In the same poem Burns refers to the devil himself as an aquatic spirit. He says:—
Ae dreary, windy, winter night,
The stars shot down wi' sklentin' light,
Wi' you, mysel I got a fright
Ayout the lough;
Ye, like a rash-bush, stood in sight
Wi' waving sough.
The cudgel in my neive did shake,
Each bristl'd hair stood like a stake,
When wi' an eldritch, stoor quaick-quaick
Amang the springs,
Awa ye squattered, like a drake,
On whistling wings.
Commenting on this poem, Allan Cunningham relates a characteristic anecdote. He says,—"The Prince and Power of the air is a favourite topic of rustic speculation. An old shepherd told me he had, when a boy, as good as seen him. 'I was,' said he, 'returning from school, and I stopped till the twilight groping trouts in a burn, when a thunder storm came on. I looked up, and just before me a cloud came down as dark as night—the queerest-shaped cloud I ever saw; and there was something terrible about it, for when it was close to me, I saw as plain as I see you, a dark form within it, thrice the size of any earthly man. It was the Evil One himself, there's nae doubt o' that. 'Samuel,' I said, 'did you hear his cloven foot on the ground?' 'No,' replied he, 'but I saw one of his horns—and O, what waves o' fire were rowing after him!' The Devil frequently makes his appearance in our old mysteries, but he comes to work unmitigated mischief, and we part with him gladly. The 'Hornie,' 'Satan,' 'Nick,' or 'Clootie,' who lives in the imaginations of the peasantry, is not quite such a reprobate, though his shape is anything but prepossessing. Nor is he an object of much alarm; a knowledge of the scriptures and a belief in heaven are considered sure protectors; and a peasant will brave a suspicious road at midnight if he can repeat a psalm."
The horn and the cloven foot in such intimate connection with the descent over the burn of a mysterious dark cloud accompanied by waves of fire, is suggestive of the Aryan thunder and rain clouds and of their attendant lightning-god. The peasant's faith in the efficacy of a psalm in overcoming the evil influence is rather corroborative of this, as the superstitious fear for the dethroned gods of the old mythology long survived the introduction of Christianity in the country. It is yet firmly believed in Lancashire that, after going through some mysterious magic formula, and repeating the Lord's prayer backwards, that his Satanic majesty will appear in the centre of a circle previously defined. In my youth, "raising the devil," was not considered by the knowing ones to be a particularly arduous task; the getting rid of him, afterwards, was the great difficulty. Some contended that the recital of a certain psalm or other passage from the scriptures was alone efficacious. Others held that holy water was his especial abhorrence, and that the repetition of the Lord's prayer, in its proper order, was essential to success.
I remember well, when very young, being cautioned against approaching to the side of stagnant pools of water partially covered with vegetation. At the time, I firmly believed that, if I disobeyed this instruction, a certain water "boggart" named "Jenny Greenteeth" would drag me beneath her verdant screen and subject me to other tortures besides death by drowning. This superstition is yet very common in Lancashire.
In "Brother Fabian's Manuscript" there is a description of a water-sprite, which appears to be one of the many singular forms which the memory of the dethroned Æsir god, Wodin or Odin, has assumed in the popular imagination:—
Where, by the marishes, bloometh the bittern,
Nickar, the soulless one, sits with his ghittern;
Sits inconsolable, friendless and foeless,
Waiting his destiny, Nickar the soulless.
Sir Noel Paton, R.S.A., has recently exhibited a picture of this mythic sprite, treated with great æsthetic power and poetic sympathy. The colour, the light and shade, the surrounding accessories, as well as the quaint melancholy features of the "doomed one," and his still quainter frog-like feet, all combine to leave a single harmonious emotional impression. This is further enhanced by the presence of the partially obscured moon and the solitary star, as well as the sedges and other plants, which, with the lonely bittern, (now extinct in Britain) affect marshy places; and by the Batrachian reptile which crawls from the water towards the feet of the "fallen god," who, whilst patiently awaiting his destiny, lulls his senses to sleep with the music of his ghittern, a singularly old-fashioned instrument apparently allied to the modern guitar. This myth is evidently one form of the popular superstition which connected natural phenomena of a peculiar character with the memory of Nickarr (old Nick), or the dethroned Odin of our Teutonic ancestors. Nickarr, it has previously been shown, was one of the appellations pertaining to this deity.
The Scotch Kelpies were supposed to be delighted with the last agonies of drowning men and of mariners in distress. Thomas Landseer, in the notes which accompany his admirable illustrations of Burns's poem, says:—"It is not twenty years since the piercing shrieks and supplications for help, of a passage boat's company, which had been landed on a sandbank at low water, in the Solway Firth, instead of on the Cumberland coast, and who found, as the moon rose and the haze dispersed, that they were in mid-channel, with a strong tide setting fast in upon them, were mistaken by the people, both on the Scotch and English shores, for the wailings of Kelpies! The consequence was that the unhappy people (whose boat had drifted from them before their fatal error was discovered) were drowned; though nothing had been easier, but for the rooted superstition of their neighbours ashore, than to have effectually succoured them."
The same writer makes the following sensible observations respecting the superstitions referred to by Burns. The poet, however, evidently attributed the phenomena to natural causes:—"This propensity to attribute natural effects to supernatural causes is one of the best known and least intelligible phenomena of the human mind. We are always rejecting the evidence of our senses, to tamper with the imaginary evidence supplied by analogous reasoning upon mere abstract principles. The good wife never dreamed of referring her alarms to the natural objects around her. A humming drone, at twilight by the waters, a rustling in the leaves of the trees about her cottage—if these did not bespeak the presence of the devil, what the d——l else could they indicate? Thus our poet proceeds to tell us that beyond the same loch, he himself had a visible encounter with something LIKE, indeed, to a bunch of rushes, waving and shaking in the wind; and after an admirable description of the emotions of fear, by which he was oppressed, he incidentally mentions that the Great Unknown did certainly, with an abrupt and hasty flight, take away like a drake; but even the appropriate note of the fluttering fowl never once awakened his suspicion that it might be the fowl proper and not the foul fiend!"