Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted

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

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The different versions of this legend, which have been
elaborately analyzed by comparative mythologists, leave no
doubt that Urvasi is one of the dawn-nymphs or bright fleecy
clouds of early morning, which vanish as the splendour of the
sun is unveiled. We saw, in the preceding paper, that the
ancient Aryans regarded the sky as a sea or great lake, and
that the clouds were explained variously as Phaiakian ships
with bird-like beaks sailing over this lake, or as bright
birds of divers shapes and hues. The light fleecy cirrhi were
regarded as mermaids, or as swans, or as maidens with swan's
plumage. In Sanskrit they are called Apsaras, or "those who
move in the water," and the Elves and Maras of Teutonic
mythology have the same significance. Urvasi appears in one
legend as a bird; and a South German prescription for getting
rid of the Mara asserts that if she be wrapped up in the
bedclothes and firmly held, a white dove will forthwith fly
from the room, leaving the bedclothes empty.[86]

[86] See Kuhn, Herabkunft des Feuers, p. 91; Weber, Indische
Studien. I. 197; Wolf, Beitrage zur deutschen Mythologie, II.
233-281 Muller, Chips, II. 114-128.

In the story of Melusina the cloud-maiden appears as a kind of
mermaid, but in other respects the legend resembles that of
Urvasi. Raymond, Count de la Foret, of Poitou, having by an
accident killed his patron and benefactor during a hunting
excursion, fled in terror and despair into the deep recesses
of the forest. All the afternoon and evening he wandered
through the thick dark woods, until at midnight he came upon a
strange scene. All at once "the boughs of the trees became
less interlaced, and the trunks fewer; next moment his horse,
crashing through the shrubs, brought him out on a pleasant
glade, white with rime, and illumined by the new moon; in the
midst bubbled up a limpid fountain, and flowed away over a
pebbly-floor with a soothing murmur. Near the fountain-head
sat three maidens in glimmering white dresses, with long
waving golden hair, and faces of inexpressible beauty."[87]
One of them advanced to meet Raymond, and according to all
mythological precedent, they were betrothed before daybreak.
In due time the fountain-nymph[88] became Countess de la
Foret, but her husband was given to understand that all her
Saturdays would be passed in strictest seclusion, upon which
he must never dare to intrude, under penalty of losing her
forever. For many years all went well, save that the fair
Melusina's children were, without exception, misshapen or
disfigured. But after a while this strange weekly seclusion
got bruited about all over the neighbourhood, and people shook
their heads and looked grave about it. So many gossiping tales
came to the Count's ears, that he began to grow anxious and
suspicious, and at last he determined to know the worst. He
went one Saturday to Melusina's private apartments, and going
through one empty room after another, at last came to a locked
door which opened into a bath; looking through a keyhole,
there he saw the Countess transformed from the waist downwards
into a fish, disporting herself like a mermaid in the water.
Of course he could not keep the secret, but when some time
afterwards they quarrelled, must needs address her as "a vile
serpent, contaminator of his honourable race." So she
disappeared through the window, but ever afterward hovered
about her husband's castle of Lusignan, like a Banshee,
whenever one of its lords was about to die.

[87] Baring-Gould, Curious Myths, II. 207.

[88] The word nymph itself means "cloud-maiden," as is
illustrated by the kinship between the Greek numph and the
Latin nubes.

The well-known story of Undine is similar to that of Melusina,
save that the naiad's desire to obtain a human soul is a
conception foreign to the spirit of the myth, and marks the
degradation which Christianity had inflicted upon the denizens
of fairy-land. In one of Dasent's tales the water-maiden is
replaced by a kind of werewolf. A white bear marries a young
girl, but assumes the human shape at night. She is never to
look upon him in his human shape, but how could a young bride
be expected to obey such an injunction as that? She lights a
candle while he is sleeping, and discovers the handsomest
prince in the world; unluckily she drops tallow on his shirt,
and that tells the story. But she is more fortunate than poor
Raymond, for after a tiresome journey to the "land east of the
sun and west of the moon," and an arduous washing-match with a
parcel of ugly Trolls, she washes out the spots, and ends her
husband's enchantment.[89]

[89] This is substantially identical with the stories of
Beauty and the Beast, Eros and Psyche, Gandharba Sena, etc.

