A FEW REMARKS UPON THE USE OF BLADDERS IN RELIGIOUS CEREMONIES.
Whether or not primitive man, excited by his insatiate, omnivorous appetite for gods, under the impulses of which he deified winds, waters, trees, and stones, and looked with a veneration not far removed from devotion itself, upon the holy graals, chalices, and other paraphernalia of his ritual, should have associated a mysterious power with the bladders he employed to hold his urine and ordure is a question which no one can to-day determine.
For our own cow-worshipping Aryan ancestry bladders were a natural means of transporting liquids, exactly as they remain among the Apaches and other Indian tribes of America.
Introduced of necessity into religious ceremonial, they would, with the advance of years, and in spite of the improvement which might be brought about in the domestic comfort of the people at large, gain a certain “medicine” value, strictly parallel to that which we know has been gained by the gourd-rattle, which, in not a few cases, has been consulted as an oracle, and adored as a god.[92]
The author has observed a number of instances of the use by Sioux, Apache, and other Indians, of bladders tied in the hair as an “ornament” long after traders had placed within reach glass beads, feathers, and other means of decoration. The Hottentots kept drinking-water in “the intestines of animals.”—(Thurnberg, in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. pp. 38, 73, 141.)
Of the Patagonians we are informed that “the only vessels they use for carrying water are bladders.”—(“Adventure and Beagle,” vol. i. p. 93.)
We are informed that the Shamans of Alaska throw into the sea inflated bladders and watch them sink, as a means of divination.—(“Our Arctic Province,” Elliott, p. 393.)
In some parts of rural England there were kept up even to our own day certain feasts or ceremonies, connected with the ploughing of the land. These “fool-plough” days varied in different sections from early in January to Shrove Tuesday. They partook of the nature of a frolic, the plough being driven by a clown armed with a bladder, with which he urged his team. There were certain peculiarities connected with this custom indicative of a Pagan origin. The clown was attired as a woman, there was music, the plough was drawn three times round a fire, the blacksmith received “sharping corn” for sharpening the plough-irons, and the whole ended with feasting, in which the cock figured as one of the articles of food. All this suggested to the writer in Brand a relationship with the “Compitalia” of the Romans and “the three sacred ploughings” of the Athenians; also the sacred ceremonial ploughing of the Chinese.—(Brand, “Popular Antiquities,” vol. i. pp. 505 et seq., article “Fool-Ploughs.”)
Bruce describes the commander-in-chief of the Abyssinian army on an expedition against the Gallas while in the act of making his toilet. “A man was then finishing his head-dress by plaiting it with some of the long and small guts of an ox, which I did not perceive had ever been cleaned.”—(Bruce, “Nile,” vol. iv. p. 212.)
The Gallas of Abyssinia, upon slaughtering an ox, “hang the entrails round their necks, or interweave them with their hair.”—(Maltebrun, “Un. Geography,” Boston, 1847, vol. ii. p. 47, article “Abyssinia.”)
Bruce describes a chief of the Gallas as having “his long hair plaited and interwoven with the bowels of oxen, and so knotted and twisted together as to render it impossible to distinguish the hair from the bowels.... He had likewise a wreath of guts hung about his neck, and several rounds of the same about his middle.”—(“Nile,” vol. iv. p. 560.)
“Their favorite ornament is composed of the entrails of their oxen, which, without superfluous care in cleansing them, are plaited in the hair and tied as girdles round the waist.”—(“Encyc. of Geog.,” Philadelphia, 1855, vol. ii. p. 588, article “Abyssinia.”)
“A Norwegian witch has boasted of sinking a ship by opening a bag in which she had shut up a wind. Ulysses received the winds in a leather bag from Æolus, king of the winds.”—(“The Golden Bough,” Frazer, vol. i. p. 27.)
An examination of the examples just adduced, as well as of those introduced under “Cures by Transplantation,” would seem to show that bladders were used in preference to material just as available and convenient, and that when a substitution was made it was always by a horn or a glass, clear as the entrail which it no doubt was supposed to resemble. The god Crepitus, as we have shown, was symbolized as a swollen paunch. The clowns of the circuses of the present day are armed with bladders; but why no antiquarian has yet arisen to explain to us.
Brand (“Popular Antiquities,” vol. i. p. 261 et seq., article “Fools”) contains no information on this point.
