If it be remembered that less than fifty years ago Dr. Belon [163]
thought it desirable to anatomise gold fishes, and prove in various ways that it is a fallacy to suppose they feed on pure gold (as many a peasant near Lyons declares of the laurets sold daily in the market), it will hardly be thought wonderful that perilous visions of precious things were seen by early fishermen in pellucid depths, and that these should at last be regarded as seductive arts of Lorelei, who have given many lakes and rivers the reputation of requiring one or more annual victims.
Possibly it was through acc.u.mulation of many dreams about beautiful realms beneath the sea or above the clouds that suicide became among the Norse folk so common. It was a proverb that the worst end was to die in bed, and to die by suicide was to be like Egil, and Omund, and King Hake, like nearly all the heroes who so pa.s.sed to Valhalla. The Northman had no doubt concerning the paradise to which he was going, and did not wish to reach it enfeebled by age. But the time would come when the earth and human affection must a.s.sert their claims, and the watery tribes be pictured as cruel devourers of the living. Even so would the wood-nymphs and mountain-nymphs be degraded, and fearful legends of those lost and wandering in dark forests be repeated to shuddering childhood. The actual dangers would mask themselves in the endless disguises of illusion, the wold and wave be peopled with cruel and treacherous seducers. Thus suicide might gradually lose its charms, and a dismal underworld of heartless gnomes replace the grottoes and fairies.
We may close this chapter with a Scottish legend relating to the "Shi"ichs," or Men of Peace, in which there is a strange intimation of a human mind dreaming that it dreams, and so far on its way to waking. A woman was carried away by these shadowy beings in order that she might suckle her child which they had previously stolen. During her retention she once observed the Shi"ichs anointing their eyes from a caldron, and seizing an opportunity, she managed to anoint one of her own eyes with the ointment. With that one eye she now saw the secret abode and all in it "as they really were." The deceptive splendour had vanished. The gaudy ornaments of a fairy grot had become the naked walls of a gloomy cavern. When this woman had returned to live among human beings again, her anointed eye saw much that others saw not; among other things she once saw a "man of peace," invisible to others, and asked him about her child. Astonished at being recognised, he demanded how she had been able to discover him; and when she had confessed, he spit in her eye and extinguished it for ever.
CHAPTER X.
DARKNESS.
Shadows--Night Deities--Kobolds--Walpurgisnacht--Night as Abettor of Evil-doers--Nightmare--Dreams--Invisible Foes--Jacob and his Phantom--Nott--The Prince of Darkness--The Brood of Midnight--Second-Sight--Spectres of Souter Fell--The Moonshine Vampyre--Glamour--Glam and Grettir--A Story of Dartmoor.
From the little night which clings to man even by day--his own shadow--to the world"s great shade of darkness, innumerable are the coverts from which have emerged the black procession of phantoms which have haunted the slumbers of the world, and betrayed the enterprise of man.
How strange to the first man seemed that shadow walking beside him, from the time when he saw it as a ghost tracking its steps and giving him his name for a ghost, on to the period in which it seemed the emanation of an occult power, as to them who brought their sick into the streets to be healed by the pa.s.sing shadow of Peter; and still on to the day when Beaumont wrote--
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill, Our fatal shadows that walk by us still;
or that in which Goethe found therein the mystical symbol of the inward arrest of our moral development, and said "No man can jump off of his shadow." And then from the culture of Europe we pa.s.s to the Feejee-Islanders, and find them believing that every man has two spirits. One is his shadow, which goes to Hades; the other is his image as reflected in water, and it is supposed to stay near the place where the man dies. [164] But, like the giants of the Brocken, these demons of the Shadow are trembled at long after they are known to be the tremblers themselves mirrored on air. Have we not priests in England still fostering the belief that the baptized child goes attended by a white spirit, the unbaptized by a dark one? Why then need we apologise for the Fijians?
