should be associated with tragedies. The Roslyn pillar, the Amiens rose
window, the Strassburg clock, many spires, and churches. The architect
of Cologne sold himself to the devil to obtain the plan. A master and
an apprentice carve pillars or construct windows, and because the
apprentice’s work is best, his master murders him. The mechanician of a
clock is blinded, some say killed, to prevent him from making another
like it. Perdix, for inventing the compass, was cast down a tower by
Daedalus.
It will be remembered that the architect of Cologne Cathedral,
according to the legend, sold himself to the devil for the plan, and
forfeited his life when the building was in progress. This really means
that the man voluntarily gave himself up to death, probably to be
laid under the tower or at the foundation of the choir, to ensure the
stability of the enormous superstructure, which he supposed could not
be held up in any other way.
An inspector of dams on the Elbe, in 1813, in his “Praxis,” relates
that, as he was engaged on a peculiarly difficult dyke, an old peasant
advised him to get a child, and sink it under the foundations.
As an instance of even later date to which the belief in the necessity
of a sacrifice lingered, I may mention that, in 1843, a new bridge was
about to be built at Halle, in Germany. The people insisted to the
architect and masons that their attempt to make the piers secure was
useless, unless they first immured a living child in the basement. We
may be very confident that if only fifty years ago people could be
found so ignorant and so superstitious as to desire to commit such an
atrocious crime, they would not have been restrained in the Middle
Ages from carrying their purpose into execution.
I have already said that originally the sacrifice was offered to
the Earth goddess, to propitiate her, and obtain her consent to the
appropriation of the soil and to bearing the burden imposed on it. But
the sacrifice had a further meaning. The world itself, the universe,
was a vast fabric, and in almost all cosmogonies the foundations of the
world are laid in blood. Creation rises out of death. The Norsemen held
that the giant Ymir was slain, that out of his body the world might be
built up. His bones formed the rocks, his flesh the soil, his blood
the rivers, and his hair the trees and herbage. So among the Greeks
Dionysos Zagreus was the Earth deity, slain by the Titans, and from
his torn flesh sprang corn and the vine, the grapes were inflated with
his blood, and the earth, his flesh, transubstantiated into bread. In
India, Brahma gave himself to form the universe. “Purusha is this All;
his head is heaven, the sun is fashioned out of his eyes, the moon out
of his heart, fire comes from his mouth, the winds are his breath, from
his navel is the atmosphere, from his ears the quarters of the world,
and the earth is trodden out of his feet” (“Rig. Veda” viii. c. 4, hymn
17-19).
So, in Persia, the Divine Ox, Ahidad, was slain that the world might
be fashioned out of him; and the Mithraic figures represent this myth.
If we put ourselves back in thought to the period when the Gospel
was proclaimed, we shall understand better some of its allusions;
with this notion of sacrifice underlying all great undertakings, all
_constructive_ work, we shall see how some of the illustrations used by
the first preachers would come home to those who heard them. We can see
exactly how suitable was the description given of Christ as the Lamb
that was slain from the foundation of the world. As the World-Lamb,
He was the sustainer of the great building, He secured its stability;
and just as the sacrifice haunts the building reared on it, so was the
idea of Christ to enter into and haunt all history, all mythology, all
religion.
We see, moreover, the appropriateness of the symbol of Christ as the
chief Corner-stone, and of the Apostles as foundation stones of the
Church; they are, as it were, the pise blocks, living stones, on whom
the whole superstructure of the spiritual city is reared.
With extraordinary vividness, moreover, does the full significance of
the old ecclesiastical hymn for the Dedication of a Church come out
when we remember this wide-spread, deeply-rooted, almost ineradicable
belief.
“Blessèd city, heavenly Salem,
Vision dear of peace and love,
Who _of living stones_ upbuilded,
Art the joy of heaven above.
* * * * *
Many a blow and biting sculpture
Polished well those stones elect,
In their places now compacted
By the heavenly Architect.
