ehistoric antiquity have now and then kept their hold upon life. While sitting one evening under the trees by the roadside, my attention was called to the unusual conduct of half a d

ally bend downwards until it had assumed the likeness of a Y in its natural position, where it would remain pointing to something in the ground beneath. One by one the bystanders proceeded to tr

wells in the village had become dry, and here was an attempt to make good the loss by the aid of the god Thor. These men were seeking water with a divining-rod.

n the ceremony a farmer's boy came u

l-defined feeling of insecurity as to the soundness of his conclusions, and when he stood over the supposed rivulet the rod bent in spite of him - as was not

ne se devoile qu'a celui qui descend, ainsi dispose, dans le passe. Mais il faut que l'esprit dem

." So he gave me the twig, and awaited, with a smile which was meant to express withering sarcasm, the discomfiture of the supposed scoffer. But when I proceeded to walk four or five times across the mysterious place, the rod pointing steadfastly toward the zenith all the while, our friend became grave and bega

success of these persons is commonly ascribed to their lack of faith; but, in the majority of cases, it might be more truly referred to the strength of their faith - faith in the constancy of nature, and in the adequacy of ordinary human experience as interpreted by science.24 La foi scientifique is an excellent preventive against that obscure, though not uncommon, kind of self-deception which enab

e of these illusions to its psychological sources, see the account

learned author attributes the discomfiture to the uncongenial Parisian environm

the white and black thorn, the Hindu asvattha, and several other woods, are quite as efficient as the hazel for the purpose of detecting water in times of drought; and in due course of time he would have perceived that the divining-rod itself is but one among a large class of things to which popular belief has ascrib

as been used from time immemorial by miners for ascertaining the position of veins of metal; and in the days when talents were wrapped in napkins and buried in the field, instead of being exposed to the risks of financial speculation, the divining-rod was employed by persons covetous of their neighbours' wealth. If B

eaning on his staff, the mountain suddenly opened, for there was a springwort in his staff without his knowing it, and the princess [Ilse] stood before him. She bade him follow her, and when he was inside the mountain she told him to take as much gold as he pleased. The shepherd filled all his pockets, and was going away, when the princes

-European Folk

ens, 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 o

ell told in verse by Mr. Baring Goul

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 th

ve 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

Kings

iarchs and Prophets, pp. 337, 338. And see the story of Diocletian's ostrich, Swan, Gesta Romanorum,

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 present

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

lk invisible."- Shakespeare, Henry IV. See

at 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 kin

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

e of the Northern Coun

was used, just like the divining-rod,

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 p

des Feuers und des Got

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 repre

is the sun red at even? I tell thee, because she looketh on hell." Thorpe, Analecta Anglo-Saxonica, p. 115

els are playing skittles aloft, and of the snow, that they are shaking u

es the earth. Hence they call foreigners papalangi, or 'heaven-bursters,' a

plate in the midst of the waters, and let it be d

esis v

ates also that in Bengal the Garrows burn their dead

psychopomps; and hence it is still a popular superstition that

rd 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 po

e 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

ese 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

ll 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 w

l. II. p. 146. Compare Tylor, Prim

as 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

. 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, s

omena, p. 57. See also Brown, Poseidon, pp. 39, 40. This objection would be relevant only in case Homer were supposed to be constructing an all

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 wh

reader. He describes Indra (the sun-god) as not only cleaving the cloud-mountains with his sword, but

r 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 be

s the gates of Night through which the solar ship, having passed successfully once, may

ned 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 it

treak 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, burs

of their lightning-trees, is trident-leaved. The mistletoe branch is forked, like a wish-bone,47 and so is the stem which bears the forget-me-not or wild scorpion grass. So too the leaves of the Hindu ficus religiosa resemble long spear-heads.48 But in many cases it is impossible for us to determine with confidence the reasons which may have guided primitive men in their choice of talismanic plants. In the case of some of these stories, it would no doubt be wasting ingenuity to attempt to assign a mythical origin for each point of detail. The ointment of the dervise, for instance, in the Arabian tale, has probably no special mythical significance, but was rather suggested by the exigencies of the story, in an age when the old mythologies were so far disintegrated and mingled together that any one talisman would serve as well as another the purposes of the narrator. But the lightning-plants of Indo-European folk-lore cannot be thus summarily disposed of; for however d

us glands; while the scaly pappus of scaliosa showed it to be a specific in leprous diseases, the spotted leaves of pulmonaria that it was a sovereign remedy for tuberculous lungs, and the growth of

cle of a fowl, itself belongs to the same

o-Saxon, indifferently "ash-tree," or "spear"; and the same is, or has been, true of the French fresne and the Greek melia. The root of oesc

of the original nature of the divining-rod. Its power of revealing treasures has been sufficiently explained; and its affinity for water results so o

y mean Fury, and it cannot be explained from Greek sources alone. It appears in Sanskrit as Saranyu, a word which signifies the light of morning creeping over the sky. And thus we are led to the startling conclusion that, as the light of morning reveals the evil d

case the phenomenon to be explained is the struggle between the day-god and one of the demons of darkness. There is essentially no distinction to the mind of the primitive man between the Panis, who steal Indra's bright cows and keep them in a dark cavern all night, and the throttling snake Ahi or Echidna, who imprisons the waters in the stronghold of the thunder-cloud and covers the earth

intment of the dervise, in the tale of Baba Abdallah, not only reveals all the treasures of the earth, but instantly thereafter blinds the unhappy man who tests its powers. And thus the hand of glory, which bursts open bars and bolts, benumbs also those who happen to be near it

descended into a spacious hall, where many men were sitting in solemn silence amid piles of gold and diamonds and long rows of enamelled vases. Beyond this he found another room, a gynaecium filled with beautiful women reclining on richly embroidered sofas; yet here, too, all was profound silence. A superb banqueting-hall next met his astonished gaze; then a silent kitchen; then granaries loaded with forage; then a stable crowded with motionless horses. The whole place was brilliantly lighted by a carbuncle which was suspended in one c

priest. Usually these lightning-caverns were like Ixion's treasure-house, into which none might look and live. This

