Traditions, Superstitions and Folk-lore Part 23

Dr. Hertz gives many examples of the prevalence of the were-wolf superst.i.tion in Germany. In some instances the bear occupies the place of the wolf. A girdle made of wolf or bear skin is supposed yet to possess the power of transforming a man into one or other of these animals. The skin of a man who has been hanged is considered equally potent. The girdle must have a buckle which possesses seven tags or tongues, and it is powerless when not affixed to the body. One were-wolf could carry a cow in his mouth. He devoured human beings, too, as well as cattle. He had, however, taught his wife how to treat him when in his lupine form. "She used to unbuckle his belt, and he became a rational man again." The wolf and the murderer were frequently hung on the same gallows, hence the old Saxon name for this structure, _varagtreo_, or wolf-tree. The mere certain recognition of a were-wolf is generally sufficient to dissolve the spell. In cases of doubt, steel or iron is thrown over the suspected animal. If this be done to a genuine were-wolf, "the skin splits crosswise on the forehead, and the naked man comes out through the opening." Kelly adds, "It frequently happens that the were-wolf is frozen, that is to say, invulnerable by ordinary weapons or missiles. In that case he must be shot with elder-pith, or with b.a.l.l.s made of inherited silver." The were-wolf of the eastern portion of the continent of Europe appears to be confounded with the vampire superst.i.tion, as in the Sclavonic tongues the same word is used to designate both these mythic monsters.

Baron Langon, in his "Evenings with Prince Cambaceres," relates a story of a vampire, or blood-sucker, named Rafin, on the authority of the celebrated Fouche. The astute chief of the police, if not absolutely imposed upon, was, certainly, much perplexed with the case. He says,--"I gave orders to have Rafin arrested, and he was placed in confinement. I paid him a visit. He was strongly bound, and in spite of his cries, supplications, and resistance, I resolutely plunged into his flesh a surgical instrument, which, without producing any injury, would cause an effusion of blood. When he perceived my object he became furiously irritated, and made inconceivable efforts to attack me. He threatened me with his future revenge; but, heedless of his violence, I thrust the instrument into him. No sooner did the first drop of blood appear than the six old wounds opened afresh. All efforts to stop the bleeding proved fruitless--and Rafin died." Some of the witnesses regarded the affair as a police trick, Fouche says,--"As to myself, I have sifted the matter deeply, and I am perplexed to the last degree. I cannot admit the reality of vampires; yet it is certain that I witnessed the facts I have stated." Two women were said to have pined away and died, owing to their intercourse with this man.

As recently as the year 1718, a solemn judicial enquiry took place at Caithness respecting the sufferings of one William Montgomery, who was reduced to a most miserable condition owing to the "gambols of a legion of cats." In Kirkpatrick Sharpe's introduction to Law's "Memorials," we read that the said Montgomery's man servant averred that the feline disturbers of his master's peace "spoke among themselves." The hypochondriac, at length, driven to desperation, attacked the enemy with "broadsword and axe," and utterly routed the caterwauling conclave, killing some and wounding others. The said cats turned out to be veritable witches, as was proved by the fact that two neighbouring "old women died immediately, and a third lost a leg, which, having been broken by a stroke of the hatchet, withered and dropped off."

It was customary, as recently as the sixteenth century, to punish alleged were-wolves as remorselessly as supposed witches. Many suffered at the stake. Kelly says, on the authority of Boquet (_Discours des Sorciers_), that "a gentleman, looking out one evening from a window of his chateau, saw a hunter whom he knew, and asked the man to bring him something on his return from the chase. The hunter was attacked in the plain by a great wolf, and, after a sharp conflict, cut off one of the fore paws with his hunting knife. On his way back he called at the chateau, and putting his hand into his game bag, to show the gentleman the wolf's paw, he drew out a human hand with a gold ring, which the gentleman at once recognised as his wife's. He looked for her, and found her in the kitchen with one arm concealed under her ap.r.o.n, and, on uncovering it, saw that the hand was gone. The lady was brought to trial, confessed(!), and was burnt at Ryon. Boquet says he had this story from a trustworthy person who had been on the spot a fortnight after the event."

