Sometimes the drug is given by one of the lower animals, most of which, it is hardly necessary to remind the reader, are regarded by peoples in the lower culture as of superhuman power or knowledge. In a Kaffir story, a bird gives a childless wife some pellets to be taken before food, and she consequently bears a beautiful daughter.[84.4] A curious tale was related to the Rev. Charles Swynnerton in the Panjab of a snake who was about to eat a young man, when his wife wept and asked the creature what would become of her when her husband was eaten;—why was he going to inflict this injury upon her? The serpent in remorse crept back to his hole and fetched two magical globules, saying: “Here, foolish woman, take these two pills and swallow them, and you will have two sons to whom you can devote yourself, and who will take good care of you!” The girl, however, replied: “But what about my good name?” The snake, who knew not that she was already wed, became exasperated. “Women are such preposterous beings!” he cried, as he fetched two more pills. These he gave to the disconsolate girl, telling her: “When any of your neighbours revile you on account of your sons, take one of these pills between finger and thumb, hold it over them, rubbing it gently so that some of the powder may fall on them, and immediately you will see them consume away to ashes.” Tying the former pills in her cloth, the girl looked at these new pills incredulously. Then, with a sudden thought, she gently rubbed them over the snake, saying with an innocent air: “O snake, explain this mystery to me again! Is this the way I am to rub them?” The moment the magical powder touched the snake he was set on fire; and in another instant he was merely a long wavy line of grey dust lying on the ground.[85.1] In one of the Arabian Nights the potent drug is the flesh of two serpents. It is prescribed by King Solomon to a king of Egypt and his vizier, both of whom were without issue. The serpents in question were remarkable: the one had a head like an asp’s, the other a head like an ifrit’s. And their flesh forms an exception to the Mohammedan rule already noted in these cases, for it was to be given to the wives of the childless men.[85.2]
Coming to Europe, we find a story told at Torricella Pelligna, in the Abruzzi, where a fairy, under the form of an old woman, tells the king that he will have no children until the queen shall drink a decoction made with three hairs from the devil’s beard. A servant is accordingly despatched for these precious materials; and when, after various adventures, he returns with them, the prescription proves so successful that the queen bears a daughter fair as the sun.[86.1] The medicine, however, is more frequently used in European märchen to gratify spite against an unfortunate maiden, by putting her unwittingly into a condition inconsistent with maidenhood. In a Tuscan tale, for example, a stepmother hates her stepdaughter, and is taught by a beggar-woman how to injure her. She accordingly prepares, from the blood of seven wild beasts, a philtre whose property it is to cause pregnancy. Her father consents to her being put to death; but the ruffians charged with the crime content themselves by simply abandoning her in the wood. She is delivered in due time of a dragon with seven heads of different animals, who becomes his mother’s guardian, procures for her an honourable marriage with a king, and ultimately transforms himself into a man.[86.2] A South Slavonic tale from Varadzin yields a similar plot. There it is a queen whose daughter is beloved by her father to such an extent as to rouse her jealousy. She is advised by a tramp to go on Good Friday to a churchyard, dig up a bone, grate it, and give the gratings to her daughter next morning in her coffee. The girl becomes pregnant, and is set adrift on a ship. She bears a son who is spotted, but who, after various adventures, is disenchanted of his foul deformity.[87.1]
We shall hereafter have to consider several superstitious beliefs and practices in connection with the dead. Here I simply pause to mention two other Slav stories attributing to portions of dead human bodies the reproductive faculty. The first comes to us from Bohemia, where it is said that a gravedigger’s beautiful daughter was followed about by a skull that never quitted her feet. By a witch’s advice her father burned it and made his daughter swallow the ashes. In consequence of so doing, she gave birth to a son who held mysterious converse with the Sleeping Heroes beneath Mount Blanik.[87.2] The other is a Lithuanian story from Godleva, concerning a hermit who, in obedience to God’s express command, burned himself alive by way of penance. The day after his immolation a hunter passed by the place, and turned aside to see the remains of the pyre, and ascertain the cause of the strange smell. Poking among the ashes he found the hermit’s heart, which he took home to his daughter to cook for his supper. She, however, ate it herself and in two hours bore a son of powers, it need hardly be said, as remarkable as his parentage.