“If thou wilt grant me this,
Cause a high wind to blow,
Extinguishing the lights.
O Cain! O Cain! O Cain!”
Before proceeding further, I would explain that the use of a photograph, which must be a negative on glass, instead of being, as was suggested to me, a modern interpolation, is, strangely enough, a proof of the antiquity of the rite. In the old time, a picture or portrait painted in transparent colour on glass was held up to the moon that its rays might pass through it and enchant the subject. And among the Romans, when one had a portrait of any one cut on diaphanous stone, it was used in the same way. I had in my possession once such a portrait-gem, [259b] and a fine needle-hole had been bored through the right eye so as to blind the original of the likeness. And I had a friend who lived in Russia, who discovered that a person who hated him had obtained his photograph, and pricked holes with a very fine needle in the eyes to blind him. The negative of a photograph on glass would very naturally occur as a substitute for a picture. But what is most important is that this mention of the translucent negative proves fully that the whole ceremony, in its
minutest detail, has actually been preserved to this day, and that the incantation, long as it is, exists as I have given it, since every line in it corresponds to the rite. And as I know that it was gathered by a witch and fortune-teller among others, and carefully compared and collated, I am sure that it is authentic and traditional.
Fifty pages are devoted by the Rev. T. Harley in his “Moon Lore” to the subject of the Man in the Moon, and since the book appeared in 1885 there have been great additions to the subject. This human being is declared by myths found in India, and especially among the Oriental gypsies, in Ireland, Borneo, Greenland, and South America, to be a man who is punished by imprisonment above for incest with his sister the sun. As he wanders for ever over the heavens, just as gypsies wander on earth, they claim him for their ancestor, and declare that Zin-gan (or gypsy) is derived from two words meaning sun and moon. Kam, the sun, has been varied to kan, and in gypsy the moon is called chone, which is also t-chen, chin, or sin. But the point lies in this, that Cain was condemned to be a “a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth,” which gives much apparent strength to the idea that Cain, whether Shemitic or Aryan, was, for a great crime, or as chief of sinners, imprisoned in the moon.
This sufferer, in different legends, has been represented as a Sabbath-breaker, as Judas Iscariot, as Isaac, and many more transgressors, almost always with a bunch or bush of thorns, for which there has been literally no real explanation whatever. This I will now investigate, and, I think, clearly explain.
Dante in two places speaks of the Man in the Moon as Cain, and as if it were a very popular legend (Inferno, xx. 123):
“Ma vienne omai che già tiene ’l confine
D’ambedue gli emisperi, e tocca l’onda
Sotto Sibilia, Caino e le spine
E gia iernotte fu la Luna tonda.”“But now he comes who doth the borders hold
Of the two hemispheres, and drive the waves
Under the sibyl, Cain, with many thorns.
And yesternight the moon was round and full;
Take care that it may never do thee harm
At any time when in the gloomy wood.”
This twentieth canto is devoted to the sorcerers in hell, and ends with allusion to the full moon, the sibyl, and Cain, as allied to witchcraft, prediction, and sin. When the moon is full it is also “high tides” with the witches, now as of yore:
“Full moon, high sea,
Great man shalt thou be:
Red dawning, cloudy sky,
Bloody death shalt thou die.”
Dante again mentions Cain in the moon, in the Paradiso, ii. 50: