Part 5 (1/2)

It may be held that the Red Men derived their bear from the European settlers. But, as we have seen, an exact knowledge of the stars has always been useful if not essential to savages; and we venture to doubt whether they would confuse their nomenclature and sacred traditions by borrowing terms from trappers and squatters. But, if this is improbable, it seems almost impossible that all savage races should have borrowed their whole conception of the heavenly bodies from the myths of Greece. It is thus that Egede, a missionary of the last century, describes the Eskimo philosophy of the stars: 'The notions that the Greenlanders have as to the origin of the heavenly lights-as sun, moon, and stars-are very nonsensical; in that they pretend they have formerly been as many of their own ancestors, who, on different accounts, were lifted up to heaven, and became such glorious celestial bodies.' Again, he writes: 'Their notions about the stars are that some of them have been men, and others different sorts, of animals and fishes.' But every reader of Ovid knows that this was the very mythical theory of the Greeks and Romans. The Egyptians, again, wors.h.i.+pped Osiris, Isis, and the rest as ancestors, and there are even modern scholars, like Mr. Loftie in his 'Essay of Scarabs,' who hold Osiris to have been originally a real historical person. But the Egyptian priests who showed Plutarch the grave of Osiris, showed him, too, the stars into which Osiris, Isis, and Horus had been metamorphosed. Here, then, we have Greeks, Egyptians, and Eskimo, all agreed about the origin of the heavenly lights, all of opinion that 'they have formerly been as many of their own ancestors.'

The Australian general theory is: 'Of the good men and women, after the deluge, Pundjel (a kind of Zeus, or rather a sort of Prometheus of Australian mythology) made stars. Sorcerers (Biraark) can tell which stars were once good men and women.' Here the sorcerers have the same knowledge as the Egyptian priests. Again, just as among the Arcadians, 'the progenitors of the existing tribes, whether birds, or beasts, or men, were set in the sky, and made to s.h.i.+ne as stars.' {130}

We have already given some Australian examples in the stories of the Pleiades, and of Castor and Pollux. We may add the case of the Eagle. In Greece the Eagle was the bird of Zeus, who carried off Ganymede to be the cup-bearer of Olympus. Among the Australians this same constellation is called Totyarguil; he was a man who, when bathing, was killed by a fabulous animal, a kind of kelpie; as Orion, in Greece, was killed by the Scorpion. Like Orion, he was placed among the stars. The Australians have a constellation named Eagle, but he is our Sinus, or Dog-star.

The Indians of the Amazon are in one tale with the Australians and Eskimo. 'Dr. Silva de Coutinho informs me,' says Professor Hartt, {131} 'that the Indians of the Amazonas not only give names to many of the heavenly bodies, but also tell stories about them. The two stars that form the shoulders of Orion are said to be an old man and a boy in a canoe, chasing a peixe boi, by which name is designated a dark spot in the sky near the above constellation.' The Indians also know monkey-stars, crane-stars, and palm-tree stars.

The Bushmen, almost the lowest tribe of South Africa, have the same star-lore and much the same myths as the Greeks, Australians, Egyptians, and Eskimo. According to Dr. Bleek, 'stars, and even the sun and moon, were once mortals on earth, or even animals or inorganic substances, which happened to get translated to the skies. The sun was once a man, whose arm-pit radiated a limited amount of light round his house. Some children threw him into the sky, and there he s.h.i.+nes.' The Homeric hymn to Helios, in the same way, as Mr. Max Muller observes, 'looks on the sun as a half-G.o.d, almost a hero, who had once lived on earth.' The pointers of the Southern Cross were 'two men who were lions,' just as Callisto, in Arcadia, was a woman who was a bear. It is not at all rare in those queer philosophies, as in that of the Scandinavians, to find that the sun or moon has been a man or woman. In Australian fable the moon was a man, the sun a woman of indifferent character, who appears at dawn in a coat of red kangaroo skins, the present of an admirer. In an old Mexican text the moon was a man, across whose face a G.o.d threw a rabbit, thus making the marks in the moon. {132a}

