‘Would you know Al? she seems a blushing maid,With locks of flame and cheeks all rosy red.’[381]
‘Would you know Al? she seems a blushing maid,With locks of flame and cheeks all rosy red.’[381]
‘Would you know Al? she seems a blushing maid,With locks of flame and cheeks all rosy red.’[381]
‘Would you know Al? she seems a blushing maid,
With locks of flame and cheeks all rosy red.’[381]
It is with this deep old spiritualistic belief clearly in view that the ghastly tales are to be read where pestilence and death come on their errand in weird human shape. To the mind of the Israelite, death and pestilence took the personal form of the destroying angel who smote the doomed.[382]When the great plague raged in Justinian’s time, men saw on the sea brazen barks whose crews were black and headless men, and where they landed, the pestilence broke out.[383]When the plague fell on Rome in Gregory’s time, the saint rising from prayer saw Michael standing with his bloody sword on Hadrian’s castle—the archangel stands there yet in bronze, giving the old fort its newer name of the Castle ofSt.Angelo. Among a whole group of stories of the pestilence seen in personal shape travelling to and fro in the land, perhaps there is none more vivid than this Slavonic one. ‘There sat a Russian under a larch-tree, and the sunshine glared like fire. He saw something coming from afar; he looked again—it was the Pest-maiden, huge of stature, all shrouded in linen, striding towards him. He would have fled in terror, but the form grasped him with her long outstretched hand. “Knowest thou the Pest?” she said; “I am she. Take me on thy shoulders and carry me through all Russia; miss no village, no town, for I must visit all. But fear not for thyself, thou shalt be safe amid the dying.” Clinging with her long hands, she clambered on the peasant’s back; he stepped onward, saw the form above him as he went, but felt no burden. First he bore her to the towns; they found there joyous dance and song; but the form waved her linen shroud, and joy and mirth were gone. As the wretched man looked round, he saw mourning, he heard the tolling of the bells, there came funeral processions, the graves could not hold the dead. He passed on, and coming near each village heard the shriek of the dying, saw all faces white in the desolate houses. But high on the hill stands his own hamlet: his wife, his little children are there, and the aged parents, and his heart bleeds as he draws near. With strong gripe he holds the maiden fast, and plunges with her beneath the waves. He sank: she rose again, but she quailed before a heart so fearless, and fled far away to the forest and the mountain.’[384]
Yet, if mythology be surveyed in a more comprehensive view, it is seen that its animistic development falls within a broader generalization still. The explanation of the course and change of nature, as caused by life such as the life of the thinking man who gazes on it, is but a part of a far wider mental process. It belongs to that great doctrine ofanalogy, from which we have gained so much of our apprehension of the world around us. Distrusted as it now is by severer science for its misleading results, analogy is still to us a chief means of discovery and illustration, while in earlier grades of education its influence was all but paramount. Analogies which are but fancy to us were to men of past ages reality. They could see the flame licking its yet undevoured prey with tongues of fire, or the serpent gliding along the waving sword from hilt to point; they could feel a live creature gnawing within their bodies in the pangs of hunger; they heard the voices of the hill-dwarfs answering in the echo, and the chariot of the Heaven-god rattling in thunder over the solid firmament. Men to whom these were living thoughts had no need of the schoolmaster and his rules of composition, his injunctions to use metaphor cautiously, and to take continual care to make all similes consistent. The similes of the old bards and orators were consistent, because they seemed to see and hear and feel them: what we call poetry was to them real life, not as to the modern versemaker a masquerade of gods and heroes, shepherds and shepherdesses, stage heroines and philosophic savages in paint and feathers. It was with a far deeper consciousness that the circumstance of nature was worked out in endless imaginative detail in ancient days and among uncultured races.
