Scenes and legends of the north of Scotland

by Hugh Miller

I find I must devote one other chapter to the consideration of the interesting remains which form almost the sole materials of this earlier portion of my history. But the class of these to which I am now about to turn, are to be found, not on the face of the country, but locked up in the minds of the inhabitants. And they are falling much more rapidly into decay—mouldering away in their hidden recesses, like bodies of the dead; while others, which more resemble the green mound and the monumental tablet, bid fair to abide the inquiry of coming generations. Those vestiges of ancient superstition, which are to be traced in the customs and manners of the common people, share in a polite age a very different fate from those impressions of it, if I may so express myself, which we find stamped upon matter. For when the just and liberal opinions which originate with philosophers and men of genius are diffused over a whole people, a modification of the same good sense which leads the scholar to treasure up old beliefs and usages, serves to emancipate the peasant from their influence or observance.

CHAPTER V.

“She darklins grapit for the bauks,

And in the blue clue throws then.”

—Burns.

REMAINS OF THE OLD MYTHOLOGY.

Violence may anticipate by many centuries the natural progress of decay. There are some of our Scottish cathedrals less entire than some of our old Picts’ houses, though the latter have been deserted for more than a thousand years, and the former for not more than three hundred. And the remark is not less applicable to the beliefs and usages of other ages, than to their more material remains. It is a curious fact, that we meet among the Protestants of Scotland with more marked traces of the Paganism of their earlier, than of the Popery of their later ancestors. For while Christianity seems to have been introduced into the country by slow degrees, and to have travelled over it by almost imperceptible stages—leaving the less obnoxious practices of the mythology which it supplanted to the natural course of decay—it is matter of history that the doctrines of the Reformation overspread it in a single age, and that the observances of the old system were effaced, not by a gradual current of popular opinion, but by the hasty surges of popular resentment. The saint-days of the priest have in consequence been long since forgotten—the festivals of the Druid still survive.

There is little risk of our mistaking these latter; the rites of Hallowe’en, and the festivities of Beltane, possess well-authenticated genealogies. There are other usages, however, which, though they bear no less strongly the impress of Paganism, show a more uncertain lineage. And regarding these, we find it difficult to determine whether they have come down to us from the days of the old mythology, or have been produced in a later period by those sentiments of the human mind to which every false religion owes its origin. The subject, though a curious, is no very tangible one. But should I attempt throwing together a few simple thoughts respecting it, in that wandering desultory style which seems best to consort with its irregularity of outline, I trust I may calculate on the forbearance of the reader. I shall strive to be not very tedious, and to choose a not very beaten path.

Man was made for the world, and the world for man. Hence we find that every faculty of the human mind has in the things which lie without some definite object, or particular class of circumstances, on which to operate. There is a thorough adaptation of that which acts to that which is acted upon—of the moving power to the machine; and woe be to him who deranges this admirable order, in the hope of rendering it more complete. It is prettily fabled by the Brahmins, that souls are moulded by pairs, and then sent to the earth to be linked together in wedlock, and that matches are unhappy merely in consequence of the parties disuniting by the way, and choosing for themselves other consorts. One might find more in this fable than any Brahmin ever found in it yet. There is a prospective connexion of a similar kind formed between the powers of the mind and the objects on which these are to be employed, and should they be subsequently united to objects other than the legitimate, a wretchedness quite as real as that which arises out of an ill-mated marriage is the infallible result.

Were I asked to illustrate my meaning by an example or two, I do not know where I could find instances better suited to my purpose than in the imaginative extravagancies of some of our wilder sectaries. There is no principle which so deals in unhappy marriages, and as unhappy divorces, as the fanatical; or that so ceaselessly employs itself in separating what Heaven has joined, and in joining what Heaven has separated. Man, I have said, was made for the world he lives in;—I should have added, that he was intended also for another world. Fanaticism makes a somewhat similar omission, only it is the other way. It forgets that he is as certainly a denizen of the present as an heir of the future; that the same Being who has imparted to him the noble sentiment which leads him to anticipate an hereafter, has also bestowed upon him a thousand lesser faculties which must be employed now; and that, if he prove untrue to even the minor end of his existence, and slight his proper though subordinate employments, the powers which he thus separates from their legitimate objects must, from the very activity of their nature, run riot in the cloisters in which they are shut up, and cast reproach by their excesses on the cause to which they are so unwisely dedicated. For it is one thing to condemn these to a life of celibacy, and quite another to keep them chaste. We may shut them up, like a sisterhood of nuns, from the objects to which they ought to have been united, but they will infallibly discover some less legitimate ones with which to connect themselves. Self-love, and the natural desire of distinction—proper enough sentiments in their own sphere—make but sad work in any other. The imagination, which was so bountifully given us to raise its ingenious theories as a kind of scaffolding to philosophical discovery, is active to worse purpose when revelling intoxicated amid the dim fields of prophecy, or behind the veil of the inner mysteries. Reason itself, though a monarch in its own proper territories, can exert only a doubtful authority in the provinces which lie beyond. Indeed, the whole history of fanaticism, from when St. Anthony retired into the deserts of Upper Egypt to burrow in a cell like a fox-earth, down to the times that witnessed some of the wilder heresiarchs of our own country, working what they had faith enough to deem miracles, is little else than a detail of the disorders occasioned by perversions of this nature.