Part 14

But he appears in other forms. A favourite is that of a horse, sometimes described as with hoofs reversed. At Bohuus in West Gothland he was caught by means of a cunningly contrived halter, from which he could not break loose. His captor kept him all the spring and made him plough his fields. Only when once the halter accidentally slipped off was the Neck able to escape this {166} slavery. He sprang like lightning into the water, dragging the harrow after him. The Neck also causes disease. His appearance forbodes tempest. He haunts wells and must be propitiated with offerings, or measures must be taken to render him innocuous.[166.1]

Without pausing to analyse the complex character assigned to the Neck, it will be abundantly clear that he belongs to the same category as the foregoing, and may be subdued by similar means. To fetch parallels to the spirit of the Jabbok from Scotland and Sweden may be thought going far afield. It is going no farther than Dr Frazer himself goes for examples of the custom of propitiating river-spirits. The protest often uttered by cautious anthropologists against those who would cast the net so widely has its reason. When we are dealing with customs it is well to remember that customs superficially alike may spring from quite different social organizations, and their real intentions may be divergent or even opposite: in short, they may have nothing in common but external resemblance. They cannot be understood without taking into account the sequences of which they are often part, and the social organization and cultural condition from which they spring. It is otherwise when those great products of human imagination that animate the world about us are concerned. The personalities believed to haunt mountain and stream, air and water, heaven and earth, are elemental conceptions, the inevitable offspring of the human mind in its intercourse with nature. Analogies discovered between them are real analogies; they are the proofs of the essential oneness of mankind in the snow-hut of an arctic winter and the tree-shelter of a tropical forest. And when we find the relations believed to exist between such personalities {167} and human beings, the need of their conciliation or coercion in order to obtain benefits for their human worshipper or antagonist, and the means taken for this purpose, the same, with only such variations as may be accounted for by differences of environment, then we may with confidence appeal to them as mutually illustrative.

For these reasons it would appear that we must regard such tales as those of the kelpie and the water-bull of Scotland and the Isle of Man, or the Neck of Sweden, as illuminating the legend of Jacob’s struggle at the ford of the Jabbok. Professor Frazer rightly adduces as in some degree analogous the story of Menelaus catching the shy sea-god Proteus sleeping on the sands, and compelling him to say his sooth, as Jacob compels the angel to pronounce a blessing, and that of Peleus catching and conquering the sea-goddess Thetis to be his bride. Here we are reminded of a cycle of traditions found all over the world, and known as the Swan-maiden cycle. The heroine of the tale is a supernatural being, usually in the form of a bird which casts its feathers like a robe and becomes human. The hero, possessing himself of the robe, acquires power over her and makes her his wife, only to lose her again when she recovers it. As told in Scotland and the adjacent isles, in the Faeroe Islands and Iceland, the lady is a seal.[167.1] It may be doubtful whether Thetis was ever so represented; but it is certainly most suggestive that Proteus was discovered sleeping among the seals. For it is not only for matrimonial purposes that these supernatural beings are caught in modern _märchen_. In a Tamil tale the hero {168} steals the dress of one of a band of divine maidens, and thereby compels her to bring him a certain divine parijata, or flower of the coral tree, which was demanded by another lady as the price of her hand.[168.1] In the Spanish tale of The Marquis of the Sun, the Marquis is a great gamester. A man who played with him lost all he had, and then staked his soul and lost it. To get it back he was advised to watch on the banks of a river. Three princesses would come in the guise of doves, cast their feathers and bathe. He was to take the dress of the smallest and thus compel her to show him the road to the Marquis her father’s castle.[168.2] It is true that both these adventures do result in the hero’s union with the bird-maiden. Such union is, however, incidental. In a Samoyed Swan-maiden story the heroine, captured in the usual way, flings the hearts of herself and her husband, as well as of other members of his family, into the air; and their owners in consequence remain neither living nor dead. The husband’s father’s sister goes in search of the hearts to the lake where the bride was captured, and finds her six sisters there swimming as before. She takes possession of the clothes of one of them, and thus compels her to restore the hearts of her relatives.[168.3] So the hero of a tale told by a tribe on Vancouver Island is sent in search of his daughter, who has eloped with a wolf. He sees a number of young wolves playing at ball, having laid aside their mantles. He sets himself down beside the mantles, and in this way putting their owners to shame at being found naked, compels them to bring him to his son-in-law’s abode.[168.4] The mantles are obviously the wolf-skins, laid aside to enable their owners to appear in human form.