The use of the bladder is to be noted in the festivals of the Inuits. “Après un superbe vacarme, ils suspendent à des cordes une centaine des vessies, prises à des animaux tous tués à coups de flèche.”—(“Les Primitifs,” Réclus, p. 110, “Les Inoits Occidentaux.”)
The explanation given by Réclus is as follows: “Faut-il expliquer que les vessies, échauffées par la flamme, symbolisent les souffles du printemps?... Qu’elles symbolisent l’esprit de vie qui entre dans les narines?”—(Idem.)
It may be enough to point out the care with which these bladders must be selected; not every bladder will do,—only those from animals killed with arrows.
XLIX.
THE WORSHIP OF COCKS AND HENS.
Only such matter has been admitted into this volume as could prima facie be considered as having the right of entry; the greatest care has been taken to avoid distortion or mutilation of authorities, and much has been excluded that might have been presented without running a risk of being accused of unfairness.
For example, as old an authority as John de Laet calls attention to the great prevalence of intoxication and debauchery among the Indians of Vextipa, near Mexico, who on feast days had the ancient custom of becoming drunk as beasts and committing enormous excesses.[93] And in like manner the first missionaries in Canada complained of the brutal orgies of the natives, in which, under cover of darkness and the cloak of their superstitions, deeds were committed which the pen dared not describe. Ample reference to these has been preserved in the Jesuit relations, and in the exact and interesting American treatises dependent so largely upon them.[94] It is more likely, however, that the Huron and Algonkin saturnalia were, in general terms, scenes of promiscuous licentiousness.
Only two authorities can be cited, Fathers Le Jeune and Sagard, who instance the use of human urine or ordure under spiritual direction; all others leave the inference that the bacchanalia of which they were the reluctant and disgusted observers had no other peculiarity than that of unrestrained sexual intercourse.
It would be hard to find a better example of the tenacity of superstition than that which the subjoined extract from the “Evening Star,” of Washington, D. C., shows as existing under our own noses.
“A CURIOUS HUNGARIAN SUPERSTITION.
“A correspondent of the ‘Philadelphia Press,’ at Pottsville, Pa., tells of a curious scene he witnessed in the Hungarian quarter. A number of children were running round barefooted, beating tin pans and boxes. In the midst of the circle they were describing was a live baby buried up to the neck in the cold ground with a shawl wound round its throat for protection. It was learned that the object of putting the baby in this peculiar position was to cure it of a skin disease, the Huns having the same faith in the curative properties of mother earth that is characteristic of many savage tribes.
“While the child was thus experiencing the medicinal virtues of the earth packed round its body, the boys beat upon the pans in order to frighten away the evil spirit that had caused the disease.”
A retrospective glance at the long list of excrementitious remedies collected shows that both the disease to be treated and the remedy by which the cure was to be effected were regarded as entirely beyond the domain of human science. Even in these cases, where medicines, pure and simple, as we should now recognize them, were to be administered, there was a complication of mysterious mummery and ceremony, the first vestige of the former power of the medicine-man. Thus felons could be treated by tracing a circle round them with a dead man’s bone; but the circle, we should remember, was pre-eminently the line of magic.[95]
Teeth were worn as amulets, or given as medicine in disease, but it was essential that they should be drawn from the jaw before the burial of the body; or that they should be the first shed by a child; that they should be those of a man who had died a violent death; or that they should be caught before they touched the ground.
If they were not to be used immediately, they were not to be carried about, but were to be buried in the bark of a tree.
The skull of a man was a remedy for the diseases of men only; that of a woman, for those of the female sex.
There were combinations of numbers; no medicine was to be administered an even number of times; of color[96] based upon the doctrine of signatures which taught among other things, that red medicines cured red diseases, and saffron-tinted ones, those of the jaundice type. There were iron-clad formulæ for gathering medicinal plants in which the hour of the day, the season of the year, the age of the moon, the position of the planets, the hand to be used in plucking, the silence to be observed, were all sedulously inculcated and enjoined.
There were charms and counter-charms, such as the Dea-soil and the Badershin of the Druids, in which the same magical incantation, used in different manners, i. e. going with or against the sun, induced contrary results.
Traces of all these superstitious ideas are to be looked for in[97] close association with the administration of excrementitious remedial agents, or the incantations in which such agents appear.
