Chapter XX

THE MEDUSA-WITCH IN SAGA AND SUPERSTITION.

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Belief of a more or less serious character in the power of the witch’s hair is one for which readers who have followed the arguments and illustrations of previous chapters will not have been wholly unprepared. If a belief not very often exhibited in sagas, it is yet, as we might anticipate, not wholly absent. The Goodwife of Laggan, a Highland witch, one day showed herself in the form of a shivering, weather-beaten cat to a hunter, who was warming himself during a storm in his hunting-hut, in the forest of Gaick in Badenoch. His hounds were stretched by his side, his only company. As the cat entered they bristled up and rose to attack her. There is no record that the hunter was astonished when the terror-stricken cat addressed him with a human voice and the rhetoric of a century ago: “Great hunter of the hills, I claim your protection. I know your hatred to my craft, and perhaps it is just. Still spare, oh spare a poor jaded wretch, who thus flies to you for protection from the cruelty and oppression of her sisterhood!” On the contrary, he pacified his dogs, and invited her to come forward to the fire and warm herself. “Nay,” she replied, if we are to believe the grandiloquent reporter of the interview, “in the first place you will please bind with {113} this long hair those two furious hounds of yours, for I am afraid they will tear my poor hams to pieces. I pray you, therefore, my dear sir, that you would have the goodness to bind them together by the necks with this long hair.” Here the hunter smelt mischief; so, instead of binding his dogs, he threw the hair across a beam of wood which connected the couple of the bothy. Supposing the dogs bound, the cat then drew near to the fire and sat down to dry herself. In a few minutes she began to grow. “A bad death to you, you nasty beast,” exclaimed the hunter jocosely, “you are getting very large.” “Ay, ay,” answered the cat, “as my hairs imbibe the heat they naturally expand.” But she grew bigger and bigger, until in the twinkling of an eye, she transformed herself into her proper likeness of the Goodwife of Laggan, and thus addressed the man: “Hunter of the hills, your hour of reckoning is arrived. Behold me before you, the avowed champion of my devoted sisterhood, of whom Macgillichallum of Razay and you were always the most relentless of enemies. But Razay is no more. His last breath is fled. He lies a lifeless corpse on the bottom of the main; and now, Hunter of the hills, it is your turn.” With these words the witch made a terrific spring at the hunter; and the dogs in their turn leaped up at her. A tremendous conflict ensued. “Fasten, hair, fasten,” she cried repeatedly, thinking the dogs were bound by it. The hair, obediently coiling round the beam, fastened so effectually that at last it snapt the timber in twain. Finding herself overmatched, she tried to flee. But the hounds had fixed themselves in her breasts; nor did they loose their hold as she trailed them after her, until she had all-to broken every tooth in their heads. Then changing herself into a raven she flew {114} away over the mountains, while the bleeding dogs crept back to their master’s feet to die. When the hunter returned to his home, the Goodwife of Laggan was found sick unto death. I spare my readers the edifying scene wherein she most properly acknowledged her crimes in the presence of the hunter and all her neighbours, before breathing her last. It is written by Mr. Stewart in the purest Johnsonese he could command, together with the further narrative of the apparition which announced that the Evil One had finally seized her soul before it had time to reach the protection of the sacred precincts of the churchyard of Dalarossie.[114.1]

The Eskimo have a tradition pertinent to our present point. Off the southernmost part of Greenland was an island to which many of the inhabitants of the mainland objected, because it cut them off from the open sea. Two of them accordingly went in their kayaks and, fastening a hair from the head of a little child to the far side of the island, pulled away to the north, chanting a magic lay. Another old man, however, desired to retain the island; and he from the main shore held it by a thong of sealskin. The contest lasted for a while; but at length the hair and the magical song prevailed. The island was floated off and planted in front of Ilulissat, where it is now known as Disco Island.[114.2] Similarly, the people of the Lewis aver that their island once formed part of France. The Wickings having conquered a province of that country determined to carry it to Norway. They, therefore, made a cable of four strands, one of heather, one of hemp, another of wool, and another of woman’s hair, and fixed it to the cliffs. For a time their enterprise promised success. But a large piece, {115} now called Ireland, broke off and sank. A storm came on; and one portion after another broke away to form the Hebrides. By-and-bye their cable itself snapped, and they were forced to leave the Lewis and adjacent islands in the situation they at present occupy. On the western side of the Butt of Lewis is a fine natural arch, called the _Suil an Rodh_, “the eye of the butt.” This was the hole drilled through the cliff in days of yore by the Wickings to hold their cable; and it is the best proof of the truth of the tradition.[115.1]

Allied to the enchanted hair of these tales is the fetter that binds Fenri the wolf. It is spun from the sound of a cat’s footsteps, a woman’s beard, the roots of a stone, a bear’s sinews, a fish’s breath, and a bird’s spittle; and it is as soft and smooth as a silken string.[115.2] So likewise when Finn MacCumhail hunted in high Keshcorran, Conaran, son of Imidel, a chief of the Tuatha De Danann, bade his three daughters, that were full of sorcery, take vengeance upon the hero. Accordingly the beldams went and sat in the entrance of a cave. “Upon three crooked and wry sticks of holly they hung as many heathenish bewitched hasps of yarn, which they began to reel off lefthandwise in front of the cave.” The attention of Finn and his companion, Conan Mael MacMorna, was attracted; they approached to view the women, and passed through the hasps; “whereupon a deadly tremor occupied them, and presently they lost their strength, so that by those valiant hags they were fast bound indissolubly. Another pair of the Fianna came, and with them the sons of Nemhuann: through the yarn they passed to where Finn and Conan {116} were; they too lost their power, and by the same hags were lashed down in rigid bonds. These warriors then they carried away into the cave.” Oscar and MacLugach, and in short “the children of Smól and the Fianna all” were drawn to the spot, and when they saw the yarns their pith and valour departed: “there was not in any one man of them all so much as a newly delivered woman’s strength.” Both gentle and simple, they were bound, “so that as helplessly pinioned and tightly tethered culprit-prisoners the hags transported them into black, mysterious holes, into dark, perplexing labyrinths.” When the witches could find no further straggler of the Fianna, they were about to hew their prisoners to pieces. The great-souled Goll MacMorna, however, was yet at large. He attacked and destroyed two of the hags; the third he spared in consideration of her setting the prisoners free. But when another sister appeared to avenge those who were slain, he fought her also, and drove his sword through her heart.[116.1]