In Denmark, Iceland, Germany, and the North of England, there exist many similar stories, but they are more or less connected with witchcraft, with which, indeed, they seem to have much in common. The chief feature is the transformation of a man into a horse, by a woman throwing a magic halter over his head while he is lying in bed. The woman, who is a disguised witch, then mounts the horse and gallops to the trysting place, where her compeers meet to revel. If the man-horse can contrive to slip the magic bridle from his head, and throw it over that of the woman, she is suddenly transformed into a mare, and in turn is ridden almost to death by her previous victim. One witch-mare, at Yarrowfoot, a few years ago, according to Mr. Henderson, was found afterwards to be shod in the usual manner, and sold to her own husband, who, on removing the bridle, saw standing before him his wife, with a horseshoe nailed to each hand and foot! Glanvil, in his "Saducismus Triumphatus," relates an instance in which a "great army of witches" was charged with performing this horse transformation feat on a large scale, at Blocula, in Sweden, in 1669.

There is a German story of a joiner at Buhl, who, being troubled with the nightmare, saw the elf enter his room, through a hole, in the shape of a cat. He caught the animal and nailed one of its paws to the floor.

In the morning he was surprised to find his feline prisoner transformed into a handsome young woman perfectly naked. He married her, however; but, after they had had three children, she disappeared suddenly, in the form of a cat, through the hole by which she had entered, her husband having inadvertently removed the material with which he had blocked it up.

In East Prussia, they have a story of a girl, who, without her knowledge, was every evening transformed into a cat, and awoke much fatigued. One night her lover caught a cat, which had regularly tormented and scratched him at night, and secured it in a sack. The next morning he found the cat transformed into his naked sweetheart. The story adds she was cured by the parson of the parish.

In 1633, a "second batch" of Lancas.h.i.+re witches was tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death, at Lancaster; but after more elaborate investigation into the circ.u.mstances, first at Chester, under the presidency of the bishop, and afterwards at London, by the physicians and surgeons to the king, and again by the king himself, Charles I., fully convinced of their innocence, extended to them his royal pardon.

The deposition of the princ.i.p.al witness, "Edward Robinson, sonne of Edmond Robinson, of Pendle Forest, mason, taken at Padiham, before Richard Shuttleworth and John Starkey, Esquires, two of his Majestie's Justices of Peace," affords curious evidence of the strength of this superst.i.tion little more than two centuries ago. The deponent sayeth that at the time he was occupied in "gettinge Bullas hee sawe two grey hounds, vizt., a blacke and a browne one, come runninge over the next field towards him. He verilie thinketh the one to be Mr. b.u.t.ters and the other to be Mr. Robinsons, the said Mr. b.u.t.ter and Mr. Robinson then havinge such like. And the said Grey Hounds came and fawned on him, they having about their necks either of them a Coller, to either of which Collers was tyed a strynge, which Collers, as this Informer affirmeth, did s.h.i.+ne like gold, and he thinkinge that some either of Mr. b.u.t.ters or Mr. Robinsons familie should have followed them, but seeinge noe bodie to followe them, hee tooke the said Grey-hounds thinkinge to hunte with them, and presentlie a hare did rise verie neere before him, at the sight whereof he cried 'Loo, loo, loo,' but the doggs would not runn, wherevpon hee beinge verie angrie tooke them, and with the string that were at their Collers tyed either of them to a little bush at the next hedge, and with a rodd that he had in his hand hee beate them, and instead of the blacke grey-hound one d.i.c.kensons wife stud vpp, a neighbour whom this Informer knoweth, and instead of the browne Greyhound a little Boy, whom this Informer knoweth not, at which sight this Informer being afrayd, endeavoured to runn awaie, but beinge stayed by the woeman, vizt., d.i.c.kensons wife, shee put her hand into her pocket, and pulled forth a piece of silver much like to a fayre s.h.i.+llinge, and offered to give it him to hold his tongue, and not to tell, which hee refused, sayinge, 'nay, thou art a witch,' wherevpon shee put her hand into her pocket againe, and pulled out a thing like unto a bridle that gingled, which shee put on the little Boyes head which stood vpp in the browne greyhounds stead, wherevpon the said Boye stood vpp a white horse. Then ymmediatlie the said d.i.c.kensons wife tooke this Informer before her vpon the said horse." As in the case previously referred to, the party galloped off to a feast of witches. It is true Dr. Webster, who carefully examined the witness, informs us, in his "Display of Witchcraft," that "the boy Robinson, in more mature years, acknowledged that he had been instructed and suborned to make these accusations by his father and others, and that, of course, the whole was a fraud." Nevertheless, the belief in the probability of such transformations must have been very general and deeply rooted, otherwise such impostors could not have practised their villainy with the impunity they did. Witches, we have previously seen, were often transformed into hares. Margery Grant, the recently deceased Scotch witch, referred to in a previous chapter, "believed herself to be trans.m.u.table, and avers that she was, at times, actually changed by evil-disposed persons into a pony or a hare, and rode for great distances, or hunted by dogs, as the case might be."