The method of curing incontinence of urine by micturating into a dog kennel probably belongs to the class of the Druidic Badershin or Widershin, to which also we might be able to refer, did we know more about it, the very ancient and widely-disseminated charact or charm, “Diabolus effodiat,” etc.
Thus, in making use of lion-dung, it was recommended that it should be that of a lioness which had brought forth young; and, to continue the subject, we find the dung of black cows, the dung of bulls and cows “collected in the month of May,” “water of cow-dung collected in May and June,” etc., specially enjoined in the compounding of prescriptions.
Questions of the deepest interest spring up like weeds as we re-examine our text. Of these, it is impossible to enumerate all, or to elaborate these remarks into a disquisition upon religio-medical botany; one or two, however, will be named. Why was hyoscyamus (henbane) added to human ordure and human urine for the frustration of witchcraft? Was it because this plant was able to kill the chicken-god sacred to so many European peoples, and still to be detected upon the spires of our churches? Was the chicken-god, or to adopt modern language, was the god of whom the chicken was the symbol, friendly to witches? Being one of the principal deities of a supplanted cultus, he must necessarily have been the power, or one of the powers, invoked by the witches who were the secret adherents of the old order of things spiritual.
Again, we read that in treating the bewitched, their limbs were bathed in their own urine; to which, Frommann says, some added assafœtida and others garlic; but assafœtida was called “merde du Diable.” (“Bib. Scat.” p. 128.) Was this fetid gum sacred to some god, and was this dung-god, or were dung-gods in general, the powers to be invoked for rendering nugatory the assaults of witches?
In our quotations we have shown that, in the opinion of old authors nothing equalled human ordure for baffling witches, and Luther has been cited as expressing the belief that Satan fled in dismay from human flatulence.
This belief has been transplanted to American soil with the German immigrants settled in the State of Pennsylvania.
Hoffman speaks of a “quack” who gave a credulous dupe “some charms and vile-smelling herbs, which he was directed to burn in his house so as to drive out the evil and remove the visitor” (i. e. the spirit which was troubling the dupe).—(“Folk-Med. of the Penn’a Germans,” in Trans. Amer. Phil. Soc. 1889.)
A marked peculiarity of the list of animals is the absence of those belonging to the fauna of the New World; there is no reference to the excrement of the turkey, a bird unknown to the nations migrating into Europe; but there are to be found the names of nearly all the birds and beasts known to Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Celtic, or Teutonic races, with, however, some notable exceptions; there is no mention of the excreta of the bear, the swan, the wren, the parrot, and a few others; the complete list contained in this work is repeated for convenience: Hare, camel, goat, wild goat, bull, cow and calf, wolf, hen, chickens and cock, boar, wild and tame, horse, ass, hippopotamus, lynx, badger, cuckoo, swallow, cat, hawk, mouse, peacock, pigeon, domestic, wood-pigeon, turtle dove, raven, sparrow, hedge-hog, dog, ring-dove, mule, weasel, stork, vulture, crocodile, starling, eagle, owl, elephant, goose, lizard, rat, duck, kid, chameleon, quail, kite, rabbit, deer, magpie, crow, ape, hyena, reindeer, fox, lion, leopard.
A closer examination will discover that the ordure and urine so prescribed were not to be taken indiscriminately from each and every animal, but that each was assigned as a remedy appropriate for some special physical disturbance.
Unfortunately, modern knowledge of the medical lore, of the botanical, mineralogical, and chemical attainments and hagiology of the ancients is not so thorough that we can venture, with the positiveness warranted by the suspicion to which a close study of this subject gives rise, to assert that the dung or urine of a given animal was most suitable to palliate the pangs of the disease traceable to the offended dignity of the deity of which the particular animal was the representative or symbol; but it is a fact deserving of scrutiny that such an association is unmistakably indicated in a number of cases.
Pliny says that goat-dung could be applied with benefit to ulcers upon the generative organs. Was not the goat sacred to Pan (i. e., was not Pan himself, in primitive days, the deified goat)? And was not Pan the god to whose care the generative organs were, under certain circumstances, confided?
When the feet of travellers became blistered, they were bathed with the urine of asses. Was the ass, the burden-bearer, at any time, or in any place under the domination of the Romans, regarded as the god of travellers? Fosbroke says, “An ass carried the utensils and statues in the sacrifices of Cybele and at the birth of Bacchus, the god newly born, but he was only sacrificed to Mars or Priapus.”—(“Encyclopædia of Antiquities,” London, 1843, vol. ii. p. 1009.)