Many separate races seem to recognise the figure of a hare, where we see 'the Man in the Moon.' In a Buddhist legend, an exemplary and altruistic hare was translated to the moon. 'To the common people in India the spots on the moon look like a hare, and Chandras, the G.o.d of the moon, carries a hare: hence the moon is called sasin or sasanka, hare-mark. The Mongolians also see in these shadows the figure of a hare.' {132b} Among the Eskimo, the moon is a girl, who always flees from her cruel brother, the sun, because he disfigured her face. Elsewhere the sun is the girl, beloved by her own brother, the moon; she blackens her face to avert his affection. On the Rio Branco, and among the Tomunda, the moon is a girl who loved her brother and visited him in the dark. He detected her wicked pa.s.sion by drawing his blackened hand over her face. The marks betrayed her, and, as the spots on the moon, remain to this day. {133}

Among the New Zealanders and North American Indians the sun is a great beast, whom the hunters trapped and thrashed with cudgels. His blood is used in some New Zealand incantations; and, according to an Egyptian myth, was kneaded into clay at the making of man. But there is no end to similar sun-myths, in all of which the sun is regarded as a man, or even as a beast.

To return to the stars-

The Red Indians, as Schoolcraft says, 'hold many of the planets to be transformed adventurers.' The Iowas 'believed stars to be a sort of living creatures.' One of them came down and talked to a hunter, and showed him where to find game. The Gallinomeros of Central California, according to Mr. Bancroft, believe that the sun and moon were made and lighted up by the Hawk and the Coyote, who one day flew into each other's faces in the dark, and were determined to prevent such accidents in the future. But the very oddest example of the survival of the notion that the stars are men or women is found in the 'Pax' of Aristophanes. Trygaeus in that comedy has just made an expedition to heaven. A slave meets him, and asks him, 'Is not the story true, then, that we become stars when we die?' The answer is 'Certainly;' and Trygaeus points out the star into which Ios of Chios has just been metamorphosed. Aristophanes is making fun of some popular Greek superst.i.tion. But that very superst.i.tion meets us in New Zealand. 'Heroes,' says Mr. Taylor, 'were thought to become stars of greater or less brightness, according to the number of their victims slain in fight.' The Aryan race is seldom far behind, when there are ludicrous notions to be credited or savage tales to be told. We have seen that Aristophanes, in Greece, knew the Eskimo doctrine that stars are souls of the dead. The Persians had the same belief, {134a} 'all the unnumbered stars were reckoned ghosts of men.' {134b} The German folklore clings to the same belief, 'Stars are souls; when a child dies G.o.d makes a new star.' Kaegi quotes {134c} the same idea from the Veda, and from the Satapatha Brahmana the thoroughly Australian notion that 'good men become stars.' For a truly savage conception, it would be difficult, in South Africa or on the Amazons, to beat the following story from the 'Aitareya Brahmana' (iii. 33.) Pragapati, the Master of Life, conceived an incestuous pa.s.sion for his own daughter. Like Zeus, and Indra, and the Australian wooer in the Pleiad tale, he concealed himself under the shape of a beast, a roebuck, and approached his own daughter, who had a.s.sumed the form of a doe. The G.o.ds, in anger at the awful crime, made a monster to punish Pragapati. The monster sent an arrow through the G.o.d's body; he sprang into heaven, and, like the Arcadian bear, this Aryan roebuck became a constellation. He is among the stars of Orion, and his punisher, also now a star, is, like the Greek Orion, a hunter. The daughter of Pragapati, the doe, became another constellation, and the avenging arrow is also a set of stars in the sky. What follows, about the origin of the G.o.ds called Adityas, is really too savage to be quoted by a chaste mythologist.