Upon the sky above the hill-country of Orissa, Pidzu Pennu, the Rain-god of the Khonds, rests as he pours down the showers through his sieve.[385]Over Peru there stands a princess with a vase of rain, and when her brother strikes the pitcher, men hear the shock in thunder and see the flash in lightning.[386]To the old Greeks the rainbow seemed stretched down by Jove from heaven, a purple sign of war and tempest, or it was the personal Iris, messenger between gods and men.[387]To the South Sea Islander it was theheaven-ladder where heroes of old climbed up and down;[388]and so to the Scandinavian it was Bifröst, the trembling bridge, timbered of three hues and stretched from sky to earth; while in German folk-lore it is the bridge where the souls of the just are led by their guardian angels across to paradise.[389]As the Israelite called it the bow of Jehovah in the clouds, it is to the Hindu the bow of Rama,[390]and to the Finn the bow of Tiermes the Thunderer, who slays with it the sorcerers that hunt after men’s lives;[391]it is imagined, moreover, as a gold-embroidered scarf, a head-dress of feathers,St.Bernard’s crown, or the sickle of an Esthonian deity.[392]And yet through all such endless varieties of mythic conception, there runs one main principle, the evident suggestion and analogy of nature. It has been said of the savages of North America, that ‘there is always something actual and physical to ground an Indian fancy on.’[393]The saying goes too far, but within limits it is emphatically true, not of North American Indians alone, but of mankind.
Such resemblances as have just been displayed thrust themselves directly on the mind, without any necessary intervention of words. Deep as language lies in our mental life, the direct comparison of object with object, and action with action, lies yet deeper. The myth-maker’s mind shows forth even among the deaf-and-dumb, who work out just such analogies of nature in their wordless thought. Again and again they have been found to suppose themselves taught by their guardians to worship and pray to sun, moon, and stars, as personal creatures. Others have described their early thoughts of the heavenly bodies as analogous to things within their reach, one fancying the moon made like a dumpling and rolled over the tree-tops like a marble acrossa table, and the stars cut out with great scissors and stuck against the sky, while another supposed the moon a furnace and the stars fire-grates, which the people above the firmament light up as we kindle fires.[394]Now the mythology of mankind at large is full of conceptions of nature like these, and to assume for them no deeper original source than metaphorical phrases, would be to ignore one of the great transitions of our intellectual history.
Language, there is no doubt, has had a great share in the formation of myth. The mere fact of its individualizing in words such notions as winter and summer, cold and heat, war and peace, vice and virtue, gives the myth-maker the means of imagining these thoughts as personal beings. Language not only acts in thorough unison with the imagination whose product it expresses, but it goes on producing of itself, and thus, by the side of the mythic conceptions in which language has followed imagination, we have others in which language has led, and imagination has followed in the track. These two actions coincide too closely for their effects to be thoroughly separated, but they should be distinguished as far as possible. For myself, I am disposed to think (differing here in some measure from Professor Max Müller’s view of the subject) that the mythology of the lower races rests especially on a basis of real and sensible analogy, and that the great expansion of verbal metaphor into myth belongs to more advanced periods of civilization. In a word, I take material myth to be the primary, and verbal myth to be the secondary formation. But whether this opinion be historically sound or not, the difference in nature between myth founded on fact and myth founded on word is sufficiently manifest. The want of reality in verbal metaphor cannot be effectually hidden by the utmost stretch of imagination. In spite of this essential weakness, however, the habit of realizing everything that words can describe isone which has grown and flourished in the world. Descriptive names become personal, the notion of personality stretches to take in even the most abstract notions to which a name may be applied, and realized name, epithet, and metaphor pass into interminable mythic growths by the process which Max Müller has so aptly characterized as ‘a disease of language.’ It would be difficult indeed to define the exact thought lying at the root of every mythic conception, but in easy cases the course of formation can be quite well followed. North American tribes have personified Nipinūkhe and Pipūnūkhe, the beings who bring the spring (nipin) and the winter (pipūn); Nipinūkhe brings the heat and birds and verdure, Pipūnūkhe ravages with his cold winds, his ice and snow; one comes as the other goes, and between them they divide the world.