Pliny also prescribed asses’ dung for uterine troubles,—a clear recognition of the animal’s priapic association.
Hippopotamus-dung was given as a remedy for fever and ague. This monster pachyderm lives in swamps, which are the hotbeds of malaria. By a mistaken analogy, the animal would have been credited with the origin of the disease always to be dreaded by intruders upon its lair.
Without desiring to enter into unnecessary controversy upon the meaning of terms, it would seem to be perfectly reasonable to assert that the majority of the deities of paganism had been zoömorphic before man’s increasing intellectuality anthropomorphized them, and relegated the animal first to the subordinate position of being the head or limbs of the god, and then to the still more ancillary one of being simply the companion or symbol.
To consider an animal a god, the messenger, attendant, companion, or representative of that god; to offer it up as the most delectable sacrifice to that deity, and afterwards restrict the oblation to a part only of the animal, such as its horns, hoofs, excreta,—are all links in the same psycho-religious chain of reasoning.
Mrs. Fanny D. Bergen shrewdly observes, “There seems to be the best of reason for believing that, to seek the origin of the popular delusion concerning the curative properties of certain animal excreta, we must study the mythology of our long-ago Aryan ancestors.” And again: “It has often happened that substances, as well as ceremonies, which originally had a religious signification, in later ages degenerated into fancied cures for diseases; so it is more than probable that the employment of animal excreta as remedies among the less intelligent classes of Europe, in both earlier and later times, as well as in our own newest offshoot from the Indo-European stem, is a survival of early Aryan religious observance.”—(“Animal and Plant Lore,” in Popular Science Monthly, New York, September, 1888.)
“Car, dans la conception vraiment orthodoxe du sacrifice, l’hostie, qu’elle soit homme, femme ou vierge, agneau ou génisse, coq ou colombe, représente la divinité elle-même.”—(“Les Primitifs,” Réclus, p. 366.)
“Our general ignorance of the popular superstitions and customs of the ancients has already been confessed.”—(“The Golden Bough,” Frazer, vol. i. p. 363.)
“Frazer’s remarks make very interesting reading in support of the theory of Zoötheistic pharmacy. He not only shows that the animals enumerated in this chapter were the deities in charge of the corn, rye, and other cereals, but that to them recourse was had for the cure of wounds, hurts, and aches happening to the reapers during harvest. In one example the cat which is introduced into the field is made to lick the laborer’s wounds; in another, the goat—which is decked with ribbons, and afterwards killed with much ceremony, and eaten at the end of the harvest—has its skin converted into a cloak, which the farmer is required to put over his shoulders during the coming harvest ... but if a reaper gets pains in his back, the farmer gives him the goat-skin to wear.”—(Idem, vol. ii. p. 16.)
“Amongst the animals whose forms the corn-spirit is supposed to take, are the wolf, dog, hare, cock, goose, cat, goat, cow (ox), bull, pig, and horse.” (Idem, vol. ii. p. 1.) “Other animal forms assumed by the corn-spirit are the stag, roe, sheep, bear, ass, fox, mouse, stork, swan, and kite.”—(Idem, vol. ii. p. 33.)
Here we have pretty nearly all our list of animals, and the excrement of every one here mentioned has been and is used in the prescriptions of folk-medicine, excepting the excreta of the bear and swan.
“Remembering that in European folk-lore the pig is a common embodiment of the corn-spirit, we may now ask, May not the pig, which was so closely associated with Demeter, be nothing but the goddess herself in animal form? The pig was sacred to her; in art she was represented carrying or accompanied by a pig; and the pig was regularly sacrificed in her mysteries, the reason assigned being that the pig injures the corn, and is therefore an enemy of the goddess. But after an animal has been conceived as a god, or a god as an animal, it sometimes happens, as we have seen, that the god sloughs off his animal form, and becomes purely anthropomorphic; and that then the animal, which at first had been slain in the character of the god, comes to be the victim offered to the god, on the ground of its hostility to the deity; in short, that the god is sacrificed to himself, on the ground that he is his own enemy.... As men emerge from savagery, the tendency to anthropomorphize or humanize their divinities gains strength.”—(“The Golden Bough,” Frazer, vol. i. p. 360.)
