MYTHOLOGICAL ORIGIN OF THE WERE-WOLF MYTH.
Metempsychosis—Sympathy between Men and Beasts—Finnbog and the
Bear—Osage and the Beaver—The Connexion of Soul and Body—Buddism—Case
of Mr. Holloway—Popular ideas concerning the Body—The derivation of the
German Leichnam—Feather Dresses—Transmigration of Souls—A Basque
Story—Story from the Pantschatantra—Savage ideas regarding Natural
Phenomena—Thunder, Lightning, and Cloud—The origin of the Dragon—John
of Bromton’s Dragon a Waterspout—The Legend of Typhoeus—Allegorizing of
the Effects of a Hurricane—Anthropomorphosis—The Cirrus Cloud, a
Heavenly Swan—Urvaci—The Storm-cloud a Daemon—Vritra and
Rakschasas—Story of a Brahmin and a Rakschasas
Transformation into beasts forms an integral portion of all
mythological systems. The gods of Greece were wont to change themselves
into animals in order to carry out their designs with greater speed,
security, and secrecy, than in human forms. In Scandinavian mythology,
Odin changed himself into the shape of an eagle, Loki into that of a
salmon. Eastern religions abound in stories of transformation.
The line of demarcation between this and the translation of a beast’s
soul into man, or a man’s soul into a beast’s (metempsychosis) is very
narrow.
The doctrine of metempsychosis is founded on the consciousness of
gradation between beasts and men. The belief in a soul-endowed animal
world was present among the ancients, and the laws of intelligence and
instinct were misconstrued, or were regarded as a puzzle, which no man
might solve.
The human soul with its consciousness seemed to be something already
perfected in a pre-existing state, and, in the myth of metempsychosis,
we trace the yearnings and gropings of the soul after the source whence
its own consciousness was derived, counting its dreams and
hallucinations as gleams of memory, recording acts which had taken
place in a former state of existence.
Modern philosophy has resumed the same thread of conjecture, and thinks
to see in man the perfected development of lower organisms.
After death the translation of the soul was supposed to continue. It
became either absorbed into the _nous_, into Brahma, into the deity, or
it sank in the scale of creation, and was degraded to animate a brute.
Thus the doctrine of metempsychosis was emphatically one of rewards and
punishments, for the condition of the soul after death depended on its
training during life. A savage and bloodthirsty man was exiled, as in
the case of Lycaon, into the body of a wild beast: the soul of a
timorous man entered a hare, and drunkards or gluttons became swine.
The intelligence which was manifest in the beasts bore such a close
resemblance to that of man, in the childhood and youth of the world,
that it is not to be wondered at, if our forefathers failed to detect
the line of demarcation drawn between instinct and reason. And failing
to distinguish this, they naturally fell into the belief in
metempsychosis.
It was not merely a fancied external resemblance between the beast and
man, but it was the perception of skill, pursuits, desires, sufferings,
and griefs like his own, in the animal creation, which led man to
detect within the beast something analogous to the soul within himself;
and this, notwithstanding the points of contrast existing between them,
elicited in his mind so strong a sympathy that, without a great stretch
of imagination, he invested the beast with his own attributes, and with
the full powers of his own understanding. He regarded it as actuated by
the same motives, as subject to the same laws of honour, as moved by
the same prejudices, and the higher the beast was in the scale, the
more he regarded it as an equal. A singular illustration of this will
be found in the Finnboga Saga, c. xi.
“Now we must relate about Finnbog. Afterward in the evening, when men
slept, he rose, took his weapons, and went forth, following the tracks
which led to the dairy farm. As was his wont, he stepped out briskly
along the spoor till he came to the dairy. There he found the bear
lying down, and he had slain the sheep, and he was lying on them
lapping their blood. Then said Finnbog: ‘Stand up, Brain! make ready
against me; that becomes you more than crouching over those sheep’s
carcases.’
“The bear sat up, looked at him, and lay down again. Finnbog said, ‘If
you think that I am too fully armed to match with you, I will do this,’
and he took of his helmet and laid aside his shield. Then he said,
Stand up now, if you dare!’
“The bear sat up, shook his head, and then cast himself down again.
“Finnbog exclaimed, ‘I see, you want us both to be _boune_ alike!’ so
he flung aside his sword and said, ‘Be it as you will; now stand up if
you have the heart that I believe you have, rather than one such as was
possessed by these rent sheep.’