[87.3] It is interesting to observe that in India potency of this kind is attached to fakirs and religious mendicants. A special privilege would seem to belong in the popular mind to such religious consecration. Vows of celibacy and other ascetic usages have their compensation. In all ages and countries, indeed, the virtue of asceticism, of self-sacrifice, or of suffering however caused, has been recognised. The Egyptian märchen of The Two Brothers, which was written down more than twelve hundred years before the Christian era, exhibits this as one of its central ideas. I shall have to refer to this legend again. It is enough to remark here that, just as the self-immolation of the hermit in the Lithuanian story seems to have conferred upon his heart the strange quality we are discussing, Bata, the younger of the Two Brothers, by his unmerited sufferings acquired an inherent and miraculous capacity of metamorphosis and reproduction. When the persea-trees, in whose form he found himself during his chequered career, were being cut down, a chip flew from one of them and entered the mouth of the king’s favourite, once his own wife. She swallowed it and, conceiving, gave birth to a male child, who was no other than a new manifestation of her former husband, Bata.[88.1]
For in these tales not only the fruit but also other parts of a tree or shrub are endowed with the power of causing conception. In Denmark we are told of a wise woman, by whose counsel a childless queen goes down before sunrise into the royal garden and eats the three buds of a certain thorny bush. After six months the queen bears a daughter, who must be kept from her parents’ sight until her fourteenth birthday, else both mother and child will suffer a dire misfortune.[89.1] An Icelandic tale gives, by a beggar-woman’s mouth, the following recipe for growing the magical plant: “Your majesty must make them bring in two pails of water some evening before you go to bed. In each of them you must wash yourself, and afterwards throw away the water under the bed. When you look under the bed next morning, two flowers will have sprung up, one fair and one ugly. The fair one you must eat; the ugly one you must let stand.” The temptation, however, was too great for the lady. Having eaten the fair one and found it delicious, she proceeded to eat the ugly one, and gave birth in due time to two daughters, a fair and a loathly one. The latter, though hideous, is her sister’s good angel, and eventually wedding the king’s son, becomes the most beautiful woman in the world.[89.2] It will be remembered that the fakir in one of the Bengali tales already cited prescribes the juice of a pomegranate-flower to be taken with his drug. Annamese folklore recounts the history of a maiden who, walking in a garden, plucks and eats a lovely flower. Her parents (who seem to have had a shrewd opinion of religious celibates) suspected the bonze of a neighbouring pagoda of having dishonoured her, and sent her to the pagoda, where she was delivered of no fewer than five sons of marvellous powers, and all exactly alike. Questioned as to their names, the first calls himself The Strong, the second Steel-body-iron-liver, the third Search-cloud-drive-dust, the fourth The Dry, and the fifth The Damp. They get up a quarrel with the king, and ultimately compel him to yield his throne to Search-cloud, who is the wisest of the brothers.[90.1] In the Pentameron a nobleman’s sister offers a prize to that one of her maids who succeeds in clearing a certain rosebush at a jump. All fail; and the lady herself, trying it, knocks off a leaf. With great adroitness she picks it up and swallows it unobserved, and thus wins the prize. After three days, mysterious pains seize her; and she learns with horror from a friendly fairy that no doubt she is pregnant from the roseleaf she has swallowed. This turns out to be the fact. A lovely baby-girl is born, for whom a strange destiny is in store. A spell is laid upon her by the fairies that if, at seven years of age, her mother be allowed to comb her, the comb will be left stuck in her hair, and she will thereupon die. The story follows a similar course to that of the Danish one just cited.[90.2] In a Tuscan folktale a woman wedded for many years, but childless, obtains a son by eating “a certain herb” pointed out to her by a fairy, to whom she promises in return a fair present. But she and her husband neglect to fulfil the promise; and to punish them the boy is born and remains of diminutive size.[90.3] The Passamaquoddies, a North American tribe of tolerably pure blood in New England, attribute the birth of a medicine-man, a hero of their folklore, to his mother’s biting off every bush as she travelled through the woods. From one of these bushes, the narrative does not say which of them, she comes to be with child.[90.4]
