Part 7 (1/2)

CHAPTER V.

ANIMALS.

Animal demons distinguished--Trivial sources of Mythology--Hedgehog--Fox--Transmigrations in j.a.pan--Horses bewitched--Rats--Lions--Cats--The Dog--Goethe's horror of dogs--Superst.i.tions of the Pa.r.s.ees, people of Travancore, and American Negroes, Red Indians, &c.--Cynocephaloi--The Wolf--Traditions of the Nez Perces--Fenris--Fables--The Boar--The Bear--Serpent--Every animal power to harm demonised--Horns.

The animal demons--those whose evil repute is the result of something in their nature which may be inimical to man--should be distinguished from the forms which have been diabolised by a.s.sociation with mythological personages or ideas. The lion, tiger, and wolf are examples of the one cla.s.s; the stag, horse, owl, and raven of the other. But there are circ.u.mstances which render it very difficult to observe this distinction. The line has to be drawn, if at all, between the measureless forces of degradation on the one side, discovering some evil in animals which, but for their bad a.s.sociations, would not have been much thought of; and of euphemism on the other, transforming harmful beasts to benignant agents by dwelling upon some minor characteristic.

There are a few obviously dangerous animals, such as the serpent, where it is easy to pick our way; we can recognise the fear that flatters it to an agathodemon and the diminished fear that p.r.o.nounces it accurst. [88] But what shall be said of the Goat? Was there really anything in its smell or in its flesh when first eaten, its b.u.t.ting, or injury to plants, which originally cla.s.sed it among the unclean animals? or was it merely demonised because of its uncanny and s.h.a.ggy appearance? What explanation can be given of the evil repute of our household friend the Cat? Is it derived by inheritance from its fierce ancestors of the jungle? Was it first suggested by its horrible human-like sleep-murdering caterwaulings at night? or has it simply suffered from a theological curse on the cats said to draw the chariots of the G.o.ddesses of Beauty? The demonic Dog is, if anything, a still more complex subject. The student of mythology and folklore speedily becomes familiar with the trivial sources from which vast streams of superst.i.tion often issue. The c.o.c.k's challenge to the all-detecting sun no doubt originated his ominous career from the Code of Manu to the c.o.c.k-headed devils frescoed in the cathedrals of Russia. The fleshy, forked roots of a soporific plant issued in that vast Mandrake Mythology which has been the subject of many volumes, without being even yet fully explored. The Italians have a saying that 'One knavery of the hedgehog is worth more than many of the fox;' yet the nocturnal and hibernating habits and general quaintness of the humble hedgehog, rather than his furtive propensity to prey on eggs and chickens, must have raised him to the honours of demonhood. In various popular fables this little animal proves more than a match for the wolf and the serpent. It was in the form of a hedgehog that the Devil is said to have made the attempt to let in the sea through the Brighton Downs, which was prevented by a light being brought, though the seriousness of the scheme is still attested in the Devil's d.y.k.e. There is an ancient tradition that when the Devil had smuggled himself into Noah's Ark, he tried to sink it by boring a hole; but this scheme was defeated, and the human race saved, by the hedgehog stuffing himself into the hole. In the Brighton story the Devil would appear to have remembered his former failure in drowning people, and to have appropriated the form which defeated him.