The story of the Enchanted Cave of Keshcorran is perhaps dangerously near the border line of sagas and _märchen_. But it is difficult to say that the Irish had entirely abandoned their belief in the real truth of the adventures attributed to the Fianna. Nations, especially nations involved in a struggle for national existence, do not easily part with a literal interpretation of traditions which are their birthright. The Iroquois likewise held to the actual existence of the supernatural personages of the following tale; but how far they credited the adventures of the human beings may admit of a difference of opinion. Ten brothers whose parents were dead resided with their uncle. One by one the elder ones, going out to hunt, failed to {117} return, until at last only the youngest was left. He and his uncle found in the woods and befriended a strange man, who turned out to be a brother of the Great Head, a creature consisting simply of a head, made terrific with huge eyes and long hair. The Great Head had his home upon a rock over which his hair streamed in shaggy fierceness; and when the hurricane swept across the land it was his voice that was heard howling through it. One day the Great Head came to the lodge. Aided by his brother, the uncle and nephew succeeded in conciliating him, and induced him to take the youth to the witch who had fordone his elders, and revenge their deaths. They heard the witch crooning her magical song. When she uttered the word _Schis-t-ki-añ_, the objects of her spells turned to dry bones. The Great Head said to the youth: “I will ask the question, ‘How long have you been here?’ and the hair will fall from my head and you must replace it, and it will grow fast; and then I will bite her flesh and pull it from her, and as it comes off you must take it from my mouth and throw it off, saying, ‘Be a fox, a bird, or anything else,’ and it will then run off never to return.” The young man obeyed these instructions; and the witch was soon brought to sue for mercy. But the Great Head replied: “You had no mercy; see the dry bones; you must die.” In this way they slew her; her flesh was turned into beasts and birds and fish; her bones they burnt to ashes. Then they sought for the bones of her victims, and placed together in rows the bones of the nine elder brothers. The Great Head flew over them on a tempest, and called out of the wind to the nine brothers to awake. They heard his voice, and arose to life, shouting for joy at seeing each other and their youngest brother again.[117.1]

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The instrument of enchantment in this Iroquoian tradition is not the magical fetter, but the magical word; whereof we seem to find a reminiscence (perhaps of the fetter also) in the sequel of Thorkill’s second voyage as recounted in the veracious pages of Saxo. Gorm Haraldson, king of Denmark, having grown old, was tormented with the question that still troubles mankind of the immortality and fate of the soul. Wherefore he sent Thorkill, who had in former days led him and three hundred of his warriors through mysterious regions, for certain information to Utgard-Loki, his god. On the hero’s return it was prophesied to Gorm that he would suddenly die if he learnt the tidings Thorkill had brought. Men were accordingly hired by the king’s command to put the adventurer to death. But he foiled the design and reproached his master for the ingratitude he displayed. The king, then, overcome by curiosity, bade Thorkill relate in order what had happened to him. Thorkill had such unfavourable revelations to make of Utgard-Loki that Gorm Haraldson could not endure to hear them. “His very life could not brook such words, and he yielded it up in the midst of Thorkill’s narrative. Thus,” piously adds the chronicler, “whilst he was so zealous in the worship of a false god, he came to find where the true prison of sorrows really was. Moreover, the reek of the hair, which Thorkill plucked from the locks of the giant,” and brought back with him, “to testify to the greatness of his own deeds, was exhaled upon the bystanders, so that many perished of it.”[118.1]

The truth is that in the lower stages of culture supernatural power is ascribed, not merely to special words, but {119} to any curses. Illustrations of this attitude of mind are needless; for in the horror with which even the least superstitious of us listen when we are by some accident compelled to hear an outburst of imprecation, we may trace more than mere revulsion from the spirit of vulgar hatred and anger dictating it: our revulsion bears at least a tinge of fear and ghastly anticipation of doom upon him who dares to call down evil, if not upon the object of his wrath. Properly performed, however, by the priest on the first day of Lent, and uttered in merely general terms “gathered out of the seven-and-twentieth chapter of Deuteronomy and other places of Scripture,” we devoutly repeat Amen to every clause, and make believe that we desire to escape “the dreadful judgment hanging over our heads and always ready to fall upon us,” by thus transferring the weight of condemnation to sinners worse than ourselves. Originally special virtue was doubtless attached, as it still is by savages, to the proper sequence of words and the suitable accompaniment of rites. In a Chaldean conjuration the effect is thus described:

“The malicious imprecation acts on man like a wicked demon, the voice which curses has power over him; the voice which curses has power over him; the malicious imprecation is the spell [which produces] the disease of his head. The malicious imprecation slaughters this man like a lamb;… the voice which curses covers him and loads him like a veil.”[119.1]

Nor is it altogether improbable that certain of the Psalms which are such a stumblingblock to Christians may have been held, when correctly chanted, to have a direct influence over the objects of the psalmist’s holy ire? When a {120} native of Borneo has planted fruit-trees, and they are bearing, he places some round stones in cleft sticks near the trees, and then proceeds to curse anybody who may venture to steal the fruit, calling on the stones to witness the anathema. The curse is to this effect: “May whoever steals my fruit suffer from stones in the stomach as large as these stones, and, if necessary, become a figure of stone!” And woe betide the man who in defiance of this curse dares to pluck the fruit![120.1]