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Wolves are of course not water-spirits, like swans or seals; but they obey the same law as that imagined for the latter. The man who seizes something which is at once the symbol of their supernatural character and the source of their power, renders them helpless and compels them to his will. The contest is in these cases one of trickery and determination, rather than of strength. The captures of Proteus and of Thetis, however, seem to have been effected by main force and a wrestler’s skill. This is often the case with the capture of mermaids in the west of Europe. Hugh Miller long ago translated into literature a local legend of Cromarty which told how John Reid captured on the shores of the Firth a mermaid, from whom he extracted as a ransom the grant of three wishes, including prosperity and union with the maiden of his choice.[169.1] Mermaid-stories thus agree with kelpie-stories and with those of Proteus and the spirit of the Jabbok in assigning victory to the strength and skill of the human wrestler.

Water-spirits are not the only supernatural beings with whom men are represented in story as matching themselves. The Lushei clans of Assam believe in various demons that inhabit hills, streams and trees. They are called Huai, those inhabiting the water being known as Tui-huai, and those residing on the land as Rām-huai. A certain sacrifice, generally of a big sow, is offered to the Rām-huai. It is called Sakhua. One night, towards morning, it is related, a Rām-huai appeared to a man who had unwittingly neglected his Sakhua sacrifice. It came into the straw where he was sleeping and wrestled with him until daylight. Even then it followed him and wrestled with him again; nor does the man seem to have been loth. At last he conquered the Rām-huai, {170} who then told him that his Sakhua sacrifice was over-due; and he performed it at once. Sometimes the Rām-huai appears as a tiger and sometimes as a man. On this occasion he seems to have been in human form.[170.1]

Yet even in such a contest the skill displayed may be much more than a trick of _jiu-jitsu_. An example or two will suffice. In the Wild Huntsman of Teutonic lands anthropologists agree in recognizing traditions of the god Woden. He is well known to the German rustic as Wod. A tale from Mecklenburg represents a peasant as encountering him one dark night in the form of a tall man on a white horse. The peasant accepts the stranger’s challenge to pull against him, and grasps one end of a heavy chain, while the stranger ascends into the clouds with the other end. The peasant knows that, if he lose, he is himself lost. He quickly twists the end around a stalwart oak, and the Huntsman tugs in vain. A second and a third time the contest is renewed, after he has persuaded the stranger that he is holding the chain, and it is only his own strength that is being put forth. The oak-tree creaks and crackles to its roots, but finally holds its ground. Wod owns himself vanquished, and rewards his courageous antagonist with a share of his game--a haunch of venison, which turns to a rich booty of gold and silver ere he reaches home.[170.2] We are indebted to Ovid for another example. He tells us how Numa by the advice of Egeria entrapped Picus and Faunus, two ancient rustic deities who were wont to drink of a certain stream. The king tempted them by means of wine placed beside the fountain; and when they had fallen into the slumber of intoxication he issued from his ambush and put them in chains. As the price of freedom he compelled them to bring down Jupiter from the sky, to give him the famous {171} formula for averting the thunderbolt.[171.1] Innocents like these are of course easily caught with strong drink. In Greek tradition Silenus, who as the son of a nymph was described as of condition inferior to the gods, but superior to mortals and to death, was not superior to some mortal weaknesses. Indeed, he was notoriously convivial. Hence he fell victim to a similar wile on the part of Midas, the Phrygian king. Nor was he released before he had revealed some astounding geographical and ethnological information, that staggered the sceptical Ælian when he found it placed on record in the now lost pages of Theopompus.[171.2]

