Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted

c >> comparative mythology by John Fiske >> Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted

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[26] Kelly, Indo-European Folk-Lore, p. 177.

Here the rod derives its marvellous properties from the
enclosed springwort, but in many cases a leaf or flower is
itself competent to open the hillside. The little blue flower,
forget-me-not, about which so many sentimental associations
have clustered, owes its name to the legends told of its
talismanic virtues.[27] A man, travelling on a lonely
mountain, picks up a little blue flower and sticks it in his
hat. Forthwith an iron door opens, showing up a lighted
passage-way, through which the man advances into a magnificent
hall, where rubies and diamonds and all other kinds of gems
are lying piled in great heaps on the floor. As he eagerly
fills his pockets his hat drops from his head, and when he
turns to go out the little flower calls after him, "Forget me
not!" He turns back and looks around, but is too bewildered
with his good fortune to think of his bare head or of the
luck-flower which he has let fall. He selects several more of
the finest jewels he can find, and again starts to go out; but
as he passes through the door the mountain closes amid the
crashing of thunder, and cuts off one of his heels. Alone, in
the gloom of the forest, he searches in vain for the
mysterious door: it has disappeared forever, and the traveller
goes on his way, thankful, let us hope, that he has fared no
worse.

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

Sometimes it is a white lady, like the Princess Ilse, who
invites the finder of the luck-flower to help himself to her
treasures, and who utters the enigmatical warning. The
mountain where the event occurred may be found almost anywhere
in Germany, and one just like it stood in Persia, in the
golden prime of Haroun Alraschid. In the story of the Forty
Thieves, the mere name of the plant sesame serves as a
talisman to open and shut the secret door which leads into the
robbers' cavern; and when the avaricious Cassim Baba, absorbed
in the contemplation of the bags of gold and bales of rich
merchandise, forgets the magic formula, he meets no better
fate than the shepherd of the Ilsenstein. In the story of
Prince Ahmed, it is an enchanted arrow which guides the young
adventurer through the hillside to the grotto of the Peri
Banou. In the tale of Baba Abdallah, it is an ointment rubbed
on the eyelid which reveals at a single glance all the
treasures hidden in the bowels of the earth

The ancient Romans also had their rock-breaking plant, called
Saxifraga, or "sassafras." And the further we penetrate into
this charmed circle of traditions the more evident does it
appear that the power of cleaving rocks or shattering hard
substances enters, as a primitive element, into the conception
of these treasure-showing talismans. Mr. Baring-Gould has
given an excellent account of the rabbinical legends
concerning the wonderful schamir, by the aid of which Solomon
was said to have built his temple. From Asmodeus, prince of
the Jann, Benaiah, the son of Jehoiada, wrested the secret of
a worm no bigger than a barley-corn, which could split the
hardest substance. This worm was called schamir. "If Solomon
desired to possess himself of the worm, he must find the nest
of the moor-hen, and cover it with a plate of glass, so that
the mother bird could not get at her young without breaking
the glass. She would seek schamir for the purpose, and the
worm must be obtained from her." As the Jewish king did need
the worm in order to hew the stones for that temple which was
to be built without sound of hammer, or axe, or any tool of
iron,[28] he sent Benaiah to obtain it. According to another
account, schamir was a mystic stone which enabled Solomon to
penetrate the earth in search of mineral wealth. Directed by a
Jinni, the wise king covered a raven's eggs with a plate of
crystal, and thus obtained schamir which the bird brought in
order to break the plate.[29]

[28] 1 Kings vi. 7.

[29] Compare the Mussulman account of the building of the
temple, in Baring-Gould, Legends of the Patriarchs and
Prophets, pp. 337, 338. And see the story of Diocletian's
ostrich, Swan, Gesta Romanorum, ed. Wright, Vol I. p. lxiv.
See also the pretty story of the knight unjustly imprisoned,
id. p. cii.

