A belief in astrology and in sacred numbers prevails to a considerable extent amongst all classes of our society. With many the stars still "fight in their courses," and our modern fortune-tellers are yet ready to "rule the planets," and predict good or ill fortune, on payment of the customary fee. That there is "luck in odd numbers" was known for a fact in Lancashire long before Mr. Lover immortalized the tradition. Our housewives always take care that their hens shall sit upon an odd number of eggs; we always bathe three times in the sea at Blackpool, Southport, and elsewhere; and our names are called over three times when our services are required in courts of law. Three times three is the orthodox number of cheers; and we still hold that the seventh son of a seventh son is destined to form an infallible physician. We inherit all such popular notions as these in common with the German and Scandinavian nations; but more especially with those of the Saxons and the Danes. Triads of leaders, or ships, constantly occur in their annals; and punishments of three and seven years' duration form the burden of many of the Anglo-Saxon and Danish laws.
A full proportion of the popular stories which are perpetuated in our nurseries most probably date their existence amongst us from some amalgamation of races; or, it may be, from the intercourse attendant upon trade and commerce. The Phœnicians, no doubt, would impart a portion of their Oriental Folk-lore to the southern Britons; the Roman legions would leave traces of their prolific mythology amongst the Brigantes and the Sistuntii; and the Saxons and the Danes would add their rugged northern modifications to the common stock. The "History of the Hunchback" is common to both England and Arabia; the "man in the moon" has found his way into the popular literature of almost every nation with which we are acquainted; "Cinderella and her slipper" is "The little golden shoe" of the ancient Scandinavians, and was equally familiar to the Greeks and Romans; "Jack and the bean-stalk" is told in Sweden and Norway as of "The boy who stole the giant's treasure;" whilst our renowned "Jack the giant-killer" figures in Norway, Lapland, Persia, and India, as the amusing story of "The herd boy and the giant." The labours of Tom Hickathrift are evidently a distorted version of those of Hercules; and these again agree in the main with the journey of Thor to Utgard, and the more classical travels of Ulysses. In Greece the clash of the elements during a thunderstorm was attributed to the chariot wheels of Jove; the Scandinavians ascribed the sounds to the ponderous wagon of the mighty Thor; our Lancashire nurses Christianize the phenomenon by assuring their young companions, poetically enough, that thunder "is the noise which God makes when passing across the heavens." The notion that the gods were wont to communicate knowledge of future events to certain favoured individuals appears to have had a wide range in ancient times; and this curiosity regarding futurity has exerted a powerful influence over the minds of men in every stage of civilization. Hence arose the consulting of oracles and the practice of divination amongst the ancients, and to the same principles we must attribute the credulity which at present exists with respect to the "wise men" who are to be found in almost every town and village in Lancashire. The means adopted by some of the oracles when responses were required, strangely remind us of the modern feats of ventriloquism; others can be well illustrated by what we now know of mesmerism and its kindred agencies; whilst these and clairvoyance will account for many of those where the agents are said by Eustathius to have spoken out of their bellies, or breasts, from oak trees, or been "cast into trances in which they lay like men dead or asleep, deprived of all sense and motion; but after some time returning to themselves, gave strange relations of what they had seen and heard."
The ancient Greeks and Romans regarded dreams as so many warnings; they prayed to Mercury to vouchsafe to them a night of good dreams. In this county we still hold the same opinions; but our country maidens, having Christianized the subject, now invoke St. Agnes and a multitude of other saints to be similarly propitious. There are many other points of resemblance between the Folk-lore of Lancashire and that of the ancients. Long or short life, health or disease, good luck or bad, are yet predicted by burning a lock of human hair; and the fire is frequently poked with much anxiety when testing the disposition of an absent lover. Many persons may be found who never put on the left shoe first; and the appearance of a single magpie has disconcerted many a stout Lancashire farmer when setting out on a journey of business or pleasure. In the matter of sneezing we are just as superstitious as when the Romans left us. They exclaimed, "May Jove protect you," when any one sneezed in their presence, and an anxious "God bless you" is the common ejaculation amongst our aged mothers. To the same sources we may probably attribute the apprehensions which many Lancashire people entertain with respect to spilling the salt; sudden silence, or fear; lucky and unlucky days; the presence of thirteen at dinner; raising ghosts; stopping blood by charms; spitting upon, or drawing blood from persons in order to avert danger; the evil eye; and a multitude of other minor superstitions. We possess much of all this in common with the Saxons and the Danes, but the original source of a great, if not the greater portion, is probably that of our earliest conquerors.