The Fox, as incarnation of cunning, holds in the primitive belief of the j.a.panese almost the same position as the Serpent in the nations that have wors.h.i.+pped, until bold enough to curse it. In many of the early pictures of j.a.panese demons one may generally detect amid their human, wolfish, or other characters some traits of the kitsune (fox). He is always the soul of the three-eyed demon of j.a.pan (fig. 7). He is the sagacious 'Vizier,' as the Persian Desatir calls him, and is practically the j.a.panese scape-goat. If a fox has appeared in any neighbourhood, the next trouble is attributed to his visit; and on such occasions the sufferers and their friends repair to some ancient gnarled tree in which the fox is theoretically resident and propitiate him, just as would be done to a serpent in other regions. In j.a.pan the fox is not regarded as always harmful, but generally so. He is not to be killed on any account. Being thus spared through superst.i.tion, the foxes increase sufficiently to supply abundant material for the continuance of its demonic character. 'Take us the foxes, the little foxes that spoil the vines,' [89] is an admonition reversed in j.a.pan. The correspondence between the cunning respected in this animal and that of the serpent, reverenced elsewhere, is confirmed by Mr. Fitz Cunliffe Owen, who observed, as he informs me, that the j.a.panese will not kill even the poisonous snakes which crawl freely amid the decaying Buddhist temples of Nikko, one of the most sacred places in j.a.pan, where once as many as eight thousand monastic Buddhists were harboured. It is the red fox that abounds in j.a.pan, and its human-like cry at night near human habitations is such as might easily encourage these superst.i.tions. But, furthermore, mythology supplies many ill.u.s.trations of a creditable tendency among rude tribes to mark out for special veneration or fear any force in nature finer than mere strength. Emerson says, 'Foxes are so cunning because they are not strong.' In our j.a.panese demon, whose three eyes alone connect it with the praeternatural vision ascribed by that race to the fox, the harelip is very p.r.o.nounced. That little animal, the Hare, is a.s.sociated with a large mythology, perhaps because out of its weakness proceeds its main forces of survival--timidity, vigilance, and swiftness. The superst.i.tion concerning the hare is found in Africa. The same animal is the much-venerated good genius of the Calmucs, who call him Sakya-muni (Buddha), and say that on earth he submitted himself to be eaten by a starving man, for which gracious deed he was raised to dominion over the moon, where they profess to see him. The legend is probably traceable back to the Sanskrit word sasin, moon, which means literally 'the hare-marked.' Sasa means 'hare.' Pausanias relates the story of the moon-G.o.ddess instructing exiles to build their city where they shall see a hare take refuge in a myrtle-grove. [90] In the demonic fauna of j.a.pan another cunning animal figures--the Weasel. The name of this demon is 'the sickle weasel,' and it also seems to occupy the position of a scape-goat. In the language of a j.a.panese report, 'When a person's clogs slip from under his feet, and he falls and cuts his face on the gravel, or when a person, who is out at night when he ought to have been at home, presents himself to his family with a freshly-scarred face, the wound is referred to the agency of the malignant invisible weasel and his sharp sickle.' In an aboriginal legend of America, also, two sister demons commonly take the form of weasels.

The popular feeling which underlay much of the animal-wors.h.i.+p in ancient times was probably that which is reflected in the j.a.panese notions of to-day, as told in the subjoined sketch from an amusing book.

'One of these visitors was an old man, who himself was at the time a victim of a popular superst.i.tion that the departed revisit the scenes of their life in this world in shapes of different animals. We noticed that he was not in his usual spirits, and pressed him to unburden his mind to us. He said he had lost his little son Chiosin, but that was not so much the cause of his grief as the absurd way in which his wife, backed up by a whole conclave of old women who had taken up their abode in his house to comfort her, was going on. 'What do they all do?' we asked sympathetically. 'Why,' he replied, 'every beastly animal that comes to my house, there is a cry amongst them all, 'Chiosin, Chiosin has come back!' and the whole house swarms with cats and dogs and bats--for they say they are not quite sure which is Chiosin, and that they had better be kind to the lot than run the chance of treating him badly; the consequence is, all these brutes are fed on my rice and meat, and now I am driven out of doors and called an unnatural parent because I killed a mosquito which bit me!' [91]

The strange and inexplicable behaviour of animals in cases of fear, panic, or pain has been generally attributed by ignorant races to their possession by demons. Of this nature is the story of the devil entering the herd of swine and carrying them into the sea, related in the New Testament. It is said that even yet in some parts of Scotland the milkmaid carries a switch of the magical rowan to expel the demon that sometimes enters the cow. Professor Monier Williams writes from Southern India--'When my fellow-travellers and myself were nearly dashed to pieces over a precipice the other day by some restive horses on a ghat near Poona, we were told that the road at this particular point was haunted by devils who often caused similar accidents, and we were given to understand that we should have done well to conciliate Ganesa, son of the G.o.d Siva, and all his troops of evil spirits, before starting.' The same writer also tells us that the guardian spirits or 'mothers' who haunt most regions of the Peninsula are believed to ride about on horses, and if they are angry, scatter blight and disease. Hence the traveller just arrived from Europe is startled and puzzled by apparitions of rudely-formed terra-cotta horses, often as large as life, placed by the peasantry round shrines in the middle of fields as acceptable propitiatory offerings, or in the fulfilment of vows in periods of sickness. [92]

This was the belief of the Corinthians in the Taraxippos, or shade of Glaucus, who, having been torn in pieces by the horses with which he had been racing, and which he had fed on human flesh to make more spirited, remained to haunt the Isthmus and frighten horses during the races.

