Among savages, however, it hardly seems necessary for their fore-elders to render themselves obnoxious to superior beings as a cause of this transformation. The natives of North Australia have tales of persons, some good and others bad, who were turned on death into stones or trees.[137.4] A Chinese legend, descending doubtless from a more barbarous period, explains the existence of three rocks in the Yang-tsze river and the Poyang lake, through which it runs. A boat containing a man, his wife and their two children was capsized on the river during a storm. The man and woman perished at once; but the lads were assisted by a compassionate frog, which took them on its back and made for their home on the banks of the lake. The younger boy, grieving at his parents’ death, threw himself off and was drowned, reappearing shortly after in the form of a bold limestone rock, now known as the Little Orphan, situate in the middle of the river about twenty miles below the egress of the lake. The surviving orphan held on until the frog had entered the lake, when he fell broken-hearted into the water and became the large rock, surmounted in later ages by a Buddhist monastery and pagoda, and called the Great Orphan. The frog, in the bitterness of grief at his unsuccessful efforts, also yielded up his life, and in due course emerged from the waves as the Frog Rock.[138.1] In Japan the peasants discern high up on the weatherworn cliffs of Matsura, “the figure of a lady in long trailing court-dress with face and figure eagerly bent over the western waves.” It is Satyohimé, the wife of Saté-hiko, petrified while gazing to catch the last glimpse of the sails that bore her husband away to Corea, as one of the Mikado’s body-guard, sent to assist the Japanese allies at Hiaksai, in the year 536 A.D. Her sad fate has rendered her name the symbol in Japanese literature of devoted love.[138.2]
I have left to the last the Gorgonian power of petrifying with a look. The fatal head was regarded, we know, as the most powerful of Athene’s weapons. As a single illustration we may take a curious case mentioned by Pausanias. Describing the temple of Athene near Coronea, in Bœotia, where the Panbœotian festival was held, he says that a priestess named Iodamia coming into the temple once at night was confronted by the goddess herself armed with Medusa’s head, and was turned into stone. An altar called by the unfortunate priestess’ name seems to have stood in the temple when Pausanias wrote; and a woman daily put fire thereon, saying in the language of the country that Iodamia was living and demanded fire.[139.1] The memory of Medusa yet lingers, as we have seen, in Seriphos, where her head on the coinage of the island seems to have preserved it. If we may trust mediæval writers like Walter Map, Gervase of Tilbury and Roger of Hoveden, a more definite recollection, though still confused and distorted, formerly remained in the Levant. Gervase tells us that between Rhodes and Cyprus are the Syrtes, commonly called the Gulf of Satalia, where the Gorgon’s head was said to have been thrown into the sea. They are opposite the town of Satalia, claimed by the Sultan of Iconium. The Gorgon was held to have been a prostitute whose beauty drove men out of their wits, until Perseus threw her head into the deep. This of course was a piece of euhemerism on the part of the Marshal of Arles or his informants, whoever they may have been. He goes on, however, to say that the natives report that a soldier fell in love with a certain queen, and not being able to obtain her during her life, he secretly violated her sepulchre. From his posthumous embraces the corpse bore a monstrous head, which, the soldier was warned by a voice in the air at the moment of his crime, would by its mere look destroy all things that it beheld. Accordingly at the proper time he opened the tomb and found the head, carefully averting himself from its gaze. Whenever he exhibited it to his foes they and their cities were destroyed. Afterwards he found another love; and one day, while sailing the sea he was sleeping peacefully in her lap, when she took the opportunity to steal the key and open the casket wherein the head was kept. Her curiosity proved her bane. Her lover awoke and, plunged in grief at the catastrophe, he took out the fatal head, stuck it up and perished with his ship from its glance. Every seven years, it was believed, the head rose to the surface of the sea and imperilled the safety of all who navigated those waters.