Scenes and legends of the north of Scotland

by Hugh Miller

THE DEVOTIONAL SENTIMENT.

There is an exhibition of phenomena equally curious when the religious sentiment, instead of thus swallowing up all the others, is deprived of even its own proper object. I once saw a solitary hen bullfinch, that retired one spring into a dark corner of her cage and laid an egg, over which she sat until it was addled. It is always thus when the devotional sentiment is left to form a religion for itself. Encaged like the poor bullfinch, it proves fruitful in just a similar way, and moping in its dark recesses, brings forth its pitiful abortions unassisted and alone. I have ever thought of the pantheons and mythological dictionaries of our libraries as a kind of museums, stored, like those of the anatomist, with embryos and abortions.

It must be remarked further, that the devotional sentiment operates in this way not only when its proper object is wanting, but even, should the mind be dark and uninformed, when that is present. Every false religion may be regarded as a wild irregular production, springing out of that basis of sentiment (one of the very foundations of our nature) which, when rendered the subject of a right course of culture, and sown with the good seed, proves the proper field of the true. But on this field, even when occupied the better way, there may be the weeds of a rank indigenous mythology shooting up below—a kind of subordinate superstition, which, in other circumstances, would have been not the underwood, but the forest. Hence our difficulty in fixing the genealogy of the Pagan-like usages to which I allude; there are two opposite sources, from either of which they may have sprung:—they may form a kind of undergrowth, thrown up at no very early period by a soil occupied by beliefs the most serious and rational, or they may constitute the ancient and broken vestiges of an obsolete and exploded mythology. I shall briefly describe a few of the more curious.

INTERESTING USAGES.

I. People acquainted with seafaring men, and who occasionally accompany them in their voyages, cannot miss seeing them, when the sails are drooping against the mast, and the vessel lagging in her course, earnestly invoking the wind in a shrill tremulous whistling—calling on it, in fact, in its own language; and scarcely less confident of being answered than if preferring a common request to one of their companions. I rarely sail in calm weather with my friends the Cromarty fishermen, without seeing them thus employed—their faces anxiously turned in the direction whence they expect the breeze; now pausing, for a light uncertain air has begun to ruffle the water, and now resuming the call still more solicitously than before, for it has died away. On thoughtlessly beginning to whistle one evening about twelve years ago, when our skiff was staggering under a closely-reefed foresail, I was instantly silenced by one of the fishermen with a “Whisht, whisht, boy, we have more than wind enough already;” and I remember being much struck for the first time by the singularity of the fact, that the winds should be as sincerely invoked by our Scottish seamen of the present day, as by the mariners of Themistocles. There was another such practice common among the Cromarty fishermen of the last age, but it is now obsolete. It was termed soothing the waves. When beating up in stormy weather along a lee-shore, it was customary for one of the men to take his place on the weather gunwale, and there continue waving his hand in a direction opposite to the sweep of the sea, in the belief that this species of appeal to it would induce it to lessen its force. We recognize in both these singular practices the workings of that religion natural to the heart, which, more vivid in its personifications than poetry itself, can address itself to every power of nature as to a sentient being endowed with a faculty of will, and able, as it inclines, either to aid or injure. The seaman’s prayer to the winds, and the thirty thousand gods of the Greek, probably derive their origin from a similar source.

II. Viewed in the light of reason, an oath owes its sacredness, not to any virtue in itself, but to the Great Being to whom it is so direct an appeal, and to the good and rational belief that He knows all things, and is the ultimate judge of all. But the same uninformed principle which can regard the winds and waves as possessed of a power independent of His, seems also to have conferred on the oath an influence and divinity exclusively its own. I have met with many among the more grossly superstitious, who deemed it a kind of ordeal, somewhat similar to the nine ploughshares of the dark ages, which distinguished between right and wrong, truth or falsehood, by some occult intrinsic virtue. The innocent person swears, and like the guiltless woman when she had drunk the waters of jealousy, thrives none the worse;—the guilty perjure themselves, and from that hour cease to prosper. I remember—by the way, a very early recollection—that when a Justice of Peace Court was sitting in my native town, many years ago, a dark cloud came suddenly over the sun; and that a man who had been lounging on the street below, ran into the Court-room to see who it was that, by swearing a false oath, had occasioned the obscuration. It is a rather singular coincidence, and one which might lead us to believe in the existence of something analogous to principle in even the extravagancies of human belief, that the only oath deemed binding on the gods of classical mythology—the oath by the river Styx—was one of merely intrinsic power and virtue. Bacon, indeed, in his “Wisdom of the Ancients” (a little book but a great work), has explained the fable as merely an ingenious allegory; but who does not know that the Father of modern philosophy found half the Novum Organum in superstitions which existed before the days of Orpheus?

