Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted
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comparative mythology by John Fiske >> Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted
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[78] Baring-Gould, Werewolves, p. 81.
[79] Baring-Gould, op. cit. chap. xiv.
This occurred only about twenty years ago, and the criminal,
though ruled by an insane appetite, is not known to have been
subject to any mental delusion. But there have been a great
many similar cases, in which the homicidal or cannibal craving
has been accompanied by genuine hallucination. Forms of
insanity in which the afflicted persons imagine themselves to
be brute animals are not perhaps very common, but they are not
unknown. I once knew a poor demented old man who believed
himself to be a horse, and would stand by the hour together
before a manger, nibbling hay, or deluding himself with the
presence of so doing. Many of the cannibals whose cases are
related by Mr. Baring-Gould, in his chapter of horrors,
actually believed themselves to have been transformed into
wolves or other wild animals. Jean Grenier was a boy of
thirteen, partially idiotic, and of strongly marked canine
physiognomy; his jaws were large and projected forward, and
his canine teeth were unnaturally long, so as to protrude
beyond the lower lip. He believed himself to be a werewolf.
One evening, meeting half a dozen young girls, he scared them
out of their wits by telling them that as soon as the sun had
set he would turn into a wolf and eat them for supper. A few
days later, one little girl, having gone out at nightfall to
look after the sheep, was attacked by some creature which in
her terror she mistook for a wolf, but which afterwards proved
to be none other than Jean Grenier. She beat him off with her
sheep-staff, and fled home. As several children had
mysteriously disappeared from the neighbourhood, Grenier was
at once suspected. Being brought before the parliament of
Bordeaux, he stated that two years ago he had met the Devil
one night in the woods and had signed a compact with him and
received from him a wolf-skin. Since then he had roamed about
as a wolf after dark, resuming his human shape by daylight. He
had killed and eaten several children whom he had found alone
in the fields, and on one occasion he had entered a house
while the family were out and taken the baby from its cradle.
A careful investigation proved the truth of these statements,
so far as the cannibalism was concerned. There is no doubt
that the missing children were eaten by Jean Grenier, and
there is no doubt that in his own mind the halfwitted boy was
firmly convinced that he was a wolf. Here the lycanthropy was
complete.
In the year 1598, "in a wild and unfrequented spot near Caude,
some countrymen came one day upon the corpse of a boy of
fifteen, horribly mutilated and bespattered with blood. As the
men approached, two wolves, which had been rending the body,
bounded away into the thicket. The men gave chase immediately,
following their bloody tracks till they lost them; when,
suddenly crouching among the bushes, his teeth chattering with
fear, they found a man half naked, with long hair and beard,
and with his hands dyed in blood. His nails were long as
claws, and were clotted with fresh gore and shreds of human
flesh."[80]
[80] Baring-Gould, op. cit. p. 82.
This man, Jacques Roulet, was a poor, half-witted creature
under the dominion of a cannibal appetite. He was employed in
tearing to pieces the corpse of the boy when these countrymen
came up. Whether there were any wolves in the case, except
what the excited imaginations of the men may have conjured up,
I will not presume to determine; but it is certain that Roulet
supposed himself to be a wolf, and killed and ate several
persons under the influence of the delusion. He was sentenced
to death, but the parliament of Paris reversed the sentence,
and charitably shut him up in a madhouse.
The annals of the Middle Ages furnish many cases similar to
these of Grenier and Roulet. Their share in maintaining the
werewolf superstition is undeniable; but modern science finds
in them nothing that cannot be readily explained. That
stupendous process of breeding, which we call civilization,
has been for long ages strengthening those kindly social
feelings by the possession of which we are chiefly
distinguished from the brutes, leaving our primitive bestial
impulses to die for want of exercise, or checking in every
possible way their further expansion by legislative
enactments. But this process, which is transforming us from
savages into civilized men, is a very slow one; and now and
then there occur cases of what physiologists call atavism, or
reversion to an ancestral type of character. Now and then
persons are born, in civilized countries, whose intellectual
powers are on a level with those of the most degraded
Australian savage, and these we call idiots. And now and then
persons are born possessed of the bestial appetites and
cravings of primitive man, his fiendish cruelty and his liking
for human flesh. Modern physiology knows how to classify and
explain these abnormal cases, but to the unscientific
mediaeval mind they were explicable only on the hypothesis of
a diabolical metamorphosis. And there is nothing strange in
the fact that, in an age when the prevailing habits of thought
rendered the transformation of men into beasts an easily
admissible notion, these monsters of cruelty and depraved
appetite should have been regarded as capable of taking on
bestial forms. Nor is it strange that the hallucination under
which these unfortunate wretches laboured should have taken
such a shape as to account to their feeble intelligence for
the existence of the appetites which they were conscious of
not sharing with their neighbours and contemporaries. If a
myth is a piece of unscientific philosophizing, it must
sometimes be applied to the explanation of obscure
psychological as well as of physical phenomena. Where the
modern calmly taps his forehead and says, "Arrested
development," the terrified ancient made the sign of the cross
and cried, "Werewolf."
