The Soul is the Salt.
The body's salt the soul is, which, when gone,
The flesh soon sucks in putrifaction.
According to the learned Moresin the devil abhorreth salt, it being the emblem of eternity and immortality. It is not liable to corruption itself, and it preserves other substances from decay. Hence its superstitious or emblematical import.
The screaming of certain birds, as we have already seen, foreboded disaster. In some districts the midnight flight of flocks of migratory seafowl are believed to be the cause of the noises in the atmosphere, which the peasant's imagination translates into the rush of the furious host. Mr. Yarrell, in "Notes and Queries," says that flocks of bean-geese, from Scandinavia and Scotland, when flying over various parts of England, select very dark nights for their migrations, and that their flight is accompanied by a very loud and very peculiar cry. The "seven whistlers," referred to by Wordsworth, and others already quoted, in some instances appear to be curlews, whose screams are believed by fishermen to announce the approach of a tempest.
The bellowing of cows at unseasonable hours was likewise regarded as an announcement of death, as well as the howling of the dog. Cows in the Aryan mythology represented the rain clouds. Odin and his host, nevertheless, seem to have fancied the earthly article. They were said to carry cows away, milk them dry, and, in about three days, generally return them, but not always. It was idle for the farmer to refuse complying, as when the furious host appeared, the fattest animals in the stalls became restive, and on being let loose suddenly disappeared.
The Lancashire peasant, in some districts, still believes the "Milky Way" to be the path by which departed souls enter Heaven. Mr. Benjamin Brierley, in one of his Lancashire stories, places in the mouth of one of his strongly marked provincial characters, the following expression,—"When tha goes up th' cow lone (lane) to th' better place," and he assures me that he has often heard the expression from the lips of the peasantry. The Germans entertain a similar belief in the "Milky Way" being the spirit path to heaven. In Friesland its name is kaupat, or cowpath. The giving of a cow to the poor, while on earth, was considered to confer upon the donor the power to pass with certainty the fearful Gjallar bridge; for, as in the Vedic superstition, a cow, (or cloud,) would be present to aid his soul to make the passage in safety. Mannhardt informs us that "hence it was of yore a funeral custom in Sweden, Denmark, England, Upper and Lower Germany, that a cow should follow the coffin to the churchyard. This custom was partially continued until recent times, being accounted for on the ground that the cow was a gift to the clergy for saying masses for the dead man's soul or preaching his funeral sermon."
It is not improbable that the "mortuary" or "heriot" of the olden time, which rendered the gift of a cow to the church, on the death of a parishioner, as a condonement of possibly unpaid dues, a necessary condition of clerical favour, was based on some such superstition. It was customary, in some places, to drive the cow in the procession of the funeral cortége to the place of sepulture. Mr. E. Baines, speaking of the manor of Ashton-under-Lyne, says:—"The obnoxious feudal heriot, consisting of the best beast on the farm, required to be given to the lord, on the death of the farmer, was a cruel and unmanly exaction, in illustration of which there are many traditionary stories in the manor of Ashton, and no doubt in other manors. The priest, as well as the lord of the manor, claimed his heriot, called a mortuary in these early times, on the death of his parishioners, as a kind of expiation for the personal tithes, which the deceased in his lifetime had neglected to pay." He adds that the custom was in Ashton for "holy kirk" to take the best beast, and the lord of the manor the second best.
To those who treated Odin with proper respect when he and his hunters passed by, he is said to have dropped a horse's leg or haunch, which turned to gold. Those who mocked him received a similar present, or "moss-wifekin's foot, with the green shoe upon it." But the limb in the latter case became fœtid, and the horrible stench resulting therefrom defied all attempts to remove it.
All of these legends have been resolved into figurative and sometimes highly poetic descriptions of natural phenomena, and especially what is termed the "elemental strife." The horse's leg thrown down by Odin represents the crooked lightning's flash; the gold its brightness, and the stench its sulphurous odour. The wild boars which he hunts are stormy wind-clouds; the fair ladies the light white scudding vapours that seem to coquette with the squally wind. Odin's broad-brimmed hat is the dark cloud, and his mantle the starry heavens. Kelly says—"The moss-wifekins and wood-maidens are female elementary spirits brought down to the earth from the clouds to become genii of the forest, and when they are chased in whole flocks—or, in other words, when the leaves are blown off the trees—this is but a modification of the older conception of flying clouds.... The wild huntsman loves to ride through houses that have two outer doors directly opposite to each other; that is to say, in plain prose, a thorough draft, more or less strong, from one door to the other."
Mr. Ruskin, in his recent lectures at Oxford, as "Slade Professor of Fine Art," gives an admirable example from paintings on an ancient vase, of the manner in which Greek artistic genius gradually evolved from out of natural phenomena, their mythological personifications. He says,—
"First you have Apollo ascending from the sea; thought of as the physical sunrise: only a circle of light for his head; his chariot horses seen foreshortened, black against the day-break, their feet not yet risen above the horizon. Underneath is the painting from the opposite side of the same vase: Athena as the morning breeze, and Hermes as the morning cloud, flying across the waves before sunrise. At the distance I now hold them from you, it is scarcely possible for you to see that they are figures at all, so like are they to broken fragments of flying mist; and when you look close you will see that as Apollo's face is invisible in the circle of light, Mercury's is invisible in the broken form of cloud; but I can tell you that it is conceived as reverted, looking back to Athena; the grotesque appearance of feature in the front is the outline of his hair. These two paintings are exceedingly rude, and of the archæic period; the deities being yet thought of chiefly as physical powers in violent agency."