It would be easy to multiply examples of this stage of thought among Aryans and savages. But we have probably brought forward enough for our purpose, and have expressly chosen instances from the most widely separated peoples. These instances, it will perhaps be admitted, suggest, if they do not prove, that the Greeks had received from tradition precisely the same sort of legends about the heavenly bodies as are current among Eskimo and Bushmen, New Zealanders and Iowas. As much, indeed, might be inferred from our own astronomical nomenclature. We now give to newly discovered stars names derived from distinguished people, as Georgium Sidus, or Herschel; or, again, merely technical appellatives, as Alpha, Beta, and the rest. We should never think when 'some new planet swims into our ken' of calling it Kangaroo, or Rabbit, or after the name of some hero of romance, as Rob Roy, or Count Fosco. But the names of stars which we inherit from Greek mythology-the Bear, the Pleiads, Castor and Pollux, and so forth-are such as no people in our mental condition would originally think of bestowing. When Callimachus and the courtly astronomers of Alexandria pretended that the golden locks of Berenice were raised to the heavens, that was a mere piece of flattery constructed on the inherited model of legends about the crown (Corona) of Ariadne. It seems evident enough that the older Greek names of stars are derived from a time when the ancestors of the Greeks were in the mental and imaginative condition of Iowas, Kanekas, Bushmen, Murri, and New Zealanders. All these, and all other savage peoples, believe in a kind of equality and intercommunion among all things animate and inanimate. Stones are supposed in the Pacific Islands to be male and female and to propagate their species. Animals are believed to have human or superhuman intelligence, and speech, if they choose to exercise the gift. Stars are just on the same footing, and their movements are explained by the same ready system of universal anthropomorphism. Stars, fishes, G.o.ds, heroes, men, trees, clouds, and animals, all play their equal part in the confused dramas of savage thought and savage mythology. Even in practical life the change of a sorcerer into an animal is accepted as a familiar phenomenon, and the power of soaring among the stars is one on which the Australian Biraark, or the Eskimo Shaman, most plumes himself. It is not wonderful that things which are held possible in daily practice should be frequent features of mythology. Hence the ready invention and belief of star-legends, which in their turn fix the names of the heavenly bodies. Nothing more, except the extreme tenacity of tradition and the inconvenience of changing a widely accepted name, is needed to account for the human and animal names of the stars. The Greeks received from the dateless past of savage intellect the myths, and the names of the constellations, and we have taken them, without inquiry, from the Greeks. Thus it happens that our celestial globes are just as queer menageries as any globes could be that were ill.u.s.trated by Australians or American Indians, by Bushmen or Peruvian aborigines, or Eskimo. It was savages, we may be tolerably certain, who first handed to science the names of the constellations, and provided Greece with the raw material of her astronomical myths-as Bacon prettily says, that we listen to the harsh ideas of earlier peoples 'blown softly through the flutes of the Grecians.'

This position has been disputed by Mr. Brown, in a work rather komically called 'The Law of Kosmic Order.' Mr. Brown's theory is that the early Accadians named the zodiacal signs after certain myths and festivals connected with the months. Thus the crab is a figure of 'the darkness power' which seized the Akkadian solar hero, Dumuzi, and 'which is constantly represented in monstrous and drakontic form.' The bull, again, is connected with night and darkness, 'in relation to the horned moon,' and is, for other reasons, 'a nocturnal potency.' Few stars, to tell the truth, are diurnal potencies. Mr. Brown's explanations appear to me far-fetched and unconvincing. But, granting that the zodiacal signs reached Greece from Chaldaea, Mr. Brown will hardly maintain that Australians, Melanesians, Iowas, Amazon Indians, Eskimo, and the rest, borrowed their human and animal stars from 'Akkadia.' The belief in animal and human stars is practically universal among savages who have not attained the 'Akkadian' degree of culture. The belief, as Mr. Tylor has shown, {137} is a natural result of savage ideas. We therefore infer that the 'Akkadians,' too, probably fell back for star-names on what they inherited from the savage past. If the Greeks borrowed certain star-names from the Akkadians, they also, like the Aryans of India, retained plenty of savage star-myths of their own, fables derived from the earliest astronomical guesses of early thought.

The first moment in astronomical science arrives when the savage, looking at a star, says, like the child in the nursery poem, 'How I wonder what you are!' The next moment comes when the savage has made his first rough practical observations of the movements of the heavenly body. His third step is to explain these to himself. Now science cannot offer any but a fanciful explanation beyond the sphere of experience. The experience of the savage is limited to the narrow world of his tribe, and of the beasts, birds, and fishes of his district. His philosophy, therefore, accounts for all phenomena on the supposition that the laws of the animate nature he observes are working everywhere. But his observations, misguided by his crude magical superst.i.tions, have led him to believe in a state of equality and kins.h.i.+p between men and animals, and even inorganic things. He often wors.h.i.+ps the very beasts he slays; he addresses them as if they understood him; he believes himself to be descended from the animals, and of their kindred. These confused ideas he applies to the stars, and recognises in them men like himself, or beasts like those with which he conceives himself to be in such close human relations. There is scarcely a bird or beast but the Red Indian or the Australian will explain its peculiarities by a myth, like a page from Ovid's 'Metamorphoses.' It was once a man or a woman, and has been changed to bird or beast by a G.o.d or a magician. Men, again, have originally been beasts, in his philosophy, and are descended from wolves, frogs or serpents, or monkeys. The heavenly bodies are traced to precisely the same sort of origin; and hence, we conclude, come their strange animal names, and the strange myths about them which appear in all ancient poetry. These names, in turn, have curiously affected human beliefs. Astrology is based on the opinion that a man's character and fate are determined by the stars under which he is born. And the nature of these stars is deduced from their names, so that the bear should have been found in the horoscope of Dr. Johnson. When Giordano Bruno wrote his satire against religion, the famous 's.p.a.ccio della bestia trionfante,' he proposed to banish not only the G.o.ds but the beasts from heaven. He would call the stars, not the Bear, or the Swan, or the Pleiads, but Truth, Mercy, Justice, and so forth, that men might be born, not under b.e.s.t.i.a.l, but moral influences. But the beasts have had too long possession of the stars to be easily dislodged, and the tenure of the Bear and the Swan will probably last as long as there is a science of Astronomy. Their names are not likely again to delude a philosopher into the opinion of Aristotle that the stars are animated.