“Then Bruin stood up and prepared to fight.”
The following story taken from the mouth of an Osage Indian by J. A.
Jones, and published in his _Traditions of the North American Indians_,
shows how thoroughly the savage mind misses the line of demarcation
between instinct and reason, and how the man of the woods looks upon
beasts as standing on an equality with himself.
An Osage warrior is in search of a wife: he admires the tidy and shrewd
habits of the beaver. He accordingly goes to a beaver-hut to obtain one
of that race for a bride. “In one corner of the room sat a beaver-woman
combing the heads of some little beavers, whose ears she boxed very
soundly when they would not lie still. The warrior, _i. e._ the
beaver-chief, whispered the Osage that she was his second wife, and was
very apt to be cross when there was work to be done, which prevented
her from going to see her neighbours. Those whose heads she was combing
were her children, he said, and she who had made them rub their noses
against each other and be friends, was his eldest daughter. Then
calling aloud, ‘Wife,’ said he, ‘what have you to eat? The stranger is
undoubtedly hungry; see, he is pale, his eye has no fire, and his step
is like that of a moose.’
“Without replying to him, for it was a sulky day with her, she called
aloud, and a dirty-looking beaver entered. ‘Go,’ said she, ‘and fetch
the stranger something to eat.’ With that the beaver girl passed
through a small door into another room, from which she soon returned,
bringing some large pieces of willow-bark, which she laid at the feet
of the warrior and his guest. While the warrior-beaver was chewing the
willow, and the Osage was pretending to do so, they fell to talking
over many matters, particularly the wars of the beavers with the
otters, and their frequent victories over them. He told our father by
what means the beavers felled large trees, and moved them to the places
where they wished to make dams; how they raised to an erect position
the poles for their lodges, and how they plastered them so as to keep
out rain. Then he spoke of their employments when they had buried the
hatchet; of the peace and happiness and tranquillity they enjoyed when
gathered into companies, they rested from their labours, and passed
their time in talking and feasting, and bathing, and playing the game
of bones, and making love. All the while the young beaver-maiden sat
with her eyes fixed upon the Osage, at every pause moving a little
nearer, till at length she was at his side with her forepaw upon his
arm; a minute more and she had placed it around his neck, and was
rubbing her soft furry cheek against his. Our ancestor, on his part,
betrayed no disinclination to receive her caresses, but returned them
with equal ardour. The old beaver seeing what was going on, turned his
back upon them, and suffered them to be as kind to each other as they
pleased. At last, turning quickly round, while the maiden, suspecting
what was coming, and pretending to be abashed, ran behind her mother,
he said, ‘To end this foolery, what say you to marrying my daughter?
She is well brought up, and is the most industrious girl in the
village. She will flap more wall with her tail in a day than any maiden
in the nation; she will gnaw down a larger tree betwixt the rising of
the sun and the coming of the shadows than many a smart beaver of the
other sex. As for her wit, try her at the game of the dish, and see who
gets up master; and for cleanliness, look at her petticoat?’ Our father
answered that he did not doubt that she was industrious and cleanly,
able to gnaw down a very large tree, and to use her tail to very good
purpose; that he loved her much, and wished to make her the mother of
his children. And thereupon the bargain was concluded.”
These two stories, the one taken from Icelandic saga, the other from
American Indian tradition, shew clearly the oneness which the
uncultivated mind believes to exist between the soul of man and the
soul of beast. The same sentiments actuate both man and brute, and if
their actions are unlike, it is because of the difference in their
formation. The soul within is identical, but the external accidents of
body are unlike.
Among many rude as well as cultivated people, the body is regarded as a
mere garment wrapped around the soul. The Buddist looks upon identity
as existing in the soul alone, and the body as no more constituting
identity, than the clothes he puts on or takes off. He exists as a
spirit; for convenience he vests himself in a body; sometimes that body
is human, sometimes it is bestial. As his soul rises in the spiritual
scale, the nobler is the animal form which it tenants. Budda himself
passed through various stages of existence; in one he was a hare, and
his soul being noble, led him to immolate himself, in order that he
might offer hospitality to Indra, who, in the form of an old man,
craved of him food and shelter. The Buddist regards animals with
reverence; an ancestor may be tenanting the body of the ox he is
driving, or a descendant may be running at his side barking, and
wagging his tail. When he falls into an ecstasy, his soul is leaving
his body for a little while, it is laying aside its raiment of flesh
and blood and bone, to return to it once more when the trance is over.