In the majority of these legends, however, the Apsaras, or
cloud-maiden, has a shirt of swan's feathers which plays the
same part as the wolfskin cape or girdle of the werewolf. If
you could get hold of a werewolf's sack and burn it, a
permanent cure was effected. No danger of a relapse, unless
the Devil furnished him with a new wolfskin. So the
swan-maiden kept her human form, as long as she was deprived
of her tunic of feathers. Indo-European folk-lore teems with
stories of swan-maidens forcibly wooed and won by mortals who
had stolen their clothes. A man travelling along the road
passes by a lake where several lovely girls are bathing; their
dresses, made of feathers curiously and daintily woven, lie on
the shore. He approaches the place cautiously and steals one
of these dresses.[90] When the girls have finished their
bathing, they all come and get their dresses and swim away as
swans; but the one whose dress is stolen must needs stay on
shore and marry the thief. It is needless to add that they
live happily together for many years, or that finally the good
man accidentally leaves the cupboard door unlocked, whereupon
his wife gets back her swan-shirt and flies away from him,
never to return. But it is not always a shirt of feathers. In
one German story, a nobleman hunting deer finds a maiden
bathing in a clear pool in the forest. He runs stealthily up
to her and seizes her necklace, at which she loses the power
to flee. They are married, and she bears seven sons at once,
all of whom have gold chains about their necks, and are able
to transform themselves into swans whenever they like. A
Flemish legend tells of three Nixies, or water-sprites, who
came out of the Meuse one autumn evening, and helped the
villagers celebrate the end of the vintage. Such graceful
dancers had never been seen in Flanders, and they could sing
as well as they could dance. As the night was warm, one of
them took off her gloves and gave them to her partner to hold
for her. When the clock struck twelve the other two started
off in hot haste, and then there was a hue and cry for gloves.
The lad would keep them as love-tokens, and so the poor Nixie
had to go home without them; but she must have died on the
way, for next morning the waters of the Meuse were blood-red,
and those damsels never returned.

[90] The feather-dress reappears in the Arabian story of
Hasssn of El-Basrah, who by stealing it secures possession of
the Jinniya. See Lane's Arabian Nights, Vol. III. p. 380.
Ralston, Songs of the Russian People, p. 179.

In the Faro Islands it is believed that seals cast off their
skins every ninth night, assume human forms, and sing and
dance like men and women until daybreak, when they resume
their skins and their seal natures. Of course a man once found
and hid one of these sealskins, and so got a mermaid for a
wife; and of course she recovered the skin and escaped.[91] On
the coasts of Ireland it is supposed to be quite an ordinary
thing for young sea-fairies to get human husbands in this way;
the brazen things even come to shore on purpose, and leave
their red caps lying around for young men to pick up; but it
behooves the husband to keep a strict watch over the red cap,
if he would not see his children left motherless.

[91] Thorpe, Northern Mythology, III. 173; Kennedy, Fictions
of the Irish Celts, p. 123.

This mermaid's cap has contributed its quota to the
superstitions of witchcraft. An Irish story tells how Red
James was aroused from sleep one night by noises in the
kitchen. Going down to the door, he saw a lot of old women
drinking punch around the fireplace, and laughing and joking
with his housekeeper. When the punchbowl was empty, they all
put on red caps, and singing

"By yarrow and rue, And my red cap too,
Hie me over to England,"

they flew up chimney. So Jimmy burst into the room, and seized
the housekeeper's cap, and went along with them. They flew
across the sea to a castle in England, passed through the
keyholes from room to room and into the cellar, where they had
a famous carouse. Unluckily Jimmy, being unused to such good
cheer, got drunk, and forgot to put on his cap when the others
did. So next morning the lord's butler found him dead-drunk on
the cellar floor, surrounded by empty casks. He was sentenced
to be hung without any trial worth speaking of; but as he was
carted to the gallows an old woman cried out, "Ach, Jimmy
alanna! Would you be afther dyin' in a strange land without
your red birredh?" The lord made no objections, and so the red
cap was brought and put on him. Accordingly when Jimmy had got
to the gallows and was making his last speech for the
edification of the spectators, he unexpectedly and somewhat
irrelevantly exclaimed, "By yarrow and rue," etc., and was off
like a rocket, shooting through the blue air en route for old
Ireland.[92]

[92] Kennedy, Fictions of the Irish Celts, p. 168.

In another Irish legend an enchanted ass comes into the
kitchen of a great house every night, and washes the dishes
and scours the tins, so that the servants lead an easy life of
it. After a while in their exuberant gratitude they offer him
any present for which he may feel inclined to ask. He desires
only "an ould coat, to keep the chill off of him these could
nights"; but as soon as he gets into the coat he resumes his
human form and bids them good by, and thenceforth they may
wash their own dishes and scour their own tins, for all him.

