After leaving Aix-la-Chapelle, I had stopped at Cologne, on the left bank of the Rhine, which I then found completely covered with several rows of women, a countless and charming multitude....
“Adorned with flowers or aromatic herbs, the sleeves pushed up above the elbow, they dipped their soft white hands and arms into the river, murmuring certain mysterious words which I could not understand.
“I questioned some people. They told me it was an ancient custom of the country. Thanks to these ablutions and certain prayers which accompanied them, the river carried down with it all the diseases, which would otherwise have attacked them during the coming year. I answered, smilingly: ‘How happy the people of the Rhine must be if the kind river thus takes all their sufferings to distant countries! The Po or the Tiber have never been able to do as much for us.’”
These are the words which Petrarch wrote in one of his familiar letters, written on St. John’s Eve.
This letter, as precious by its date as by its contents, proves beyond all question, that in the fourteenth century the Rhine was popularly worshipped and adored on the very days on which the summer solstice is celebrated by bonfires after the manner of the old fire worshippers.
Unfortunately the Christians ended by appealing to the elements, to Fire or Water, as to a judicial authority.
The popular notion that the elements were perfectly pure and would hence instinctively reject every impure substance, led naturally to ordeals by water. The accused was undressed; his hands and feet were tied crosswise, the right hand to the left foot and the right foot to the left hand, and thus bound he was thrown into a river or any watercourse that was deep enough. If he floated, he was guilty and instantly burnt; if he sank and remained for some time at the bottom of the water, he was considered innocent—but he was drowned.
Heinrich Heine, at least, tells us that this was the infallible result of justice in the Middle Ages, and the Middle Ages ended in Germany but yesterday.
There was also a trial by bread and cheese (exorcismus panis hordeacei, vel casei, ad probationem veri), but bread and cheese are not elements. Let us return to the elementary spirits of Water.
During the great religious reaction which took place after the days of Charlemagne, all the mythological gods of rivers and streams had gradually returned, more or less successfully, to their former occupations. The great Nix or Nichus, upon whom devolved the rule over all the rivers of Germany, was no other than the ancient Niord, a very important deity and a kind of Northern Neptune. This very weighty discovery is due to the learned Mallet.