But this idea is not confined to Buddists, it is common everywhere. The
spirit or soul is supposed to be imprisoned in the body, the body is
but the lantern through which the spirit shines, “the corruptible body”
is believed to “press down the soul,” and the soul is unable to attain
to perfect happiness till it has shuffled off this earthy coil. Butler
regards the members of the body as so many instruments used by the soul
for the purpose of seeing, hearing, feeling, &c., just as we use
telescopes or crutches, and which may be rejected without injury to our
individuality.
The late Mr. J. Holloway, of the Bank of England, brother to the
engraver of that name, related of himself that, being one night in bed,
and unable to sleep, he had fixed his eyes and thoughts with uncommon
intensity on a beautiful star that was shining in at the window, when
he suddenly found his spirit released from his body and soaring into
space. But instantly seized with anxiety for the anguish of his wife,
if she discovered his body apparently dead beside her, he returned, and
re-entered it with difficulty. He described that returning as a
returning from light into darkness, and that whilst the spirit was
free, he was alternately in the light or the dark, accordingly as his
thoughts were with his wife or with the star. Popular mythology in most
lands regards the soul as oppressed by the body, and its liberation is
considered a deliverance from the “burden” of the flesh. Whether the
soul is at all able to act or express itself without a body, any more
than a fire is able to make cloth without the apparatus of boiler and
machinery, is a question which has not commended itself to the popular
mind. But it may be remarked that the Christian religion alone is that
which raises the body to a dignity equal to that of the soul, and gives
it a hope of ennoblement and resurrection never dreamed of in any
mythological system.
But the popular creed, in spite of the most emphatic testimony of
Scripture, is that the soul is in bondage so long as it is united to a
body, a creed entirely in accordance with that of Buddism.
If the body be but the cage, as a poet[1] of our own has been pleased
to call it, in which dwells the imprisoned soul, it is quite possible
for the soul to change its cage. If the body be but a vesture clothing
the soul, as the Buddist asserts, it is not improbable that it may
occasionally change its vesture.
[1] VAUGHN, _Sitex Scintillans_.
This is self-evident, and thus have arisen the countless tales of
transformation and transmigration which are found all over the world.
That the same view of the body as a mere clothing of the soul was taken
by our Teutonic and Scandinavian ancestors, is evident even from the
etymology of the words _leichnam_, _lîkhama_, used to express the
soulless body.
I have already spoken of the Norse word _hamr_, I wish now to make some
further remarks upon it. _Hamr_ is represented in Anglo-Saxon by
_hama_, _homa_, in Saxon by _hamo_, in old High German by _hamo_, in
old French by _homa_, _hama_, to which are related the Gothic
_gahamon_, _ufar-hamon_, _ana-hamon_, {Greek _e?ndúesðai_}, {Greek
_e?pendúesðai_}; _and-hamon_, _af-hamon_, {Greek _a?pekdúein_} {Greek
_e?kdúesðai?_} thence also the old High German _hemidi_, and the modern
_Hemde_, garment. In composition we find this word, as _lîk-hagnr_, in
old Norse; in old High German _lîk-hamo_, Anglo-Saxon _lîk-hama_, and
_flæsc-hama_, Old Saxon, _lîk-hamo_, modern German _Leich-nam_, a body,
_i. e._ a garment of flesh, precisely as the bodies of birds are called
in old Norse _fjaðr-hamr_, in Anglo-Saxon _feðerhoma_, in Old Saxon
_fetherhamo_, or feather-dresses and the bodies of wolves are called in
old Norse _ûlfshamr_, and seals’ bodies in Faroëse _kôpahamr_. The
significance of the old verb _að hamaz_ is now evident; it is to
migrate from one body to another, and _hama-skipti_ is a transmigration
of the soul. The method of this transmigration consisted in simply
investing the body with the skin of the animal into which the soul was
to migrate. When Loki, the Northern god of evil, went in quest of the
stolen Idunn, he borrowed of Freyja her falcon dress, and at once
became, to all intents and purposes, a falcon. Thiassi pursued him as
he left Thrymheimr, having first taken upon him an eagle’s dress, and
thereby become an eagle.
In order to seek Thor’s lost hammer, Loki borrowed again of Freyja her
feather dress, and as be flew away in it, the feathers sounded as they
winnowed the breeze (_fjaðrhamr dunði_).