This argument had been worked out to the writer's satisfaction when he chanced to light on Mr. Max Muller's explanation of the name of the Great Bear. We have explained that name as only one out of countless similar appellations which men of every race give to the stars. These names, again, we have accounted for as the result of savage philosophy, which takes no great distinction between man and the things in the world, and looks on stars, beasts, birds, fishes, flowers, and trees as men and women in disguise. Mr. Muller's theory is based on philological considerations. He thinks that the name of the Great Bear is the result of a mistake as to the meaning of words. There was in Sanskrit, he says, {140} a root ark, or arch, meaning 'to be bright.' The stars are called riksha, that is, bright ones, in the Veda. 'The constellations here called the Rikshas, in the sense of the ”bright ones,” would be h.o.m.onymous in Sanskrit with the Bears. Remember also that, apparently without rhyme or reason, the same constellation is called by Greeks and Romans the Bear... . There is not the shadow of a likeness with a bear. You will now perceive the influence of words on thought, or the spontaneous growth of mythology. The name Riksha was applied to the bear in the sense of the bright fuscous animal, and in that sense it became most popular in the later Sanskrit, and in Greek and Latin. The same name, ”in the sense of the bright ones,” had been applied by the Vedic poets to the stars in general, and more particularly to that constellation which in the northern parts of India was the most prominent. The etymological meaning, ”the bright stars,” was forgotten; the popular meaning of Riksha (bear) was known to everyone. And thus it happened that, when the Greeks had left their central home and settled in Europe, they retained the name of Arktos for the same unchanging stars; but, not knowing why those stars had originally received that name, they ceased to speak of them as arktoi, or many bears, and spoke of them as the Bear.'

This is a very good example of the philological way of explaining a myth. If once we admit that ark, or arch, in the sense of 'bright' and of 'bear,' existed, not only in Sanskrit, but in the undivided Aryan tongue, and that the name Riksha, bear, 'became in that sense most popular in Greek and Latin,' this theory seems more than plausible. But the explanation does not look so well if we examine, not only the Aryan, but all the known myths and names of the Bear and the other stars. Professor Sayce, a distinguished philologist, says we may not compare non-Aryan with Aryan myths. We have ventured to do so, however, in this paper, and have shown that the most widely severed races give the stars animal names, of which the Bear is one example. Now, if the philologists wish to persuade us that it was decaying and half-forgotten language which caused men to give the names of animals to the stars, they must prove their case on an immense collection of instances-on Iowa, Kaneka, Murri, Maori, Brazilian, Peruvian, Mexican, Egyptian, Eskimo, instances. It would be the most amazing coincidence in the world if forgetfulness of the meaning of their own speech compelled tribes of every tongue and race to recognise men and beasts, cranes, c.o.c.katoos, serpents, monkeys, bears, and so forth, in the heavens. How came the misunderstood words always to be misunderstood in the same way? Does the philological explanation account for the enormous majority of the phenomena? If it fails, we may at least doubt whether it solves the one isolated case of the Great Bear among the Greeks and Romans. It must be observed that the philological explanation of Mr. Muller does not clear up the Arcadian story of their own descent from a she-bear who is now a star. Yet similar stories of the descent of tribes from animals are so widespread that it would be difficult to name the race or the quarter of the globe where they are not found. Are they all derived from misunderstood words meaning 'bright'? These considerations appear to be a strong argument for comparing not only Aryan, but all attainable myths. We shall often find, if we take a wide view, that the philological explanation which seemed plausible in a single case is hopelessly narrow when applied to a large collection of parallel cases in languages of various families.