But neither the form of the malediction nor the accurate performance of a ceremony is an invariable requirement. A few illustrations of the petrifying potency of curses, oftentimes the more awful because uttered in mere carelessness or wantonness, may be given from peoples on different levels of civilisation. An Altaic tale relates that Sartaktai was building a stone bridge over the Katunya; and in order to complete it by the following day it was necessary that his son should preserve continence. The young man, however, disregarded his father’s taboo, and frustrated the work. Wherefore the old man cursed his daughter-in-law, so that she stands, a white rock on one side of the river, and cursed and spat upon his son, so that he remained on the other side, the mountain called to-day Täldäkpän.[120.2] A local legend concerning the fort of Jangada, in India, attributes its erection to Râjâ Kesari, who built it of lac, or sealing-wax, in order that missiles discharged against it should be held by its natural tenacity. The secret was betrayed to a besieging army by an old woman; and the walls began to melt under the power of the fire and bellows she advised the soldiers to use. The râjâ, as he died in the trench with sword in hand, cursed the traitress to be turned into stone. {121} The curse was immediately fulfilled, as witness the satti pillar outside the fort, regarded as her image to this day.[121.1] At a certain farmhouse in Iceland it befell that several years successively the inmates who were left to take care of the house while their fellows went to church on Christmas Eve were found the next morning either stark mad or dead. Naturally nobody cared to stay in the place; but at last a young girl was found brave enough to do so. During the night something came to the window, and began to praise her hands. She was ready at once with a spirited retort. Her eyes and her feet were then made the subject of eulogy by the mysterious visitor, who got from the maiden each time a proper answer. By-and-bye the creature mentioned the dawn standing ready to appear. “Stand thou, too, and become stone, and hurt no one!” exclaimed the girl. And when the people returned from church in the morning they were astounded to see a big stone standing before the window; and there it remains ever since.[121.2] There is a hill on the boundary of the manor of Bagdad near Wirsitz, in the province of Posen, surmounted by a great stone of a reddish colour, somewhat in the form of a gravestone. This was formerly a girl who went out with her mother to gather wild strawberries in the pine-wood which then covered the height. The mother wandered off in another direction, and lost her daughter. Not being able to find her, she angrily shouted: “As you are not coming, turn to stone!” Her prayer was instantly answered, as in a similar case at Strelno, in the same province, where a lazy slut going with her pitcher to the spring, and being unconscionably long on the errand, was cursed by a fellow-servant, {122} under whose orders she was, and transformed into stone. The block is shown at the village of Mlyny, near the town; and at a distance it is said to bear some resemblance to a girl with a pitcher. Nor is this the only tale of the kind current in Posen. A great stone, whose top was not unlike a roof, lay several years ago on the boundary between Czempin and Piechanin, and was held to be the roof of a castle, enchanted by a wizard who had begged a night’s lodging there in vain. His curses buried the castle in the earth, and turned its inhabitants and dependants into a number of smaller stones which lay around the large one.[122.1] Near Gbel, in Bohemia, is a stone called The Enchanted Huntsman. A luckless hunter, we learn, pursued and shot at a roe, which thereupon changed into an old hag, and cried out: “How dare you shoot at me? I am the witch Nera! But you with your pack shall be turned into stone and guarded for ever with invisible flames!” Since that hour none dares to go near the stone at midnight, lest he be consumed by the flames.[122.2] A witch is likewise the agent of evil in the Rollright legends. The King-stone at Rollright was once a king indeed, who was bent on the conquest of all England. He had got as far as the hill on which Rollright stands when the witch appeared. From the crest of the hill the village of Long Compton is visible in the combe below. The king was approaching the top when the witch addressed him: “Seven long strides shalt thou take, and--

If Long Compton thou canst see, King of England thou shalt be.”

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The king, now certain of success, exclaimed:

“Stick, stock, stone, As King of England I shall be known!”

But as he took the seven strides forward there rose before him the long mound of earth which crowns the hill, and prevented him from seeing Long Compton. The witch then cried:

“As Long Compton thou canst not see, King of England thou shalt not be. Rise up, stick, and stand still, stone, For king of England thou shalt be none; Thou and thy men hoar stones shall be, And I myself an eldern-tree.”

Forthwith “the king and his army were turned into stones where they stood, the king on the side of the mound and his army in a circle behind him, while the witch herself became an elder-tree. But some day, they do say, the spell will be broken. The stones will turn into flesh and blood once more, and the king will start as an armed warrior at the head of his army to overcome his enemies and rule over all the land.”[123.1]

In the last tradition the witch’s words fell upon her own head, as well as upon her foes. Incautious or wicked words often have this effect in European folklore; and I strongly suspect they owe their origin to Christian teaching. Tales of imprecations fulfilled upon the perjurer pervade English history from the great, and probably innocent, Earl Godwin downwards. Joan Flower, not more guilty, mentioned in an earlier chapter, is another example. The case of Dorothy Mately of Ashover, related with all circumstance {124} by the master-pen of John Bunyan, is more famous. In fact, the tales are endless; but I must limit my illustrations to two or three of such as account for stones and rocks.