Mr. A. Russel Wallace, in his "Malay Archipelago," says that it is yet "universally believed in Lombock that some men have the power to turn themselves into crocodiles, which they do for the sake of devouring their enemies, and many strange tales are told of such transformations."

He adds that the islands of Bali and Lombock, situated to the east of Java, "are the only islands in the whole Archipelago in which the Hindoo religion still maintains itself--and they form the extreme point of the two great zoological divisions of the Eastern hemisphere."

The owl and the eagle, both lightning birds of the Aryan mythology, received divine honours from the Greeks. The eagle was Jove's emblem, the owl that of Pallas, or Athene. The latter was sometimes called Glaucopis, or "owl-eyed," significant of the supernatural light which was presumed to radiate from her lightning orbs.

The owl is not the only bird that is believed to have been transformed into a human being skilled in the art of baking bread. The cuckoo and the woodp.e.c.k.e.r have been subjected to a similar metamorphosis. The legend of the owl and the baker's daughter appears to be still popular in Gloucesters.h.i.+re. The story is generally told with a view to prevent children and others from indulging in harsh conduct towards the poor.

Douce relates the legend in the following terms:--

"Our Saviour went into a baker's shop where they were baking, and asked for some bread to eat: the mistress of the shop immediately put a piece of dough into the oven to bake for him; but was reprimanded by her daughter, who, insisting that the piece of dough was too large, reduced it to a very small size; the dough, however, immediately began to swell, and presently became a most enormous size, whereupon the baker's daughter cried out, 'Heugh, heugh, heugh!' which owl-like noise probably induced our Saviour to transform her into that bird for her wickedness."

Dasent, in his "Popular Tales from the Norse," gives a very minute version of this tradition, in which the purely heathen superst.i.tion is related with the nomenclature modernised. The names, however, are its only Christian attributes. It markedly exhibits the tendency of the vulgar to confound one mystery or tradition with another, to which I have previously referred. Dasent gives the story as follows:--

"In those days, when our Lord and St. Peter wandered upon earth, they came once to an old wife's house, who sat baking. Her name was Gertrude, and she had a red mutch on her head. They had walked a long way, and were both hungry, and our Lord begged hard for a bannock to stay their hunger. Yes, they should have it. So she took a little tiny piece of dough and rolled it out, but as she rolled it, it grew until it covered the whole griddle.

"Nay, that was too big; they couldn't have that. So she took a tinier bit still; but when that was rolled out it covered the whole griddle just the same, and that bannock was too big, she said; they couldn't have that either.

"The third time she took a still tinier bit--so tiny that you could scarce see it; but it was the same story over again--the bannock was too big.

"'Well,' said Gertrude, 'I can't give you anything; you must just go without, for all these bannocks are too big.'

"Then our Lord waxeth wroth, and said. 'Since you loved me so little as to grudge me a morsel of food, you shall have this punishment--you shall become a bird and seek your food between bark and bole, and never get a drop to drink save when it rains.'