But little need be said here of demons of the Dark, for they are closely related to the phantasms of Delusion, of Winter, and others already described. Yet have they distinctive characters. As many as were the sunbeams were the shadows; every G.o.ddess of the Dawn (Ushas) cast her shadow; every Day was swallowed up by Night. This is the cavern where hide the treacherous Panis (fog) in Vedic mythology, they who steal and hide Indra"s cows; this is the realm of Hades (the invisible); this is the cavern of the hag Thokk (dark) in Scandinavian mythology,--she who alone of all in the universe refused to weep for Baldur when he was shut up in Helheim, where he had been sent by the dart of his blind brother Hodr (darkness). In the cavern of Night sleep the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, and Barbarossa, and all slumbering phantoms whose genius is the night-winged raven. Thorr, the Norse Hercules, once tried to lift a cat--as it seemed to him--from the ground; but it was the great mid-earth serpent which encircles the whole earth. Impossible feat as it was for Thorr--who got only one paw of the seeming cat off the ground--in that gla.s.sless and gasless era, invention has accomplished much in that direction; but the black Cat is still domiciled securely among idols of the mental cave.
There is an Anglo-Saxon word, cof-G.o.das (lit. cove-G.o.ds), employed as the equivalent of the Latin lares (the Penates, too, are interpreted as cof-G.o.du, cofa signifying the inner recess of a house, penetrale). The word in German corresponding to this cofa, is koben; and from this Hildebrand conjectures kob-old to be derived. The latter part of the word he supposes to be walt (one who "presides over," e.g., Walter); so that the original form would be kob-walt. [165] Here, then, in the recesses of the household, among the least enlightened of its members--the menials, who still often neutralise the efforts of rational people to dispel the delusions of their children--the discredited deities and demons of the past found refuge, and through a little baptismal change of names are familiars of millions unto this day. In the words of the ancient Hebrew, "they lay in their own houses prisoners of darkness, fettered with the bonds of a long night." "No power of the fire might give them light, neither could the bright flames of the stars lighten that horrible night." [166]
Well is it added, "Fear is nothing else but a betraying of the succours which reason offereth," a truth which finds ample ill.u.s.tration in the Kobolds. These imaginary beings were naturally a.s.sociated with the dark recesses of mines. There they gave the name to our metal Cobalt. The value of Cobalt was not understood until the 17th century, and the metal was first obtained by the Swedish chemist Brandt in 1733. The miners had believed that the silver was stolen away by Kobolds, and these "worthless" ores left in its place. Nickel had the like history, and is named after Old Nick. So long did those Beauties slumber in the cavern of Ignorance till Science kissed them with its sunbeam, and led them forth to decorate the world!
How pa.s.sed this (mental) cave-dweller even amid the upper splendours and vastnesses of his unlit world? A Faust guided by his Mephistopheles only amid interminable Hartz labyrinths.
How sadly rises, incomplete and ruddy, The moon"s lone disk, with its belated glow, And lights so dimly, that, as one advances, At every step one strikes a rock or tree!
Let us then use a Jack-o"-lantern"s glances: I see one yonder, burning merrily.
Ho, there! my friend! I"ll levy thine attendance: Why waste so vainly thy resplendence?
Be kind enough to light us up the steep!
Tell me, if we still are standing, Or if further we"re ascending?
All is turning, whirling, blending, Trees and rocks with grinning faces, Wandering lights that spin in mazes, Still increasing and expanding. [167]
It could only have been at a comparatively late period of social development that Sancho"s benediction on the inventor of sleep could have found general response. The Red Indian found its helplessness fatal when the "Nick of the Woods" was abroad; the Scotch sailor found in it a demon"s opiate when the "Nigg of the Sea" was gathering his storms above the sleeping watchman. It was among the problems of Job, the cooperation of darkness with evil-doers.
The eye of the adulterer waiteth for the twilight; He saith, No eye will see me, And putteth a mask upon his face.
In the dark men break into houses; In the day-time they shut themselves up; They are strangers to the light.