[140.1] Map’s account is that the hero was a cordwainer of exceeding great skill, who flourished at Constantinople in the time of Gerbert, that is to say, about a hundred and fifty years before his own time. Falling in love with a noble maiden whose naked foot he had been called upon to clothe in the course of business, he sold everything and took service in the army, in order to rise in the world and become worthy of her. She, however, died in his absence. The violation of her tomb follows. The Gorgonian head is expressly declared to have stiffened the wretches upon whom its gaze was brought to bear. The soldier at length weds the daughter and heiress of the Emperor. She gives him no peace until he tells her the contents of his casket; and having learnt the secret she tries the effect of the head upon her husband as he wakes from sleep. Having thus fordone him by her wiles, she orders his body and the instrument of his enormities to be cast together into the Grecian Sea. A terrific storm arose when her command was fulfilled; and on its subsiding a vast and destructive whirlpool remained ever thereafter, called Satalia, or more commonly, the Gulf of Satalia, from the maiden’s name.[140.2]
More nearly akin to the classical myth is a Danish tradition that in former days a troll who dwelt in the Issefiord was accustomed to stop every passing vessel and take a man by way of toll. At last it became known that the troll’s power would endure until the head of Pope Lucius, who had suffered decapitation in Rome ages before, should be shown him. Some monks were accordingly despatched to Rome for the head. “When the ship returned and was about to run into the fiord the troll made his appearance; but as soon as they held forth the head and the troll got a sight of it, he with a horrid howl transformed himself into a rock.” Representations in Roeskilde Cathedral commemorate the event.[141.1] One of the commonest of Scandinavian sagas is that which attributes the power of transforming trolls and giants to the sun. The earliest mention of it is in the Helgi poems, which are only known to us in a single manuscript, the Codex Regius at Copenhagen, but which probably date from the tenth century. In one of these poems, Rimegerd, the giantess, whose father Helgi has slain, appears by night and calls on the hero to recompense her for her father’s slaughter. Helgi and Atli his warder detain her in a war of words until the sun rises, when Atli exclaims: “Look eastward now, Rimegerd! Helgi hath stricken thee with the wand of Death.… It is day, Rimegerd! Atli has lured thee to deadly delay. It will be a laughter-moving harbour-mark, methinks, that thou wilt make now thou art turned to stone!” The same catastrophe is implied in the Alvíssmal, also found only in the Codex Regius, but at least as old as the Helgi poems. Allwise the dwarf has come to fetch Freya, whom he has entrapped the Anses into a promise to give him as wife. He comes by night; and one of the Anses detains him with questions calculated to bring out his extensive cosmological knowledge, until the day breaks and the hall is full of sunshine. We are then to understand, from the triumphant expressions of his interlocutor, that the power of the sun effects his petrifaction.[142.1] In a Norwegian ballad of Hermod the Young the hero rescues a beautiful maiden from a giantess, riding off with her on Christmas Day. The giantess pursues all night, and is on the point of catching the fugitives, when the sun arises and she is changed to a stone.[142.2] Two tall isolated cliffs lift themselves out of the sound between Eysturoy and Streymoy, two of the Færoe Islands. They were a giant and his wife who had been sent from Iceland to drag the Færoe Islands nearer to that island. It was at night. The giant stood in the sea while the giantess took the other end of the rope, and after an ineffectual attempt made it fast to the top of one of the hills. She saw the glimmering of dawn and hastened down; but too late. Before she and her husband could wade back to Iceland with their charge the sun came up out of the sea and they were instantly turned to stone, to stand there for ever looking northward but unable to move from the spot.[142.3] These are sufficient as samples of the Scandinavian belief in the transforming influence exercised by the gaze of the sun upon the evil powers of darkness. The incident has passed into a Lapp märchen from Tanen, where a king’s son, by the help of a friendly fox, has stolen a maiden called Evening-glow, the sun’s sister, from some giants who held her captive. The fox leads the pursuing giants astray until the dawn, when he exclaims: “See, there comes the sun’s sister!” They raise their eyes to the morning glow, and are forthwith changed into stone pillars.