Romances are, of course, literature, not folklore. In other words, they are the deliberate productions of civilisation, they are works of conscious art. Their authority, therefore, as evidence of tradition is greatly inferior to that with which the report of a folktale is invested. Folktales, when written down, cease to be traditions. They are merely evidence of tradition preserved for us by reporters. Their value depends on the accuracy and knowledge with which they have been reported. The more closely they represent the very words of the tellers of the tales—the bearers of the traditions—the more valuable, the more authentic, they are. Romances, on the other hand, cannot claim to be reports of traditions. They are subject to the laws of art, as developed under the influences of civilisation. Even when starting from real traditions, their aim is not accuracy but amusement. Whatever changes are required by the development of taste or fashion, whatever changes will from any cause add to the pleasure of the reader, their authors are at liberty—nay, they are bound—to make. But when all this is conceded there remains the fact that an immense number of romances start from tradition, and embody its characteristic barbarisms and its fantastic impossibilities. Of this kind is an incident in the Spanish Romance de don Tristan by Alonso de Salaya, written towards the end of the fifteenth century. It is related there that, Tristram being wounded in a transport of jealousy by King Mark, Isolte visited him; and the two lovers shed abundant tears. From these tears a lily sprang. “Every woman who eats of it forthwith feels herself pregnant; Queen Isolte ate of it to her sorrow.”[91.1]
In the Annamite story of The Lazy Man mentioned just now, the fish had been washed in the man’s urine. A variant, also from Annam, describes a sort of female Tom Thumb, born in answer to prayer, as eating the rind of a water-melon, the substance of which had been eaten by a prince. The prince, before throwing the rind away, had made water into it; and the heroine consequently became pregnant.[92.1] In both these cases it is the man’s urine that confers the efficacy upon the food. A nasty Nubian tale ascribes the same result to a woman’s drinking, under stress of great thirst, the urine of an ass.[92.2]
Other stories recall the German Water Peter and Water Paul, discussed in a previous chapter. A maiden in a Tjame tale, being thirsty, sees water spring from the midst of some rocks in the forest and fill a rocky basin. There she drinks and bathes. But when, on returning to her father who is at work hard by, he asks her to show him the spring that he may drink also, it is already dried up. Her subsequent pregnancy is said to be the result of having drunk of that spring. She gives birth to a son round as a cocoa-nut, and covered with a cocoa-nut envelope. He turns out to be a great magician. A princess penetrates his disguise and marries him. At night when he comes out of his envelope, his wife buries it and persuades him to exhibit himself in his true and beautiful manhood.[92.3] A Wallachian märchen brings before us a maiden condemned by the king, her father, to seclusion from her earliest infancy in a castle to which no men were allowed access. His precautions were vain. At the age of sixteen a Gipsy woman gives her a flower she declares herself to have found in the forest, not far from the castle. The princess plays with it until the evening, and then puts it in water until the morning. The water becomes purple-red, like the lovely flower itself, with little golden and silver stars swimming in it, like the fragrant dust on the petals. The princess had never seen anything of the kind. She was so delighted that she dipped the whole flower into the water and crumpled it up. At last she lifted up the glass, and, finding the water had taken a delicious scent, she drank it to the bottom. Before long she had reason to repent. Her condition became manifest, and her stern father would listen to no denials. Beside himself with rage, he caused her to be fastened up in a cask and thrown into the sea. There she bore a son, and was, with the child, cast after a while on shore. The rest of the story unfortunately is not so much to her credit; for she forms a tender connection with an ogre, and plots against the son who has been her support and comforter in her outcast condition.[93.1] A Gipsy story from southern Hungary represents a childless woman as given by a witch a certain liquid, with instructions to pour it into a gourd, and drink it in the waxing of the moon. Unhappily, however, the child is born dead. Now, a stillborn child becomes a Mulo, a kind of ghoul dwelling in the mountains and guarding hidden treasure. This prospect was so terrible to the woman and her husband, that the latter made a journey to the mountains, and at last got the child back from the Mulo-folk, and he grew up a clever man.[93.2]
Nor is it only by the mouth that supernatural impregnation has been fabled to take place. A variant from Varadzin of one of the South Slavonic tales quoted a few paragraphs back mentions a youth who was fated to kill his parents. Rather than fulfil so horrible a doom he burnt himself to death. But his heart remained intact and palpitating. A maiden passed by, saw and smelt the heart, and gave birth to a boy, who was no other than the first come to life again. He had struggled against his fate in vain, and in due course, though unwittingly, he slew his former parents.[94.1] In a Sanskrit romance, the Princess Chand Ráwati, bathing in the Ganges, sees a flower afloat on the water and takes it up to smell. It contains some sperma genitale which has escaped from a Rishi; the lady inhales this, with consequences readily guessed, having regard to the holiness of the ascetic. But in this case her son appropriately finds his way into the world by his mother’s nose. It is satisfactory to add that she eventually marries the lad’s father, and that the lad himself by his filial obedience and courage obtains immortality.