[395]Just such personification as this furnishes the staple of endless nature-metaphor in our own European poetry. In the springtime it comes to be said that May has conquered Winter, his gate is open, he has sent letters before him to tell the fruit that he is coming, his tent is pitched, he brings the woods their summer clothing. Thus, when Night is personified, we see how it comes to pass that Day is her son, and how each in a heavenly chariot drives round the world. To minds in this mythologic stage, the Curse becomes a personal being, hovering in space till it can light upon its victim; Time and Nature arise as real entities; Fate and Fortune become personal arbiters of our lives. But at last, as the change of meaning goes on, thoughts that once had a more real sense fade into mere poetic forms of speech. We have but to compare the effect of ancient and modern personification on our own minds, to understand something of what has happened in the interval. Milton may be consistent, classical, majestic, when he tells how Sin and Death sat within the gates of hell, and how they built their bridge of length prodigious across the deep abyss to earth. Yet such descriptions leavebut scant sense of meaning on modern minds, and we are apt to say, as we might of some counterfeit bronze from Naples, ‘For a sham antique how cleverly it is done.’ Entering into the mind of the old Norseman, we guess how much more of meaning than the cleverest modern imitation can carry, lay in his pictures of Hel, the death-goddess, stern and grim and livid, dwelling in her high and strong-barred house, and keeping in her nine worlds the souls of the departed; Hunger is her dish, Famine is her knife, Care is her bed, and Misery her curtain. When such old material descriptions are transferred to modern times, in spite of all the accuracy of reproduction their spirit is quite changed. The story of the monk who displayed among his relics the garments ofSt.Faith is to us only a jest; and we call it quaint humour when Charles Lamb, falling old and infirm, once wrote to a friend, ‘My bed-fellows are Cough and Cramp; we sleep three in a bed.’ Perhaps we need not appreciate the drollery any the less for seeing in it at once a consequence and a record of a past intellectual life.
The distinction of grammatical gender is a process intimately connected with the formation of myths. Grammatical gender is of two kinds. What may be called sexual gender is familiar to all classically-educated Englishmen, though their mother tongue has mostly lost its traces. Thus in Latin not only are such words ashomoandfeminaclassed naturally as masculine and feminine, but such words aspesandgladiusare made masculine, andbigaandnavisfeminine, and the same distinction is actually drawn between such abstractions ashonosandfides. That sexless objects and ideas should thus be classed as male and female, in spite of a new gender—the neuter or ‘neither’ gender—having been defined, seems in part explained by considering this latter to have been of later formation, and the original Indo-European genders to have been only masculine and feminine, as is actually the case in Hebrew. Thoughthe practice of attributing sex to objects that have none is not easy to explain in detail, yet there seems nothing mysterious in its principles, to judge from one at least of its main ideas, which is still quite intelligible. Language makes an admirably appropriate distinction between strong and weak, stern and gentle, rough and delicate, when it contrasts them as male and female. It is possible to understand even such fancies as those which Pietro della Valle describes among the mediæval Persians, distinguishing between male and female, that is to say, practically between robust and tender, even in such things as food and cloth, air and water, and prescribing their proper use accordingly.[396]And no phrase could be more plain and forcible than that of the Dayaks of Borneo, who say of a heavy downpour of rain, ‘ujatn arai, ‘sa!’—‘aherain this!’[397]Difficult as it may be to decide how far objects and thoughts were classed in language as male and female because they were personified, and how far they were personified because they were classed as male and female, it is evident at any rate that these two processes fit together and promote each other.[398]
Moreover, in studying languages which lie beyond the range of common European scholarship, it is found that the theory of grammatical gender must be extended into a wider field. The Dravidian languages of South India make the interesting distinction between a ‘high-caste or major gender,’ which includes rational beings, i.e. deities and men, and a ‘caste-less or minor gender,’ which includes irrational objects, whether living animals or lifeless things.[399]The distinction between an animate and an inanimate gender appears with especial import in a family of North American Indian languages, the Algonquin. Here not onlydo all animals belong to the animate gender, but also the sun, moon, and stars, thunder and lightning, as being personified creatures. The animate gender, moreover, includes not only trees and fruits, but certain exceptional lifeless objects which appear to owe this distinction to their special sanctity or power; such are the stone which serves as the altar of sacrifice to the manitus, the bow, the eagle’s feather, the kettle, tobacco-pipe, drum, and wampum. Where the whole animal is animate, parts of its body considered separately may be inanimate—hand or foot, beak or wing. Yet even here, for special reasons, special objects are treated as of animate gender; such are the eagle’s talons, the bear’s claws, the beaver’s castor, the man’s nails, and other objects for which there is claimed a peculiar or mystic power.[400]If to anyone it seems surprising that savage thought should be steeped through and through in mythology, let him consider the meaning that is involved in a grammar of nature like this. Such a language is the very reflexion of a mythic world.