Finally, in dealing with star myths, we adhere to the hypothesis of Mr. Tylor: 'From savagery up to civilisation,' Akkadian, Greek, or English, 'there may be traced in the mythology of the stars a course of thought, changed, indeed, in application, yet never broken in its evident connection from first to last. The savage sees individual stars as animate beings, or combines star-groups into living celestial creatures, or limbs of them, or objects connected with them; while at the other extremity of the scale of civilisation the modern astronomer keeps up just such ancient fancies, turning them to account in useful survival, as a means of mapping out the celestial globe.'

MOLY AND MANDRAGORA.

'I have found out a new cure for rheumatism,' said the lady beside whom it was my privilege to sit at dinner. 'You carry a potato about in your pocket!'

Some one has written an amusing account of the behaviour of a man who is finis.h.i.+ng a book. He takes his ideas everywhere with him and broods over them, even at dinner, in the pauses of conversation. But here was a lady who kindly contributed to my studies and offered me folklore and survivals in cultivated Kensington.

My mind had strayed from the potato cure to the New Zealand habit of carrying a baked yam at night to frighten away ghosts, and to the old English belief that a bit of bread kept in the pocket was sovereign against evil spirits. Why should ghosts dread the food of mortals when it is the custom of most races of mortals to feed ancestral ghosts? The human mind works pretty rapidly, and all this had pa.s.sed through my brain while I replied, in tones of curiosity: 'A potato!'

'Yes; but it is not every potato that will do. I heard of the cure in the country, and when we came up to town, and my husband was complaining of rheumatism, I told one of the servants to get me a potato for Mr. Johnson's rheumatism. ”Yes, ma'am,” said the man; ”but it must be a stolen potato.” I had forgotten that. Well, one can't ask one's servants to steal potatoes. It is easy in the country, where you can pick one out of anybody's field.' 'And what did you do?' I asked. 'Oh, I drove to Covent Garden and ordered a lot of fruit and flowers. While the man was not looking, I stole a potato-a very little one. I don't think there was any harm in it.' 'And did Mr. Johnson try the potato cure?' 'Yes, he carried it in his pocket, and now he is quite well. I told the doctor, and he says he knows of the cure, but he dares not recommend it.'

How oddly superst.i.tions survive! The central idea of this modern folly about the potato is that you must pilfer the root. Let us work the idea of the healing or magical herb backwards, from Kensington to European folklore, and thence to cla.s.sical times, to Homer, and to the Hottentots. Turning first to Germany, we note the beliefs, not about the potato, but about another vegetable, the mandrake. Of all roots, in German superst.i.tion, the Alraun, or mandrake, is the most famous. The herb was conceived of, in the savage fas.h.i.+on, as a living human person, a kind of old witch-wife. {144}

Again, the root has a human shape. 'If a hereditary thief who has preserved his chast.i.ty gets hung,' the broad-leafed, yellow-flowered mandrake grows up, in his likeness, beneath the gallows from which he is suspended. The mandrake, like the moly, the magical herb of the Odyssey, is 'hard for men to dig.' He who desires to possess a mandrake must stop his ears with wax, so that he may not hear the deathly yells which the plant utters as it is being dragged out of the earth. Then before sunrise, on a Friday, the amateur goes out with a dog, 'all black,' makes three crosses round the mandrake, loosens the soil about the root, ties the root to the dog's tail, and offers the beast a piece of bread. The dog runs at the bread, drags out the mandrake root, and falls dead, killed by the horrible yell of the plant. The root is now taken up, washed with wine, wrapped in silk, laid in a casket, bathed every Friday, 'and clothed in a little new white smock every new moon.' The mandrake acts, if thus considerately treated, as a kind of familiar spirit. 'Every piece of coin put to her over night is found doubled in the morning.' Gipsy folklore, and the folklore of American children, keep this belief in doubling deposits. The gipsies use the notion in what they call 'The Great Trick.' Some foolish rustic makes up his money in a parcel which he gives to the gipsy. The latter, after various ceremonies performed, returns the parcel, which is to be buried. The money will be found doubled by a certain date. Of course when the owner unburies the parcel he finds nothing in it but bra.s.s b.u.t.tons. In the same way, and with pious confidence, the American boy buries a marble in a hollow log, uttering the formula, 'What hasn't come here, come! what's here, stay here!' and expects to find all the marbles he has ever lost. {145} Let us follow the belief in magical roots into the old Pagan world.