“A man would eat freely of what was regarded as the incarnation of the god of another man, but the incarnation of his own particular god he would consider it death to injure or eat. The god was supposed to avenge the insult by taking up his abode in that person’s body, and causing to generate there the very thing which he had eaten, until it produced death.”—(“Samoa,” Turner, p. 17.)
“The ram was Ammon himself. On the monuments, it is true, Ammon appears in semi-human form, with the body of a man, and the head of a ram. But this only shows that he was in the usual chrysalis state through which beast-gods regularly pass before they emerge as full-fledged anthropomorphic gods.”—(“The Golden Bough,” Frazer, vol. ii. p. 93.)
“Each god has his favorite animal, which is dedicated to him, and serves him as messenger.”—(“Fetichism,” Baudin, p. 68.)
To write what may be designated the hagiology of animal life, as known to the ancients, would be impossible. Our knowledge is too fragmentary and too confused, from the inextricable blending of the ideas of different races and cults, due to the conquests by and the subversion of the Roman empire, when victor and vanquished reciprocally exchanged gods, or added to the attributes of the victorious deities those of the defeated.
Religion, in the last years of the Roman empire, was a kaleidoscopic jumble of the tenets and rituals of many races, adopting without caring to fully understand, whatever struck the fancy in the religion of their neighbors.
Hence it is impossible to demonstrate, what at first sight seemed to be an easy task, that the excreta of any particular animal was applied in the treatment of the diseases over which the god to whom the animal was assigned stood guard. We are not absolutely without light upon the subject,—just enough to discover that no animal was insignificant enough to be absolutely without adoration, but not sufficiently clear to define exactly what functions each quadruped or bird god exercised.
“The representation of the devil in the shape of a he-goat goes back to a remote antiquity. What can have given it such a vigorous growth among heretics and witches? The witches all imagine their master as a black he-goat, to whom, at festival-gatherings, they pay divine honors; conversely, the white goat atoned for and defeated diabolic influence.... In oaths and curses of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the he-goat apes the true god.” (Grimm, “Teutonic Mythology,” vol. iii. p. 395.) “The devil, in retiring, is compelled unawares to let his foot be seen.” (Idem, p. 994.) “A kobold (horse-sprite) is also horse-footed.... To the water-sprite, the whole or half of a horse’s figure is attributed.... That is why horses are sacrificed to rivers.... A British demon, Grant, ... shewed himself as a foal.... Loki changed himself into a mare.... The devil appears as a horse in the stories of Zeno and Brother Rausch.... In legends, black steeds fetch away the damned.... Next to the goat, ... the boar is a devil’s animal.” (Idem, pp. 994-996.) “A soul-snatching wolf, the devil was already to the fathers.” (Idem, p. 996.) “A canine conformation of the devil is supported by many authorities.” (Idem, p. 996.) “Foremost among birds comes the raven, whose form the devil is fond of assuming.” (Idem, p. 997.) “Within the last few centuries only I find the vulture put for the devil.... Still more frequently the cuckoo.” (Idem, p. 997.) “Another bird whose figure is assumed is the cock.” (Idem, p. 997), “When stag-beetles and dung-beetles are taken as devils, ... it gives assurance of a heathen point of view.”—(p. 999.)
“In Norway, lambs and kids, mostly black ones, were offered to the water-sprite.”—(Idem, p. 1009.)
“It is a natural and well-known fact, that the gods of one nation become the devils of their conquerors or successors.”—(Black, “Folk-Medicine,” p. 12.)
Gladiators wore camel’s dung as a charm; it is not at all unlikely that to the Bedouin nomad the “ship of the desert” was the god of fortitude.
Fosbroke says that it was the “symbol of Arabia.”—(“Antiquities,” p. 1011.)
The sacredness of the domestic cattle in India and elsewhere is too well known to require remark; so is that of the crocodile in parts of ancient Egypt.
The hare was sacred in China, and is as sacred to-day to certain tribes of American Indians as it was to the Britons when Boadicea drew one from her bosom to consult as an omen before joining battle with the Roman legions.
The rabbit and hare figured upon ancient Spanish coins.—(Fosbroke, “Antiquities,” vol. ii. p. 1022.)