Divination by means of the works of Homer and Virgil was not uncommon amongst the ancients; the earlier Christians made use of the Psalter or New Testament for such purposes. In Lancashire the Bible and a key are resorted to, both for deciding doubts respecting a lover, and also to aid in detecting a thief. Divination by water affords another striking parallel. The ancients decided questions in dispute by means of a tumbler of water, into which they lowered a ring suspended by a thread, and having prayed to the gods to decide the question in dispute, the ring of its own accord would strike the tumbler a certain number of times. Our "Lancashire witches" adopt the same means, and follow the Christianized formula, with a wedding-ring suspended by a hair, whenever the time before marriage, the number of a family, or even the length of life, becomes a matter of anxiety.
Most nations, in all ages, have been accustomed to deck the graves of their dead with appropriate flowers, much as we do at present. The last words of the dying have, from the earliest times, been considered of prophetic import; and according to Theocritus, some one of those present endeavoured to receive into his mouth the last breath of a dying parent or friend, "as fancying the soul to pass out with it and enter into their own bodies." Few would expect to find this singular custom still existing in Lancashire; and yet such is the fact. Witchcraft can boast her votaries in this county even up to the present date, and she numbers this practice amongst her rites and ceremonies.
A very large portion of the Lancashire Folk-lore is identical in many respects with that which prevailed amongst the sturdy warriors who founded the Heptarchy, or ruled Northumbria. During the Saxon and Danish periods their heathendom had a real existence. Its practices were maintained by an array of priests and altars, with a prescribed ritual and ceremonies; public worship was performed and oblations offered with all the pomp and power of a church establishment. The remnants of this ancient creed are now presented to us in the form of popular superstitions, in legends and nursery tales, which have survived all attempts to eradicate them from the minds of the people. Christ, his apostles, and the saints, have supplanted the old mythological conceptions; but many popular stories and impious incantations which now involve these sacred names were formerly told of some northern hero, or perhaps invoked the power of Satan himself. The great festival in honour of Eostre may be instanced as having been transferred to the Christian celebration of the resurrection of our Lord; whilst the lighting of fires on St. John's eve, and the bringing in of the boar's head at Christmas, serve to remind us that the worship of Freja is not extinct. When Christianity became the national religion, the rooted prejudices of the people were evidently respected by our early missionaries, and hence the curious admixture of the sacred and the profane, which everywhere presents itself in our local popular forms of expression for the pretended cure of various diseases. The powers and attributes of Woden and Freja are attributed to Jesus, Peter, or Mary; but in all other respects the spells and incantations remain the same.
Our forefathers appear to have possessed a full proportion of those stern characteristics which have ever marked the Northumbrian population. Whatever opinions they had acquired, they were prepared to hold them firmly; nor did they give up their most heathenish practices without a struggle. Both the "law and the testimony" had to be called into requisition as occasion required; and even the terrors of these did not at once suffice. In one of the Anglo-Saxon Penitentiaries, quoted by Mr. Wright in his Essays, we find a penalty imposed upon those women who use "any witchcraft to their children, or who draw them through the earth at the meeting of roads, because that is great heathenishness." A Saxon Homily, preserved in the public library at Cambridge, states that divinations were used, "through the devil's teaching," in taking a wife, in going a journey, in brewing, when beginning any undertaking, when any person or animal is born, and when children begin to pine away or to be unhealthy. The same Homily also speaks of divination by fowls, by sneezing, by horses, by dogs howling, and concludes by declaring that "he is no Christian who does these things." In a Latin Penitentialia now in the British Museum, we find allusions to incantations for taking away stores of milk, honey, or other things belonging to another, and converting them to our own use. He who rides with Diana and obeys her commands, he who prepares three knives in company in order to predestine happiness to those born there, he who makes inquiry into the future on the first day of January, or begins a work on that day in order to secure prosperity during the whole of the year, is pointed out for reprobation; whilst hiding charms in grass, or on a tree, or in a path, for the preservation of cattle, placing children in a furnace, or on the roof of a house, and using characters for curing disease, or charms for collecting medicinal herbs, are enumerated, for the purpose of pointing out the penances to be undergone by those found guilty of "such heinous sins." Nearly all these instances may be said to belong to the transition state of our Folk-lore, and relate at once both to the ancient and the modern portions of our subject. We have seen that much the same practices were used by the Greeks and Romans; and it is a curious fact that many of the more important are still in vogue amongst the peasantry of Lancashire. Many persons will still shudder with apprehension if a dog howl during the sickness of a friend: dragging a child across the earth at "four lane ends" is yet practised for the cure of whooping-cough: fern seed is still said to be gathered on the Holy Bible, and is then believed to be able to render those invisible who will dare to take it. We still have prejudices respecting the first day of the new year; black-haired visitors are most welcome on the morning of that day; charms for the protection of families and cattle are yet to be found; and herbs for the use of man and beast are still collected when their "proper planets are ruling" in the heavens. More copies of Culpepper's Herbal and Sibley's Astrology are sold in Lancashire than all other works on the same subjects put together, and this principally on account of the planetary influence with which each disease and its antidote are connected. Old Moore's Almanac, however, is now sadly at a discount, because it lacks the table of the Moon's signs; the farmers are consequently at a loss to know which will be healthy cattle, and hence they prefer a spurious edition which supplies the grave omission.