In like manner Cædmon speaks of an evil spirit flying away in
feather-dress: “þät he mid feðerhomon fleôgan meahte, windan on wolkne”
(Gen. ed. Gr. 417), and of an angel, “þuo þar suogan quam engil þes
alowaldon obhana fun radure faran an feðerhamon” (Hêlj. 171, 23), the
very expression made use of when speaking of a bird: “farad an
feðarhamun” (Hêlj. 50,11).
The soul, in certain cases, is able to free itself from the body and to
enter that of beast or man—in this form stood the myth in various
theological systems.
Among the Finns and Lapps it is not uncommon for a magician to fall
into a cataleptic condition, and during the period his soul is believed
to travel very frequently in bodily form, having assumed that of any
animal most suitable for its purpose. I have given instances in a
former chapter. The same doctrine is evident in most cases of
lycanthropy. The patient is in a state of trance, his body is watched,
and it remains motionless, but his soul has migrated into the carcase
of a wolf, which it vivifies, and in which it runs its course. A
curious Basque story shows that among this strange Turanian people, cut
off by such a flood of Aryan nations from any other members of its
family, the same superstition remains. A huntsman was once engaged in
the chase of it bear among the Pyreneean peaks, when Bruin turned
suddenly on him and hugged him to death, but not before he had dealt
the brute its mortal wound. As the huntsman expired, he breathed his
soul into the body of the bear, and thenceforward ranged the mountains
as a beast.
One of the tales of the Sanskrit book of fables, the _Pantschatantra_,
affords such a remarkable testimony to the Indian belief in
metempsychosis, that I am tempted to give it in abstract.
A king was one day passing through the marketplace of his city, when he
observed a hunchbacked merryandrew, whose contortions and jokes kept
the bystanders in a roar of laughter. Amused with the fellow, the king
brought him to his palace. Shortly after, in the hearing of the clown,
a necromancer taught the monarch the art of sending his soul into a
body not his own.
Some little while after this, the monarch, anxious to put in practice
his newly acquired knowledge, rode into the forest accompanied by his
fool, who, he believed, had not heard, or, at all events comprehended,
the lesson. They came upon the corpse of a Brahmin lying in the depth
of the jungle, where he had died of thirst. The king, leaving his
horse, performed the requisite ceremony, and instantly his soul had
migrated into the body of the, Brahmin, and his own lay as dead upon
the ground. At the same moment, however, the hunchback deserted his
body, and possessed himself of that which had been the king’s, and
shouting farewell to the dismayed monarch, he rode back to the palace,
where he was received with royal honours. But it was not long before
the queen and one of the ministers discovered that a screw was
somewhere loose, and when the quondam king, but now Brahmin, arrived
and told his tale, a plot was laid for the recovery of his body. The
queen asked her false husband whether it were possible to make her
parrot talk, and he in a moment of uxorious weakness promised to make
it speak. He laid his body aside, and sent his soul into the parrot.
Immediately the true king jumped out of his Brahmin body and resumed
that which was legitimately his own, and then proceeded, with the
queen, to wring the neck of the parrot.
But besides the doctrine of metempsychosis, which proved such a fertile
mother of fable, there was another article of popular mythology which
gave rise to stories of transformation. Among the abundant
superstitions existing relative to transformation, three shapes seem to
have been pre-eminently affected—that of the swan, that of the wolf,
and that of the serpent. In many of the stories of those transformed,
it is evident that the individual who changes shape is regarded with
superstitious reverence, as a being of a higher order—of a divine
nature. In Christian countries, everything relating to heathen
mythology was regarded with a suspicious eye by the clergy, and any
miraculous powers not sanctioned by the church were attributed to the
evil one. The heathen gods became devils, and the marvels related of
them were supposed to be effected by diabolic agency. A case of
transformation which had shown the power of an ancient god, was in
Christian times considered as an instance of witchcraft. Thus stories
of transformation fell into bad odour, and those who changed shapes
were no longer regarded as heavenly beings, commanding reverence, but
as miserable witches deserving the stake.
In the infancy of the world, when natural phenomena were
ill-understood, expressions which to us are poetical were of a real
significance. When we speak of thunder rolling, we use an expression
which conveys no further idea than a certain likeness observed between
the detonations and the roll of a vehicle; but to the uninstructed mind
it was more. The primæval savage knew not what caused thunder, and
tracing the resemblance between it and the sound of wheels, he at once
concluded that the chariot of the gods was going abroad, or that the
celestial spirits were enjoying a game of bowls.