The dung of hawks, eagles, and vultures was administered to expel the fœtus from the womb. This may have been on the principle of similia similibus, because these rapacious birds tore the young of other birds from their nests and devoured them. However, the eagle was worshipped by the Romans, Persians, and Babylonians, upon whose standards it perched.—(See Fosbroke, “Antiquities,” vol. ii. pp. 1024, 1025, article “Eagle.”)
“It was the common symbol of Jupiter.”—(Idem.)
The cat was a moon-goddess symbol to the Egyptians, as well as to many others.—(Idem, p. 1011.)
The dog was sacred to Mercury as being the protector of shepherds.—(Idem, p. 1012.)
The dove, as well known, was one of the symbols of Venus.
The dove was also worshipped by the Assyrians.—(Idem, p. 1024.)
The stork “accompanies filial piety ... upon coins.”—(Idem, vol. i. p. 215.)
The swallow was the emblem of Isis.—(Idem, p. 216.)
The ancient Britons, the English down to modern days, the ancient Romans, the Hungarians, the Scotch, and many other nations, drew omens from the crossing of a man’s path by a hare. It is related of Queen Boadicea that before joining battle with the Romans she drew from her bosom a hare, which she released, and from its gambols the priests drew the augury that success was to rest with her.—(See in Brand, “Popular Antiquities,” vol. iii. pp. 201 et seq., article “Hare, Wolf, or Sow.”)
Says Plinius: “There must be something in the general persuasion that after seeing a hare a man is good-looking for nine days.”—(“Saxon Leechdoms,” vol. i. p. 14.)
“The sun was represented by the Persians under the form of a lion, which they called Mithra; and his priests were called lions, and the priestesses hyenas.”—(Fosbroke, “Antiquities,” vol. ii. p. 1020.)
The hyena, according to Pliny, was an especially “magic” animal.—(Lib. xxviii.)
The ape was “worshipped in Egypt, and is now in India.”—(Fosbroke, “Antiquities,” vol. ii. p. 1008.)
“The Greeks of Pythsecusa worshipped this animal” (monkey).—(Idem, p. 1020.)
The wolf. “The Hebrews venerated this animal.”—(Idem, p. 1023.)
The wolf was “consecrated to Apollo.”—(Idem.)
The ancient belief all over Europe was that it was lucky to have one’s path crossed by a wolf. This corresponds to the idea of the Apache in regard to the bear.—(See Brand, “Popular Antiquities,” vol. iii. p. 202, article “Hare, Wolf, or Sow.”)
The Irish veneration for the wolf is well known.
The lynx “accompanied Bacchus.”—(Fosbroke, “Antiquities,” vol. ii. p. 1020.)
The pig was “sacrificed in the Eleusinian mysteries.”—(Idem, p. 1021.)
The cow, among the Egyptians, “was the symbol of Venus.”—(Idem, p. 1011.)
The elephant was “peculiar to the cars of Bacchus.”—(Idem, p. 1014.)
The goat. “Maimonides says ... that the Zabii worshipped demons under the figure of goats.”—(Idem, vol. ii. p. 1015.)
“Steeds were consecrated to the sun.”—(Idem, p. 1016.)
The crow, “anciently the symbol of Venus,” was “superseded by the owl.”—(Idem, p. 1024.)
The cock was “the symbol of courage, ... consecrated to Mars; also to Minerva, to Bellona, to Mercury, to Esculapius.”—(Idem, p. 1029.)
A flock of geese was kept on the Capitoline Hill in memory of the story that they had saved Rome,—a story which it is safe to say had no foundation in fact.
The raven “was the ensign of the Danes.”—(Idem, p. 1030.)
“So revered is he (the fox) that no place in a Mantchurian temple is too high for him.”—(H. E. M. James, “The Long White Mountain,” London, 1888, p. 190.)
“The serpent also is greatly feared and worshipped; so is the hare.”—(Idem, p. 192.)
The peacock was sacred to Juno, whose car was drawn by those birds. Pliny says that the peacock was reported to swallow its own excrement, as if envying man the possession of a treasure so precious. When the dung of the peacock was administered in epilepsy, vertigo, etc., the medicine was to be taken from the new moon to the full. Juno was a lunar deity.
“It was an ancient and wide-spread custom in Europe to bestow names of honor on these three” (bear, wolf, and fox).—(Grimm, “Teutonic Mythology,” vol. ii. p. 667.)
“The Gypsies call the bear ‘vieux,’ or ‘grand-père.’”—(Idem, foot-note, quoting Victor Hugo’s “Notre Dame de Paris.”)