There is yet another way in which language and mythology can act and re-act on one another. Even we, with our blunted mythologic sense, cannot give an individual name to a lifeless object, such as a boat or a weapon, without in the very act imagining for it something of a personal nature. Among nations whose mythic conceptions have remained in full vigour, this action may be yet more vivid. Perhaps very low savages may not be apt to name their implements or their canoes as though they were live people, but races a few stages above them show the habit in perfection. Among the Zulus we hear of names for clubs, Igumgehle or Glutton, U-nothlola-mazibuko or He-who-watches-the-fords; among names for assagais are Imbubuzi or Groan-causer, U-silo-si-lambile or Hungry Leopard, and the weapon being also used as an implement, a certainassagai bears the peaceful name of U-simbela-banta-bami, He-digs-up-for-my-children.[401]A similar custom prevailed among the New Zealanders. The traditions of their ancestral migrations tell how Ngahue made from his jasper stone those two sharp axes whose names were Tutauru and Hauhau-te-rangi; how with these axes were shaped the canoes Arawa and Tainui; how the two stone anchors of Te Arawa were called Toka-parore or Wrystone, and Tu-te-rangi-haruru or Like-to-the-roaring-sky. These legends do not break off in a remote past, but carry on a chronicle which reaches into modern times. It is only lately, the Maoris say, that the famous axe Tutauru was lost, and as for the ear-ornament named Kaukau-matua, which was made from a chip of the same stone, they declare that it was not lost till 1846, when its owner, Te Heuheu, perished in a landslip.[402]Up from this savage level the same childlike habit of giving personal names to lifeless objects may be traced, as we read of Thor’s hammer, Miölnir, whom the giants know as he comes flying through the air, or of Arthur’s brand, Excalibur, caught by the arm clothed in white samite when Sir Bedivere flung him back into the lake, or of the Cid’s mighty sword Tizona, the Firebrand, whom he vowed to bury in his own breast were she overcome through cowardice of his.
The teachings of a childlike primæval philosophy ascribing personal life to nature at large, and the early tyranny of speech over the human mind, have thus been two great and, perhaps, greatest agents in mythologic development. Other causes, too, have been at work, which will be noticed in connexion with special legendary groups, and a full list, could it be drawn up, might include as contributories many other intellectual actions. It must be thoroughly understood, however, that such investigation of the processes of myth-formation demands a lively sense of the state of men’sminds in the mythologic period. When the Russians in Siberia listened to the talk of the rude Kirgis, they stood amazed at the barbarians’ ceaseless flow of poetic improvisation, and exclaimed, ‘Whatever these people see gives birth to fancies!’ Just so the civilized European may contrast his own stiff orderly prosaic thought with the wild shifting poetry and legend of the old myth-maker, and may say of him that everything he saw gave birth to fancy. Wanting the power of transporting himself into this imaginative atmosphere, the student occupied with the analysis of the mythic world may fail so pitiably in conceiving its depth and intensity of meaning, as to convert it into stupid fiction. Those can see more justly who have the poet’s gift of throwing their minds back into the world’s older life, like the actor who for a moment can forget himself and become what he pretends to be. Wordsworth, that ‘modern ancient,’ as Max Müller has so well called him, could write of Storm and Winter, or of the naked Sun climbing the sky, as though he were some Vedic poet at the head-spring of his race, ‘seeing’ with his mind’s eye a mythic hymn to Agni or Varuna. Fully to understand an old-world myth needs not evidence and argument alone, but deep poetic feeling.