There is a modern legend in the Far West (America) of a horse called 'The White Devil,' which, in revenge for some harm to its comrades, slew men by biting and trampling them, and was itself slain after defying many attempts at its capture; but among the many ancient legends of demon-horses there are few which suggest anything about that animal hostile to man. His occasional evil character is simply derived from his a.s.sociation with man, and is therefore postponed. For a similar reason the Goat also must be dealt with hereafter, and as a symbolical animal. A few myths are met with which relate to its unpleasant characteristics. In South Guinea the odour of goats is accounted for by the Saga that their ancestor having had the presumption to ask a G.o.ddess for her aromatic ointment, she angrily rubbed him with ointment of a reverse kind. It has also been said that it was regarded as a demon by the wors.h.i.+ppers of Bacchus, because it cropped the vines; and that it thus originated the Trageluphoi, or goat-stag monsters mentioned by Plato, [93] and gave us also the word tragedy. [94] But such traits of the Goat can have very little to do with its important relations to Mythology and Demonology. To the list of animals demonised by a.s.sociation must also be added the Stag. No doubt the anxious mothers, wives, or sweethearts of rash young huntsmen utilised the old fables of beautiful hinds which in the deep forests changed to demons and devoured their pursuers, [95] for admonition; but the fact that such stags had to transform themselves for evil work is a sufficient certificate of character to prevent their being included among the animal demons proper, that is, such as have in whole or part supplied in their disposition to harm man the basis of a demonic representation.

It will not be deemed wonderful that Rats bear a venerable rank in Demonology. The shudder which some nervous persons feel at sight of even a harmless mouse is a survival from the time when it was believed that in this form unshriven souls or unbaptized children haunted their former homes; and probably it would be difficult to estimate the number of ghost-stories which have originated in their nocturnal scamperings. Many legends report the departure of unhallowed souls from human mouths in the shape of a Mouse. During the earlier Napoleonic wars mice were used in Southern Germany as diviners, by being set with inked feet on the map of Europe to show where the fatal Frenchmen would march. They gained this sanct.i.ty by a series of a.s.sociations with force stretching back to the Hindu fable of a mouse delivering the elephant and the lion by gnawing the cords that bound them. The battle of the Frogs and Mice is ascribed to Homer. Mice are said to have foretold the first civil war in Rome by gnawing the gold in the temple. Rats appear in various legends as avengers. The uncles of King Popelus II., murdered by him and his wife and thrown into a lake, reappear as rats and gnaw the king and queen to death. The same fate overtakes Miskilaus of Poland, through the transformed widows and orphans he had wronged. Mouse Tower, standing in the middle of the Rhine, is the haunted monument of cruel Archbishop Hatto, of Mainz, who (anno 970) bade the famine-stricken people repair to his barn, wherein he shut them fast and burned them. But next morning an army of rats, having eaten all the corn in his granaries, darkened the roads to the palace. The prelate sought refuge from them in the Tower, but they swam after, gnawed through the walls and devoured him. [96]

St. Gertrude, wearing the funereal mantle of Holda, commands an army of mice. In this respect she succeeds to the Pied Piper of Hamelin, who also leads off children; and my ingenious friend Mr. John Fiske suggests that this may be the reason why Irish servant-maids often show such frantic terror at sight of a mouse. [97] The care of children is often intrusted to them, and the appearance of mice prognosticated of old the appearance of the praeternatural rat-catcher and psychopomp. Pliny says that in his time it was considered fortunate to meet a white rat. The people of Ba.s.sorah always bow to these revered animals when seen, no doubt to propitiate them.