But we are diverging from the subject of swan-maidens, and are
in danger of losing ourselves in that labyrinth of popular
fancies which is more intricate than any that Daidalos ever
planned. The significance of all these sealskins and
feather-dresses and mermaid caps and werewolf-girdles may best
be sought in the etymology of words like the German leichnam,
in which the body is described as a garment of flesh for the
soul.[93] In the naive philosophy of primitive thinkers, the
soul, in passing from one visible shape to another, had only
to put on the outward integument of the creature in which it
wished to incarnate itself. With respect to the mode of
metamorphosis, there is little difference between the werewolf
and the swan-maiden; and the similarity is no less striking
between the genesis of the two conceptions. The original
werewolf is the night-wind, regarded now as a manlike deity
and now as a howling lupine fiend; and the original
swan-maiden is the light fleecy cloud, regarded either as a
woman-like goddess or as a bird swimming in the sky sea. The
one conception has been productive of little else but horrors;
the other has given rise to a great variety of fanciful
creations, from the treacherous mermaid and the fiendish
nightmare to the gentle Undine, the charming Nausikaa, and the
stately Muse of classic antiquity.

[93] Baring-Gould, Book of Werewolves, p. 133.

We have seen that the original werewolf, howling in the wintry
blast, is a kind of psychopomp, or leader of departed souls;
he is the wild ancestor of the death-dog, whose voice under
the window of a sick-chamber is even now a sound of ill-omen.
The swan-maiden has also been supposed to summon the dying to
her home in the Phaiakian land. The Valkyries, with their
shirts of swan-plumage, who hovered over Scandinavian
battle-fields to receive the souls of falling heroes, were
identical with the Hindu Apsaras; and the Houris of the
Mussulman belong to the same family. Even for the
angels,--women with large wings, who are seen in popular
pictures bearing mortals on high towards heaven,--we can
hardly claim a different kinship. Melusina, when she leaves
the castle of Lusignan, becomes a Banshee; and it has been a
common superstition among sailors, that the appearance of a
mermaid, with her comb and looking-glass, foretokens
shipwreck, with the loss of all on board.

October, 1870.

IV. LIGHT AND DARKNESS.

WHEN Maitland blasphemously asserted that God was but "a Bogie
of the nursery," he unwittingly made a remark as suggestive in
point of philology as it was crude and repulsive in its
atheism. When examined with the lenses of linguistic science,
the "Bogie" or "Bug-a-boo" or "Bugbear" of nursery lore turns
out to be identical, not only with the fairy "Puck," whom
Shakespeare has immortalized, but also with the Slavonic "Bog"
and the "Baga" of the Cuneiform Inscriptions, both of which
are names for the Supreme Being. If we proceed further, and
inquire after the ancestral form of these epithets,--so
strangely incongruous in their significations,--we shall find
it in the Old Aryan "Bhaga," which reappears unchanged in the
Sanskrit of the Vedas, and has left a memento of itself in the
surname of the Phrygian Zeus "Bagaios." It seems originally
to have denoted either the unclouded sun or the sky of noonday
illumined by the solar rays. In Sayana's commentary on the
Rig-Veda, Bhaga is enumerated among the seven (or eight) sons
of Aditi, the boundless Orient; and he is elsewhere described
as the lord of life, the giver of bread, and the bringer of
happiness.[94]

[94] Muir's Sanskrit Texts, Vol. IV. p. 12; Muller, Rig-Veda
Sanhita, Vol. I. pp. 230-251; Fick, Woerterbuch der
Indogermanischen Grundsprache, p. 124, s v. Bhaga.

Thus the same name which, to the Vedic poet, to the Persian of
the time of Xerxes, and to the modern Russian, suggests the
supreme majesty of deity, is in English associated with an
ugly and ludicrous fiend, closely akin to that grotesque
Northern Devil of whom Southey was unable to think without
laughing. Such is the irony of fate toward a deposed deity.
The German name for idol--Abgott, that is, "ex-god," or
"dethroned god"--sums up in a single etymology the history of
the havoc wrought by monotheism among the ancient symbols of
deity. In the hospitable Pantheon of the Greeks and Romans a
niche was always in readiness for every new divinity who could
produce respectable credentials; but the triumph of monotheism
converted the stately mansion into a Pandemonium peopled with
fiends. To the monotheist an "ex-god" was simply a devilish
deceiver of mankind whom the true God had succeeded in
vanquishing; and thus the word demon, which to the ancient
meant a divine or semi-divine being, came to be applied to
fiends exclusively. Thus the Teutonic races, who preserved the
name of their highest divinity, Odin,--originally, Guodan,--by
which to designate the God of the Christian,[95] were unable
to regard the Bog of ancient tradition as anything but an
"ex-god," or vanquished demon.