We speak of fleecy clouds, because they appear to us soft and light as
wool, but the first men tracing the same resemblance, believed the
light vapours to be flocks of heavenly sheep. Or we say that the clouds
are flying: the savage used the same expression, as he looked up at the
mackerel sky, and saw in it flights of swans coursing over the heavenly
lake. Once more, we creep nearer to the winter fire, shivering at the
wind, which we remark is howling around the house, and yet we do not
suppose that the wind has a voice. The wild primæval men thought that
it had, and because dogs and wolves howl, and the wind howled, and
because they had seen dogs and wolves, they concluded that the
storm-wind was a night-hound, or a monstrous wolf, racing over the
country in the darkness of the winter night, ravening for prey.
Along with the rise of this system of explaining the operations of
nature by analogies in the bestial world, another conclusion forced
itself on the untaught mind. The flocks which strayed in heaven were no
earthly sheep, but were the property of spiritual beings, and were
themselves perhaps spiritual; the swans which flew aloft, far above the
topmost peak of the Himalaya, were no ordinary swans, but were divine
and heavenly. The wolf which howled so wildly in the long winter night,
the hounds, whose bay sounded so. dismally through the shaking black
forest, were no mundane wolves and hounds, but issued from the home of
a divine hunter, and were themselves wondrous, supernatural beings of
godlike race.
And so, the clouds having become swans, the swan-clouds were next
believed to be divine beings, valkyries, apsaras, and the like, seen by
mortals in their feather-dresses, but appearing among the gods as
damsels. The storm-wind having been supposed to be a wolf, next was
taken to be a tempestuous god, who delighted to hunt on earth in lupine
form.
I have mentioned also the serpent shape, as being one very favourite in
mythology. The ancient people saw the forked and writhing lightning,
and supposed it to be a heavenly fiery serpent, a serpent which had
godlike powers, which was in fact a divine being, manifesting himself
to mortals under that form. Among the North American Indians, the
lightning is still regarded as the great serpent, and the thunder is
supposed to be his hissing.
“Ah!” exclaimed a Magdeburg peasant to a German professor, during a
thunder-storm, as a vivid forked gleam shot to earth, “what a glorious
snake was that!” And this resemblance did not escape the Greeks.
{Greek _é!likes d? e?klámpousi steroph~s ksápuroi_}.
_Æsch. Prom._ 1064.
{Greek _drákonta pursónwton, ó!s á?platon a?mfeliktòs
é!lik? e?froúrei, ktanw’n_}.
_Eurip. Herc. F._ 395.
And according to Aristotle, {Greek _e!likíai_} are the lightnings,
{Greek _grammoeidw~s ferómenoi_}.
It is so difficult for us to unlearn all we know of the nature of
meteorological phenomena, so hard for us to look upon atmospheric
changes as though we knew nothing of the laws that govern them, that we
are disposed to treat such explanations of popular myths as I have
given above, as fantastic and improbable.
But among the ancients all solutions of natural problems were
tentative, and it is only after the failure of every attempt made to
explain these phenomena on supernatural grounds that we have been
driven to the discovery of the true interpretation. Yet among the
vulgar a vast amount of mythology remains, and is used still to explain
atmospheric mysteries. The other day a Yorkshire girl, when asked why
she was not afraid of thunder, replied because it was only her Father’s
voice; what knew she of the rushing together of air to fill the vacuum
caused by the transit of the electric fluid? to her the thunder-clap
was the utterance of the Almighty. Still in North Germany does the
peasant say of thunder, that the angels are playing skittles aloft, and
of the snow, that they are shaking up the feather-beds in heaven.
The myth of the dragon is one which admits, perhaps more than any
other, of identification with a meteorological phenomenon, and presents
to us as well the phase of transition from theriomorphosis to
anthropomorphosis.
The dragon of popular mythology is nothing else than the thunderstorm,
rising at the horizon, rushing with expanded, winnowing, black pennons
across the sky, darting out its forked fiery tongue, and belching fire.