We shall be assisted in this explanation by turning aside for
a moment to examine the wild superstitions about
"changelings," which contributed, along with so many others,
to make the lives of our ancestors anxious and miserable.
These superstitions were for the most part attempts to explain
the phenomena of insanity, epilepsy, and other obscure nervous
diseases. A man who has hitherto enjoyed perfect health, and
whose actions have been consistent and rational, suddenly
loses all self-control and seems actuated by a will foreign to
himself. Modern science possesses the key to this phenomenon;
but in former times it was explicable only on the hypothesis
that a demon had entered the body of the lunatic, or else that
the fairies had stolen the real man and substituted for him a
diabolical phantom exactly like him in stature and features.
Hence the numerous legends of changelings, some of which are
very curious. In Irish folk-lore we find the story of one
Rickard, surnamed the Rake, from his worthless character. A
good-natured, idle fellow, he spent all his evenings in
dancing,--an accomplishment in which no one in the village
could rival him. One night, in the midst of a lively reel, he
fell down in a fit. "He's struck with a fairy-dart,"
exclaimed all the friends, and they carried him home and
nursed him; but his face grew so thin and his manner so morose
that by and by all began to suspect that the true Rickard was
gone and a changeling put in his place. Rickard, with all his
accomplishments, was no musician; and so, in order to put the
matter to a crucial test, a bagpipe was left in the room by
the side of his bed. The trick succeeded. One hot summer's
day, when all were supposed to be in the field making hay,
some members of the family secreted in a clothes-press saw the
bedroom door open a little way, and a lean, foxy face, with a
pair of deep-sunken eyes, peer anxiously about the premises.
Having satisfied itself that the coast was clear, the face
withdrew, the door was closed, and presently such ravishing
strains of music were heard as never proceeded from a bagpipe
before or since that day. Soon was heard the rustle of
innumerable fairies, come to dance to the changeling's music.
Then the "fairy-man" of the village, who was keeping watch
with the family, heated a pair of tongs red-hot, and with
deafening shouts all burst at once into the sick-chamber. The
music had ceased and the room was empty, but in at the window
glared a fiendish face, with such fearful looks of hatred,
that for a moment all stood motionless with terror. But when
the fairy-man, recovering himself, advanced with the hot tongs
to pinch its nose, it vanished with an unearthly yell, and
there on the bed was Rickard, safe and sound, and cured of his
epilepsy.[81]
[81] Kennedy, Fictions of the Irish Celts, p. 90.
Comparing this legend with numerous others relating to
changelings, and stripping off the fantastic garb of
fairy-lore with which popular imagination has invested them,
it seems impossible to doubt that they have arisen from myths
devised for the purpose of explaining the obscure phenomena of
mental disease. If this be so, they afford an excellent
collateral illustration of the belief in werewolves. The same
mental habits which led men to regard the insane or epileptic
person as a changeling, and which allowed them to explain
catalepsy as the temporary departure of a witch's soul from
its body, would enable them to attribute a wolf's nature to
the maniac or idiot with cannibal appetites. And when the
myth-forming process had got thus far, it would not stop short
of assigning to the unfortunate wretch a tangible lupine body;
for all ancient mythology teemed with precedents for such a
transformation.