In these traditions, which may possibly be of Aryan descent,
due to the prolonged intercourse between the Jews and the
Persians, a new feature is added to those before enumerated:
the rock-splitting talisman is always found in the possession
of a bird. The same feature in the myth reappears on Aryan
soil. The springwort, whose marvellous powers we have noticed
in the case of the Ilsenstein shepherd, is obtained, according
to Pliny, by stopping up the hole in a tree where a woodpecker
keeps its young. The bird flies away, and presently returns
with the springwort, which it applies to the plug, causing it
to shoot out with a loud explosion. The same account is given
in German folk-lore. Elsewhere, as in Iceland, Normandy, and
ancient Greece, the bird is an eagle, a swallow, an ostrich,
or a hoopoe.

In the Icelandic and Pomeranian myths the schamir, or
"raven-stone," also renders its possessor invisible,--a
property which it shares with one of the treasure-finding
plants, the fern.[30] In this respect it resembles the ring of
Gyges, as in its divining and rock-splitting qualities it
resembles that other ring which the African magri-cian gave to
Aladdin, to enable him to descend into the cavern where stood
the wonderful lamp.

[30] "We have the receipt of fern-seed. We walk invisible."--
Shakespeare, Henry IV. See Ralston, Songs of the Russian
People, p. 98

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

In the North of Europe schamir appears strangely and
grotesquely metamorphosed. The hand of a man that has been
hanged, when dried and prepared with certain weird unguents
and set on fire, is known as the Hand of Glory; and as it not
only bursts open all safe-locks, but also lulls to sleep all
persons within the circle of its influence, it is of course
invaluable to thieves and burglars. I quote the following
story from Thorpe's "Northern Mythology": "Two fellows once
came to Huy, who pretended to be exceedingly fatigued, and
when they had supped would not retire to a sleeping-room, but
begged their host would allow them to take a nap on the
hearth. But the maid-servant, who did not like the looks of
the two guests, remained by the kitchen door and peeped
through a chink, when she saw that one of them drew a thief's
hand from his pocket, the fingers of which, after having
rubbed them with an ointment, he lighted, and they all burned
except one. Again they held this finger to the fire, but still
it would not burn, at which they appeared much surprised, and
one said, 'There must surely be some one in the house who is
not yet asleep.' They then hung the hand with its four
burning fingers by the chimney, and went out to call their
associates. But the maid followed them instantly and made the
door fast, then ran up stairs, where the landlord slept, that
she might wake him, but was unable, notwithstanding all her
shaking and calling. In the mean time the thieves had returned
and were endeavouring to enter the house by a window, but the
maid cast them down from the ladder. They then took a
different course, and would have forced an entrance, had it
not occurred to the maid that the burning fingers might
probably be the cause of her master's profound sleep.
Impressed with this idea she ran to the kitchen and blew them
out, when the master and his men-servants instantly awoke, and
soon drove away the robbers." The same event is said to have
occurred at Stainmore in England; and Torquermada relates of
Mexican thieves that they carry with them the left hand of a
woman who has died in her first childbed, before which
talisman all bolts yield and all opposition is benumbed. In
1831 "some Irish thieves attempted to commit a robbery on the
estate of Mr. Naper, of Loughcrew, county Meath. They entered
the house armed with a dead man's hand with a lighted candle
in it, believing in the superstitious notion that a candle
placed in a dead man's hand will not be seen by any but those
by whom it is used; and also that if a candle in a dead hand
be introduced into a house, it will prevent those who may be
asleep from awaking. The inmates, however, were alarmed, and
the robbers fled, leaving the hand behind them."[31]

[31] Henderson, Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties of England,
p. 202