On the island of Sardinia, near the village of Tresnuraghes, in the district of Oristano, are two stones, once a peasant and his ox. This unhappy man was ploughing on the vigil of Saint Mark, and neglected to doff his cap when the saint’s colossal statue was carried by in procession. Being remonstrated with by one of the confraternity, he answered that he did not worship a piece of wood. What could be expected after such profanity, but that he and his ox should be turned to stone? A similar judgment is recorded as the origin of a monolith standing near the church of Saint Constantine, on the side of a hill in the district of Sedilo, on the same island. It is the custom there to perform a ceremony called _S’ardia_, or the Guard, which consists in a cavalcade of about a hundred persons running at full speed thrice around the church, and then flinging themselves down the valley upon a sacred enclosure containing a cross. This enclosure they encompass in the same manner. The spectacle, considered as a religious rite, is doubtless grotesque enough; and a woman who once witnessed it was profane enough to burst out laughing. She stands there still, never to laugh again.[124.1] A bridal train on the Frisian island of Sylt once met an old woman who recognised the bride as a witch, and called out to warn the party. The leader replied: “If our bride be a witch, I would that we might all sink down here and rise up again grey stones.” No sooner said than done; and the identical stones were on view up to the early years of {125} this century.[125.1] So it is related of an unwilling bride from the village of Bonese, in Altmark, that when she arrived with her cavalcade on the boundary of the district of Markau, where she was to wed the son of a rich magistrate, she sprang from her seat after an altercation with her kinsmen and exclaimed: “Rather will I be turned to stone than overstep the boundary of Markau!” and she alighted on the ground a stone. Round that stone at midnight, when the full moon sheds her rays, the many-coloured bridal ribbons gleam even yet.[125.2] Sometimes the catastrophe is occasioned by the mere breach of a taboo. Such is the case in a story told by the Lapps concerning the origin of the Aniov Islands. Three giants who were shamans determined to cut a piece of land off Norway and bring it away with all its reindeer and other wealth in order to increase their own stores. They succeeded in doing so, and were conveying it round to its destination, when their mother dreamed she saw them returning. She ran out of the hut and, hearing a noise, cried: “See! my children are coming, they bring goods, oxen, reindeer; they spoke truth.” But she thus violated the rule of strict silence during the performance of magical rites, and was punished by being turned, together with the whole parish, into stone, while her sons and the reindeer they had stolen were drowned, and the land they had cut off became two islands.[125.3] Another woman underwent the like transformation in the island of Coll, off the western coast of Scotland. She was gathering shellfish when the tide rose, and “finding no other means of escape made a last effort by climbing {126} the rocks. When at the top, and almost out of danger, she said: ‘I am safe now, in spite of God and men!’” Her blasphemy was immediately avenged by her conversion into a stone, which now forms part of the rock whence the headland of Cailleach Point (the Old Wife’s Headland) takes its name.[126.1]

Often, however, the Deity himself, or some holy man endowed with a portion of divine power, by curses or prayers effects the metamorphosis. Thus, it is believed in Bombay that the moon once became enamoured of Ahalyá, the wife of the Rishi Gautama, and visited her in her husband’s absence. Unluckily the Rishi returned and found the guilty pair together. His wife was turned into stone as the effect of his curses; and the moon bears, and will bear for ever, the black mark of the blow he received from the Rishi’s well-aimed shoe.[126.2] So, too, when Ino fleeing from Juno’s wrath flung herself into the sea, and was made immortal by Neptune at the prayer of Venus, her attendants, as Ovid tells us, reproaching the vengeful goddess, were metamorphosed. Juno exclaimed: “I will make you terrible monuments of my displeasure.” As she uttered the words, some of the women, attempting to follow their mistress into the water, were stiffened in the various attitudes of the moment into rocks on the shore, while others were transformed into seabirds that now stretch their wings over every wave of the Ionian sea.[126.3] The kind of superstition here portrayed has of course survived into Christianity. It is partly the superhuman might of the priest as such, and partly the strength of his incantations, which nobody but he knows so well how to perform that {127} gives effect to his words when, like the Cardinal Lord Archbishop of Rheims, and other priests before and since, he calls for his candle, his bell, and his book. It was the superhuman might of the shaman that was acknowledged by Balak in the Hebrew saga, when he sent for Balaam to come and curse Israel; “for I know that he whom thou blessest is blessed, and he whom thou cursest is cursed.” Balaam, indeed, performed his function with due solemnity and order; yet the ceremonies, however valuable in themselves, would hardly have been effectual if performed by a lesser man. This belief has constantly tended, in all religions alike, to invest the lightest word of a saint with efficacy graduated according to his sanctity. Take the following Christian examples out of many. Saint Constant, pursued by a party of heathen up a hill in the neighbourhood of Deonero, in the Italian province of Cuneo, launched his maledictions upon them with such effect that they were changed into stones, many of which are still to be seen on the spot. His potency must have been exhausted by the effort; for he had scarcely reached the top when another band of persecutors seized and put him to death. But the night fell murky and wet; and a labourer, going home after an evening’s enjoyment, beheld the saint toiling up the steep laden with stones. In the morning the Church of Villar San Costanzo stood on the place of the martyrdom, built by the saint’s own hands out of some of the very men whom he had conveniently petrified; and there it is to be seen at the present day. Strangely enough, his holiness did not avail to procure him mortar. Nor was it needful, for the stones, whether naturally or supernaturally fitted together, stand perfectly well without it. When his work was done, his body, which had been left by his murderers {128} where it fell, disappeared. Some say that it was transported by angels into heaven; and there can be no more difficulty in crediting this than the rest of the story.[128.1] In the Isle of Man Saint Patrick cursed a sea-monster, which was following to devour him, and turned it into a solid rock at the foot of Peel Hill.[128.2] According to Sardinian belief a greater than Saint Constant, or even Saint Patrick, inflicted the same vengeance for a smaller crime. One day Our Lord and Saint Peter presented themselves at a threshing-floor near Mores, and prayed for alms, but were denied. Thereupon Jesus Christ uttered an imprecation; and in a moment the corn became sand, while the guilty farmer and his innocent workmen were alike transformed into stones.[128.3] Judging doubtless by their own unhappy experience, the greater the personage the more trifling is the occasion to which the peasants ascribe his wrath. On the right-hand side of the road from Flatow to Lobsens, in the province of Posen, about half a German mile from the latter place, is a great stone, formerly a landed proprietor, who, being out hunting, put his horse to jump a ditch at that spot. The horse refused, perhaps for some similar reason to that which animated Balaam’s talking donkey, since we are told that the Lord flew into a passion and cried, “Become stone!” Forthwith horse and rider were turned into a stone which is alive at this day to testify to the truth of the story, though many have been the attempts to destroy it.[128.4]

So far the power of words. Another magical power {129} which appears in the _märchen_ is that of a blow. Nor is it absent from sagas told to explain the origin of rocks whose form has appealed to the imagination of uncultured peoples. The story of the discovery of Inishbofin, an island off the coast of Galway, relates that two fishermen lost in a fog landed on an unknown shore. When the fog lifted they found themselves on what is now called the north Beach of Inishbofin.