It remains for us to sum up,--to tie into a bunch the keys
which have helped us to penetrate into the secret causes of
the werewolf superstition. In a previous paper we saw what a
host of myths, fairy-tales, and superstitious observances have
sprung from attempts to interpret one simple natural
phenomenon,--the descent of fire from the clouds. Here, on the
other hand, we see what a heterogeneous multitude of mythical
elements may combine to build up in course of time a single
enormous superstition, and we see how curiously fact and fancy
have co-operated in keeping the superstition from falling. In
the first place the worship of dead ancestors with wolf totems
originated the notion of the transformation of men into divine
or superhuman wolves; and this notion was confirmed by the
ambiguous explanation of the storm-wind as the rushing of a
troop of dead men's souls or as the howling of wolf-like
monsters. Mediaeval Christianity retained these conceptions,
merely changing the superhuman wolves into evil demons; and
finally the occurrence of cases of Berserker madness and
cannibalism, accompanied by lycanthropic hallucinations, being
interpreted as due to such demoniacal metamorphosis, gave rise
to the werewolf superstition of the Middle Ages. The
etymological proceedings, to which Mr. Cox would incontinently
ascribe the origin of the entire superstition, seemed to me to
have played a very subordinate part in the matter. To suppose
that Jean Grenier imagined himself to be a wolf, because the
Greek word for wolf sounded like the word for light, and thus
gave rise to the story of a light-deity who became a wolf,
seems to me quite inadmissible. Yet as far as such verbal
equivocations may have prevailed, they doubtless helped to
sustain the delusion.
Thus we need no longer regard our werewolf as an inexplicable
creature of undetermined pedigree. But any account of him
would be quite imperfect which should omit all consideration
of the methods by which his change of form was accomplished.
By the ancient Romans the werewolf was commonly called a
"skin-changer" or "turn-coat" (versipellis), and similar
epithets were applied to him in the Middle Ages The mediaeval
theory was that, while the werewolf kept his human form, his
hair grew inwards; when he wished to become a wolf, he simply
turned himself inside out. In many trials on record, the
prisoners were closely interrogated as to how this inversion
might be accomplished; but I am not aware that any one of them
ever gave a satisfactory answer. At the moment of change their
memories seem to have become temporarily befogged. Now and
then a poor wretch had his arms and legs cut off, or was
partially flayed, in order that the ingrowing hair might be
detected.[82] Another theory was, that the possessed person
had merely to put on a wolf's skin, in order to assume
instantly the lupine form and character; and in this may
perhaps be seen a vague reminiscence of the alleged fact that
Berserkers were in the habit of haunting the woods by night,
clothed in the hides of wolves or bears.[83] Such a wolfskin
was kept by the boy Grenier. Roulet, on the other hand,
confessed to using a magic salve or ointment. A fourth method
of becoming a werewolf was to obtain a girdle, usually made of
human skin. Several cases are related in Thorpe's "Northern
Mythology." One hot day in harvest-time some reapers lay down
to sleep in the shade; when one of them, who could not sleep,
saw the man next him arise quietly and gird him with a strap,
whereupon he instantly vanished, and a wolf jumped up from
among the sleepers and ran off across the fields. Another man,
who possessed such a girdle, once went away from home without
remembering to lock it up. His little son climbed up to the
cupboard and got it, and as he proceeded to buckle it around
his waist, he became instantly transformed into a
strange-looking beast. Just then his father came in, and
seizing the girdle restored the child to his natural shape.
The boy said that no sooner had he buckled it on than he was
tormented with a raging hunger.
[82] "En 1541, a Padoue, dit Wier, un homme qui se croyait
change en loup courait la campagne, attaquant et mettant a
mort ceux qu'il rencontrait. Apres bien des difficultes, on
parvint s'emparer de lui. Il dit en confidence a ceux qui
l'arreterent: Je suis vraiment un loup, et si ma peau ne
parait pas etre celle d'un loup, c'est parce qu'elle est
retournee et que les poils sont en dedans.--Pour s'assurer du
fait, on coupa le malheureux aux differentes parties du corps,
on lui emporta les bras et les jambes."--Taine, De
l'Intelligence, Tom. II. p. 203. See the account of Slavonic
werewolves in Ralston, Songs of the Russian People, pp.
404-418.
[83] Mr. Cox, whose scepticism on obscure points in history
rather surpasses that of Sir G. C. Lewis, dismisses with a
sneer the subject of the Berserker madness, observing that
"the unanimous testimony of the Norse historians is worth as
much and as little as the convictions of Glanvil and Hale on
the reality of witchcraft." I have not the special knowledge
requisite for pronouncing an opinion on this point, but Mr.