The morning to them is the shadow of death; They are familiar with the dark terrors of midnight.
Besides this fact that the night befriends and masks every treacherous foe, it is also to be remembered that man is weakest at night. Not only is he weaker than by day in the veil drawn over his senses, but physiologically also. When the body is wearied out by the toils or combats of the day, and the mind haunted by dreams of danger, there are present all the terrors which Byron portrays around the restless pillow of Sardanapalus. The war-horse of the day becomes a night-mare in the darkness. In the Heimskringla it is recorded: "Vanland, Svegdir"s son, succeeded his father and ruled over the Upsal domain. He was a great warrior, and went far around in different lands. Once he took up his winter abode in Finland with Snio the Old, and got his daughter Drisa in marriage; but in spring he set out leaving Drisa behind, and although he had promised to return within three years he did not come back for ten. Then Drisa sent a message to the witch Hulda; and sent Visbur, her son by Vanland, to Sweden. Drisa bribed the witch-wife Hulda, either that she should bewitch Vanland to return to Finland or kill him. When this witch-work was going on Vanland was at Upsal, and a great desire came over him to go to Finland, but his friends and counsellors advised him against it, and said the witchcraft of the Fin people showed itself in this desire of his to go there. He then became very drowsy, and laid himself down to sleep; but when he had slept but a little while he cried out, saying, "Mara was treading on him." His men hastened to help him; but when they took hold of his head she trod on his legs, and when they laid hold of his legs she pressed upon his head; and it was his death." [168]
This witch is, no doubt, Hildur, a Walkyr of the Edda, leading heroes to Walhalla. Indeed, in Westphalia, nightmare is called Walriderske. It is a curious fact that "Mara" should be preserved in the French word for nightmare, Cauche-mar, "cauche" being from Latin calcare, to tread. Through Teutonic folklore this Night-demon of many names, having floated from England in a sieve paddled with cow-ribs, rides to the distress of an increasingly unheroic part of the population. Nearly always still the "Mahrt" is said to be a pretty woman,--sometimes, indeed, a sweetheart is involuntarily transformed to one,--every rustic settlement abounding with tales of how the demoness has been captured by stopping the keyhole, calling the ridden sleeper by his baptismal name, and making the sign of the cross; by such process the wicked beauty appears in human form, and is apt to marry the sleeper, with usually evil results. The fondness of cats for getting on the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of sleepers, or near their breath, for warmth, has made that animal a common form of the "Mahrt." Sometimes it is a black fly with red ring around its neck. This demoness is believed to suffer more pain than it inflicts, and vainly endeavours to destroy herself.
In savage and nomadic times sound sleep being an element of danger, the security which required men to sleep on their arms demanded also that they should sleep as it were with one eye open. Thus there might have arisen both the intense vividness which demons acquired by blending subjective and objective impressions, and the curious inability, so frequent among barbarians and not unknown among the men civilised, to distinguish dream from fact. The habit of day-dreaming seems, indeed, more general than is usually supposed. Dreams haunt all the region of our intellectual twilight,--the borderland of mystery, where rise the sources of the occult and the mystical which environ our lives. The daily terrors of barbarous life avail to haunt the nerves of civilised people, now many generations after they have pa.s.sed away, with special and irrational shudders at certain objects or noises: how then must they have haunted the dreams of humanity when, like the daughter of Nathan the Wise, rescued from flames, it pa.s.sed the intervals of strife
With nerves unstrung through fear, And fire and flame in all she sees or fancies; Her soul awake in sleep, asleep when wide awake?