The Lion is a symbol of majesty and of the sun in his glory (reached in the zodiacal Leo), though here and there his original demonic character appears,--as in the combats of Indra, Samson, and Herakles with terrible lions. Euphemism, in one sense, fulfils the conditions of Samson's riddle--Sweetness coming out of the Strong--and has brought honey out of the Lion. His cruel character has subtly fallen to Sirius the Dog-star, to whom are ascribed the drought and malaria of 'dog-days' (when the sun is in Leo); but the primitive fact is intimated in several fables like that of Aristaeus, who, born after his mother had been rescued from the Lybian lion, was wors.h.i.+pped in Ceos as a saviour from both droughts and lions. The Lion couching at the feet of beautiful Doorga in India, reappears drawing the chariot of Aphrodite, and typifies the potency of beauty rather than, as Emerson interprets, that beauty depends on strength. The chariot of the Norse Venus, Freyja, was drawn by Cats, diminished forms of her Southern sister's steeds. It was partly by these routes the Cat came to play the sometimes beneficent role in Russian, and to some extent in German, French, and English folklore,--e.g., Puss in Boots, Whittington and his Cat, and Madame D'Aulnoy's La Chatte Blanche. The demonic characteristics of the destructive cats have been inherited by the black,--or, as in Macbeth, the brindled,--cat. In Germany the approach of a cat to a sick-bed announces death; to dream of one is an evil omen. In Hungary it is said every black cat becomes a witch at the age of seven. It is the witch's favourite riding-horse, but may sometimes be saved from such servitude by incision of the sign of the cross. A scratch from a black cat is thought to be the beginning of a fatal spell.

De Gubernatis [98] has a very curious speculation concerning the origin of our familiar fable the Kilkenny Cats, which he traces to the German superst.i.tion which dreads the combat between cats as presaging death to one who witnesses it; and this belief he finds reflected in the Tuscan child's 'game of souls,' in which the devil and angel are supposed to contend for the soul. The author thinks this may be one outcome of the contest between Night and Twilight in Mythology; but, if the connection can be traced, it would probably prove to be derived from the struggle between the two angels of Death, one variation of which is a.s.sociated with the legend of the strife for the body of Moses. The Book of Enoch says that Gabriel was sent, before the Flood, to excite the man-devouring giants to destroy one another. In an ancient Persian picture in my possession, animal monsters are shown devouring each other, while their proffered victim, like Daniel, is unharmed. The idea is a natural one, and hardly requires comparative tracing.

Dr. Dennys tells us that in China there exists precisely the same superst.i.tion as in Scotland as to the evil omen of a cat (or dog) pa.s.sing over a corpse. Brand and Pennant both mention this, the latter stating that the cat or dog that has so done is killed without mercy. This fact would seem to show that the fear is for the living, lest the soul of the deceased should enter the animal and become one of the innumerable werewolf or vampyre cla.s.s of demons. But the origin of the superst.i.tion is no doubt told in the Slavonic belief that if a cat leap over a corpse the deceased person will become a vampyre.

In Russia the cat enjoys a somewhat better reputation than it does in most other countries. Several peasants in the neighbourhood of Moscow a.s.sured me that while they would never be willing to remain in a church where a dog had entered, they would esteem it a good sign if a cat came to church. One aged woman near Moscow told me that when the Devil once tried to creep into Paradise he took the form of a mouse: the Dog and Cat were on guard at the gates, and the Dog allowed the evil one to pa.s.s, but the Cat pounced on him, and so defeated another treacherous attempt against human felicity.

The Cat superst.i.tion has always been strong in Great Britain. It is, indeed, in one sense true, as old Howell wrote (1647)--'We need not cross the sea for examples of this kind, we have too many (G.o.d wot) at home: King James a great while was loath to believe there were witches; but that which happened to my Lord Francis of Rutland's children convinced him, who were bewitched by an old woman that was a servant of Belvoir Castle, but, being displeased, she contracted with the Devil, who conversed with her in the form of a Cat, whom she called Rutterkin, to make away those children out of mere malignity and thirst of revenge.' It is to be feared that many a poor woman has been burned as a witch against whom her cherished cat was the chief witness. It would be a curious psychological study to trace how far the superst.i.tion owns a survival in even scientific minds,--as in Buffon's vituperation of the cat, and in the astonis.h.i.+ng story, told by Mr. Wood, of a cat which saw a ghost (anno 1877)!