Yet such of us as share but very little in this rare gift, may make shift to let evidence in some measure stand in its stead. In the poetic stage of thought we may see that ideal conceptions once shaped in the mind must have assumed some such reality to grown-up men and women as they still do to children. I have never forgotten the vividness with which, as a child, I fancied I might look through a great telescope, and see the constellations stand round the sky, red, green, and yellow, as I had just been shown them on the celestial globe. The intensity of mythic fancy may be brought even more nearly home to our minds by comparing it with the morbid subjectivity of illness. Among the lower races, and high above their level, morbid ecstasy brought on by meditation, fasting, narcotics, excitement, ordisease, is a state common and held in honour among the very classes specially concerned with mythic idealism, and under its influence the barriers between sensation and imagination break utterly away. A North American Indian prophetess once related the story of her first vision: At her solitary fast at womanhood she fell into an ecstasy, and at the call of the spirits she went up to heaven by the path that leads to the opening of the sky; there she heard a voice, and, standing still, saw the figure of a man standing near the path, whose head was surrounded by a brilliant halo, and his breast was covered with squares; he said, ‘Look at me, my name is Oshauwauegeeghick, the Bright Blue Sky!’ Recording her experience afterwards in the rude picture-writing of her race, she painted this glorious spirit with the hieroglyphic horns of power and the brilliant halo round his head.[403]We know enough of the Indian pictographs to guess how a fancy with these familiar details of the picture-language came into the poor excited creature’s mind; but how far is our cold analysis from her utter belief that in vision she had really seen this bright being, this Red Indian Zeus. Far from being an isolated case, this is scarcely more than a fair example of the rule that any idea shaped and made current by mythic fancy, may at once acquire all the definiteness of fact. Even if to the first shaper it be no more than lively imagination, yet when it comes to be embodied in words and to pass from house to house, those who hear it become capable of the most intense belief that it may be seen in material shape, that it has been seen, that they themselves have seen it. The South African who believes in a god with a crooked leg sees him with a crooked leg in dreams and visions.[404]In the time of Tacitus it was said, with a more poetic imagination, that in the far north of Scandinavia men might see the very forms of the gods and the rays streaming from their heads.[405]In the6thcentury the famed Nile-god might still be seen, in gigantic human form, rising waist-high from the waters of his river.[406]Want of originality indeed seems one of the most remarkable features in the visions of mystics. The stiff Madonnas with their crowns and petticoats still transfer themselves from the pictures on cottage walls to appear in spiritual personality to peasant visionaries, as the saints who stood in vision before ecstatic monks of old were to be known by their conventional pictorial attributes. When the devil with horns, hoofs, and tail had once become a fixed image in the popular mind, of course men saw him in this conventional shape. So real hadSt.Anthony’s satyr-demon become to men’s opinion, that there is a grave13thcentury account of the mummy of such a devil being exhibited at Alexandria; and it is not fifteen years back from the present time that there was a story current at Teignmouth of a devil walking up the walls of the houses, and leaving his fiendish backward footprints in the snow. Nor is it vision alone that is concerned with the delusive realization of the ideal; there is, as it were, a conspiracy of all the senses to give it proof. To take a striking instance: there is an irritating herpetic disease which gradually encircles the body as with a girdle, whence its English name of theshingles(Latin,cingulum). By an imagination not difficult to understand, this disease is attributed to a sort of coiling snake; and I remember a case in Cornwall where a girl’s family waited in great fear to see if the creature would stretch all round her, the belief being that if the snake’s head and tail met, the patient would die. But a yet fuller meaning of this fantastic notion is brought out in an account by Dr. Bastian of a physician who suffered in a painful disease, as though a snake were twined round him, and in whose mind this idea reached such reality that in moments of excessive pain he could see the snake and touch its rough scales with his hand.
The relation of morbid imagination to myth is peculiarlywell instanced in the history of a widespread belief, extending through savage, barbaric, classic, oriental, and mediæval life, and surviving to this day in European superstition. This belief, which may be conveniently called the Doctrine of Werewolves, is that certain men, by natural gift or magic art, can turn for a time into ravening wild beasts. The origin of this idea is by no means sufficiently explained. What we are especially concerned with is the fact of its prevalence in the world. It may be noticed that such a notion is quite consistent with the animistic theory that a man’s soul may go out of his body and enter that of a beast or bird, and also with the opinion that men may be transformed into animals; both these ideas having an important place in the belief of mankind, from savagery onward. The doctrine of werewolves is substantially that of a temporary metempsychosis or metamorphosis. Now it really occurs that, in various forms of mental disease, patients prowl shyly, long to bite and destroy mankind, and even fancy themselves transformed into wild beasts. Belief in the possibility of such transformation may have been the very suggesting cause which led the patient to imagine it taking place in his own person. But at any rate such insane delusions do occur, and physicians apply to them the mythologic term of lycanthropy. The belief in men being werewolves, man-tigers, and the like, may thus have the strong support of the very witnesses who believe themselves to be such creatures. Moreover, professional sorcerers have taken up the idea, as they do any morbid delusion, and pretend to turn themselves and others into beasts by magic art. Through the mass of ethnographic details relating to this subject, there is manifest a remarkable uniformity of principle.
