Forthwith she flew away in quest of a plant called poa (the springwort?), and having found a spray returned and applied it to the plaster, which at once fell off from the crack and gave her free access to her nest. Then she went forth to seek food, but during her absence the master again plastered up the hole. The object was again removed by means of the magic poa, and a third time the hole was stopped and opened in the same way.
The springwort and several other flowering plants were credited in old times with a magical property in opening locks. “Pliny records the superstition concerning it almost in the same form in which it is now found in Germany. If anyone touches a lock with it the lock, however strong, must yield.... One cannot easily find it oneself, but generally the woodpecker [according to Pliny, also the raven; in Switzerland and Swabia the hoopoe; in the Tyrol the swallow] will bring it under the following circumstances: When the bird visits its nest the nest must be stopped up with wood. The bird will open it by touching it with a spring-wurzel. Meantime a fire or a red cloth must be placed near by, which will so frighten the bird that it will let the magic root fall.”
The English antiquary Aubrey (1626–97) records an anecdote of a keeper of a baronial park in Herefordshire who “did for exprinent’s sake drive an iron naile thwert the hole of the woodpecker’s nest, there being a tradition that the damme will bring some leafe to open it. He layed at the bottom of the tree a cleane sheet, and before many houres passed the naile came out, and he found a leafe lying by it on the sheet. They say the moonwort will do such things.” The moonwort is a fern which was formerly reputed to have power to draw nails out of horseshoes.
From such roots as these grew the superstitions and legends innumerable of plants that would cure a snake (another lightning-symbol) or other animal of wounds, or even restore the dead. A tradition of the Middle Ages is that two little birds were seen fighting till one was exhausted. “It went away and ate of a certain herb and then returned to renew the battle. When the old man who witnessed the encounter had seen this done several times he took away the herb on which the bird was wont to feed, whereupon the little bird, unable to find its plant, set up a great cry and died.” It is a foolish little story, but illustrative.
One reads of magic crystals, and of gems with marvellous properties that would open mountains in which princes or glittering treasures were hidden. A curious example of this is related by Leland[[97]] anent the constant and ordinarily fruitless hunt for treasure in ancient Etruscan tombs, which went on in Italy for centuries. “When one would find a treasure,” the peasants told Leland, “he must take the door of the house in which he dwells and carry it forth into the fields at night until he comes to a tree. Then he must wait till many birds fly over him, and when they come he must throw down the door, making a great noise. Then the birds in fear will speak with a human voice, and tell where the treasure is buried.”
Much of this tinctures the mental life of many uneducated persons to this day. They will tell you now at Rauen, in Germany, that a princess is entombed alive in the Markgrafenstein, and that she and her wealth can be released only by one who will go there on a Friday at midnight carrying a white woodpecker—which would seem to make an albino of that species well worth searching for! The woodpecker of old was a “lightning-bird” because, among other reasons, it was supposed to get fire by boring into wood, as did primitive savages by means of the fire-drill; and its red cap was not only a badge of its office, but a lightning-symbol in general.
Let me illuminate this matter still more by quoting the comments of John Fiske[[98]] on the mythical conceptions of this character that are so old, and so cherished among the unlearned:
Among the birds enumerated by Kuhn [author of The Descent of Fire] and others as representing the storm-cloud, are likewise the wren or kinglet (French roitelet); the owl, sacred to Athenæ; the cuckoo, stork and sparrow; and the red-breasted robin, whose name Robert was originally an epithet of the lightning-god Thor. In certain parts of France it is still believed that the robbing of a wren’s nest will render the culprit liable to be struck by lightning. The same belief was formerly entertained in Teutonic countries with respect to the robin....
Now, as the raven or woodpecker, in the various myths of schamir, is the dark storm-cloud, so the rock-splitting worm, or plant or pebble is nothing more or less than the flash of lightning carried and dropped by the cloud....
The persons who told these stories were not weaving ingenious allegories about thunder-storms, or giving utterance to superstitions of which the original meaning was forgotten. The old grannies who, along with a stoical indifference to the fate of quails and partridges, used to impress upon me the wickedness of killing robins, did not add that I should be struck by lightning if I failed to heed their admonitions. They had never heard that the robin was the bird of Thor: they merely rehearsed the remnant of the superstition which had survived to their own times, while the essential part of it had long since faded from recollection. The reason for regarding a robin’s life as more sacred than a partridge’s had been forgotten; but it left behind, as was natural, a vague recognition of that mythical sanctity. The primitive meaning of a myth fades away as inevitably as the primitive meaning of a word or phrase; and the rabbins which told of a worm which shattered rocks no more thought of the writhing thunderbolts than the modern reader thinks of oyster-shells when he sees the word ostracism, or consciously breathes a prayer when he writes the phrase Good-bye.