The Dog, so long the faithful friend of man, and even, possibly, because of the degree to which he has caught his master's manners, has a large demonic history. In the Semitic stories there are many that indicate the path by which 'dog' became the Mussulman synonym of infidel; and the one dog Katmir who in Arabic legend was admitted to Paradise for his faithful watching three hundred and nine years before the cave of the Seven Sleepers, [99] must have drifted among the Moslems from India as the Ephesian Sleepers did from the christian world. In the beautiful episode of the 'Mahabharata,' Yudhisthira having journeyed to the door of heaven, refuses to enter into that happy abode unless his faithful dog is admitted also. He is told by Indra, 'My heaven hath no place for dogs; they steal away our offerings on earth;' and again, 'If a dog but behold a sacrifice, men esteem it unholy and void.' This difficulty was solved by the Dog--Yama in disguise--revealing himself and praising his friend's fidelity. It is tolerably clear that it is to his connection with Yama, G.o.d of Death, and under the evolution of that dualism which divided the universe into upper and nether, that the Dog was degraded among our Aryan ancestors; at the same time his sometimes wolfish disposition and some other natural characters supplied the basis of his demonic character. He was at once a dangerous and a corruptible guard.

In the early Vedic Mythology it is the abode of the G.o.ds that is guarded by the two dogs, identified by solar mythologists as the morning and evening twilight: a later phase shows them in the service of Yama, and they reappear in the guardian of the Greek Hades, Cerberus, and Orthros. The first of these has been traced to the Vedic Sarvara, the latter to the monster Vritra. 'Orthros'

is the phonetical equivalent of Vritra. The b.i.t.c.h Sarama, mother of the two Vedic dogs, proved a treacherous guard, and was slain by Indra. Hence the Russian peasant comes fairly by another version of how the Dog, while on guard, admitted the Devil into heaven on being thrown a bone. But the two watch-dogs of the Hindu myth do not seem to bear an evil character. In a funeral hymn of the 'Rig-Veda' (x. 14), addressed to Yama, King of Death, we read:--'By an auspicious path do thou hasten past the two four-eyed brindled dogs, the offspring of Sarama; then approach the beautiful Pitris who rejoice together with Yama. Intrust him, O Yama, to thy two watch-dogs, four-eyed, road-guarding, and man-observing. The two brown messengers of Yama, broad of nostril and insatiable, wander about among men; may they give us again to-day the auspicious breath of life that we may see the sun!'

And now thousands of years after this was said we find the Dog still regarded as the seer of ghosts, and watcher at the gates of death, of whose opening his howl forewarns. The howling of a dog on the night of December 9, 1871, at Sandringham, where the Prince of Wales lay ill, was thought important enough for newspapers to report to a shuddering country. I read lately of a dog in a German village which was supposed to have announced so many deaths that he became an object of general terror, and was put to death. In that country belief in the demonic character of the dog seems to have been strong enough to transmit an influence even to the powerful brain of Goethe.

In Goethe's poem, it was when Faust was walking with the student Wagner that the black Dog appeared, rus.h.i.+ng around them in spiral curves--spreading, as Faust said, 'a magic coil as a snare around them;' [100] that after this dog had followed Faust into his study, it a.s.sumed a monstrous shape, until changed to a mist, from which Mephistopheles steps forth--'the kernel of the brute'--in guise of a travelling scholar. This is in notable coincidence with the archaic symbolism of the Dog as the most frequent form of the 'Lares' (fig. 9), or household genii, originally because of its vigilance. The form here presented is nearly identical with the Cynocephalus, whom the learned author of 'Mankind: their Origin and Destiny,' identifies as the Adamic being set as a watch and instructor in Eden (Gen. xvi. 15), an example of which, holding pen and tablet (as described by Horapollo), is given in that work from Philae. Chrysippus says that these were afterwards represented as young men clothed with dog-skins. Remnants of the tutelary character of the dog are scattered through German folklore: he is regarded as oracle, ghost-seer, and gifted with second sight; in Bohemia he is sometimes made to lick an infant's face that it may see well.

The pa.s.sage in 'Faust' has been traced to Goethe's antipathy to dogs, as expressed in his conversation with Falk at the time of Wieland's death. 'Annihilation is utterly out of the question; but the possibility of being caught on the way by some more powerful and yet baser monas, and subordinated to it; this is unquestionably a very serious consideration; and I, for my part, have never been able entirely to divest myself of the fear of it, in the way of a mere observation of nature.' At this moment, says Falk, a dog was heard repeatedly barking in the street. Goethe, sprang hastily to the window and called to it: 'Take what form you will, vile larva, you shall not subjugate me!' After some pause, he resumed with the remark: 'This rabble of creation is extremely offensive. It is a perfect pack of monades with which we are thrown together in this planetary nook; their company will do us little honour with the inhabitants of other planets, if they happen to hear anything about them.'