The blood of a hare was regarded as one of the finest remedies for erysipelas and bloody flux, and this by a certain “sympathetic power.” A towel dipped in hare’s blood and allowed to dry was kept to be touched to an epileptic patient.—(See Von Helmont, “Orotrika,” English translation, London, 1662, pp. 114, 475.)
The Ostaiks of Siberia “regardent comme sacré l’arbre où un aigle a fait sa ponte plusieurs années de suite; et ils ont aussi beaucoup d’égards pour cette aigle. On ne peut les offenser plus cruellement qu’en tuant cette aigle ou en détruisant son nid.”—(“Voyages de Pallas,” vol. iv. pp. 81, 82.)
The very name of owl (googue) was considered unlucky by the Abyssinians for use as the watchword, although we are told that it was so used.—(See Bruce, “Nile,” vol. iv. p. 698.)
That a belief in the sinister character of the hooting of the owl by night prevailed all over Europe, especially among the Romans, in the period of their greatest civilization, and that this credulity was transmitted down almost to our own times, see in Brand, “Popular Antiquities,” vol. iii. p. 206 et seq., article “Owl.” He quotes from Suetonius, Pliny, Ovid, Lucan, Claudia, and from various old English authors,—“The cryinge of the owle by night betokeneth deathe, as divinours conjecte and deme,” and
“Then screech-owls croak upon the chimney-tops
It’s certain then you of a corse shall hear.”
In Egypt, “it is said that in whatever house a cat died all the family shaved the eyebrows.”—(Idem, vol. iii. p. 38, article “Sorcery.”)
“In the earliest period the horse seems to have been the favorite animal for sacrifice.”—(“Teut. Mythol.,” Grimm, vol. i. p. 47.)
The crow was always a bird of bad omen among the Romans.—(See Brand, “Popular Antiquities,” vol. iii. p. 213, article “The Crow.”)
Roman magicians asserted “that the heart of a horned owl applied to the left breast of a woman, while asleep, will make her disclose all her secret thoughts.... Persons who have it about them in battle will be sure to display valor;” but “it was ominous to see the bird itself.”—(Pliny, lib. xxix, c. 26.)
The crocodile seems to take in Borneo the place occupied so generally elsewhere by the serpent; although we know that in Central America the alligator was revered, and along the Nile in many districts the crocodile.—(See Bock’s “Head-Hunters of Borneo,” London, 1881, passim.)
“The hare, which shares with the cat the reputation of being the familiar of witches, has naturally some virtues attributed to it. Thus that the right forefoot worn in the pocket will infallibly ward off rheumatism is a common belief in Northamptonshire, and generally over England.” (“Folk-Medicine,” Black, p. 154.) The Chinese say that a hare sits at the foot of the cassia-tree in the moon pounding out the drugs of which the elixir of immortality is compounded. In a poem of Tu-fu, a bard of the T’ang dynasty, the fame of this hare is sung,—
“The frog is not drowned in the river;
The medicine hare lives forever.”
“The devil’s mark was said to sometimes resemble the impression of a hare’s foot.... Seeing a hare was thought in Ireland to produce a hare-lip in the child to be born; and, as a charm, the woman who unfortunately saw the hare was recommended to make a small rent immediately in some part of her dress.”—(Idem, p. 155.)
“It is held extremely unlucky, says Grose, to kill a cricket, a ladybug, a swallow, martin, robin red-breast, or wren,—perhaps from the idea of its being a breach of hospitality, all these birds and insects alike taking refuge in our houses.... Persons killing any of the above-mentioned birds or insects, or destroying their nests, will infallibly, within the course of the year, break a bone, or meet with some other dreadful misfortune.... On the contrary, it was deemed lucky to have martins or swallows build their nests in the eaves of a house or in the chimneys.... Its being accounted unlucky to destroy swallows is probably a pagan relic. We read in Ælian that these birds were sacred to the penates or household gods of the ancients, and therefore were preserved. They were honored anciently as the nuncios of the spring. The Rhodians are said to have had a solemn anniversary song to welcome in the swallow. Anacreon’s ode to that bird is well known.” Brand also alludes to the still surviving omens attaching to the swallow,—such as “the swallow falling down the chimney,” and others.—(“Popular Antiquities,” vol. iii. p. 193.)