[142.4] The incident here probably owes its origin to the adjacent Norsemen; the Quiché saga of the three tribal gods, Tohil, Avilix, and Hacavitz is, however, quite independent. Originally, we learn, there was neither sun, moon, nor star. When for the first time the sun rose, it petrified these and other ferocious deities, but without taking away from them the power of changing their forms and resuming mobility when they pleased.[143.1] According to the story of the inhabitants of Hispaniola, men came out of two caves. A giant, Machakael, was set to guard these caves and prevent mankind from looking upon the light of the sun. One night he wandered from his post, and could not return before sunrise. The sun rose out of the sea and looked with anger upon the giant, who was forthwith turned into a rock called Kauta.[143.2]
The power of petrification is, however, usually regarded as equivalent to that of striking dead with a glance. This is expressed, as we have already seen,[143.3] in the case of Balor of Tory Island. A long list of stories wherein a glance is credited with this terrible might could be culled from every nation, beginning with that of Isis punishing at Byblos an unlucky boy who disturbed her in her grief.[143.4] In some cases, as in a variant of the tale of Balor, the baleful eye not only slays but reduces its victim to ashes.[143.5] The elephant head of the Hindu god, Ganesa, is a substitute for his original head burned to cinders by the gaze of Sani. Nor is the murderous property confined to supernatural beings. Witches, who of course partake of more than ordinary human qualities, are credited with it. Men of special holiness have sometimes the fatal gift, like Rabbi Juda in rabbinical tradition, who thus killed four-and-twenty of his scholars in a single day;[144.1] or a Samoan high-priest of the heavenly gods, whose very look was poison; “if he looked at a cocoa-nut tree it died, and if he glanced at a bread-fruit tree it also withered away.”[144.2] Various writers, classic and mediæval, have told us of the women of a certain Scythian tribe, of the Sardinians, or of a remote island in the ocean, whose glance is death.[144.3] To such writers we owe the fable of the Catoblepas, or Downlooker, an animal “so wicked and so venomous that no man may behold it right in the face, but he die anon without remedy.” Some of the soldiers of Marius in his expedition against Jugurtha, not knowing the creature and attacking it incautiously, were slain by the eye of this terrible beast.[144.4] In various parts of Asia and Africa serpents also have naturally been reputed to possess the same horrible gift; while countries like Spain have not yet parted with the belief in the basilisk.[144.5] Among American tribes the superstition and the stories of the deadly glance are found in similar terms to those of the Old World. I have already mentioned the Quiché gods petrified by the sun. The Cegihas have a tale of a mysterious being called Two Faces that slew every one who looked at it.[145.1] The Ts’ets’āut of British Columbia account for the prohibition to a man to look at his adult sister by a legend of one of their fore-elders who married his sister. Their brothers were ashamed, tied them together by way of punishment, and deserted them. But the man broke the ropes; and having killed a ram, an ewe and a kid of the mountain-goats, he clad himself, his wife and their child in the skins, and they assumed the shape of goats. “He had acquired the power of killing everything by a glance of his eyes. One day his tribe came up the river for the purpose of hunting, and he killed them. Then he travelled all over the world, leaving signs of his presence everywhere, such as remarkable rocks.”[145.2] Iroquois traditions tell of an Onondaga chief, named Tododäho, whose head was covered with tangled serpents, and whose angry look sufficed to strike the beholders dead. He submitted, however, to be tamed, and to have the serpents combed out of his locks.[145.3] But the saga which presents the closest parallel to the incident of the Slaughter of the Gorgon comes to us from Brazil, and comes with every mark of indigenous growth. Some of the Brazilian tribes tell of a bird which kills with a look. The story goes that a hunter succeeded in slaying one, and cut off its head, without the dreadful eye being turned upon him. Like Perseus, he killed his game thenceforward by turning the eye upon it. “His wife, not dreaming of its destructive power, however, once turned it toward her husband and killed him, and then accidentally turned it toward herself and died.”[146.1]