Among the sources of demoniac beliefs few indeed are more prolific than Dreams. "The witchcraft of sleep," says Emerson, "divides with truth the empire of our lives. This soft enchantress visits two children lying locked in each other"s arms, and carries them asunder by wide spans of land and sea, wide intervals of time. "Tis superfluous to think of the dreams of mult.i.tudes; the astonishment remains that one should dream; that we should resign so quietly this deifying reason and become the theatre of delusions, shows, wherein time, s.p.a.ce, persons, cities, animals, should dance before us in merry and mad confusion, a delicate creation outdoing the prime and flower of actual nature, antic comedy alternating with horrid spectres. Or we seem busied for hours and days in peregrinations over seas and lands, in earnest dialogues, strenuous actions for nothings and absurdities, cheated by spectral jokes, and waking suddenly with ghostly laughter, to be rebuked by the cold lonely silent midnight, and to rake with confusion in memory among the gibbering nonsense to find the motive of this contemptible cachinnation." [169]
It has always been the worst of periods of religious excitement that they shape the dreams of old and young, and find there a fearful and distorted, but vivid and realistic, embodiment of their feverish experiences. In the days of witchcraft thousands visited the Witches"
Sabbaths, as they believed and danced in the Walpurgis orgies, borne (by hereditary orthodox canon) on their own brooms up their own chimneys; and to-day, by the same morbid imaginations, the victims are able to see themselves or others elongated, levitated, floating through the air. If people only knew how few are ever really wide-awake, these spiritual nightmares would soon reach their termination. The natural terrors before which helpless man once cowered, have been prolonged past all his real victories over his demons by a succession of such nightmares, so that the vulgar religion might be portrayed somewhat as Richard Wagner described his first tragedy, in which, having killed off forty-two of his characters, he had to bring them back as ghosts to carry on the fifth act!
The perils of darkness, as ambush of foes human and animal, concealer of pitfalls, misguider of footsteps, misdirector of aims, were more real than men can well imagine in an age of gaslight plus the policeman. The myth of Joshua commanding the sun to stand still; the cry of Ajax when darkness fell on the combat, "Grant me but to see!" refer us to the region from which come all childish shudders at going into the dark. The limit of human courage is reached where its foe is beyond the reach of its force. Fighting in the dark may even be suicidal. A German fable of blindfold zeal--the awakened sleeper demolishing his furniture and knocking out his own teeth in the attempt to punish cats--has its tragical ill.u.s.trations also. But none of these actual dangers have been of more real evil to man than the demonisation of them. This rendered his very skill a blunder, his energy weakness. If it was bad to retreat in the dusk from an innocent bush into an unrecognised well, it was worse to meet the ghost with rune or crucifix and find it an a.s.sa.s.sin. When man fights with his shadow, he instantly makes it the demon he fears; ghoul-like it preys upon his paralysed strength, vampyre-like it sucks his blood, and he is consigned disarmed to the evil that is no shadow. The Scottish Sinclair marching through Norway, in the 16th century, owes his monument at Wiblungen rather to the magpie believed to precede him as a spy, with night and day upon its wings, than to his own prowess or power.
In a sense all demons, whatever their shapes, are the ancient brood of night. Mental darkness, even more moral darkness within, supply the phantasmagoria in which unknown things shape themselves as demons. Esau is already reconciled, but guilty Jacob must still wrestle with him as a phantom of Fear till daybreak. A work has already been written on "The Night-side of Nature," but it would require many volumes to tell the story of what monsters have been conjured out of the kind protecting darkness. How great is the darkness which man makes for himself out of the imagination which should be his light and vision! Much of the so-called "religion" of our time is but elaborate demoniculture and artificial preservation of mental Walpurgis-nights. Nott (Night) says the Edda rides first on her horse called Hrimfaxi (frost-maned), which every morning as he ends his course bedews the earth with the foam that falls from his bit. Though the horse of Day--Skinfaxi, or Shining-mane--follows hard after her, yet the foam is by no means drunk up by his fires. Foam of the old phantasms still lingers in our mediaeval liturgies, and even falls afresh where the daylight is shut out that altar-candles may burn, or for other dark seances are prepared the conditions necessary for whatsoever loves not the light.