The ancients knew mandragora and the superst.i.tions connected with it very well. Dioscorides mentions mandragorus, or antimelon, or dircaea, or Circaea, and says the Egyptians call it apemoum, and Pythagoras 'anthropomorphon.' In digging the root, Pliny says, 'there are some ceremonies observed, first they that goe about this worke, look especially to this that the wind be not in their face, but blow upon their backs. Then with the point of a sword they draw three circles round about the plant, which don, they dig it up afterwards with their face unto the west.' Pliny says nothing of the fetich qualities of the plant, as credited in modern and mediaeval Germany, but mentions 'sufficient it is with some bodies to cast them into sleep with the smel of mandrago.' This is like Shakespeare's 'poppy and mandragora, and all the drowsy syrups of the world.' Plato and Demosthenes {146a} also speak of mandragora as a soporific. It is more to the purpose of magic that Columella mentions 'the half-human mandragora.' Here we touch the origin of the mandrake superst.i.tions. The roots have a kind of fantastic resemblance to the human shape; Pliny describes them as being 'of a fleshy substance and tender.' Now it is one of the recognised principles in magic, that things like each other, however superficially, affect each other in a mystic way, and possess identical properties. Thus, in Melanesia, according to Mr. Codrington, {146b} 'a stone in the shape of a pig, of a bread-fruit, of a yam, was a most valuable find,' because it made pigs prolific, and fertilised bread-fruit trees and yam-plots. In Scotland, too, 'stones were called by the names of the limbs they resembled, as ”eye-stane,” ”head-stane.” A patient washed the affected part of his body, and rubbed it well with the stone corresponding.' {147a} In precisely the same way, the mandrake root, being thought to resemble the human body, was credited with human and superhuman powers. Josephus mentions {147b} a plant 'not easily caught, which slips away from them that wish to gather it, and never stands still' till certain repulsive rites are performed. These rites cannot well be reported here, but they are quite familiar to Red Indian and to Bushman magic. Another way to dig the plant spoken of by Josephus is by aid of the dog, as in the German superst.i.tion quoted from Grimm. aelian also recommends the use of the dog to pluck the herb aglaophotis, which s.h.i.+nes at night. {147c} When the dog has dragged up the root, and died of terror, his body is to be buried on the spot with religious honours and secret sacred rites.

So much for mandragora, which, like the healing potato, has to be acquired stealthily and with peril. Now let us examine the Homeric herb moly. The plant is thus introduced by Homer: In the tenth book of the 'Odyssey,' Circe has turned Odysseus's men into swine. He sets forth to rescue them, trusting only to his sword. The G.o.d Hermes meets him, and offers him 'a charmed herb,' 'this herb of grace' (fa?a??? es????) whereby he may subdue the magic wiles of Circe.

The plant is described by Homer with some minuteness. 'It was black at the root, but the flower was like to milk. ”Moly,” the G.o.ds call it, but it is hard for mortal men to dig, howbeit with the G.o.ds all things are possible.' The etymologies given of 'moly' are almost as numerous as the etymologists. One derivation, from the old 'Turanian' tongue of Accadia, will be examined later. The Scholiast offers the derivation '???e??, to make charms of no avail'; but this is exactly like Professor Blackie's etymological discovery that Erinys is derived from e????e??: 'he might as well derive critic from criticise.' {148} The Scholiast adds that moly caused death to the person who dragged it out of the ground. This identification of moly with mandrake is probably based on Homer's remark that moly is 'hard to dig.' The black root and white flower of moly are quite unlike the yellow flower and white fleshy root ascribed by Pliny to mandrake. Only confusion is caused by regarding the two magical herbs as identical.

But why are any herbs or roots magical? While some scholars, like De Gubernatis, seek an explanation in supposed myths about clouds and stars, it is enough for our purpose to observe that herbs really have medicinal properties, and that untutored people invariably confound medicine with magic. A plant or root is thought to possess virtue, not only when swallowed in powder or decoction, but when carried in the hand. St. John's wort and rowan berries, like the Homeric moly, still 'make evil charms of none avail;'