In a Slovakian legend, the dragon sleeps in a mountain cave through the
winter months, but, at the equinox, bursts forth—“In a moment the
heaven was darkened and became black as pitch, only illumined by the
fire which flashed from dragon’s jaws and eyes. The earth shuddered,
the stones rattled down the mountain sides into the glens. Right and
left, left and right, did the dragon lash his tail, overthrowing pines
and beeches, snapping them as rods. He evacuated such floods of water
that the mountain torrents were full. But after a while his power was
exhausted, he lashed no more with his tail, ejected no more water, and
spat no more fire.”
I think it is impossible not to see in this description, a spring-tide
thunderstorm. But to make it more evident that the untaught mind did
regard such a storm as a dragon, I think the following quotation from
_John of Brompton’s Chronicle_ will convince the most sceptical:
“Another remarkable thing is this, that took place during a certain
month in the Gulf of Satalia (on the coast of Pamphylia). There
appeared a great and black dragon which came in clouds, and let down
his head into the water, whilst his tail seemed turned to the sky; and
the dragon drew the water to him by drinking, with such avidity, that,
if any ship, even though laden with men or any other heavy articles,
had been near him when drinking, it would nevertheless have been sucked
up and carried on high. In order however to avoid this danger, it is
necessary, when people see it, at once to make a great uproar, and to
shout and hammer tables, so that the dragon, hearing the noise, and the
voices of those shouting, may withdraw himself far off. Some people,
however, assert that this is not a dragon, but the sun drawing up the
waters of the sea; which seems more probable.”[2] Such is John of
Brompton’s account of a waterspout. In Greek mythology the dragon of
the storm has begun to undergo anthropomorphosis. Typhœus is the son of
Tartarus and Terra; the storm rising from the horizon may well be
supposed to issue from the earth’s womb, and its characteristics are
sufficient to decide its paternity. Typhœus, the whirlwind or typhoon,
has a hundred dragon or serpent heads, the long writhing strive of
vapour which run before the hurricane cloud. He belches fire, that is,
lightnings issue from the clouds, and his roaring is like the howling
of wild dogs. Typhœus ascends to heaven to make war on the gods, who
fly from him in various fantastic shapes; who cannot see in this ascent
the hurricane climbing up the vault of sky, and in the flying gods, the
many fleeting fragments of white cloud which are seen drifting across
the heavens before the gale!
[2] Apud TWYSDEN, Hist. Anglicæ Script. x. 1652. p. 1216.
Typhœus, according to Hesiod, is the father of all bad winds, which
destroy with rain and tempest, all in fact which went among the Greeks
by the name of {Greek _laílaps_}, bringing injury to the agriculturist
and peril to the voyager.
{Greek_?Ek dè Tufwéos é?st? a?némwn ménos u!gròn á?eptwn,
nósfi Nótou Boréw te, kaì a?rgéstew Zefúrou te.
oí! ge mèn e?n ðeófin geneh`, ðnhtoïs még? ó?neiar.
ai! d? á?llai mapsau~rai e?pipneíousi ðalassan.
ai! d? h?’toi píptousai e?s heroeideá pónton,
ph~ma méga ðnhtoi~si, kakh~j ðúousin a?éllhj.
á?llote d? á?llai a?eísi, diaskidna~si te nh~as,
naútas te fðeírousi. kakou~ d? ou? gígnetai a?lkh`
a?ndrásin, oí! keínhjsi sinántwntai katà pónton.
ai! d? aû? kaì katà gai~an a?peíriton, a?nðemóessan
é?rg? e?ratà fðeírousi xamaigenéwn a?nðrw’pwn,
pimpleu~sai kóniós te kaì a?rgaléou kolosurtou~_}
_Hesiod. Theog._ 870, _seq._
In both modern Greek and Lithuanian household mythology the dragon or
drake has become an ogre, a gigantic man with few of the dracontine
attributes remaining. Von Hahn, in his _Griechische und Albanesische
Märchen_, tells many tales of drakes, and in all, the old
characteristics have been lost, and the drake is simply a gigantic man
with magical and superhuman powers.
It is the same among the Lithuanian peasantry. A dragon walks on two
legs, talks, flirts with a lady, and marries her. He retains his evil
disposition, but has sloughed off his scales and wings.
Such is the change which has taken place in the popular conception of
the dragon, which is an impersonification of the thunderstorm. A
similar change has taken place in the swan-maiden and were-wolf myths.