On one side lay the ocean, and on one Lay a great water;

and close at hand they beheld an old woman driving a white cow down to the lake. She drove the cow right into the water, and struck her with a stick, whereupon the cow was metamorphosed into a rock. One of the fishermen got so angry at the sight that he struck the woman; and both he and she were turned into stones. The rock and stones are still to be seen. “The cow used to rise up out of the lake and walk about the island when any great event was about to happen; but it is now more than thirty years since she was last seen.” From this cow the island takes its name (Inis-bo-finne, the Island of the White Cow).[129.1] In the south-west of Ireland is a cliff called Fail Mahisht, once the daughter of the king of the White Nation and wife of Finn MacCumhail, whom she won by playing at chess with him for a wager. The condition was that he was to be her husband until he had seven shovelfuls of earth put on his head. After various adventures Diarmaid fulfilled the condition, and with a blow of his fist sent the lady spinning through the air until she fell at the water’s edge, where she now stands, and from that day to this gives {130} food to the people of Erin from the limpets and periwinkles that cluster upon her beyond any other cliff in Ireland.[130.1] The heroic cycle of Ireland as now found in the mouths of the people is full of tales of petrifaction from a blow;[130.2] but how far they are now believed as records of fact must be regarded as more than doubtful, whatever might have been the case at the time the legend of the Enchanted Cave, already mentioned, was written. No such uncertainty seems to rest on the Sardinian tale concerning a stone on the side of the Montesanto of Mores. It is called Saint Elisha’s Stone, and was once a man whom the saint threw from the top of the mountain and, when he saw him fast below, called out: “Dost thou stand well?” “Yes, sir,” replied the stone; and there it remains immovable.[130.3]

The mixed population of Missouri tell a story, probably of Indian origin, about a beautiful but mysterious witch, who seduced the young braves, and with a touch from her right hand turned their hearts into stone. The people, fearful of attacking her, waited long for vengeance from on high to repay her iniquities. She used to feed on fish that came out of the river in response to her call. One day she went down to the water and summoned the fish in vain. At last, after she had uttered in her rage and impatience words that would dismay devils, there came up a little fish like silver. She essayed to swallow it; but it swelled and {131} stuck in her throat, and at length stiffened into stone. In her agony she clutched her throat and beat her breast with the fatal hand. So now she stands upon, and part of, the rocky bluff on the banks of the Missouri.[131.1]

At Jaunpur, in India, is the shrine of Kerárbír, where a great stone is the object of worship. The stone in question is part of the body of the giant-demon Kerar, slain by Rámchandra for his wickedness.[131.2] Two rocks observed in descending the pass of Markundi into the valley of the Son, in Mirzapur, are worshipped and connected with the flight of two lovers from a barbarian king who ruled at the fort of Agori. One of these rocks was cloven by a blow of the fugitives’ sword; the other is the pursuer’s elephant, decapitated by the same means.[131.3]

Divine vengeance, without any visible or audible intervention, has often been invoked in various parts of the world to account for the existence of rocks and stones. Niobe, weeping for her children slain by Apollo, was turned to stone, as anybody, says Pausanias, may reasonably be persuaded. She stood, a rock, on Mount Sipylos in Bœotia, and in summer-time was reported to weep.[131.4] Such, too, was the fate which overtook Lot’s wife. Her legend doubtless grew up to account for some prominent pile on the cliffs overlooking the Dead Sea; and perhaps the archæologists who are now striving to rehabilitate the writings of Moses will point out the crag and prove the truth of the story. Of course they will be equally ready and willing to prove a thousand other tales. Let me mention a few equally authentic.

{132}

I pass over instances like those of the Stone-woman near the village of Moras in the department of Isère, France, manifestly a mere transplantation of the Biblical tradition.[132.1] There are cases, however, in which the crime of looking back in disobedience to an express taboo has been punished by petrifaction, and where the connection with Lot’s wife is by no means so easily proved. Once upon a time the Hindu saint, Sri Dharamnathji, was doing penance in the jungle near Pattan. His disciple Gharibnáthji used to beg alms in the city, but as the people were not charitable he was obliged to maintain himself by carrying bundles of firewood and selling them in the town. From the proceeds he purchased flour, which a shepherd’s wife baked for him, adding a loaf from herself. The sage, “observing the bald patch on his disciple’s head caused by the loads he carried, cursed the city to be swallowed up. He had previously warned the shepherd’s wife to leave the place and not look back. The city was swallowed up; and the woman, disobeying the saint’s command, was turned into a stone.”[132.2]

Here the destruction of the city was caused by niggardliness towards a personage of supernatural power. Another Indian saga shows us this crime punished by petrifaction. Near the village of Dudhi, in South Mirzapur, are two stones, once a bride and bridegroom who were thus transformed by an angry bhút, or malevolent spirit. His proper offerings had been forgotten, and he wrought his vengeance in this way.[132.3] Sometimes the fault is breach of tribal custom or social convention. When a rajah’s daughter made a rash vow only to wed him who could count the palm-trees {133} within view of her father’s palace, and a low-born wizard fulfilled the condition, the earth herself interfered and, rather than allow so shameful a marriage to be accomplished, she turned the princess into a stone, which now lies within the ruined fort of Rájá Sahay, protected from human touch by a number of enormous snakes.[133.1] Among the Gonds of Central India, the bride goes in procession to the bridegroom, instead of his coming to her, as is usual among the Hindus. It is intended in this way to prevent the repetition of the catastrophe which overtook a luckless pair who were about to be married in the ordinary way. The youth, borne on his uncle’s shoulders in the procession, came within sight of his bride, and unable to restrain his impatience he leaped to the ground and looked with all his might to the place where he expected to see her. She felt no less eager, and their eyes met. In a moment not only the young couple but also the bridegroom’s uncle were turned into sandstone spires yet visible on the road in descending into the valley of the Narbada over the Vindhyan range from Bhopál.[133.2] The same cause may perhaps be understood in an Enganese tale accounting for a block of coral and a rock bearing some resemblance to human form off the coast of the island, near the anchorages of Baraháu and Kai-Kokoh. The one represents a husband who was deserting his wife because he found she had a disgusting malady, and the other the deserted wife.[133.3] It is more obvious in the case of two stones in the tanks near the temples at Arang, in the Ráepur district of India, and at Deobáluda. The erection of the pinnacle of a temple is {134} the act of completion; and it seems that it is necessary to be performed naked. These two temples were built simultaneously. When they were ready to receive their pinnacles the mason and his sister agreed to put them on at the same auspicious moment. Stripping themselves according to custom, they climbed to the top. As they reached it, each could see the other, and each through shame jumped down into the tank beneath and was changed into stone. Both stones are visible in seasons of drought, when the water in the tanks is low.[134.1]