Such legends of contest are not confined to merely second-rate personages like these subordinate or superseded divinities. When in the _Iliad_ Diomed attacks and wounds Aphrodite, she goes crying to her mother. Dione by way of consolation recounts a list of Olympian gods who have grievously suffered in fight with headstrong and violent men. It includes Ares, Hera, and Hades, all of them potent figures in Greek mythology. Ares was bound by Otus and Ephialtes, the sons of Aloeus, and kept in durance vile for thirteen moons, until Hermes came to his rescue. Even he, it seems, was obliged to have recourse to secret means to steal him away. The arrows of Herakles inflicted grievous wounds on Hera and Pluto. And though naturally Dione denounces untimely death as the penalty for such presumption, the injuries received in the conflict are not all on one side.[171.3] Odin himself fights more than once in the Scandinavian lays and sagas against human antagonists. Nay, if M. A. J. Reinach’s interpretation be accepted, Jacob’s {172} opponent at the ford of the Jabbok was no other than “Elohim in person.” The growth of religious feeling, on this theory, found this coarse representation abhorrent; and while the incident, being part of the sacred legends, could not be ignored or repudiated, it was so altered as to obscure its real significance.[172.1]

However this may be, tales like these are echoes of belief in the possibility of a successful corporeal struggle with the mysterious powers. They are blurred memories of the practice of threatening and even attacking what we call supernatural beings under their material manifestations. Those beings were conceived, if not always in human form, at least as human in their wills and passions, hence in their motives and modes of action. The only way in which they differed from humanity was in their vaster and undefined powers. They were, to adopt Matthew Arnold’s phrase, magnified, non-natural--that is to say, mysterious--men.[172.2] Thus conceived, they were accessible to every sort of influence that affected mankind, including coercion. But it took a bold man to coerce them, though the task might be attempted upon occasion, even by ordinary mortals--not always with success. Sometimes the contest is of a more distinctly intellectual character. The trial of musical skill between Apollo and Marsyas will occur to everyone. The Egyptian king called by Herodotus Rhampsinitus is said to have penetrated to Hades and there played at dice with Demeter. Varying fortune attended him; but he was so far successful that he returned with a golden handkerchief, the gift of the goddess. And the Egyptians {173} still in the historian’s time celebrated a feast in memory of the adventure.[173.1]

If we turn from legend to fact, we find the belief translated into action, into the attempt to control the supernatural by force. Thus did Xerxes when he lashed the Hellespont and let down fetters into it, for destroying the bridge he had endeavoured to build.[173.2] Thus did the ancient priestesses of the Canary Islands when rain was too long in coming: they beat the sea with rods to punish the spirit of the waters for withholding the boon they needed.[173.3] In the same way (the tale is probably at least founded on fact), when the Nile had risen to the height of eighteen cubits--higher than it had ever risen before--Pheros, the son and successor of Sesostris, is declared to have taken a spear and driven it into the midst of the whirling waters. It is added--and here we have a testimony to the recognition by the ancient Egyptians of the awful divinity whom the king had thus challenged--that he was thereupon struck with a disease of the eyes and made blind.[173.4] The vengeance mentioned by Dr Frazer as taken by the Kakhyeen of Upper Burmah points distinctly to the same intention. “If some friend or relative has been drowned in crossing a river, the avenger repairs once a year to the banks, and, filling a bamboo vessel with the water, hews it through with his _dah_ [sword] as if he were despatching {174} a living enemy.”[174.1] The Korwas of Chota Nagpur on a similar occasion shoot arrows into the river.[174.2]

After comparing these cases there can be little doubt that the Celtic practice of fighting the waves reported by Ælian was not undertaken as a foolhardy piece of presumption, but literally as a combat with a foe susceptible to such attacks, or (as the Irish text suggests) a necessary proceeding in self-defence, lest otherwise the sea should encroach upon the land. The _orenda_ of the land-dwellers was pitted against that of the waters.