[94.2] Even without the adventitious aid of a saint, the scent or the touch of flowers has been known in traditional songs and fairy tales to produce the same result. A Gipsy story from the Land beyond the Forest speaks of a woman who, by smelling a certain flower, became pregnant of a son, born in the form of a serpent; and in another, from southern Hungary, a childless queen receives from a beldam a camomile flower to bear in her bosom, on the stipulation she should give in exchange one of the sons whom she would bring into the world.[94.3] A Portuguese romanceiro speaks of an enchanted herb, which any woman who touched would at once feel herself fertilised. A ballad current in Asturia narrates that the princess Alexandra was fated to tread on so apparently innocent a herb as borage. The king of Spain, her father, with his parental eyes, detected that there was something the matter. He summoned the doctors; and when she had given birth to a boy he executed summary justice upon her by cutting off her head.[95.1] In Sardinia the folk tell of a maiden who, while buying some roses from a woman, took them up to examine, when they all fell to pieces. The woman, annoyed, cursed her to become pregnant by the petals; and her imprecation was only too effective.[95.2] Here it is the curse which provides the magical power. A different origin is attributed to it in a Bulgarian ballad. A widow, we are told, had nine sons who were all carried off by the plague. One of them was his mother’s idol. She buried him in her courtyard, and every day she came to weep upon his grave. In obedience to a voice proceeding from the earth, she gathered two hyacinth flowers which grew upon the tomb, hid them in her bosom, and thus conceived afresh. A son was born, over whom she uttered the wish: “Mayest thou one day reave the kingdom from the king!” When her words were reported to the monarch he ordered the boy to be thrown into an underground dungeon, and there left. After several years the king was attacked by a horrible malady; grass grew between his bones and his eyes littered mice. He naturally believed that this was the consequence of the widowed mother’s curses, and sent to the dungeon for the boy’s bones, for the purpose of forwarding them to her, as the only consolation in his power to give her. But the messengers found the boy alive and reading the gospel, which was held before him by Saint Friday, while Saint Sunday further contributed to his convenience by holding the candle. The youth, fated by his mother’s words, arose from his pious exercises, and going to the king, tore out his eyes, cut off his hands, and turned him out of doors to beg his bread. Then he placed himself upon the throne, trifling the while with a sceptre that weighed, mere toy that it was, some three hundred pounds.[96.1]
I have cited fully the substance of this ballad as given by M. Dragomanov, because that scholar is inclined to trace the influence of Buddhism in the last touch. Buddha, he says, is considered as a man of great physical force, and in several places his sceptres of considerable weight are shown. The learned critic specifies none of the places in question; but we may for the nonce admit the literal accuracy of his statement. He does not commit himself, however, to the assertion that no other hero of legend or fairy tale had ever been possessed of gigantic strength or material “properties” of unusual proportions. He merely assumes it; and upon the validity of this assumption his reasoning is founded. Gautama no doubt underwent many incarnations; and perhaps European students may yet be persuaded to hold that the paladin Roland was a Bodisat and Thor a full-blown Buddha. They will then probably extend their articles of belief over the rest of the world, including the countless personages of wondrous might and bulk that swarm in the traditions of the Slavonic race, to which, in great part at all events, the Bulgars belong. The task of converting them may be commended to M. Dragomanov; and, meanwhile, we may dismiss the suggestion of Buddhist influence on this Bulgarian ballad.
But it is not only flowers and herbs that possess the magical virtue of causing conception by the touch. In an Eskimo tradition a man who longs for offspring is advised to set off in his kayak to the open sea. When he hears a voice like that of a child crying, he must go towards it; and he will then find a worm, which he must bring home and throw on his wife’s body. Having followed this counsel, he beholds the worm disappear in the woman’s body; and soon afterward she gives birth to a son, who becomes a seal-fisher of marvellous powers.[97.1] According to a story given by Dr. von Wlislocki as current among the Armenian settlers at the foot of the Carpathians, a childless queen picked up in her garden a half-dead bird. She restored it to life, putting its bill between her lips to give it breath. Her saliva touched its tongue and gave it human speech. By its directions she hid in the garden at midnight and watched until a Luckwife—that is to say, a Fate or Norn—came to bathe in the pool. Then she caught up the golden veil left by the Luckwife lying on the margin, and ran off with it. Binding it round her body, she wore it next her skin for nine months, until she at length brought forth a lovely daughter.[97.2]