Petrifaction in the traditions of Christian Europe, when directly inflicted by divine intervention, is usually the punishment of a serious infraction of the divine law, often amounting to _lèse-majesté_. Various stone circles in Cornwall, such as the Hurlers, the Nine Maids and the Merry Maidens, were once human beings transformed for Sabbath-breaking by hurling or dancing.[134.2] Stories of this kind are commonplace all over Europe. We will be satisfied with the following samples taken from Germany and Bohemia. The legend of the two stone Jews at Ottorowo on the crossroad to Krzeszkowice, in the province of Posen, relates that these culprits suffered metamorphosis for profaning a crucifix.[134.3] In the neighbourhood of the town of Gabel in Bohemia stand three blocks of stone surmounted by crosses. They were girls who went to work in the fields on Easter Sunday. They carried their disregard of holy things so far as to mock when the sanctus bell sounded at the completion of the sacred rite; and each time it rang they threw up to heaven the sickles they were using to cut the grass. The third time the sickles fell not down again, {135} and the girls were turned into stone. Near Commotau, in the same country, lie seven great stones, once girls who led an evil life, and were therefore transformed.[135.1] In Styria the same penalty fell on a maiden who would spin on Sundays. A violent storm destroyed the hut wherein she dwelt and transported her to the top of a neighbouring rock, where she stands for ever, a warning against blasphemy and greed.[135.2] On some pasture lands not far from Jevenstedt stands a stone circle with two larger stones in the midst. These were a bridal party who danced on Sunday during divine service.[135.3] Bridal parties in the West as in the East seem specially obnoxious to the displeasure of the higher powers. In Altmark, near Dahrendorf, not far from the Hanoverian border, is a large piece of granite surrounded by smaller stones, formerly a bride, named Lene, from the state of Hanover, who with her attendants was changed, no one knows why, into stone. We have already met with several other instances. A circle of stones near Wirchow, in Neumark, was a party of persons who added to their scorn of Whitsunday the shameless eccentricity of dancing naked, and are now called the Adam’s Dance. It has ever been held by the folk a grave misdemeanour to treat with wanton disrespect the necessaries of life; and singular judgments have, both in this country and elsewhere in Europe, fallen on such as have dealt improperly with bread and other common kinds of food. Seven boys were thus turned into stone, and are still to be seen near the little town of Morin in Neumark.[135.4] Let us hope that the children of the district are duly impressed by their awful doom.

{136}

Similar to the fate of the Styrian maiden was that of a pair of lovers in Sardinia, who in consequence of the opposition of their families to their union entered, the one a monastery, and the other a nunnery. But love triumphs over even the vows of celibacy. The young monk escaped from his convent, carried off his sweetheart and lived with her in the wilds. The infraction of their vows could not, however, be passed over. God raised one day an impetuous wind, which transported the lovers to the top of Monte Ruju, where they rest changed into stone.[136.1]

On the western continent are to be found many legends accounting for rocks of peculiar form as human victims of supernatural caprice. The Zuñi tradition mentioned in a previous chapter is but one example of many. Mrs. Stevenson, who reports this tale, also records the tradition of an allied people, the Sia, concerning two brothers of ancient days, the culture-heroes of their tribe, renowned for giant-slaying and other feats. On two occasions they went disguised as poor, dirty, beggar-boys to villages of the Oraibi and the Katsuna where feasts were being held. They were refused food save by one family at each place; and the people were in consequence turned into stone.[136.2] {137} More frequently, perhaps, in aboriginal folklore the metamorphosis is suffered by a fugitive. In such cases it seems a little doubtful whether the pursuers are thus foiled or satiated of their revenge. The story of the Peruvian goddess, Cavillaca, will be remembered in this connection.[137.1] “There is a Winnebago tradition that a woman carrying her child was running from her enemies, so she jumped down a steep place and was turned into a rock. And now when they [the Winnebagoes] pass that place they make offerings to her.”[137.2] A similar saga of the Nasqually Indians of British Columbia is told to account for an isolated rock on the coast.[137.3] Many other instances are to be found.

Among savages, however, it hardly seems necessary for their fore-elders to render themselves obnoxious to superior beings as a cause of this transformation. The natives of North Australia have tales of persons, some good and others bad, who were turned on death into stones or trees.[137.4] A Chinese legend, descending doubtless from a more barbarous period, explains the existence of three rocks in the Yang-tsze river and the Poyang lake, through which it runs. A boat containing a man, his wife and their two children was capsized on the river during a storm. The man and woman perished at once; but the lads were assisted by a compassionate frog, which took them on its back and made for their home on the banks of the lake. The younger boy, grieving at his parents’ death, threw himself off and was drowned, reappearing shortly after in the {138} form of a bold limestone rock, now known as the Little Orphan, situate in the middle of the river about twenty miles below the egress of the lake. The surviving orphan held on until the frog had entered the lake, when he fell broken-hearted into the water and became the large rock, surmounted in later ages by a Buddhist monastery and pagoda, and called the Great Orphan. The frog, in the bitterness of grief at his unsuccessful efforts, also yielded up his life, and in due course emerged from the waves as the Frog Rock.[138.1] In Japan the peasants discern high up on the weatherworn cliffs of Matsura, “the figure of a lady in long trailing court-dress with face and figure eagerly bent over the western waves.” It is Satyohimé, the wife of Saté-hiko, petrified while gazing to catch the last glimpse of the sails that bore her husband away to Corea, as one of the Mikado’s body-guard, sent to assist the Japanese allies at Hiaksai, in the year 536 A.D. Her sad fate has rendered her name the symbol in Japanese literature of devoted love.[138.2]