The conclusion will be confirmed by considering a few examples of the treatment of divinities other than those of sea or river. The tribe of the Getai, the bravest of the Thracians, were in the habit, during thunderstorms, of shooting arrows up to the sky and threatening their god. It is indeed not clear what god they threatened. Usually it is understood to be the god Zalmoxis, pre-eminently the god of the Getai. But he seems to have been a chthonic divinity; and as the text of Herodotus stands they recognized no other god. The historian’s account of him is rationalized; and there is reason to think that he failed to grasp all the essentials of the Getic religion: his own doubts on the subject are more than hinted at. In shooting upwards, however, and uttering threats, the Getai must have menaced some being conceived more or less in personal terms. This is sufficient for our present purpose.[174.3] The Atarantes, who dwelt ten days’ journey from Mount Atlas, in like {175} manner cursed the sun when he was at his height and reviled him with all manner of foul terms, because he oppressed both themselves and their land by his burning heat.[175.1] Among the Bayaka of the Kasai district in the Congo State it is common to hear people running about at night and shouting insults to Moloki, a malignant spirit who has made them ill, or caused the death of a relation.[175.2] The Bechuana, on the great central plain of South Africa, ascribe changes of weather to the influence of the _manes_ of deceased members of the tribe. They are called by the generic term _Barimo_, of which the singular form, _Morimo_, was adopted by the early missionaries to translate God; and it is now frequently used with that meaning. When hail damaged the crops, or rain fell unseasonably, Moffat tells us, Morimo would be cursed in the vilest language. “Would that I could catch it, I would transfix it with my spear!” exclaimed in the missionary’s hearing a chief whose judgement on other subjects would command attention.[175.3] On the occasion of an earthquake a traveller saw the Bakwena women in an instant rushing out of their huts, with clubs and hoes in their hands, holding them up at the sky, and cursing God with most awful imprecations and demoniac yells.[175.4] The proceedings of the Zulus, neighbours of the Bakwena, during a thunderstorm were thus described by a native to Bishop Callaway: “When it thunders the doctors go out and scold it; they take a stick and say they are going to beat the lightning of heaven. They say they can overcome the lightning. They shout and take shields and sticks; they strike on their shields and shout. And when it clears away again {176} they say, ‘We have conquered it.’ They say they can overcome the heaven.”[176.1] The Hottentots curse the thunder and shoot their poisoned arrows at the lightning, telling him to be off. Some of them, however, adopt a milder course, assembling to dance and sing an incantation. Two specimens of these incantations have been preserved. The thunder is thus addressed:

“Son of the Thunder-cloud, Thou brave loud-speaking Guru! Talk softly, please, For I have no guilt! Leave me alone (Forgive me)! For I have become quite weak (= I am quite stunned, perplexed). Thou, O Guru, Son of the Thunder-cloud!”

The other incantation is addressed to the lightning. It is a dramatic performance, the lightning being played by one person, the chorus representing the appeal of the inhabitants of the kraal.

_Chorus._ “Thou, Thunder-cloud’s daughter, daughter-in-law of the Fire! Thou who hast killed my brother! Therefore thou liest now so nicely in a hole!

_Solo._ (Yes) indeed, I have killed thy brother so well!

