The Philosophy of Mystery

by Walter Cooper Dendy

Astr. Methinks you claim too much homage from our courtesy to your philosophy, Evelyn. Can we believe that all these wondrous forms and shadows are but an illusion of the eye, or of the mind’s eye? And, if I grant this truth in regard to the eye of one mind, can we so easily libel the evidence of a multitude, to whom the world of shadows is unlocked?

We are now wandering in the very land of omens; and will this cold philosophy of thine presume to draw aside the veil of mystery, which hangs over the mountain and the cataract of yon wild principality?

E’en now the legends of many climes crowd on my memory; and, while this purple cloud is o’er the sun, listen, I pr’ythee, to the traditions which I have gathered; muse on the sequences of these strange appearances, and you will at length confess, with the Benedictine Calmet—“Realité des apparitions est prouvée par l’événement des choses prédites.”

The Tan-we or Tan-wed are streams of lucid fire, rolling along the lands of a freeholder, who, warned of his coming fate, immediately makes his will, and shortly after dies.

Among the gloomy gorges of Preselle, in Pembrokeshire, comes dancing on that blue wild-fire the “Canwyl y Cyrph,” or “Corpse-candle.” As the shades of evening are approaching, the spectre of the doomed comes flitting before us, with a lighted taper in its hand, and with a solemn step halts not until it rests on its destined grave, in the church-yard ground. If dignities and fortune have been the earthly lot of this doomed mortal, then is there shadowed forth an awful pageantry of hearse and ghostly steeds, and mute mourners, all gliding away to the place of the tomb, and, like the phantoms of the Aensprecker, in Holland, (a funeral procession of no less fatality,) they foretell the doom of some ill-fated friend.

Among the dingles of the Bachwy, in Radnorshire, amid scenery of wild and lonely beauty, a few rugged stones denote the site of an ancient castle of a Welsh prince; it is the ruin of the “Black Rock.” The opposing masses of this eternal rock, tapestried with deep green moss and lichen, fold in upon the stream directly over its matchless cataract, which falls abruptly from the upper to the lower valley into this gloomy gorge; the sunbeam playing on the upper ledge of the waterfall, while its deep basin is shrouded in Stygian darkness. Into this gulph it was the pleasure of the prince to hurl from his castle walls, those whom fate had made his prisoners. Often since the era of these cruelties, (as I learned from the oral legends of the peasants,) before a death, a strange unearthly groaning is heard, the “Kyhirraeth,” becoming fainter and fainter until the last gasp of the mortal whose doom it forebodes.

There is the dead-bell, which the Scottish peasants believe to foretell the death of a friend; and the death-cart of Lancashire, which is heard rattling along the streets like a whirlwind; and the Owke Mouraske, a demon of Norway, which never enters a house but some one of the family dies within the year. We are assured also by the Saxon, Cranmer, that ere one of the electoral house of Brandenburgh dies, a woman in white appears to many throughout the dominions of Prussia.

The wild mountains that surround us are prolific in the “Anderyn y Corff,” or “Corpse-bird,” and the “Cwm Amon,” or “Dogs of Hell,” which are believed to be demons of death, in the shape of hounds, and, like the mongrel of Faust, marked by a train of fire. These howl forth their awful warning, while the death-peal rings in the ears of the nearest kin of one about to die.

There is the legend of the “Ellyllon,” a prototype of the Scotch and Irish “Banshie,” which appears as an old crone, with streaming hair and a coat of blue, with her boding scream of death. The “Gwrach y Rhibyn,” or “Hag of the Dribble,” whose pastime is to carry stones in her apron across the mountains, and then to loosen her apron-string, and by the shower of stones to make a “dribble.” This hag, at twilight, flaps her raven wing against the chamber window of a doomed creature, and, with a howl, cries out, “A a a ui ui Anni.”

In the wilderness of Zin, which stretches between Palestine and the Red Sea, both the Bedouin Arab and the traveller are greeted by the sound of matin bells, like the convent peal which calls the nuns to their devotion; and this, according to tradition, has been heard ever since the crusades.