"He had scarce said the last word before she was turned into a great black woodp.e.c.k.e.r, or Gertrude's bird, and flew from her kneading trough right up the chimney; and till this very day you may see her flying about, with her red mutch on her head, and her body all black, because of the soot in the chimney; and so she hacks and taps away at the trees for her food, and whistles when rain is coming, for she is ever athirst, and then she looks for a drop to cool her tongue."

Brand informs us that "the woodp.e.c.k.e.r's cry denotes wet."

Grimm tells a German version of the story, in which the hard-hearted baker is a man, but whose wife and six daughters were made of more charitable materials. They privately bestowed what he had publicly refused, and were rewarded by being converted into the "seven stars"

(the Pleiades), while the baker was transformed into a cuckoo. The cuckoo is believed to continue his spring cry only so long as the "seven stars" are visible in the heavens. Another version says the cuckoo was a baker's or miller's man. He cheated the poor, and "when the dough swelled by G.o.d's blessing in the oven, he drew it out and nipped off a portion of it, crying each time 'gukuk,' which signifies 'look! look!'

For this crime he was converted into a cuckoo, and condemned to the perpetual repet.i.tion of the monotonous cry."

A Lancas.h.i.+re superst.i.tion exists referred to in Chapter IX., in which the plover is identified as the trans.m.u.ted soul of a Jew. At least, when seven of them are seen together, they are called the "seven whistlers,"

and their musical chorus bodes ill or harm to those who hear it. The tradition represents them as the "souls of those Jews who a.s.sisted at the crucifixion, and in consequence were doomed to float in the air for ever."

Wordsworth, in his beautiful poem, "The White Doe of Rylstone," has preserved the memory of a Yorks.h.i.+re tradition which a.s.serts that the soul of the lady founder of Bolton Abbey revisited the ruins of the venerable pile, in the form of a spotless white doe.

When Lady Aaliza mourned Her son, and felt in her despair, The pang of unavailing prayer; Her son in Wharf's abysses drowned, The n.o.ble boy of Egremound, From which affliction, when G.o.d's grace At length had in her heart found place, A pious structure fair to see, Rose up this stately Priory!

The lady's work,--but now laid low; To the grief of her soul that doth come and go, In the beautiful form of this innocent doe: Which, though seemingly doomed in its breast to sustain A softened remembrance of sorrow and pain, Is spotless, and holy, and gentle, and bright,-- And glides o'er the earth like an angel of light.

The Manx wren, the robin, and the stork are supposed to be inhabited by the souls of human beings. MacTaggart, speaking of the wren, says,--"Manx herring fishers dare not go to sea without one of these birds taken dead with them, for fear of disasters and storms. Their tradition is of a _sea spirit_ that hunted the _herring track_, attended always by storms, and at last it a.s.sumed the figure of a wren and flew away. So they think that when they have a dead wren with them all is snug. The poor bird had a sad life of it in that singular island. When one is seen at any time, scores of Manxmen start and hunt it down." The stork in Prussia, on the contrary, is protected from injury, owing to the belief that "he is elsewhere a man." Gervase of Tilbury informs us that in England it was regarded as both bird and man. It was a very wide-spread belief that the human soul left its earthly tabernacle in the form of a bird. The "Milky-way" is, in Finland and Lithuania, the "Birds' way," or the "Way of Souls." Grimm tells us that every member of a certain Polish n.o.ble family are turned into eagles at death. He adds the eldest daughter of the Pileck line, if they die unmarried, are transformed into doves, but, if married, into owls. Kelly relates an anecdote of a gentleman in Soho, London, who believed that the departing soul of his brother-in-law, in the form of a bird, tapped at his window at the time of his death. The mother and sister, in Grimm's story of "The White and the Black Bride," push the true bride into the stream. At the same or the following moment a snow-white swan is discovered swimming gracefully down the river.