What we call the Dark Ages were indeed spiritually a perpetual seance with lights lowered. Nay, human superst.i.tion was able to turn the very moon and stars into mere bluish night-tapers, giving just light enough to make the darkness visible in fantastic shapes fluttering around the Prince of Darkness,--or Non-existence in Chief! How much of the theosophic speculation of our time is the mere artificial conservation of that darkness? How much that still flits bat-winged from universities, will, in the future, be read with the same wonder as that with which even the more respectable bats can now read account of the midnight brood which now for the most part sleep tranquilly in such books as Burton"s "Anatomy of Melancholy"? "There are," he says, "certain spirits which Miraldus calls Ambulones, that walk about midnight on great heaths and desert places, which (saith Lavater) draw men out of their way, and lead them all night by a byway, or quite bar them of their way. These have several names in several places. We commonly call them Pucks. In the deserts of Lop, in Asia, such illusions of walking spirits are often perceived, as you may read in M. Paulus, the Venetian, his travels. If one lose his company by chance, these devils will call him by his name, and counterfeit voices of his companions to seduce him. Lavater and Cicogna have a variety of examples of spirits and walking devils in this kind. Sometimes they sit by the wayside to give men falls, and make their horses stumble and start as they ride (according to the narration of that holy man Ketellus in Nubrigensis, that had an especial grace to see devils); and if a man curse and spur his horse for stumbling, they do heartily rejoice at it."
While observing a spirited and imaginative picture by Macallum of the Siege of Jerusalem, it much interested me to observe the greater or less ease with which other visitors discovered the portents in the air which, following the narrative of Josephus, the artist had vaguely portrayed. The chariots and hors.e.m.e.n said to have been seen before that event were here faintly blent with indefinite outlines of clouds; and while some of the artist"s friends saw them with a distinctness greater, perhaps, than that with which they impressed the eye of the artist himself, others could hardly be made to see anything except shapeless vapour, though of course they all agreed that they were there and remarkably fine.
It would seem that thus, in a London studio, there were present all the mental pigments for frescoing the air and sky with those visions of aerial armies or huntsmen which have become so normal in history as to be, in a subjective sense, natural. In the year 1763, an author, styling himself Theophilus Insula.n.u.s, published at Edinburgh a book on Second-Sight, in which he related more than a hundred instances of the power he believed to exist of seeing events before they had occurred, and whilst, of course, they did not exist. It is not difficult in reading them to see that they are all substantially one and the same story, and that the sight in operation was indeed second; for man or woman, at once imaginative and illiterate, have a second and supernumerary pair of eyes inherited from the traditional superst.i.tions and ghost stories which fill all the air they breathe from the cradle to the grave. While the mind is in this condition, that same nature whose apparitions and illusions originally evoked and fostered the glamoury, still moves on with her minglings of light and shade, cloud and mirage, giving no word of explanation. There are never wanting the shadowy forms without that cast their shuttles to the dark idols of the mental cave, together weaving subtle spells round the half-waking mind.
In the year 1743 all the North of England and Scotland was in alarm on account of some spectres which were seen on the mountain of Souter Fell in c.u.mberland. The mountain is about half-a-mile high. On a summer evening a farmer and his servant, looking from Wilton Hall, half a mile off, saw the figures of a man and a dog pursuing some horses along the mountain-side, which is very steep; and on the following morning they repaired to the place, expecting to find dead bodies, but finding none. About one year later a troop of hors.e.m.e.n were seen riding along the same mountain-side by one of the same persons, the servant, who then called others who also saw the aerial troopers. After a year had elapsed the above vision was attested before a magistrate by two of those who saw it. The event occurred on the eve of the Rebellion, when hors.e.m.e.n were exercising, and when also the popular mind along the Border may be supposed to have been in a highly excited condition.