[95] In the North American Review, October, 1869, p. 354, I
have collected a number of facts which seem to me to prove
beyond question that the name God is derived from Guodan, the
original form of Odin, the supreme deity of our Pagan
forefathers. The case is exactly parallel to that of the
French Dieu, which is descended from the Deus of the pagan
Roman.

The most striking illustration of this process is to be found
in the word devil itself: To a reader unfamiliar with the
endless tricks which language delights in playing, it may seem
shocking to be told that the Gypsies use the word devil as the
name of God.[96] This, however, is not because these people
have made the archfiend an object of worship, but because the
Gypsy language, descending directly from the Sanskrit, has
retained in its primitive exalted sense a word which the
English language has received only in its debased and
perverted sense. The Teutonic words devil, teufel, diuval,
djofull, djevful, may all be traced back to the Zend dev,[97]
a name in which is implicitly contained the record of the
oldest monotheistic revolution known to history. The influence
of the so-called Zoroastrian reform upon the long-subsequent
development of Christianity will receive further notice in the
course of this paper; for the present it is enough to know
that it furnished for all Christendom the name by which it
designates the author of evil. To the Parsee follower of
Zarathustra the name of the Devil has very nearly the same
signification as to the Christian; yet, as Grimm has shown, it
is nothing else than a corruption of deva, the Sanskrit name
for God. When Zarathustra overthrew the primeval Aryan
nature-worship in Bactria, this name met the same evil fate
which in early Christian times overtook the word demon, and
from a symbol of reverence became henceforth a symbol of
detestation.[98] But throughout the rest of the Aryan world it
achieved a nobler career, producing the Greek theos, the
Lithuanian diewas, the Latin deus, and hence the modern French
Dieu, all meaning God.

[96] See Pott, Die Zigeuner, II. 311; Kuhn, Beitrage, I. 147.
Yet in the worship of dewel by the Gypsies is to be found the
element of diabolism invariably present in barbaric worship.
"Dewel, the great god in heaven (dewa, deus), is rather feared
than loved by these weather-beaten outcasts, for he harms them
on their wanderings with his thunder and lightning, his snow
and rain, and his stars interfere with their dark doings.
Therefore they curse him foully when misfortune falls on them;
and when a child dies, they say that Dewel has eaten it."
Tylor, Primitive Culture, Vol. II. p. 248.

[97] See Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie, 939.

[98] The Buddhistic as well as the Zarathustrian reformation
degraded the Vedic gods into demons. "In Buddhism we find
these ancient devas, Indra and the rest, carried about at
shows, as servants of Buddha, as goblins, or fabulous heroes."
Max Muller, Chips, I. 25. This is like the Christian change of
Odin into an ogre, and of Thor into the Devil.

If we trace back this remarkable word to its primitive source
in that once lost but now partially recovered mother-tongue
from which all our Aryan languages are descended, we find a
root div or dyu, meaning "to shine." From the first-mentioned
form comes deva, with its numerous progeny of good and evil
appellatives; from the latter is derived the name of Dyaus,
with its brethren, Zeus and Jupiter. In Sanskrit dyu, as a
noun, means "sky" and "day"; and there are many passages in
the Rig-Veda where the character of the god Dyaus, as the
personification of the sky or the brightness of the ethereal
heavens, is unmistakably apparent. This key unlocks for us one
of the secrets of Greek mythology. So long as there was for
Zeus no better etymology than that which assigned it to the
root zen, "to live,"[99] there was little hope of
understanding the nature of Zeus. But when we learn that Zeus
is identical with Dyaus, the bright sky, we are enabled to
understand Horace's expression, "sub Jove frigido," and the
prayer of the Athenians, "Rain, rain, dear Zeus, on the land
of the Athenians, and on the fields."[100] Such expressions as
these were retained by the Greeks and Romans long after they
had forgotten that their supreme deity was once the sky. Yet
even the Brahman, from whose mind the physical significance of
the god's name never wholly disappeared, could speak of him as
Father Dyaus, the great Pitri, or ancestor of gods and men;
and in this reverential name Dyaus pitar may be seen the exact
equivalent of the Roman's Jupiter, or Jove the Father. The
same root can be followed into Old German, where Zio is the
god of day; and into Anglo-Saxon, where Tiwsdaeg, or the day
of Zeus, is the ancestral form of Tuesday.