Cox's ordinary methods of disposing of such questions are not
such as to make one feel obliged to accept his bare assertion,
unaccompanied by critical arguments. The madness of the
bearsarks may, no doubt, be the same thing us the frenzy of
Herakles; but something more than mere dogmatism is needed to
prove it.
Sometimes the werewolf transformation led to unlucky
accidents. At Caseburg, as a man and his wife were making hay,
the woman threw down her pitchfork and went away, telling her
husband that if a wild beast should come to him during her
absence he must throw his hat at it. Presently a she-wolf
rushed towards him. The man threw his hat at it, but a boy
came up from another part of the field and stabbed the animal
with his pitchfork, whereupon it vanished, and the woman's
dead body lay at his feet.
A parallel legend shows that this woman wished to have the hat
thrown at her, in order that she might be henceforth free from
her liability to become a werewolf. A man was one night
returning with his wife from a merry-making when he felt the
change coming on. Giving his wife the reins, he jumped from
the wagon, telling her to strike with her apron at any animal
which might come to her. In a few moments a wolf ran up to the
side of the vehicle, and, as the woman struck out with her
apron, it bit off a piece and ran away. Presently the man
returned with the piece of apron in his mouth and consoled his
terrified wife with the information that the enchantment had
left him forever.
A terrible case at a village in Auvergne has found its way
into the annals of witchcraft. "A gentleman while hunting was
suddenly attacked by a savage wolf of monstrous size.
Impenetrable by his shot, the beast made a spring upon the
helpless huntsman, who in the struggle luckily, or unluckily
for the unfortunate lady, contrived to cut off one of its
fore-paws. This trophy he placed in his pocket, and made the
best of his way homewards in safety. On the road he met a
friend, to whom he exhibited a bleeding paw, or rather (as it
now appeared) a woman's hand, upon which was a wedding-ring.
His wife's ring was at once recognized by the other. His
suspicions aroused, he immediately went in search of his wife,
who was found sitting by the fire in the kitchen, her arm
hidden beneath her apron, when the husband, seizing her by the
arm, found his terrible suspicions verified. The bleeding
stump was there, evidently just fresh from the wound. She was
given into custody, and in the event was burned at Riom, in
presence of thousands of spectators."[84]
[84] Williams, Superstitions of Witchcraft, p. 179. See a
parallel case of a cat-woman, in Thorpe's Northern Mythology,
II. 26. "Certain witches at Thurso for a long time tormented
an honest fellow under the usual form of cats, till one night
he put them to flight with his broadsword, 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."--Tylor, Primitive Culture, I. 283.
Sometimes a werewolf was cured merely by recognizing him while
in his brute shape. A Swedish legend tells of a cottager who,
on entering the forest one day without recollecting to say his
Patter Noster, got into the power of a Troll, who changed him
into a wolf. For many years his wife mourned him as dead. But
one Christmas eve the old Troll, disguised as a beggarwoman,
came to the house for alms; and being taken in and kindly
treated, told the woman that her husband might very likely
appear to her in wolf-shape. Going at night to the pantry to
lay aside a joint of meat for tomorrow's dinner, she saw a
wolf standing with its paws on the window-sill, looking
wistfully in at her. "Ah, dearest," said she, "if I knew that
thou wert really my husband, I would give thee a bone."
Whereupon the wolf-skin fell off, and her husband stood before
her in the same old clothes which he had on the day that the
Troll got hold of him.
In Denmark it was believed that if a woman were to creep
through a colt's placental membrane stretched between four
sticks, she would for the rest of her life bring forth
children without pain or illness; but all the boys would in
such case be werewolves, and all the girls Maras, or
nightmares. In this grotesque superstition appears that
curious kinship between the werewolf and the wife or maiden of
supernatural race, which serves admirably to illustrate the
nature of both conceptions, and the elucidation of which shall
occupy us throughout the remainder of this paper.
It is, perhaps, needless to state that in the personality of
the nightmare, or Mara, there was nothing equine. The Mara was
a female demon,[85] who would come at night and torment men or
women by crouching on their chests or stomachs and stopping
their respiration. The scene is well enough represented in
Fuseli's picture, though the frenzied-looking horse which
there accompanies the demon has no place in the original
superstition. A Netherlandish story illustrates the character
of the Mara. Two young men were in love with the same damsel.