Among the non-Aryan indigenes of India, the tribes of the Garo Hills describe as ‘transformation into a tiger’ a kind of temporary madness, apparently of the nature of delirium tremens, in which the patient walks like a tiger, shunning society.[407]The Khonds of Orissa say that some among themhave the art of ‘mleepa,’ and by the aid of a god become ‘mleepa’ tigers for the purpose of killing enemies, one of the man’s four souls going out to animate the bestial form. Natural tigers, say the Khonds, kill game to benefit men, who find it half devoured and share it, whereas man-killing tigers are either incarnations of the wrathful Earth-goddess, or they are transformed men.[408]Thus the notion of man-tigers serves, as similar notions do elsewhere, to account for the fact that certain individual wild beasts show a peculiar hostility to man. Among the Ho of Singbhoom it is related, as an example of similar belief, that a man named Mora saw his wife killed by a tiger, and followed the beast till it led him to the house of a man named Poosa. Telling Poosa’s relatives of what had occurred, they replied that they were aware that he had the power of becoming a tiger, and accordingly they brought him out bound, and Mora deliberately killed him. Inquisition being made by the authorities, the family deposed, in explanation of their belief, that Poosa had one night devoured an entire goat, roaring like a tiger whilst eating it, and that on another occasion he told his friends he had a longing to eat a particular bullock, and that very night that very bullock was killed and devoured by a tiger.[409]South-eastern Asia is not less familiar with the idea of sorcerers turning into man-tigers and wandering after prey; thus the Jakuns of the Malay Peninsula believe that when a man becomes a tiger to revenge himself on his enemies, the transformation happens just before he springs, and has been seen to take place.[410]
How vividly the imagination of an excited tribe, once inoculated with a belief like this, can realize it into an event, is graphically told by Dobrizhoffer among the Abipones of South America. When a sorcerer, to get the better of an enemy, threatens to change himself into a tiger and tear histribesmen to pieces, no sooner does he begin to roar, than all the neighbours fly to a distance; but still they hear the feigned sounds. ‘Alas!’ they cry, ‘his whole body is beginning to be covered with tiger-spots!’ ‘Look, his nails are growing!’ the fear-struck women exclaim, although they cannot see the rogue, who is concealed within his tent, but distracted fear presents things to their eyes which have no real existence. ‘You daily kill tigers in the plain without dread,’ said the missionary; ‘why then should you weakly fear a false imaginary tiger in the town?’ ‘You fathers don’t understand these matters,’ they reply with a smile. ‘We never fear, but kill tigers in the plain, because we can see them. Artificial tigers we do fear, because they can neither be seen nor killed by us.’[411]The sorcerers who induced assemblies of credulous savages to believe in this monstrous imposture, were also the professional spiritualistic mediums of the tribes, whose business it was to hold intercourse with the spirits of the dead, causing them to appear visibly, or carrying on audible dialogues with them behind a curtain. Africa is especially rich in myths of man-lions, man-leopards, man-hyænas. In the Kanuri language of Bornu, there is grammatically formed from the word ‘bultu,’ a hyæna, the verb ‘bultungin,’ meaning ‘I transform myself into a hyæna;’ and the natives maintain that there is a town called Kabutiloa, where every man possesses this faculty.[412]The tribe of Budas in Abyssinia, iron-workers and potters, are believed to combine with these civilized avocations the gift of the evil eye and the power of turning into hyænas, wherefore they are excluded from society and the Christian sacrament. In the ‘Life of Nathaniel Pearce,’ the testimony of one Mr. Coffin is printed. A young Buda, his servant, came for leave of absence, which was granted; but scarcely was Mr. Coffin’s head turned to his otherservants, when some of them called out, pointing in the direction the Buda had taken, ‘Look, look, he is turning himself into a hyæna.’ Mr. Coffin instantly looked round, the young man had vanished, and a large hyæna was running off at about a hundred paces’ distance, in full light on the open plain, without tree or bush to intercept the view. The Buda came back next morning, and as usual rather affected to countenance than deny the prodigy. Coffin says, moreover, that the Budas wear a peculiar gold earring, and this he has frequently seen in the ears of hyænas shot in traps, or speared by himself and others; the Budas are dreaded for their magical arts, and the editor of the book suggests that they put ear-rings in hyænas’ ears to encourage a profitable superstition.[413]Mr. Mansfield Parkyns’ more recent account shows how thoroughly this belief is part and parcel of Abyssinian spiritualism. Hysterics, lethargy, morbid insensibility to pain, and the ‘demoniacal possession,’ in which the patient speaks in the name and language of an intruding spirit, are all ascribed to the spiritual agency of the Budas. Among the cases described by Mr. Parkyns was that of a servant-woman of his, whose illness was set down to the influence of one of these blacksmith-hyænas, who wanted to get her out into the forest and devour her. One night, a hyæna having been heard howling and laughing near the village, the woman was bound hand and foot and closely guarded in the hut, when suddenly, the hyæna calling close by, her master, to his astonishment, saw her rise ‘without her bonds’ like a Davenport Brother, and try to escape.[414]In Ashango-land,M.Du Chaillu tells the following suggestive story. He was informed that a leopard had killed two men, and many palavers were held to settle the affair; but this was no ordinary leopard, but a transformed man. Two of Akondogo’s men had disappeared, and onlytheir blood was found, so a great doctor was sent for, who said it was Akondogo’s own nephew and heir Akosho. The lad was sent for, and when asked by the chief, answered that it was truly he who had committed the murders, that he could not help it, for he had turned into a leopard, and his heart longed for blood, and after each deed he had turned into a man again. Akondogo loved the boy so much that he would not believe his confession, till Akosho took him to a place in the forest, where lay the mangled bodies of the two men, whom he had really murdered under the influence of this morbid imagination. He was slowly burnt to death, all the people standing by.[415]
Brief mention is enough for the comparatively well-known European representatives of these beliefs. What with the mere continuance of old tradition, what with the tricks of magicians, and what with cases of patients under delusion believing themselves to have suffered transformation, of which a number are on record, the European series of details from ancient to modern ages is very complete. Virgil in the Bucolics shows the popular opinion of his time that the arts of the werewolf, the necromancer or ‘medium,’ and the witch, were different branches of one craft, where he tells of Mœris as turning into a wolf by the use of poisonous herbs, as calling up souls from the tombs, and as bewitching away crops:—
‘Has herbas, atque haec Ponto mihi lecta venenaIpse dedit Moeris; nascuntur plurima Ponto.His ego saepe lupum fieri, et se condere sylvisMoerin, saepe animas imis excire sepulcris,Atque satas aliò vidi traducere messes.’[416]
‘Has herbas, atque haec Ponto mihi lecta venenaIpse dedit Moeris; nascuntur plurima Ponto.His ego saepe lupum fieri, et se condere sylvisMoerin, saepe animas imis excire sepulcris,Atque satas aliò vidi traducere messes.’[416]
‘Has herbas, atque haec Ponto mihi lecta venenaIpse dedit Moeris; nascuntur plurima Ponto.His ego saepe lupum fieri, et se condere sylvisMoerin, saepe animas imis excire sepulcris,Atque satas aliò vidi traducere messes.’[416]
‘Has herbas, atque haec Ponto mihi lecta venena
Ipse dedit Moeris; nascuntur plurima Ponto.
His ego saepe lupum fieri, et se condere sylvis
Moerin, saepe animas imis excire sepulcris,
Atque satas aliò vidi traducere messes.’[416]
Of the classic accounts, one of the most remarkable is Petronius Arbiter’s story of the transformation of a ‘versipellis’ or ‘turnskin;’ this contains the episode of thewolf being wounded and the man who wore its shape found with a similar wound, an idea not sufficiently proved to belong originally to the lower races, but which becomes a familiar feature in European stories of werewolves and witches. In Augustine’s time magicians were persuading their dupes that by means of herbs they could turn them to wolves, and the use of salve for this purpose is mentioned at a comparatively modern date. Old Scandinavian sagas have their werewolf warriors, and shape-changers (hamramr) raging in fits of furious madness. The Danes still know a man who is a werewolf by his eyebrows meeting, and thus resembling a butterfly, the familiar type of the soul, ready to fly off and enter some other body. In the last year of the Swedish war with Russia, the people of Kalmar said the wolves which overran the land were transformed Swedish prisoners. From Herodotus’ legend of the Neuri who turned every year for a few days to wolves, we follow the idea on Slavonic ground to where Livonian sorcerers bathe yearly in a river and turn for twelve days to wolves; and widespread Slavonic superstition still declares that the wolves that sometimes in bitter winters dare to attack men, are themselves ‘wilkolak,’ men bewitched into wolf’s shape. The modern Greeks instead of the classicλυκάνθρωποςadopt the Slavonic term βρύκολακας (Bulgarian ‘vrkolak’); it is a man who falls into a cataleptic state, while his soul enters a wolf and goes ravening for blood. Modern Germany, especially in the north, still keeps up the stories of wolf-girdles, and in December you must not ‘talk of the wolf’ by name, lest the werewolves hear you. Our English word ‘werewolf,’ that is ‘man-wolf’ (the ‘verevulf’ of Cnut’s Laws), still reminds us of the old belief in our own country, and if it has had for centuries but little place in English folklore, this has been not so much for lack of superstition, as of wolves. To instance the survival of the idea, transferred to another animal, in the more modern witch-persecution, the following Scotch story may serve. Certain witches at Thurso for along time tormented an honest fellow under the usual form of cats, till one night he put them to flight with his broad-sword, and cut off the leg of one less nimble than the rest; taking it up, to his amazement he found it to be a woman’s leg, and next morning he discovered the old hag its owner with but one leg left. In France the creature has what is historically the same name as our ‘werewolf;’ viz. in early forms ‘gerulphus,’ ‘garoul,’ and now pleonastically ‘loup-garou.’ The parliament of Franche-Comté made a law in 1573 to expel the werewolves; in 1598 the werewolf of Angers gave evidence of his hands and feet turning to wolf’s claws; in 1603, in the case of Jean Grenier, the judge declared lycanthropy to be an insane delusion, not a crime. In 1658, a French satirical description of a magician could still give the following perfect account of the witch-werewolf: ‘I teach the witches to take the form of wolves and eat children, and when anyone has cut off one of their legs (which proves to be a man’s arm) I forsake them when they are discovered, and leave them in the power of justice.’ Even in our own day the idea has by no means died out of the French peasant’s mind. Not ten years ago in France, Mr. Baring-Gould found it impossible to get a guide after dark across a wild place haunted by a loup-garou, an incident which led him afterwards to write his ‘Book of Werewolves,’ a monograph of this remarkable combination of myth and madness.[417]
If we judged the myths of early ages by the unaided power of our modern fancy, we might be left unable to account for their immense effect on the life and belief of mankind. But by the study of such evidence as this, itbecomes possible to realize a usual state of the imagination among ancient and savage peoples, intermediate between the conditions of a healthy prosaic modern citizen and of a raving fanatic or a patient in a fever-ward. A poet of our own day has still much in common with the minds of uncultured tribes in the mythologic stage of thought. The rude man’s imaginations may be narrow, crude, and repulsive, while the poet’s more conscious fictions may be highly wrought into shapes of fresh artistic beauty, but both share in that sense of the reality of ideas, which fortunately or unfortunately modern education has proved so powerful to destroy. The change of meaning of a single word will tell the history of this transition, ranging from primæval to modern thought. From first to last, the processes ofphantasyhave been at work; but where the savage could seephantasms, the civilized man has come to amuse himself withfancies.