far beyond the plains, overthrowing churches that had but just been completed, and drowning in his waters all the deserters from the altars of Odin.
Niord was a wicked god, who had a fearful temper. He held his subjects, to whatever class they might belong, completely under his yoke, treating them capriciously and cruelly, and making of the Rhine a hell of waters.
It is to this dark and damp kingdom of the great Nichus that we have to go in order to make the acquaintance, not of his great dignitaries, butof the very humblest and lowest of his subjects, the Nixen and the male and female Undines, a race of anathematized demons, who make up, by themselves, almost the whole population of this realm beneath the waters of the Rhine.
What! Must we really count our beautiful Lore, the charming fairy Lorelei, you who preferred death to the punishment of making all men fall in love with you, much as you loved men in general, must we count you among the demons, evildoing and accursed sprites? No! How public opinion has stoutly held its own in defiance of all the decrees of the Church. Nixen, like the Fairies, are by common consent divided into two classes: Nixen proper, who are former pagan deities and not too much to be dreaded, and female Nixen, almost always harmless and at times even useful.
It is these latter only of whom we shall hereafter speak as Undines.
The Nixen of the first class are ever ready to assume any disguise that may aid them in attaining their purpose. Some of them roam about in deserted places near the banks of rivers; others have at times appeared in the neighboring towns, pretending to be foreign ladies of distinction, or artists, generally great performers on the harp. Here they have begun intrigues with credulous lovers or unlucky admirers. Others appear at villagecelebrations, mingling in the dance with such energy, that their partners are intoxicated, carried away, and, losing their heads, think they continue to hear the sound of harps and violins, while they are already far away, led on by imaginary music, and only return to consciousness on the banks of the river, at the moment when they are about to sink helpless into the waters of the Rhine.
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One important point, however, must not be overlooked. To protect one’s self against the allurements of these accursed fairies, a bit of horehound or marjoram is sufficient. We hope all who propose visiting the Rhine will be careful always to keep such an herb on their person. Before they take out their passports they ought always to pay a visit to an herbalist.
The second class of Nixen, the only one in which we are interested, the Undines, are, as far as I have been able to learn, the restless souls ofpoor girls who, driven to despair by love, have thrown themselves into the Rhine. Unfortunately German lovers, not very courageous at best, are but too apt to seek relief in suicide.
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According to the somewhat uncertain information for which I am indebted to my authorities or to my intercourse with the Rosahl family, the Undinesare born as human beings and very inferior in power to the genuine Nixen. They live under the water exactly the same time they would have lived on earth, if they had not voluntarily put an end to their existence. They are thus granted a kind of exceptional resurrection and have here a preliminary purgatory, in which they but too frequently expiate, if not the sin of their love, at least that of their death.
In the lowest depths of the river, at the bottom of vast, submerged grottoes, a secret tribunal, presided over by the great Nichus, holds its solemn meetings. Here they are disciplined with the utmost severity, as is abundantly proven by a great number of terrible stories, such as the account of the three Undines of Sinzheim, which the two brothers Grimm report in their great work.
Three young girls of marvelous beauty, three sisters, appeared every evening at the social meetings of Epfenbach, near Sinzheim and took their seats among the linen-spinners. They brought new songs and merry stories which no one had heard before. Where did they come from? No one knew, and no one dared to ask for fear of appearing suspicious. They were the delight of these meetings, but as soon as the clock struck ten they rose, and neither prayers nor supplications could induce them to stay a moment longer.One evening the schoolmaster’s son, who had fallen in love with one of them, undertook to prevent their departure at the usual hour; he put back the wooden clock, which usually gave them warning.