* * * * *
Christ is made the sure foundation
And the precious corner-stone,
Who, the twofold walls uniting,
Binds them closely into one.”
II.
On Gables.
The tourist on the Rhine, as a matter of duty, visits in Cologne three
points of interest, in addition to providing himself with a little box
of the world-famous _Eau_, at the real original Maria Farina’s factory.
After he has “done” the Cathedral, and the bones of the Eleven Thousand
Virgins, he feels it incumbent on him to pay a visit to the horses’
heads in the market-place, looking out of an attic window.
[Illustration: _Fig. 2._--THE HORSES’ HEADS, COLOGNE.]
Myths attach equally to the Minster, the Ursuline relics, and to the
horses’ heads. The devil is said to have prophesied that the cathedral
would never be completed, yet lo! it is finished to the last stone of
the spires! The bones of the eleven thousand virgins have been proved
to have come from an old neglected cemetery, broken into when the
mediæval walls of Cologne were erected. It will be shown that the heads
of the two grey mares near the Church of the Apostles have a very
curious and instructive history attaching to them, and that, though the
story that accounts for their presence on top of a house is fabulous,
their presence is of extreme interest to the antiquary.
The legend told of these particular heads is shortly this:[4] Richmod
of Adocht was a wealthy citizen’s wife at Cologne. She died in 1357,
and was buried with her jewelry about her. At night the sexton opened
her grave, and, because he could not remove the rings, cut her finger.
The blood began to flow, and she awoke from her cataleptic fit. The
sexton fled panic-stricken. She then walked home, and knocked at her
door, and called up the apprentice, who, without admitting her, ran
upstairs to his master, to tell him that his wife stood without.
“Pshaw!” said the widower, “as well make me believe that my pair of
greys are looking out of the attic window.” Hardly were the words
spoken, than, tramp--tramp--and his horses ascended the staircase,
passed his door, and entered the garret. Next day every passer-by
saw their heads peering from the window. The greatest difficulty was
experienced in getting the brutes downstairs again. As a remembrance of
this marvel, the horses were stuffed, and placed where they are now to
be seen.
Such is the story as we take it from an account published in 1816. I
had an opportunity a little while ago of examining the heads. They are
of painted wood.
The story of the resuscitation of the lady is a very common one, and
we are not concerned with this part of the myth. That which occupies
us is the presence of the horses’ heads in the window. Now, singularly
enough, precisely the same story is told of other horses’ heads
occupying precisely similar positions in other parts of Germany. We
know of at least a dozen.[5] It seems therefore probable that the
story is of later origin, and grew up to account for the presence of
the heads, which the popular mind could not otherwise explain. This
conjecture becomes a certainty when we find that pairs of horses’ heads
were at one time a very general adornment of gable ends, and that they
are so still in many places.
[Illustration: _Fig. 3._--GABLE OF A FARM-HOUSE IN MECKLENBURG.]
In Mecklenburg, Pomerania, Luneburg, Holstein, it is still customary
to affix carved wooden horse-heads to the apex of the principal gable
of the house. There are usually two of these, back to back, the heads
pointed in opposite directions. In Tyrol, the heads of chamois occupy
similar positions. The writer of this article was recently in Silesia,
and sketched similar heads on the gables of wooden houses of modern
construction in the “Giant Mountains.” They are also found in Russia.
[Illustration: _Fig. 4._--ANCIENT GERMAN HOUSE.]
