I'm for the air; this night I'll spend
Unto a dismal and a fatal end.
Great business must be wrought ere noon:
Upon the corner of the moon
There hangs a vapourous drop profound
I'll catch, ere it come to the ground;
And that distill'd by magic sleights,
Shall raise such artificial sprights,
As by the strength of their illusion,
Shall draw him on to his confusion.
And previous to departing, Hecate further says:—
Hark, I am called; my little spirit, see,
Sits in a foggy cloud, and stays for me.
Hecate, in the classical mythology, is the Pandemonium name for Diana. This goddess was known by the latter appellation on earth, and by that of Luna in heaven. Hence the absurdity of converting her into a burly masculine basso in the so-called "Locke's music," introduced with very questionable taste into Shakspere's sublime tragedy of Macbeth. Proserpina, the wife of Pluto, is confounded with Hecate. She was supposed to preside over sorceries and incantations.
Grimm, although he, in one of his tales, speaks of "angels drawing water in a perforated vessel," seems not to have clearly interpreted the mythic import of the sieve. He, however, expressly says that it "appears to be a sacred archaic implement to which marvellous powers were attributed." Liebrecht speaks of a tribe of water-spirits, or cloud-gods, the Draci of Languedoc, with "hands perforated like colanders." The Grecian Naiads, with their urns, and the various river-gods, from old Tiber or Ilissus to Father Thames, are but more artistic modifications of a similar thought.
There is a tradition, in the neighbourhood of Grimsargh, near Preston, to the effect that during some drought, "in the olden time," a gigantic dun cow appeared and gave an almost unlimited supply of milk, which saved the inhabitants from death. An old woman—of the witch fraternity, I suspect—however, with the view to obtain from the beast more than the usual number of pails-full, milked the cow with a sieve, riddle, or colander, which, of course, never became full, as the precious liquid passed through the orifices into a vessel below. When full, the latter was replaced by an empty one of a similar character. The tradition adds that the cow either died of grief, on detecting the imposture, or from sheer exhaustion, I forget which. A locality is still pointed out, named "Cow Hill," where gossips aver that, in relatively recent times, the huge bones of the said cow were disinterred. Over the porch of a house on the way from Goosnargh to Longridge, I remember, not very long ago, seeing a large bone, apparently a rib, placed in a conspicuous position. This was stated to have been a portion of the skeleton so disinterred. I fancied at the time that, in Polonius's phraseology, the bone in question was suggestive of something "very like a whale." It is not improbable, however, that at some early period, the remains of the huge extinct ox, the bos primigenius, or even the elephas primigenius or fossil mammoth, may have been exhumed in the neighbourhood of Grimsargh. Many bones and skulls of the former have been dredged from the bed of the Ribble, and others taken from the fluvial drift excavated in the valley when preparing for the foundations of the piers of the railway bridges in the neighbourhood of Preston. Bones of two species of fossil elephant, two species of rhinoceros, and other extinct pachyderms of huge dimensions, have recently been found in connection with early flint implements, indicative of the presence of man, in the fresh water gravel belonging to what Lyell terms the post-pliocene period of the earth's history, both in France and in several parts of England. Some such discovery, grafted upon the ancient Aryan tradition respecting the heavenly cows, or rain-giving clouds, opportunely rescuing the parched vegetation from premature decay, might very easily eventuate in such a tradition as the one current in Grimsargh at the present day.
Some of the deeds of the Saxon giant, the celebrated Guy of Warwick, appear to enshrine elements of myths of a similar character. In the "Huddersford Wiccamical Chaplet," we read:—
By gallant Guy of Warwick slain
Was Colbrand, that gigantic Dane.
Nor could this desp'rate champion daunt
A dun cow bigger than elephaunt:
But he, to prove his courage sterling,
His whinyard in her blood embrued.
He cut from her enormous side a sirloin,
And in his porridge-pot her brisket stew'd,
Then butcher'd a wild boar, and eat him barbicu'd.[23]
We have here the cow, or rain cloud, the boar, typical of the lightning, and the human giant or warrior substitute for Indra or Odin, in the Aryan and Teutonic mythologies.
The ribs of the gigantic dun cow, said to have been slain by the redoubtable Guy, are still preserved at Warwick. A similar rib is to be seen in the church of St. Mary Redcliffe, at Bristol, and another at Chesterfield. At an inn in Lincolnshire, a huge scapula is exhibited as a relic of the famous dun cow. The tradition at Bristol asserts that, at some former period, the said bovine monster supplied the whole of the city with milk. This coincides with the Grimsargh tradition. One Warwick legend too asserts that the cow had been driven mad by the overmilking of a witch. Another says that the cow was slain by Guy during a season of great scarcity, and that the consumption of its flesh saved the inhabitants from perishing of famine. The large rib in the Foljambe Chapel, Warwick, is said to measure seven feet four inches in length, and from twelve to thirteen inches in circumference. Frank Buckland, in his "Curiosities of Natural History," says, "the ribs of the dun cow at Warwick and the gigantic rib at St. Mary Redcliffe Church, Bristol, are the bones of whales."