M. Paul B. Du Chaillu, in his recent work, "A Journey to Ashango-land; and further penetration into Equatorial Africa," gives two curious ill.u.s.trations of the existence of a belief in men being sometimes transformed into beasts. He says,--

"I cannot avoid relating in this place a very curious instance of a strange and horrid form of monomania which is sometimes displayed by these primitive negroes. It was related to me so circ.u.mstantially by Akondogo, and so well confirmed by others, that I cannot help fully believing in all the princ.i.p.al facts of the case. Poor Akondogo said that he had had plenty of trouble in his day, that a leopard had killed two of his men, and that he had a great many palavers to settle on account of these deaths. Not knowing exactly what he meant, I said to him, 'Why did you not make a trap to catch the leopard?' To my astonishment, he replied, 'The leopard was not of the kind you mean. It was a man who had changed himself into a leopard, and then became a man again.' I said, 'Akondogo, I will never believe your story. How can a man be turned into a leopard?' He again a.s.serted that it was true, and gave me the following history:--'Whilst he was in the woods with his people, gathering india-rubber, one of his men disappeared, and, notwithstanding all their endeavours, nothing could be found of him but a quant.i.ty of blood. The next day another man disappeared, and in searching for him more blood was found. All the people got alarmed, and Akondogo sent for a great doctor to drink the mboundou, and solve the mystery of these two deaths. To the horror and astonishment of the old chief, the doctor declared it was Akondogo's own child (his nephew and heir), Akosho, who had killed the two men. Akosho 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 been turned into a leopard, and his heart longed for blood; and that after each deed he had turned into a man again. Akondogo loved his boy so much that he would not believe his own confession, until the boy took him to a place in the forest where lay the two bodies, one with the head cut off, and the other with the belly torn open. Upon this, Akondogo gave orders to seize the lad. He was bound with ropes, taken to the village, and then tied in a horizontal position to a post, and burnt slowly to death, all the people standing by until he expired.'

"I must say the end of the story seemed to me too horrible to listen to.

I shuddered, and was ready to curse the race that was capable of committing such acts. But on careful enquiry, I found it was a case of monomania with the boy Akosho, and that he really was the murderer of the two men. It is probable that the superst.i.tious belief of these morbidly imaginative Africans in the transformation of men into leopards, being early instilled into the minds of their children, is the direct cause of murders being committed under the influence of it. The boy himself, as well as Akondogo and all the people, believed he had really turned into a leopard, and the cruel punishment was partly in vengeance for witchcraft, and partly to prevent the committal of more crimes by the boy in a similar way, for, say they, the man has a spirit of witchcraft."

Again, after informing us that the Ashango people believed (not knowing that he was really wounded in his disastrous retreat from their country), that he, being "Oguisi," or "the spirit," was invulnerable, and that their poisoned arrows glanced from his body without doing him any injury, he further adds, that Magouga, one of his native guides, said "he had heard that at one time I had turned myself into a leopard, had hid myself in a tree, and had sprung upon the Mouaou people as they came to make war upon my men; that at other times I turned myself into a gorilla, or into an elephant, and struck terror and death among the Mouaou and Mobana. Magouga finished his story by asking me for a 'war fetich,' for he said I must possess the art of making fetiches, or I and my men could not have escaped so miraculously."

It is necessary to remind the reader that Du Chaillu and others have failed to find any remains of ancient civilisation on the western coast of Equatorial Africa, and that he expressly states his belief in the native tradition that the ancestors of the present tribes migrated from the east.

The Rev. G. W. c.o.x, in his "Mythology of the Aryan Nations," referring to the origin of Greek "Lykanthropy," says,--"The question to be answered is, whence came the notions that men were changed into wolves, bears, and birds, and not into lions, fishes, or reptiles; and to this question Comparative Mythology seems to me to furnish a complete answer; nor can I disavow my belief that this loathsome vampire superst.i.tion was in the first instance purely the result of a verbal equivocation which, as we have seen, has furnished so fruitful a source of myths." Mr. c.o.x regards the superst.i.tion to have originated in "that confusion between Leukos bright, as a general epithet, and the same word Lukos as a special name for the wolf, from which sprung first the myth of the transformation of Lycaon, and then probably the wide-spread superst.i.tion of Lykanthropy."