[99] Zeus--Dia--Zhna--di on ............ Plato Kratylos, p.
396, A., with Stallbaum's note. See also Proklos, Comm. ad
Timaeum, II. p. 226, Schneider; and compare Pseudo-Aristotle,
De Mundo, p. 401, a, 15, who adopts the etymology. See also
Diogenes Laertius, VII. 147.

[100] Marcus Aurelius, v. 7; Hom. Iliad, xii. 25, cf.
Petronius Arbiter, Sat. xliv.

Thus we again reach the same results which were obtained from
the examination of the name Bhaga. These various names for the
supreme Aryan god, which without the help afforded by the
Vedas could never have been interpreted, are seen to have been
originally applied to the sun-illumined firmament. Countless
other examples, when similarly analyzed, show that the
earliest Aryan conception of a Divine Power, nourishing man
and sustaining the universe, was suggested by the light of the
mighty Sun; who, as modern science has shown, is the
originator of all life and motion upon the globe, and whom the
ancients delighted to believe the source, not only of "the
golden light,"[101] but of everything that is bright,
joy-giving, and pure. Nevertheless, in accepting this
conclusion as well established by linguistic science, we must
be on our guard against an error into which writers on
mythology are very liable to fall. Neither sky nor sun nor
light of day, neither Zeus nor Apollo, neither Dyaus nor
Indra, was ever worshipped by the ancient Aryan in anything
like a monotheistic sense. To interpret Zeus or Jupiter as
originally the supreme Aryan god, and to regard classic
paganism as one of the degraded remnants of a primeval
monotheism, is to sin against the canons of a sound inductive
philosophy. Philology itself teaches us that this could not
have been so. Father Dyaus was originally the bright sky and
nothing more. Although his name became generalized, in the
classic languages, into deus, or God, it is quite certain that
in early days, before the Aryan separation, it had acquired no
such exalted significance. It was only in Greece and Rome--or,
we may say, among the still united Italo-Hellenic tribes--that
Jupiter-Zeus attained a pre-eminence over all other deities.
The people of Iran quite rejected him, the Teutons preferred
Thor and Odin, and in India he was superseded, first by Indra,
afterwards by Brahma and Vishnu. We need not, therefore, look
for a single supreme divinity among the old Aryans; nor may we
expect to find any sense, active or dormant, of monotheism in
the primitive intelligence of uncivilized men.[102] The whole
fabric of comparative mythology, as at present constituted,
and as described above, in the first of these papers, rests
upon the postulate that the earliest religion was pure
fetichism.

[101] "Il Sol, dell aurea luce eterno forte." Tasso,
Gerusalemme, XV. 47; ef. Dante, Paradiso, X. 28.

[102] The Aryans were, however, doubtless better off than the
tribes of North America. "In no Indian language could the
early missionaries find a word to express the idea of God.
Manitou and Oki meant anything endowed with supernatural
powers, from a snake-skin or a greasy Indian conjurer up to
Manabozho and Jouskeha. The priests were forced to use a
circumlocution,--`the great chief of men,' or 'he who lives in
the sky.' " Parkman, Jesuits in North America, p. lxxix. "The
Algonquins used no oaths, for their language supplied none;
doubtless because their mythology had no beings sufficiently
distinct to swear by." Ibid, p. 31.

In the unsystematic nature-worship of the old Aryans the gods
are presented to us only as vague powers, with their nature
and attributes dimly defined, and their relations to each
other fluctuating and often contradictory. There is no
theogony, no regular subordination of one deity to another.
The same pair of divinities appear now as father and daughter,
now as brother and sister, now as husband and wife; and again
they quite lose their personality, and are represented as mere
natural phenomena. As Muller observes, "The poets of the Veda
indulged freely in theogonic speculations without being
frightened by any contradictions. They knew of Indra as the
greatest of gods, they knew of Agni as the god of gods, they
knew of Varuna as the ruler of all; but they were by no means
startled at the idea that their Indra had a mother, or that
their Agni [Latin ignis] was born like a babe from the
friction of two fire-sticks, or that Varuna and his brother
Mitra were nursed in the lap of Aditi."[103] Thus we have seen
Bhaga, the daylight, represented as the offspring, of Aditi,
the boundless Orient; but he had several brothers, and among
them were Mitra, the sun, Varuna, the overarching firmament,
and Vivasvat, the vivifying sun. Manifestly we have here but
so many different names for what is at bottom one and the same
conception. The common element which, in Dyaus and Varuna, in
Bhaga and Indra, was made an object of worship, is the
brightness, warmth, and life of day, as contrasted with the
darkness, cold, and seeming death of the night-time. And this
common element was personified in as many different ways as
the unrestrained fancy of the ancient worshipper saw fit to
devise.[104]

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