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

Here, then, we have a large and motley group of objects--the
forked rod of ash or hazel, the springwort and the
luck-flower, leaves, worms, stones, rings, and dead men's
hands--which are for the most part competent to open the way
into cavernous rocks, and which all agree in pointing out
hidden wealth. We find, moreover, that many of these charmed
objects are carried about by birds, and that some of them
possess, in addition to their generic properties, the specific
power of benumbing people's senses. What, now, is the common
origin of this whole group of superstitions? And since
mythology has been shown to be the result of primeval attempts
to explain the phenomena of nature, what natural phenomenon
could ever have given rise to so many seemingly wanton
conceptions? Hopeless as the problem may at first sight seem,
it has nevertheless been solved. In his great treatise on "The
Descent of Fire," Dr. Kuhn has shown that all these legends
and traditions are descended from primitive myths explanatory
of the lightning and the storm-cloud.[32]

[32] Kuhn, Die Herabkunft des Feuers und des Gottertranks.
Berlin, 1859.

To us, who are nourished from childhood on the truths revealed
by science, the sky is known to be merely an optical
appearance due to the partial absorption of the solar rays in
passing through a thick stratum of atmospheric air; the clouds
are known to be large masses of watery vapour, which descend
in rain-drops when sufficiently condensed; and the lightning
is known to be a flash of light accompanying an electric
discharge. But these conceptions are extremely recondite, and
have been attained only through centuries of philosophizing
and after careful observation and laborious experiment. To the
untaught mind of a child or of an uncivilized man, it seems
far more natural and plausible to regard the sky as a solid
dome of blue crystal, the clouds as snowy mountains, or
perhaps even as giants or angels, the lightning as a flashing
dart or a fiery serpent. In point of fact, we find that the
conceptions actually entertained are often far more grotesque
than these. I can recollect once framing the hypothesis that
the flaming clouds of sunset were transient apparitions,
vouchsafed us by way of warning, of that burning Calvinistic
hell with which my childish imagination had been unwisely
terrified;[33] and I have known of a four-year-old boy who
thought that the snowy clouds of noonday were the white robes
of the angels hung out to dry in the sun.[34] My little
daughter is anxious to know whether it is necessary to take a
balloon in order to get to the place where God lives, or
whether the same end can be accomplished by going to the
horizon and crawling up the sky;[35] the Mohammedan of old was
working at the same problem when he called the rainbow the
bridge Es-Sirat, over which souls must pass on their way to
heaven. According to the ancient Jew, the sky was a solid
plate, hammered out by the gods, and spread over the earth in
order to keep up the ocean overhead;[36] but the plate was
full of little windows, which were opened whenever it became
necessary to let the rain come through.[37] With equal
plausibility the Greek represented the rainy sky as a sieve in
which the daughters of Danaos were vainly trying to draw
water; while to the Hindu the rain-clouds were celestial
cattle milked by the wind-god. In primitive Aryan lore, the
sky itself was a blue sea, and the clouds were ships sailing
over it; and an English legend tells how one of these ships
once caught its anchor on a gravestone in the churchyard, to
the great astonishment of the people who were coming out of
church. Charon's ferry-boat was one of these vessels, and
another was Odin's golden ship, in which the souls of slain
heroes were conveyed to Valhalla. Hence it was once the
Scandinavian practice to bury the dead in boats; and in
Altmark a penny is still placed in the mouth of the corpse,
that it may have the means of paying its fare to the ghostly
ferryman.[38] In such a vessel drifted the Lady of Shalott on
her fatal voyage; and of similar nature was the dusky barge,
"dark as a funeral-scarf from stem to stern," in which Arthur
was received by the black-hooded queens.[39]

[33] "Saga me forwhan byth seo sunne read on aefen? Ic the
secge, forthon heo locath on helle.--Tell me, why is the sun
red at even? I tell thee, because she looketh on hell."
Thorpe, Analecta Anglo-Saxonica, p. 115, apud Tylor, Primitive
Culture, Vol. II. p. 63. Barbaric thought had partly
anticipated my childish theory.

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

[35] "The Polynesians imagine that the sky descends at the
horizon and encloses the earth. Hence they call foreigners
papalangi, or 'heaven-bursters,' as having broken in from
another world outside."--Max Muller, Chips, II. 268.