Several lucky stones for the protection of cattle have, within a few years past, been procured by the writer from the "shippons" of those who, in other respects, are not counted behind the age; and it would have been easy to collect an ample stock of horse-shoes and rusty sickles from the same sources. However, during the last forty years the inhabitants of Lancashire have made rapid progress both in numbers and intelligence. They have had the "schoolmaster abroad" amongst them, and have consequently divested themselves of many of the grosser superstitions which formed a portion of the popular faith of their immediate predecessors; but there is yet a dense substratum of popular opinions existing in those localities which have escaped the renovating influences of the spindle or the rail. As time progresses many of these will become further modified, or perhaps totally disappear; and hence it may be desirable to secure a permanent record of the customs and superstitions of the county.
As to the most ancient forms of religious belief or cult, we may surely assume that the simple must of necessity precede the complex, and consequently the idea of one supernatural Being must be anterior in point of time to that of two or more. Under this view, the good and the evil principles would form the second stage of development—a necessary consequence of increased observation—and, accordingly, we find the Great Spirit and his Adversary among the prevailing notions of some of the least civilized communities. A gradual progression from one to many gods appears to have been the natural process by which all known mythologies have been formed. The tendency of observation to multiply causes, real or ideal, and to personify ideas, may be ranked as one of the tendencies of unassisted human nature; and the operation of this natural force must have been equally efficient at all times and in all countries. In the early stages of social improvement, man would be very forcibly affected by natural phenomena. The regular succession of day and night—the order of the seasons—the heat of summer—the cold of winter—storms and tempests on sea and land—the sensations of pleasure and pain, hope and fear—would each impress him with ideas of effects for which he could assign no adequate causes; but having become susceptible of supernatural influences, the addition of imaginary beings to his mythology would keep pace with his experience, until every portion of the heavens, the earth, and the sea, was peopled with, and presided over, by its respective deity or demi-god. Thus it was that the rolling thunder and the "lightning's vivid flash" suggested the idea of a Jupiter grasping his destructive bolts, or of a Thor wielding his ponderous hammer. The "raging tempest" and the "boiling surge" gave birth to a Neptune or Njörd, each endowed with attributes suited to the aspects of the locality where the observations were made, and specially adapted to the intellectual condition of the community which first deified the conception. As society progressed in civilization, so did the study of philosophy and religion. The poets and the priests, however, did not entrust their speculations to the judgment of the people; they were too sensible of the power which secrecy conferred upon their occult pursuits, and hence they allegorized their conceptions of supernatural agencies, and also their ideas of the ordinary operations of nature and art. The elements were spoken of as persons, and the changes which these underwent were regarded as the actions of individuals; and these in the lapse of ages, by losing their esoteric meaning, came to be considered as realities, and so passed into the popular belief. This is eminently the case with the northern mythology, respecting which we are at present more particularly concerned; for by far the greater portion of these highly poetical, though rugged myths, admit of a very plausible and rational explanation on astronomical and physical principles.[1] Whether this was equally the case with the Greek and Roman mythologies is now, perhaps, more difficult to determine. Enough, however, remains in the etymology of the names to prove that both these and the northern systems had much in common. The fundamental conceptions of each possess the same leading characteristics; and both are probably due to the conquering tribes who migrated into Europe from the fertile plains of Central Asia.[2]