I have left to the last the Gorgonian power of petrifying with a look. The fatal head was regarded, we know, as the most powerful of Athene’s weapons. As a single illustration we may take a curious case mentioned by Pausanias. Describing the temple of Athene near Coronea, in Bœotia, where the Panbœotian festival was held, he says that a priestess named Iodamia coming into the temple once at night was confronted by the goddess herself armed with Medusa’s head, and was turned into stone. An altar called by the unfortunate priestess’ name seems to have stood in the temple when Pausanias wrote; and a woman daily put fire thereon, saying in the language of the country that {139} Iodamia was living and demanded fire.[139.1] The memory of Medusa yet lingers, as we have seen, in Seriphos, where her head on the coinage of the island seems to have preserved it. If we may trust mediæval writers like Walter Map, Gervase of Tilbury and Roger of Hoveden, a more definite recollection, though still confused and distorted, formerly remained in the Levant. Gervase tells us that between Rhodes and Cyprus are the Syrtes, commonly called the Gulf of Satalia, where the Gorgon’s head was said to have been thrown into the sea. They are opposite the town of Satalia, claimed by the Sultan of Iconium. The Gorgon was held to have been a prostitute whose beauty drove men out of their wits, until Perseus threw her head into the deep. This of course was a piece of euhemerism on the part of the Marshal of Arles or his informants, whoever they may have been. He goes on, however, to say that the natives report that a soldier fell in love with a certain queen, and not being able to obtain her during her life, he secretly violated her sepulchre. From his posthumous embraces the corpse bore a monstrous head, which, the soldier was warned by a voice in the air at the moment of his crime, would by its mere look destroy all things that it beheld. Accordingly at the proper time he opened the tomb and found the head, carefully averting himself from its gaze. Whenever he exhibited it to his foes they and their cities were destroyed. Afterwards he found another love; and one day, while sailing the sea he was sleeping peacefully in her lap, when she took the opportunity to steal the key and open the casket wherein the head was kept. Her curiosity proved her bane. Her lover awoke and, plunged in grief at the catastrophe, he took out the {140} fatal head, stuck it up and perished with his ship from its glance. Every seven years, it was believed, the head rose to the surface of the sea and imperilled the safety of all who navigated those waters.[140.1] Map’s account is that the hero was a cordwainer of exceeding great skill, who flourished at Constantinople in the time of Gerbert, that is to say, about a hundred and fifty years before his own time. Falling in love with a noble maiden whose naked foot he had been called upon to clothe in the course of business, he sold everything and took service in the army, in order to rise in the world and become worthy of her. She, however, died in his absence. The violation of her tomb follows. The Gorgonian head is expressly declared to have _stiffened_ the wretches upon whom its gaze was brought to bear. The soldier at length weds the daughter and heiress of the Emperor. She gives him no peace until he tells her the contents of his casket; and having learnt the secret she tries the effect of the head upon her husband as he wakes from sleep. Having thus fordone him by her wiles, she orders his body and the instrument of his enormities to be cast together into the Grecian Sea. A terrific storm arose when her command was fulfilled; and on its subsiding a vast and destructive whirlpool remained ever thereafter, called Satalia, or more commonly, the Gulf of Satalia, from the maiden’s name.[140.2]

More nearly akin to the classical myth is a Danish tradition that in former days a troll who dwelt in the Issefiord was accustomed to stop every passing vessel and take a man by way of toll. At last it became known that the troll’s power would endure until the head of Pope Lucius, {141} who had suffered decapitation in Rome ages before, should be shown him. Some monks were accordingly despatched to Rome for the head. “When the ship returned and was about to run into the fiord the troll made his appearance; but as soon as they held forth the head and the troll got a sight of it, he with a horrid howl transformed himself into a rock.” Representations in Roeskilde Cathedral commemorate the event.[141.1] One of the commonest of Scandinavian sagas is that which attributes the power of transforming trolls and giants to the sun. The earliest mention of it is in the Helgi poems, which are only known to us in a single manuscript, the Codex Regius at Copenhagen, but which probably date from the tenth century. In one of these poems, Rimegerd, the giantess, whose father Helgi has slain, appears by night and calls on the hero to recompense her for her father’s slaughter. Helgi and Atli his warder detain her in a war of words until the sun rises, when Atli exclaims: “Look eastward now, Rimegerd! Helgi hath stricken thee with the wand of Death.… It is day, Rimegerd! Atli has lured thee to deadly delay. It will be a laughter-moving harbour-mark, methinks, that thou wilt make now thou art turned to stone!” The same catastrophe is implied in the _Alvíssmal_, also found only in the Codex Regius, but at least as old as the Helgi poems. Allwise the dwarf has come to fetch Freya, whom he has entrapped the Anses into a promise to give him as wife. He comes by night; and one of the Anses detains him with questions calculated to bring out his extensive cosmological knowledge, until the day breaks and the hall is full of sunshine. We are then to understand, from the triumphant expressions of his interlocutor, that the power {142} of the sun effects his petrifaction.[142.1] In a Norwegian ballad of _Hermod the Young_ the hero rescues a beautiful maiden from a giantess, riding off with her on Christmas Day. The giantess pursues all night, and is on the point of catching the fugitives, when the sun arises and she is changed to a stone.[142.2] Two tall isolated cliffs lift themselves out of the sound between Eysturoy and Streymoy, two of the Færoe Islands. They were a giant and his wife who had been sent from Iceland to drag the Færoe Islands nearer to that island. It was at night. The giant stood in the sea while the giantess took the other end of the rope, and after an ineffectual attempt made it fast to the top of one of the hills. She saw the glimmering of dawn and hastened down; but too late. Before she and her husband could wade back to Iceland with their charge the sun came up out of the sea and they were instantly turned to stone, to stand there for ever looking northward but unable to move from the spot.[142.3] These are sufficient as samples of the Scandinavian belief in the transforming influence exercised by the gaze of the sun upon the evil powers of darkness. The incident has passed into a Lapp _märchen_ from Tanen, where a king’s son, by the help of a friendly fox, has stolen a maiden called Evening-glow, the sun’s sister, from some giants who held her captive. The fox leads the pursuing giants astray until the dawn, when he exclaims: “See, there comes the sun’s sister!” They raise their eyes to the morning glow, and are forthwith changed into stone pillars.[142.4] The incident here probably owes its origin to the adjacent Norsemen; the Quiché {143} saga of the three tribal gods, Tohil, Avilix, and Hacavitz is, however, quite independent. Originally, we learn, there was neither sun, moon, nor star. When for the first time the sun rose, it petrified these and other ferocious deities, but without taking away from them the power of changing their forms and resuming mobility when they pleased.[143.1] According to the story of the inhabitants of Hispaniola, men came out of two caves. A giant, Machakael, was set to guard these caves and prevent mankind from looking upon the light of the sun. One night he wandered from his post, and could not return before sunrise. The sun rose out of the sea and looked with anger upon the giant, who was forthwith turned into a rock called Kauta.[143.2]

