Soon he shed
His hellish slough, and many a subtle wile
Was his to seem a heavenly spirit to man,
First, he a hermit, sore subdued in flesh,
O’er a cold cruse of water and a crust,
Poured out meet prayers abundant. Then he changed
Into a maid when she first dreams of man,
And from beneath two silken eyelids sent,
The sidelong light of two such wondrous eyes,
That all the saints grew sinners . . .
Then a professor of God’s word he seemed,
And o’er a multitude of upturned eyes
Showered blessed dews, and made the pitchy path,
Down which howl damnéd Spirits, seem the bright
Thrice hallowed way to Heaven; yet grimly through
The glorious veil of those seducing shapes,
Frowned out the fearful Spirit.
S. Anthony, in the wilderness, as related in his life by S. Athanasius, had many conflicts in the night with the powers of darkness, Satan appearing personally to him, to batter him from the strongholds of his faith. S. Dunstan, in his cell, was tempted by the Devil in the form of a lovely woman, but a grip of his nose with a heated tongs made him bellow out, and cease his nightly visits to that holy man. Ezra Peden, as related by Allan Cunningham, was also tempted by one who “was indeed passing fair,” and the longer he looked on her she became the lovelier—“owre lovely for mere flesh and blood,” and poor Peden succumbed to her wiles.
From the book of Tobit it would appear that an Evil Spirit slew the first seven husbands of Sara from jealousy and lust, in the vain hope of securing her for himself. In Giraldus Cambrensis’s Itinerary through Wales, Bohn’s ed., p. 411 demons are shown to possess those qualities which are ascribed to them in the Apocryphal book of Tobit.
There is nothing new, as far as I am aware, respecting the doings of the Great Enemy of mankind in Welsh Folk-Lore. His tactics in the Principality evince no originality. They are the usual weapons used by him everywhere, and these he found to be sufficient for his purposes even in Wales.
Gladly would I here put down my pen and leave the uncongenial task of treating further about the spirits of darkness to others, but were I to do so, I should be guilty of a grave omission, for, as I have already said, ghosts, goblins, spirits, and other beings allied to Satan, occupy a prominent place in Welsh Folk-Lore.
Of a winter’s evening, by the faint light of a peat fire and rush candles, our forefathers recounted the weird stories of
olden times, of devils, fairies, ghosts, witches, apparitions, giants, hidden treasures, and other cognate subjects, and they delighted in implanting terrors in the minds of the listeners that no philosophy, nor religion of after years, could entirely eradicate. These tales made a strong impression upon the imagination, and possibly upon the conduct of the people, and hence the necessity laid upon me to make a further selection of the many tales that I have collected on this subject.
I will begin with a couple of stories extracted from the work of the Rev. Edmund Jones, by a writer in the Cambro-Briton, vol. ii., p. 276.
Satan appearing to a Man who was fetching a Load of Bibles, etc.
“A Mr. Henry Llewelyn, having been sent to Samuel Davies, of Ystrad Defodoc Parish, in Glamorganshire, to fetch a load of books, viz., Bibles, Testaments, Watts’s Psalms, Hymns, and Songs for Children, said—Coming home by night towards Mynyddustwyn, having just passed by Clwyd yr Helygen ale-house, and being in a dry part of the lane—the mare, which he rode, stood still, and, like the ass of the ungodly Balaam, would go no farther, but kept drawing back. Presently he could see a living thing, round like a bowl, rolling from the right hand to the left, and crossing the lane, moving sometimes slow and sometimes very swift—yea, swifter than a bird could fly, though it had neither wings nor feet,—altering also its size. It appeared three times, less one time than another, seemed least when near him, and appeared to roll towards the mare’s belly. The mare would then want to go forward, but he stopped her, to see more carefully what manner of thing it was. He staid, as he thought, about three minutes, to look at it; but, fearing to see a worse sight, he thought it