Respecting the Eastern origin of this superst.i.tion, Kelly says,--"The were-wolf tradition has not been discovered with certainty amongst the Hindoos, but there is no European nation of Aryan descent in which it has not existed from time immemorial. Hence, it is certain that the tradition itself, or the germs of it more or less developed, must have been brought by them all from Arya; and if Dr. Schwartz has not actually proved his case, he seems at least to have conjectured rightly in a.s.signing, as one of these germs, the Aryan conception of the howling wind as a wolf. The Maruts and other beings who were busy in the storm a.s.sumed various shapes. The human form was proper to many or all of them, for they were identical with the Pitris or Fathers, and it would have been a very natural thought, when a storm broke out suddenly, that one or more of these people of the air had turned into wolves for the occasion. It was also a primaeval notion that there were dogs and wolves amongst the dwellers in h.e.l.l; and Weber, who has shown that this belief was entertained by the early Hindoos, is of opinion that these infernal animals were real were-wolves, that is to say, men upon whom such a transformation had been inflicted as a punishment."

The darkness of night is personified by the wolf in the folk-lore of the Teutonic nations. It is the Fenris of the Edda. In this sense the mythic wolf and "Little Red Riding Hood" are transparent enough. The ruddy glow of the evening sunlight is extinguished in the darkness of night. The Rev. G. W. c.o.x says that in one version of the story "Little Red Cap escapes his malice as Memnon rises again from Hades." This resurrection typifies the dawn springing from the darkness of the night on the following morning.

The Greek myth developed into the story that Zeus, when visiting Lycaon, was fed by his numerous sons with human flesh, and that he, in his anger at such treatment, turned them all into wolves. Similar transformations are frequent in the cla.s.sical myths. Kirke turned the followers of Odysseus into swine, and Callisto was turned into a bear by the anger of Artemis.

This were-wolf, or man-wolf, myth, from the Anglo-Saxon _wer_, a man, has doubtless undergone much change and mutilation in its descent to modern times. The earlier Apollo of the Greeks, at the time of Homer even, was not the Sun-G.o.d he afterwards became. He was the "G.o.d of the summer storms," and, as such, he himself appeared in the form of a wolf.

His mother, Latona, as Kelly observes, was regarded as "the dark storm-cloud, escorted at Jove's command by the Northwind," and she "came as a she-wolf from Lycia to the place where she was delivered of her twins.... In mythical language, Apollo was the son of Zeus; that is to say, he was Zeus in another form. The two G.o.ds were, in fact, like Indra and Rudra, only different personifications of the same cycle of natural phenomena."

The Laureate, in his recent poem, "The Coming of Arthur," has the following beautiful poetic ill.u.s.tration of that which, no doubt, underlies much of the were-wolf superst.i.tions:--

Thick with wet woods, and many a beast therein, And none or few to scare or chase the beast; So that wild dog and wolf and boar and bear Came night and day, and rooted in the fields, And wallow'd in the gardens of the king.

And ever and anon the wolf would steal The children and devour, but now and then, Her own brood lost or dead, lent her fierce teat To human sucklings; and the children, housed In her foul den, there at their meal would growl, And mock their foster-mother on four feet, Till, straighten'd, they grew up to wolf-like men, Worse than the wolves.

CHAPTER XII.

SACRED AND OMINOUS BIRDS, ETC.

The fatal cuckoo, on yon spreading tree, Hath sounded out your dying knell already.

_Cowley._

Amongst the various lightning birds of the Aryan mythology, some were regarded as portentous of evil; others, as the robin, the stork, and the woodp.e.c.k.e.r, on the contrary, were regarded with favour, and especially protected. The red breast of the robin, the red legs of the stork, and the red mutch of the woodp.e.c.k.e.r, were believed to result from their lightning origin. In Germany the robin is held in as much regard as it is in England. The Anglo-Saxon name, _Hrodhbeorht_, or _Hrodhbriht_, signifies flamebright, which was one of the appellations of Thor. In ill.u.s.tration of the reverence paid to the redbreast, a writer in "Notes and Queries" relates the following beautiful story, which he had from his nurse, a native of Caermarthens.h.i.+re:--