Tom Brown ("Amusements for the Meridian of London," 1700) mentions a remarkable superstitious reverence for the milk of a red cow. Referring to the Green Walk, St. James's Park, London, he says: "There were a cluster of senators talking of state affairs, and the price of corn and cattle, and were disturbed with the noisy Milk folk crying: 'A can of Milk, ladies; a can of Red Cow's Milk, sirs?' This appears to be a remnant of the Aryan reverence for the heavenly fire or the lightning, which they believed to be typified in the red breast of the robin, the red mutch of the woodpecker, and the red colour of other 'fire-bringers.'"
In the Vedas, the dawn is symbolised by the goddess Ushas, by philologists regarded as the prototype of the Greek Eôs, and the Latin Aurora. The ruddy light on the eastern horizon which preceded the sunrise, was regarded as a herd of red cows attendant upon her. In the Vedic hymns she is sometimes addressed as a quail. Kelly says, "Vartikâ, the Sanscrit name of the bird, corresponds etymologically with ortyx, its Greek name; and in the myths of Greece and Asia Minor the quail is a symbol of light and heat."
The early Greek mythology has preserved some remains of this bovine personification of the ruddy dawn clouds. Mr. Gladstone, in "Juventus Mundi," says, "Although animal worship has played so considerable a part in the religions of the East, the traces of it in Homer are few, and, with one exception, they are also faint. That exception is the extraordinary sanctity attaching, in the Twelfth Odyssey, to the Oxen of the Sun, which I have treated as belonging to the Phœnician system, and as foreign to the Olympian religion." Notwithstanding this, the evidence in favour of the Aryan origin of the myth seems indisputable. Dr. Benisch, in one of his expositions of "Maimonides and Kimchito" to members of the Society of Hebrew Literature, on the 30th of March, 1871, stated that he was engaged in a comparison of the Semitic and Aryan tongues, with a view to establish many more points of contact than are usually admitted to exist between these two families of speech.
Red cow's milk is an important element in a recipe for the cure of consumption in Dr. Sampson Jones's "Medicine Boke," published in the latter portion of the seventeenth century. Red is especially mentioned as the colour of the heifer set apart for sacrifice for the purification of sin in Numbers, chapter 19; and scarlet is specified as the colour of one of the articles "cast into the midst of the burning of the heifer." Thousands of persons yet believe that there is more warmth in red flannel than in either black, white, blue, or yellow.
On some public-house signs it is not uncommon to refer to the liquor sold within as the "dun cow's milk." On one, between York and Durham, we read the following:—
Oh, come you from the east,
Oh, come you from the west,
If ye will taste the Dun Cow's milk,
Y'll say it is the best.
The Durham legend of St. Cuthbert's dun cow is well known in the North of England. The eccentric saint would not permit a cow to approach his sacred residence at Lindisfarne. He excused himself for this strange freak by averring that "where there is a cow there must be a woman, and where there is a woman there must be mischief." Has not the Scotchman's "mountain dew" some figurative relationship to the Aryan heavenly soma?
A belief in the influence of witches on the milk and butter yielding habits of cows is yet very widely entertained. In his "Ancient and Modern Manners of the Irish," Camden says: "If a cow becomes dry a witch is applied to, who, inspiring her with a fondness for some other calf, makes her yield her milk." He further observes that they slaughter all hares found amongst their cattle on May-day, from a belief that they are witches, who, having designs on their butter, have assumed this form the better to effect their purpose. Other authorities speak of the general belief in witches sucking the dugs of cows in the form of hares. A writer in the Athenæum, as recently as 1846, refers to a certain Scotch witch, who, he says, "has been seen a hundred times milking the cows in the shape of a hare." A Scotch witch, recently deceased, named Margery Scott, firmly believed that she had been frequently transmuted into a hare and hunted by dogs.
Mr. Robert Hunt, in his "Drolls, Superstitions, and Traditions of Old Cornwall," relates a very amusing story about "the witch of Treva." Being without food, the husband of the old crone, who doubted her pretended supernatural power, asked, as a proof to which he would yield, that she would walk to St. Ives and back, a distance of five miles, and procure some substantial human victuals. This she undertook to effect in the space of half-an-hour. The man kept his eye on her for some time, after she started on her strange errand, "and at the bottom of the hill he saw his wife quietly place herself on the ground and disappear. In her place a fine hare ran on at its full speed." He further adds that the woman returned within the prescribed time, and brought with her "good flesh and taties, all ready for aiting!" When the said crone was carried to her grave, she caused much amazement and even terror by her mad pranks. "When they were about half way between the house and the church, a hare started from the roadside and leaped over the coffin. The terrified bearers let the corpse fall to the ground, and ran away. Another lot of men took up the coffin and proceeded. They had not gone far when puss was suddenly seen seated on the coffin, and again the coffin was abandoned." After considerable labour and much tribulation, we are informed the parson commenced "the ordinary burial service, and there stood the hare, which, as soon as the clergyman began 'I am the resurrection and the life,' uttered a diabolical howl, changed into a black, unshapen creature, and disappeared!"
One of the Saxon forms of the goddess Freyja, according to Mannhardt, has hares for trainbearers, and another walks at night in the fields of Aargau, accompanied by a hare of silver-grey colour. The prevalent superstition that a hare crossing the highway before any person prognosticated ill-fortune, doubtless, has its origin in the witchcraft association. Perhaps the story of the hare's nest, to which children are sent in search of eggs at Easter, in Swabia and Hesse, according to Meier, is the original of our "mare's nest," and has some reference to the supposed supernatural attributes of the animal. Mannhardt says the hare is reputed to be a fire and soul bringer; that many kinder-brünnen (baby fountains) are so named from this circumstance; and that children are supposed to be procured from the hare's form, as well as from the parsley bed. We learn from Cæsar that the Ancient Britons held the hare in reverence, and refused, therefore, to kill it for food.