[36] "--And said the gods, let there be a hammered plate in the
midst of the waters, and let it be dividing between waters and
waters." Genesis i. 6.

[37] Genesis vii. 11.

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

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

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

But the fact that a natural phenomenon was explained in one
way did not hinder it from being explained in a dozen other
ways. The fact that the sun was generally regarded as an
all-conquering hero did not prevent its being called an egg,
an apple, or a frog squatting on the waters, or Ixion's wheel,
or the eye of Polyphemos, or the stone of Sisyphos, which was
no sooner pushed to the zenith than it rolled down to the
horizon. So the sky was not only a crystal dome, or a
celestial ocean, but it was also the Aleian land through which
Bellerophon wandered, the country of the Lotos-eaters, or
again the realm of the Graiai beyond the twilight; and finally
it was personified and worshipped as Dyaus or Varuna, the
Vedic prototypes of the Greek Zeus and Ouranos. The clouds,
too, had many other representatives besides ships and cows. In
a future paper it will be shown that they were sometimes
regarded as angels or houris; at present it more nearly
concerns us to know that they appear, throughout all Aryan
mythology, under the form of birds. It used to be a matter of
hopeless wonder to me that Aladdin's innocent request for a
roc's egg to hang in the dome of his palace should have been
regarded as a crime worthy of punishment by the loss of the
wonderful lamp; the obscurest part of the whole affair being
perhaps the Jinni's passionate allusion to the egg as his
master: "Wretch! dost thou command me to bring thee my
master, and hang him up in the midst of this vaulted dome?"
But the incident is to some extent cleared of its mystery when
we learn that the roc's egg is the bright sun, and that the
roc itself is the rushing storm-cloud which, in the tale of
Sindbad, haunts the sparkling starry firmament, symbolized as
a valley of diamonds.[40] According to one Arabic authority,
the length of its wings is ten thousand fathoms. But in
European tradition it dwindles from these huge dimensions to
the size of an eagle, a raven, or a woodpecker. Among the
birds enumerated by Kuhn and others as representing the
storm-cloud are likewise the wren or "kinglet" (French
roitelet); the owl, sacred to Athene; the cuckoo, stork, and
sparrow; and the red-breasted robin, whose name Robert was
originally an epithet of the lightning-god Thor. In certain
parts of France it is still believed that the robbing of a
wren's nest will render the culprit liable to be struck by
lightning. The same belief was formerly entertained in
Teutonic countries with respect to the robin; and I suppose
that from this superstition is descended the prevalent notion,
which I often encountered in childhood, that there is
something peculiarly wicked in killing robins.

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

Now, as the raven or woodpecker, in the various myths of
schamir, is the dark storm-cloud, so the rock-splitting worm
or plant or pebble which the bird carries in its beak and lets
fall to the ground is nothing more or less than the flash of
lightning carried and dropped by the cloud. "If the cloud was
supposed to be a great bird, the lightnings were regarded as
writhing worms or serpents in its beak. These fiery serpents,
elikiai gram-moeidws feromenoi, are believed in to this day by
the Canadian Indians, who call the thunder their hissing."[41]

[41] Baring-Gould, Curious Myths, Vol. II. p. 146. Compare
Tylor, Primitive Culture, Vol. II. p. 237, seq.