The power of petrification is, however, usually regarded as equivalent to that of striking dead with a glance. This is expressed, as we have already seen,[143.3] in the case of Balor of Tory Island. A long list of stories wherein a glance is credited with this terrible might could be culled from every nation, beginning with that of Isis punishing at Byblos an unlucky boy who disturbed her in her grief.[143.4] In some cases, as in a variant of the tale of Balor, the baleful eye not only slays but reduces its victim to ashes.[143.5] The elephant head of the Hindu god, Ganesa, is a substitute for his original head burned to cinders by the gaze of Sani. Nor is the murderous property confined to supernatural beings. Witches, who of course partake of more than {144} ordinary human qualities, are credited with it. Men of special holiness have sometimes the fatal gift, like Rabbi Juda in rabbinical tradition, who thus killed four-and-twenty of his scholars in a single day;[144.1] or a Samoan high-priest of the heavenly gods, whose very look was poison; “if he looked at a cocoa-nut tree it died, and if he glanced at a bread-fruit tree it also withered away.”[144.2] Various writers, classic and mediæval, have told us of the women of a certain Scythian tribe, of the Sardinians, or of a remote island in the ocean, whose glance is death.[144.3] To such writers we owe the fable of the Catoblepas, or Downlooker, an animal “so wicked and so venomous that no man may behold it right in the face, but he die anon without remedy.” Some of the soldiers of Marius in his expedition against Jugurtha, not knowing the creature and attacking it incautiously, were slain by the eye of this terrible beast.[144.4] In various parts of Asia and Africa serpents also have naturally been reputed to possess the same horrible gift; while countries like Spain have not yet parted with the belief in the basilisk.[144.5] Among American tribes the superstition and the stories of the deadly glance are found in similar terms to those of the Old World. I have already mentioned the Quiché gods petrified by the sun. The Cegihas have a tale of a mysterious being called Two Faces that slew every one {145} who looked at it.[145.1] The Ts’ets’āut of British Columbia account for the prohibition to a man to look at his adult sister by a legend of one of their fore-elders who married his sister. Their brothers were ashamed, tied them together by way of punishment, and deserted them. But the man broke the ropes; and having killed a ram, an ewe and a kid of the mountain-goats, he clad himself, his wife and their child in the skins, and they assumed the shape of goats. “He had acquired the power of killing everything by a glance of his eyes. One day his tribe came up the river for the purpose of hunting, and he killed them. Then he travelled all over the world, leaving signs of his presence everywhere, such as remarkable rocks.”[145.2] Iroquois traditions tell of an Onondaga chief, named Tododäho, whose head was covered with tangled serpents, and whose angry look sufficed to strike the beholders dead. He submitted, however, to be tamed, and to have the serpents combed out of his locks.[145.3] But the saga which presents the closest parallel to the incident of the Slaughter of the Gorgon comes to us from Brazil, and comes with every mark of indigenous growth. Some of the Brazilian tribes tell of a bird which kills with a look. The story goes that a hunter succeeded in slaying one, and cut off its head, without the dreadful eye being turned upon him. Like Perseus, he killed his game thenceforward by turning the eye upon it. “His wife, not dreaming of its destructive power, however, once turned it toward her husband and {146} killed him, and then accidentally turned it toward herself and died.”[146.1]

The truth is that we are here in presence of the worldwide belief in the Evil Eye: one more demonstration of the inseparable connection between tale, superstition, and custom. The awful weapon of the mythical Brazilian bird was Medusa’s power, the same as is to-day the terror of the Italian peasant, and is not yet regarded with indifference even in lands, like our own, which boast of being in the van of civilisation. From all parts of the world we read of the superstition that certain persons wield, intentionally or unintentionally--as often the latter as the former--the power of blasting others by their look. This power was dreaded in Palestine from time immemorial. The maxim, “Eat thou not the bread of him that hath an Evil Eye” is found among the Hebrew proverbs; and Jesus Christ alludes to the superstition, though only to warn the Pharisees against “an Evil Eye” as a moral quality proceeding out of the heart.[146.2] The superstition has left its traces in language. To the ancient Roman “Envy, eldest born of Hell,” was really _Invidia_, the Evil Eye; and the English rustic still speaks of being “overlooked.” Wizards and witches are thus gifted, of course: the Evil Eye is amongst their mightiest weapons. But it is by no means theirs alone. Innocent women, according to many nations, are periodically cursed with it. In fact, anybody may have an Evil Eye, even without knowing it; the most sacred personages are not exempt. The Samoan high priest and the Rabbi Juda are examples from the opposite ends of the {147} earth. Pius the Ninth, infallible head of the church as he was, vicar of Christ and what not, was afflicted with the Evil Eye. There was nothing so fatal as his blessing; and the flock he tended cowered and quailed before their shepherd’s sight.[147.1]

So much has been written of late on the Evil Eye that it is enough to mention in these general terms a superstition at once much less complex and much more fully known to anthropological students than some of those investigated in other chapters of these volumes. Its origin is doubtless to be sought in the evil passions of which the human countenance is so admirable and so terrible an exponent, striking inevitably with horror and awe even beholders who are not the object of the resentment or the jealousy expressed--much more, fascinating and paralysing with fear the unhappy victims, as a bird is said to be fascinated by a snake.[147.2]