III. There seems to have once obtained in this part of the country a belief that the natural sentiment of justice had its tutelary spirit, which, like the Astræa of the Greeks, existed for it, and for it alone; and which not only seconded the dictates of conscience, but even punished those by whom they were disregarded. The creed of superstition is, however, rarely a well defined or consistent one; and this belief seems to have partaken, as much as any of the others, of the incoherent obscurity in which it originated. The mysterious agent (the object of it) existed no one knew where, and effected its purposes no one knew how. But the traditions which illustrate it, narrate better than they define. Many years ago, says one of these, a woman of Tarbat was passing along the shores of Loch-Slin, with a large web of linen on her back. There was a market held that morning at Tain, and she was bringing the web there to be sold. In those times it was quite as customary for farmers to rear the flax which supplied them with clothing, as the corn which furnished them with food; and it was of course necessary, in some of the earlier processes of preparing the former, to leave it for weeks spread out on the fields, with little else to trust to for its protection than the honesty of neighbours. But to the neighbours of this woman the protection was, it would seem, incomplete; and the web she carried on this occasion was composed of stolen lint. She had nearly reached the western extremity of the lake, when, feeling fatigued, she seated herself by the water edge, and laid down the web beside her. But no sooner had it touched the earth than up it bounded three Scots ells into the air, and slowly unrolling fold after fold, until it had stretched itself out as when on the bleaching-green, it flew into the middle of the lake, and disappeared for ever. There are several other stories of the same class, but the one related may serve as a specimen of the whole.

IV. The evils which men dread, and the appearances which they cannot understand, are invariably appropriated by superstition: if her power extend not over the terrible and the mysterious, she is without power at all. And not only does she claim whatever is inexplicable in the great world, but also in some cases what seems mysterious in the little; some, for instance, of the more paradoxical phenomena of human nature. It has been represented to me as a mysterious, unaccountable fact, that persons who have been rescued from drowning regard their deliverers ever after with a dislike which borders almost on enmity. I have heard it affirmed, too, that when the crew of some boat or vessel have perished, with the exception of one individual, the relatives of the deceased invariably regard that one with a deep, irrepressible hatred; and in both cases the feelings described are said to originate in some occult and supernatural cause. Alas! neither envy nor ingratitude lie out of our ordinary everyday walk. There occurs to me a little anecdote illustrative of this kind of apotheosis of the envious principle. Some fifty years ago there was a Cromarty boat wrecked on the rough shores of Eathie. All the crew perished with the exception of one fisherman; and the poor man was so persecuted by the relatives of the drowned, who even threatened his life, that he was compelled, much against his inclination, to remove to Nairn. There, however, only a few years after, he was wrecked a second time, and, as in the first instance, proved the sole survivor of the crew. And so he was again subjected to a persecution similar to the one he had already endured; and compelled to quit Nairn as he had before quitted Cromarty. And in both cases the relatives of the deceased were deemed as entirely under the influence of a mysterious, irresistible impulse, which acted upon their minds from without, as the Orestes of the dramatist when pursued by the Furies.

One may question, as I have already remarked, whether one sees, in these several instances, polytheism in the act of forming, and but barely forming, in the human mind, or the mutilated remnants of a long-exploded mythology. The usages to which I have alluded as more certain in their lineage, are perhaps less suited to employ speculation. But they are curious; and the fact that they are fast sinking into an oblivion, out of which the diligence of no future excavator will be able to restore them, gives them of itself a kind of claim on our notice. I pass over Beltane; its fires in this part of the country have long since been extinguished; but to its half-surviving partner, Halloween, I shall devote a few pages; and this the more readily, as it chances to be connected with a story of humble life which belongs to that period of my history at which I have now arrived. True, the festival itself has already sat for its picture, and so admirable was the skill of the artist, that its very name recalls to us rather the masterly strokes of the transcript than the features of the original. But, with all its truth and beauty, the portrait is not yet complete.

RITES OF THE SCOTTISH HALLOWEEN.