But these are not the only mythical conceptions which are to
be found wrapped up in the various myths of schamir and the
divining-rod. The persons who told these stories were not
weaving ingenious allegories about thunder-storms; they were
telling stories, or giving utterance to superstitions, of
which the original meaning was forgotten. The old grannies
who, along with a stoical indifference to the fate of quails
and partridges, used to impress upon me the wickedness of
killing robins, did not add that I should be struck by
lightning if I failed to heed their admonitions. They had
never heard that the robin was the bird of Thor; they merely
rehearsed the remnant of the superstition which had survived
to their own times, while the essential part of it had long
since faded from recollection. The reason for regarding a
robin's life as more sacred than a partridge's had been
forgotten; but it left behind, as was natural, a vague
recognition of that mythical sanctity. The primitive meaning
of a myth fades away as inevitably as the primitive meaning of
a word or phrase; and the rabbins who told of a worm which
shatters rocks no more thought of the writhing thunderbolts
than the modern reader thinks of oyster-shells when he sees
the word ostracism, or consciously breathes a prayer as he
writes the phrase good bye. It is only in its callow infancy
that the full force of a myth is felt, and its period of
luxuriant development dates from the time when its physical
significance is lost or obscured. It was because the Greek had
forgotten that Zeus meant the bright sky, that he could make
him king over an anthropomorphic Olympos. The Hindu Dyaus, who
carried his significance in his name as plainly as the Greek
Helios, never attained such an exalted position; he yielded to
deities of less obvious pedigree, such as Brahma and Vishnu.

Since, therefore, the myth-tellers recounted merely the
wonderful stories which their own nurses and grandmas had told
them, and had no intention of weaving subtle allegories or
wrapping up a physical truth in mystic emblems, it follows
that they were not bound to avoid incongruities or to preserve
a philosophical symmetry in their narratives. In the great
majority of complex myths, no such symmetry is to be found. A
score of different mythical conceptions would get wrought into
the same story, and the attempt to pull them apart and
construct a single harmonious system of conceptions out of the
pieces must often end in ingenious absurdity. If Odysseus is
unquestionably the sun, so is the eye of Polyphemos, which
Odysseus puts out.[42] But the Greek poet knew nothing of the
incongruity, for he was thinking only of a superhuman hero
freeing himself from a giant cannibal; he knew nothing of
Sanskrit, or of comparative mythology, and the sources of his
myths were as completely hidden from his view as the sources
of the Nile.

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

We need not be surprised, then, to find that in one version of
the schamir-myth the cloud is the bird which carries the worm,
while in another version the cloud is the rock or mountain
which the talisman cleaves open; nor need we wonder at it, if
we find stories in which the two conceptions are mingled
together without regard to an incongruity which in the mind of
the myth-teller no longer exists.[43]

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

In early Aryan mythology there is nothing by which the clouds
are more frequently represented than by rocks or mountains.
Such were the Symplegades, which, charmed by the harp of the
wind-god Orpheus, parted to make way for the talking ship
Argo, with its crew of solar heroes.[44] Such, too, were the
mountains Ossa and Pelion, which the giants piled up one upon
another in their impious assault upon Zeus, the lord of the
bright sky. As Mr. Baring-Gould observes: "The ancient Aryan
had the same name for cloud and mountain. To him the piles of
vapour on the horizon were so like Alpine ranges, that he had
but one word whereby to designate both.[45] These great
mountains of heaven were opened by the lightning. In the
sudden flash he beheld the dazzling splendour within, but only
for a moment, and then, with a crash, the celestial rocks
closed again. Believing these vaporous piles to contain
resplendent treasures of which partial glimpse was obtained by
mortals in a momentary gleam, tales were speedily formed,
relating the adventures of some who had succeeded in entering
these treasure-mountains."

[44] Mr. Tylor offers a different, and possibly a better,
explanation of the Symplegades as the gates of Night through
which the solar ship, having passed successfully once, may
henceforth pass forever. See the details of the evidence in
his Primitive Culture, I. 315.

[45] The Sanskrit parvata, a bulging or inflated body, means
both "cloud" and "mountain." "In the Edda, too, the rocks,
said to have been fashioned out of Ymir's bones, are supposed
to be intended for clouds. In Old Norse Klakkr means both
cloud and rock; nay, the English word CLOUD itself has been
identified with the Anglo-Saxon clud, rock. See Justi, Orient
und Occident, Vol. II. p. 62." Max Muller, Rig-Veda, Vol. 1.
p. 44.

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

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