One of them, being tormented every night by a Mara, sought
advice from his rival, and it was a treacherous counsel that
he got. "Hold a sharp knife with the point towards your
breast, and you'll never see the Mara again," said this false
friend. The lad thanked him, but when he lay down to rest he
thought it as well to be on the safe side, and so held the
knife handle downward. So when the Mara came, instead of
forcing the blade into his breast, she cut herself badly, and
fled howling; and let us hope, though the legend here leaves
us in the dark, that this poor youth, who is said to have been
the comelier of the two, revenged himself on his malicious
rival by marrying the young lady.
[85] "The mare in nightmare means spirit, elf, or nymph;
compare Anglo-Saxon wudurmaere (wood-mare) = echo."--Tylor,
Primitive Culture, Vol. II. p. 173.
But the Mara sometimes appeared in less revolting shape, and
became the mistress or even the wife of some mortal man to
whom she happened to take a fancy. In such cases she would
vanish on being recognized. There is a well-told monkish tale
of a pious knight who, journeying one day through the forest,
found a beautiful lady stripped naked and tied to a tree, her
back all covered with deep gashes streaming with blood, from a
flogging which some bandits had given her. Of course he took
her home to his castle and married her, and for a while they
lived very happily together, and the fame of the lady's beauty
was so great that kings and emperors held tournaments in honor
of her. But this pious knight used to go to mass every Sunday,
and greatly was he scandalized when he found that his wife
would never stay to assist in the Credo, but would always get
up and walk out of church just as the choir struck up. All her
husband's coaxing was of no use; threats and entreaties were
alike powerless even to elicit an explanation of this strange
conduct. At last the good man determined to use force; and so
one Sunday, as the lady got up to go out, according to custom,
he seized her by the arm and sternly commanded her to remain.
Her whole frame was suddenly convulsed, and her dark eyes
gleamed with weird, unearthly brilliancy. The services paused
for a moment, and all eyes were turned toward the knight and
his lady. "In God's name, tell me what thou art," shouted the
knight; and instantly, says the chronicler, "the bodily form
of the lady melted away, and was seen no more; whilst, with a
cry of anguish and of terror, an evil spirit of monstrous form
rose from the ground, clave the chapel roof asunder, and
disappeared in the air."
In a Danish legend, the Mara betrays her affinity to the
Nixies, or Swan-maidens. A peasant discovered that his
sweetheart was in the habit of coming to him by night as a
Mara. He kept strict watch until he discovered her creeping
into the room through a small knot-hole in the door. Next day
he made a peg, and after she had come to him, drove in the peg
so that she was unable to escape. They were married and lived
together many years; but one night it happened that the man,
joking with his wife about the way in which he had secured
her, drew the peg from the knot-hole, that she might see how
she had entered his room. As she peeped through, she became
suddenly quite small, passed out, and was never seen again.
The well-known pathological phenomena of nightmare are
sufficient to account for the mediaeval theory of a fiend who
sits upon one's bosom and hinders respiration; but as we
compare these various legends relating to the Mara, we see
that a more recondite explanation is needed to account for all
her peculiarities. Indigestion may interfere with our
breathing, but it does not make beautiful women crawl through
keyholes, nor does it bring wives from the spirit-world. The
Mara belongs to an ancient family, and in passing from the
regions of monkish superstition to those of pure mythology we
find that, like her kinsman the werewolf, she had once seen
better days. Christianity made a demon of the Mara, and
adopted the theory that Satan employed these seductive
creatures as agents for ruining human souls. Such is the
character of the knight's wife, in the monkish legend just
cited. But in the Danish tale the Mara appears as one of that
large family of supernatural wives who are permitted to live
with mortal men under certain conditions, but who are
compelled to flee away when these conditions are broken, as is
always sure to be the case. The eldest and one of the
loveliest of this family is the Hindu nymph Urvasi, whose love
adventures with Pururavas are narrated in the Puranas, and
form the subject of the well-known and exquisite Sanskrit
drama by Kalidasa. Urvasi is allowed to live with Pururavas so
long as she does not see him undressed. But one night her
kinsmen, the Gandharvas, or cloud-demons, vexed at her long
absence from heaven, resolved to get her away from her mortal
companion, They stole a pet lamb which had been tied at the
foot of her couch, whereat she bitterly upbraided her husband.
In rage and mortification, Pururavas sprang up without
throwing on his tunic, and grasping his sword sought the
robber. Then the wicked Gandharvas sent a flash of lightning,
and Urvasi, seeing her naked husband, instantly vanished.
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