, the association of the thunder-storm with the approach of summer has produced many myths in which the lightning is symbolized as the life-renewing wand of the victorious sun-god. Hence the use of the divining-rod in the cure of disease; and hence the large family of schamir-myths in which the dead are restored to life by leaves or herbs. In Grimm's tale of the Three Snake Leaves," a prince is buried alive (like Sindbad) with his dead wife, and seeing a snake approaching her body, he cuts it in three pieces. Presently another snake, crawling from the corner, saw the other lying dead, and going, away soon returned with three green leaves in its mouth; then laying the parts of the body together so as

of the Aryan Natio

ize the venom of serpents. The notion that snakes are afraid of an ash-tree is not extinct even in the United States. The other day I was told, not by an old granny, but by a man fairly educated and endowed with a very unusual amount of good common-sense, that a rattlesnake will sooner go through fire than creep over ash leaves or into the shadow of an ash-tree. Exactly the same statement is made by Piny, who adds that if you draw a circle with an ash rod around the spot of ground on which a snake is lying, the anim

pean Folk-Lore, pp.

in such a way that the unwinding of the one would wind up the other, and then, placing the point of the stick against a circular disk of wood, twirled it rapidly by alternate pulls on the two strings. This instrument is called a chark, and is still used in South Africa,53 in Australia, in Sumatra, and among the Veddahs of Ceylon. The Russians found it in Kamtchatka; and it was formerly employed in America, from Labrador to the Straits of Magellan.54 The Hindus churned milk by a similar process;55 and in order to explain the thunder-storm, a Sanskrit poem tells how "once upon a time the Devas, or gods, and their opponents, the Asuras, made a truce, and joined together in churning the ocean to procure amrita, the drink of immortality. They took Mount Mandara for a churning-stick, and, wrapping the great serpent Sesha round it for a rope,

ths of the New

u Nursery Tales,

238; Primitive Culture, Vol. II. p. 2

ade a hole; then he cut and pointed a long stick, and inserting the point into the block, worked it round between his palms for some time and with increasing rapidity. Presently there

g, e. g. "He took the uvati [chark], and sat down and churned

k-Lore, p. 39. Burnouf, Bha

ld, Curious M

water of baptism, and the "holy

his name, pramantha, is etymologically identical with Prometheus, the name of the beneficent Titan, who stole fire from heaven and bestowed it upon mankind as the richest of boons. This sublime personage was originally nothing but the celestial drill which churns fire out of the clouds; but the Greeks had so ent

nce be needed to convince the most sceptical that the divining-rod is nothing but a symbol of the lightning, that exception will furnish such evidence. For this exceptional ki

r name, is the first man, and his mother was an ash-tree. In Norse mythology, also, the gods were said to have made the first man out of the ash-tree Yggdrasil. The association of the heavenly fire with the life-giving forces of nature is very common in the myths of both hemispheres, and in view of the facts already cited it need not surprise us. Hence the Hindu Agni and the Norse Thor were patrons of marriage, and in Norway, the most lucky day on which to be married is still supposed to

icial ambrosia, is the deity who imparts to men life, knowledge, and happiness.

ason for making the Greek fire-god

n the breast, for the purpose of causing prophetic dreams respecting a dilatory lover. The leaves of the y

der-flash and clap hurls from his sling the small, round, smooth thunder-stones, treasured in the v

ich the ancient man shared with modern children. In the Norse story of Frodi's quern, the myth assumes a whimsical shape. The prose Edda tells of a primeval age of gold, when everybody had whatever he wanted. This was because the giant Frodi had a mill which ground out peace and plenty and abundance of gold withal, so that it lay about the roads like pebbles. Through the inexcusable avarice of Frodi, this wonderful implement was lost to the

er form of the fire-churn, or chark. According to another version the quern is still grinding away and keeping t

of the Homeric Hymn is a wind-god; but the later Hermes Agoraios, the patron of gymnasia, the mutilation of whose statues caused such terrible excitement in Athens during the Peloponnesian War, is a very different personage. He is a fire-god, invested w

ter a sound thrashing to the enemies of its possessor. Having cut a hazel stick, you have only to lay down an old coat, name your intended victim, wish he was there, and whack away: he will howl with pain at every bl

cation to his enigmatic solar-celestial character by app

ce. Next day the boy went home in great glee to show off for his mother's astonishment what the North Wind had given him, but all the dinner he got that day was what the old woman cooked for him. In his despair he went back to the North Wind and called him a liar, and again demanded his rights for the meal he had lost. "I have n't got your meal," said the Wind, "but here's a ram which will drop money out of its fleece whenever you tell it to." So the lad travelled home, stopping over night at the same inn, and when he got home he found himself with a ram which did n't drop coins out of its fleece. A third time he visited the North Wind, and obtained a bag with a sti