In ancient Indian Vedaic mythology the apsaras were heavenly damsels
who dwelt in the tether, between earth and sun. Their name, which
signifies “the shapeless,” or “those who go in the water “—it is
uncertain which. is the correct derivation—is expressive of the white
cirrus, constantly changing form, and apparently floating swan-like on
the blue heaven-sea. These apsaras, according to the Vedaic creed, were
fond of changing their shapes, appearing generally as ducks or swans,
occasionally as human beings. The souls of heroes were given to them
for lovers and husbands. One of the most graceful of the early Indian
myths is the story of the apsaras, Urvaçî. Urvaçî loved Puravaras and
became his ’wife, on the condition that she was n-ever to behold him in
a state of nudity. They remained together for years, till the heavenly
companions of Urvaçî determined to secure her return to them. They
accordingly beguiled Puravaras into leaving his bed in the darkness of
night, and then with a lightning flash they disclosed him, in his
nudity, to his wife, who was thereupon constrained to leave him. He
pursued her, full of sorrow at his loss, and found her at length
swimming in a large lotus pond, in swan’s shape.
That this story is not a mere invention, but rests on some mythological
explanation of natural phenomena, I think more than probable, as it is
found all over the world with few variations. As every Aryan branch
retains the story, or traces of it, there can be no doubt that the
belief in swan-maidens, who swam in the heavenly sea, and who sometimes
became the wives of those fortunate men who managed to steal from them
their feather dresses, formed an integral portion of the old
mythological system of the Aryan family, before it was broken up into
Indian, Persian, Greek, Latin, Russian, Scandinavian, Teutonic, and
other races. But more, as the same myth is found. in tribes not Aryan,
and far removed from contact with European or Indian superstition,—as,
for instance, among Samoyeds and American Indians,—it is even possible
that this story may be a tradition of the first primæval stock of men.
But it is time for me to leave the summer cirrus and turn to the
tempest-born rain-cloud. It is represented in ancient Indian mythology
by the Vritra or Râkshasas. At first the form of these dæmons was
uncertain and obscure. Vritra is often used as an appellative for a
cloud, and kabhanda, an old name for a rain-cloud, in later times
became the name of a devil. Of Vritra, who envelopes the mountains with
vapour, it is said, “The darkness stood retaining the water, the
mountains lay in the belly of Vritra.” By degrees Vritra stood out more
prominently as a dæmon, and he is described as a “devourer” of gigantic
proportions. In the same way Râkshasas obtained corporeal form and
individuality. He is a misshapen giant “like to a cloud,” with a red
beard and red hair, with pointed protruding teeth, ready to lacerate
and devour human flesh. His body is covered with coarse bristling hair,
his huge mouth is open, he looks from side to side as he walks, lusting
after the flesh and blood of men, to satisfy his raging hunger, and
quench his consuming thirst. Towards nightfall his strength increases
manifold. He can change his shape at will. He haunts the woods, and
roams howling through the jungle; in short, he is to the Hindoo what
the were-wolf is to the European.
A certain wood was haunted by a Râkschasa; he one day came across a
Brahmin, and with a bound reached his shoulders, and clung to them,
exclaiming, “Heh! go on with you!” And the Brahmin, quaking with fear,
advanced with him. But when he observed that the feet of the Râkschasa
were as delicate as the stamens of the lotus, he asked him, How is it
that you have such weak and slender feet? The Râkschasa replied, “I
never walk nor touch the earth with my feet. I have made a vow not to
do so.” Presently they came to a large pond. Then the Râkschasa bade
the Brahmin wait at the edge whilst he bathed and prayed to the gods.
But the Brahmin thought: “As soon as these prayers and ablutions are
over, he will tear me to pieces with his fangs and eat me. He has vowed
not to walk; I will be off post haste!” so he ran away, and the
Râkschasa dared not follow him for fear of breaking his VOW.
(_Pantschatantra_, v. 13.) There is a similar story in the Mahâbhârata,
xiii., and in the Kathâ Sarit Sâgara, v. 49-53.
I have said sufficient to show that natural phenomena gave rise to
mythological stories, and that these stories have gradually
deteriorated, and have been degraded into vulgar superstitions. And I
have shown that both the doctrine of metempsychosis and the
mythological explanations of meteorological changes have given rise to
abundant fable, and among others to the popular and wide-spread
superstition of lycanthropy. I shall now pass from myth to history, and
shall give instances of bloodthirstiness, cruelty, and cannibalism.