What was seen on this strongly-authenticated occasion? Was anything seen? None can tell. It is open to us to believe that there may have been some play of mirage. As there are purely aerial echoes, so are there aerial reflectors for the eye. On the other hand, the vision so nearly resembles the spectral processions which have pa.s.sed through the mythology of the world, that we can never be sure that it was not the troop of King Arthur, emerging from Avallon to announce the approaching strife. A few fleecy, strangely-shaped clouds, chasing each other along the hillside in the evening"s dusk would have amply sufficed to create the latter vision, and the danger of the time would easily have supplied all the Second-Sight required to reveal it to considerable numbers. In questions of this kind a very small circ.u.mstance--a phrase, a name, perhaps--may turn the balance of probabilities. Thus it may be noted that, in the instance just related, the vision was seen on the steep side of Souter Fell. Fell means a hill or a steep rock, as in Drachenfels. But as to Souter, although, as Mr. Robert Ferguson says, the word may originally have meant sheep, [170] it is found in Scotland used as "shoemaker"
in connection with the fabulous giants of that region. Sir Thomas Urquhart, in the seventeenth century, relates it as the tradition of the two promontories of Cromarty, called "Soutars," that they were the work-stools of two giants who supplied their comrades with shoes and buskins. Possessing but one set of implements, they used to fling these to each other across the opening of the firth, where the promontories are only two miles apart. In process of time the name Soutar, shoemaker, was bequeathed by the craftsmen to their stools. It is not improbable that the name gradually connected itself with other places bearing traditions connecting them with the fabulous race, and that in this way the Souter Fell, from meaning in early times much the same as Giants" Hill, preserved even in 1743-44 enough of the earlier uncanny a.s.sociations to awaken the awe of Borderers in a time of rebellion. The vision may therefore have been seen by light which had journeyed all the way from the mythologic heavens of ancient India: substantially subjective--such stuff as dreams and dreamers are made of--no doubt there were outer clouds, shapes and afterglows enough, even in the absence of any fata morgana to supply canvas and pigment to the cunning artist that hides in the eye.
In an old tale, the often-slain Vampyre-bat only requests, with pathos, that his body may be laid where no sunlight, but only the moonlight, will fall on it--only that! But it is under the moonshine that it always gains new life. No demon requires absolute darkness, but half-darkness, in which to live: enough light to disclose a Somewhat, but not enough to define and reveal its nature, is just what has been required for the bat-eyes of fable and phantasy, which can make vampyre of a sparrow or giant out of a windmill.
Glamour! A marvellous history has this word of the artists and poets,--sometimes meaning the charm with which the eye invests any object; or, in Wordsworth"s phrase, "the light that never was on land or sea." But no artist or poet ever rose to the full height of the simple term itself, which well ill.u.s.trates Emerson"s saying, "Words are fossil poetry." Professor Cowell of Cambridge says: "Glam, or in the nominative Glamr, is also a poetical name for the Moon. It does not actually occur in the ancient literature, but it is given in the glossary in the Prose Edda in the list of the very old words for the Moon." Vigfusson in his dictionary says, "The word is interesting on account of its ident.i.ty with Scot. Glamour, which shows that the tale of Glam was common to Scotland and Iceland, and this much older than Grettir (in the year 1014)." The Ghost or Goblin Glam seems evidently to have arisen from a personification of the delusive and treacherous effects of moonlight on the benighted traveller,
Quale per incertam lunam sub luce maligna, Est iter in sylvis.
Now, there is a curious old Sanskrit word, glau or glav, which is explained in all the old native lexicons as meaning "the moon." It might either be taken as "waning," or in a casual sense "obscuring."
The following lines from an early mediaeval poet, Bhasa (seventh century), will ill.u.s.trate the deceptive character of moonlight from a Hindu point of view. The strong and wild Norse imagination delights in what is terrible and gloomy: the Hindu loves to dwell on the milder and quieter aspects of human life.
"The cat laps the moonbeams in the bowl of water, thinking them to be milk: the elephant thinks that the moonbeams, threaded through the intervals of the trees, are the fibres of the lotus-stalk. The woman s.n.a.t.c.hes at the moonbeams as they lie on the bed, taking them for her muslin garment: oh, how the moon, intoxicated with radiance, bewilders all the world!"