_Chorus._ (Well) therefore thou liest (now) in a hole. Thou who hast painted thy body red, like Goro! Thou who dost not drop the menses, Thou wife of the Copper-bodied man (the mythical ancestor of the Hottentots)!”[176.2]

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Perhaps the sex of the lightning here may render it more amenable to the softer arts of persuasion. The Bushmen used to look steadily at the quarter whence the lightning came. They believed its object was to kill them by stealth, and that if they looked towards it they would cause the thunderbolts to turn back. It appears, they said, “to fear our eye, when it feels that we quickly look towards it.… Therefore it goes over us; it goes to sit on the ground yonder, while it does not kill us.”[177.1] In other words, they believed themselves so powerful that the lightning quailed before them and did not dare to strike. Among the Nandi, a Nilotic tribe of East Africa, it is the duty of the Toiyoi, or Thunder-clan, when a heavy thunderstorm occurs, to seize an axe and, having rubbed it in the ashes of the fire, to throw it outside the hut, crying out: “Thunder, be silent in our village!”[177.2] Among their neighbours (but not kinsfolk), the Wawanga, an old man was recently found by a government official to have stuck a curious-looking spear in an ant-hill in his village to drive off the hail.[177.3]

Similar practices are found in the less advanced cultures of the New World. The Hurons of Canada were in the habit of sticking their javelins into the ground point upwards. The explanation they gave, as reported by the Jesuit Father, was that the thunder had intelligence, and it would, on seeing these naked javelins, turn aside and be careful not to come near their cabins.[177.4] The Salinans of California possess an amulet which will stop the thunder, if it be held in the hand and pushed out towards a thunder-cloud.[177.5] The Guaycurus of Paraguay, {178} great and small, on the occasion of a great storm of wind and rain, issued from their huts armed with clubs and sticks, and uttering terrible cries, to fight with the hurricane, persuaded that it was an attack on them by evil spirits, and that they must defend themselves without showing cowardice.[178.1] According to legends current at the time of the conquest, “the _hapiñuñu_, or bosom-clutching spirits, who were believed to have been the original occupants of the Peruvian valleys, were forcibly expelled by the early human inhabitants, immigrants from the country of the Guaycurus. When the ancestors of the Incas arrived in the sierra ‘from beyond Potosi’--that is, from the Gran Chaco--these spirits, according to a fragment of an ancient song which has been preserved by an Indian writer, disappeared with terrible cries, saying:

‘We are conquered! We are conquered! Alas, for I lose my lands!’”[178.2]

The tribes of the Uaupes River in Brazil, after a funeral, shoot into the air to chase away, and if possible kill, the evil-disposed spirit which has caused the death.[178.3]

In tropical surroundings, separated from the Hurons by nearly half the globe, by the whole breadth of the Pacific Ocean and nearly the whole breadth of the continent of North America, the Kai-folk of the Kai, or forest hinterland of the south-eastern coast of German New Guinea, adopt the very same measure as they for protection against the storms. Like their surroundings, their culture is widely different from that of the Hurons. They dwell in frail cabins raised upon posts, in order to secure them from the intrusion of their half-domesticated swine and the attacks of the wilder animals. These huts {179} cluster on the mountain-side in tiny villages of from two to six. Their framework is of wood, bound together with tough lengths of a climbing plant. The walls consist of long pandanus leaves; and they are thatched with leaves of the sago-palm, or with grass. It is obvious that such feeble structures can offer little resistance to high winds. Happily wind-storms are of rare occurrence; but when they do come they wield terrific force, splitting or uprooting powerful trees. Against the onslaught of such foes, which, it need not be said, are regarded as personal beings, the Kai-folk have more than one means of defence. They take one of the jawbones of wild beasts which hang in the hut as trophies of the chase, put it in the fire and pray the storm-spirit to accept the soul of the deceased animal and spare the house. But they do not rely on the chance of placating the spirit; they oppose him with threats and with weapons. They fasten a pointed stake or spear before the windward side of the house, its point turned to the wind, so that it will “prick him in the belly,” and thus compel him to leave the hut in peace. Or they reply to each gust by striking the threshold with a club or stone-axe, crying out: “If you tread here on my house, I will smash your feet!”[179.1]

Almost all nations in the lower culture hold an eclipse to be the attempt on the part of some evil-disposed being to eat up or destroy the sun or moon. The custom of terrifying and driving him away is too well known to need illustration.