The truth is that we are here in presence of the worldwide belief in the Evil Eye: one more demonstration of the inseparable connection between tale, superstition, and custom. The awful weapon of the mythical Brazilian bird was Medusa’s power, the same as is to-day the terror of the Italian peasant, and is not yet regarded with indifference even in lands, like our own, which boast of being in the van of civilisation. From all parts of the world we read of the superstition that certain persons wield, intentionally or unintentionally—as often the latter as the former—the power of blasting others by their look. This power was dreaded in Palestine from time immemorial. The maxim, “Eat thou not the bread of him that hath an Evil Eye” is found among the Hebrew proverbs; and Jesus Christ alludes to the superstition, though only to warn the Pharisees against “an Evil Eye” as a moral quality proceeding out of the heart.[146.2] The superstition has left its traces in language. To the ancient Roman “Envy, eldest born of Hell,” was really Invidia, the Evil Eye; and the English rustic still speaks of being “overlooked.” Wizards and witches are thus gifted, of course: the Evil Eye is amongst their mightiest weapons. But it is by no means theirs alone. Innocent women, according to many nations, are periodically cursed with it. In fact, anybody may have an Evil Eye, even without knowing it; the most sacred personages are not exempt. The Samoan high priest and the Rabbi Juda are examples from the opposite ends of the earth. Pius the Ninth, infallible head of the church as he was, vicar of Christ and what not, was afflicted with the Evil Eye. There was nothing so fatal as his blessing; and the flock he tended cowered and quailed before their shepherd’s sight.[147.1]
So much has been written of late on the Evil Eye that it is enough to mention in these general terms a superstition at once much less complex and much more fully known to anthropological students than some of those investigated in other chapters of these volumes. Its origin is doubtless to be sought in the evil passions of which the human countenance is so admirable and so terrible an exponent, striking inevitably with horror and awe even beholders who are not the object of the resentment or the jealousy expressed—much more, fascinating and paralysing with fear the unhappy victims, as a bird is said to be fascinated by a snake.[147.2]
CHAPTER XXI.
THE STORY AS A WHOLE. THE PROBLEM OF ITS PLACE OF ORIGIN. CONCLUSION.
My task draws towards its close. We have now examined the four leading trains of incident as developed in modern folktales belonging to the Perseus cycle. We have found the Supernatural Birth, the Life-token, and the Medusa-witch founded on superstitions common to all mankind and arising in the depths of savagery. The Rescue of Andromeda, on the other hand, appears to be restricted to nations which have attained a certain grade of civilisation, and to spring out of the suppression of human sacrifices to divinities in bestial form.
We have now to return to the story as an artistic whole, and to inquire where and when it originated.
In seeking the origin of the story as a whole it is well to begin with a caution, to which I have alluded in a note to an earlier chapter, namely, that it is dangerous in these matters to assert that a story or a custom is not found outside a given area. Anthropological research is so modern that much material is certain to have already perished unrecorded, and much that still exists as yet is unrecorded, either because it has been overlooked, or because scientific observers have not yet reached it. All assertions or assumptions, therefore, of a negative character must be taken with the limitations imposed by this condition of things. They can only be provisional, for they may, any of them, be upset by further research. Moreover, the mass of anthropological data is already so great, and is growing with such rapidity, that nothing is easier than for a single inquirer, how diligent soever he may be, to overlook facts duly recorded which may be in conflict with his conclusions. To assert, for example, and to base any portion of an argument upon the assertion, that tales of the group under consideration are not found in Hindustan in anything like the shape wherein we find them in Europe, would be to run the risk of having to revise the argument in the face of new discoveries, or of old records which have not been brought to the writer’s knowledge.