Originally, in Germany, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and indeed England,
all houses were built of timber, and those which were not of circular
form, with bee-hive roofs, had gables. Unfortunately, we have but one
very early representation of a Teutonic village, and that is on the
Antonine column at Rome. One of the bas-reliefs there shows us the
attack by Romans on a German village. The houses are figured as built
of wattled sides, and thatched over. Most are of bee-hive shape, but
one, that of the chief, is oblong and gabled. The soldiers are applying
torches to the roofs, and, provokingly enough, we cannot see the gable
of the quadrangular house, because it is obscured by the figure of a
German warrior who is being killed by a Roman soldier. Though this
representation does not help us much, still there is abundance of
evidence to show that the old German houses--at least, those of the
chiefs--were like the dwellings of the Scandinavian Bonders, with
oblong walls with gables, and with but a single main front and gable
a-piece. The Icelandic farmhouses perpetuate the type to the present
day, with some modifications. These dwellings have lateral walls of
stone and turf scarcely six feet high, and from six to ten feet thick,
to bank out the cold. On these low parallel walls rest the principals
of the roof, which is turf-covered. The face of the house is to the
south, it is the only face that shows; the back is banked up like
the sides, so that from every quarter but one a house looks like a
grassy mound. The front consists of two or more wooden gables, and is
all of wood, often painted red. Originally, we know, there was but a
single gable. At present the subsidiary gable is low, comparatively
insignificant, and contains the door. Now the old Anglo-Saxon, Norse,
and German houses of the chiefs were all originally constructed on the
same principle, and the timber and plaster gable fronts of our old
houses, the splendid stone and brick-gabled faces of the halls of the
trade guilds in the market-place at Brussels, and the wonderful stepped
and convoluted house-fronts throughout Holland and Germany, are direct
descendants of the old rude oblong house of our common forefathers.
We come now to another point, the gable apex. A gable, of course, is
and must be an inverted _v_, [Illustration: inverted V]; but there are
just three ways in which the apex can be treated. When the principals
are first erected they form an _x_, [Illustration: X], the upper limbs
shorter than the lower. Sometimes they are so left. But sometimes
they are sawn off, and are held together by mortices into an upright
piece of timber. Then the gable represents an inverted [Illustration:
inverted Y]. If the ends are sawn off, and there be no such upright,
then there remains an inverted _v_, but, to prevent the rotting of the
ends at the apex, a _crease_ like a small _v_ is put over the juncture,
[Illustration]. These are the only three variations conceivable. The
last is the latest, and dates from the introduction of lead, or of
tile ridges. By far the earliest type is the simplest, the leaving
of the protruding ends of the principals forming [Illustration: X].
Then, to protect these ends from the weather, to prevent the water
from entering the grain, and rotting them, they were covered with
horse-skulls, and thus two horse-skulls looking in opposite directions
became an usual ornament of the gable of a house. Precisely the same
thing was done with the tie-beams that protruded under the eaves. These
also were exposed with the grain to the weather, though not to the same
extent as the principals. They also were protected by skulls being
fastened over their ends, and these skulls at the end of the tie-beams
are the prototypes of the corbel-heads round old Norman churches.
Among the Anglo-Saxons the [Illustration: X] gable was soon displaced
by that shaped like [Illustration: inverted Y], if we may judge by
early illustrations, but the more archaic and simple construction
prevailed in North Germany and in Scandinavia. To the present day the
carved heads are affixed to the ends of the principals, and these heads
take the place of the original skulls. The gable of the Horn Church in
Essex has got an ox’s head with horns on it.
[Illustration: HORNED HEAD ON CHURCH
GABLE OF CHURCH, HORN-CHURCH.--_Fig. 5._]
In one Anglo-Saxon miniature representing a nobleman’s house, a stag’s
head is at the apex. The old Norwegian wooden church of Wang of the
twelfth century, which was bought and transported to the flanks of the
Schnee-Koppe in Silesia by Frederick William IV. in 1842, is adorned
with two heads of sea-snakes or dragons, one at each end of the gable.
In the Rhætian Alps the gables of old timber houses have on them the
fore-parts of horses, carved out of the ends of the intersecting
principals.
But the horse’s head, sometimes even a human skull, was also affixed to
the upright leg of the inverted _y_--the hipknob,[6] as architects term
it--partly, no doubt, as a protection of the cross-cut end from rain
and rotting. But though there was a practical reason for putting skulls
on these exposed timber-ends, their use was not only practical, they
were there affixed for religious reasons also, and indeed principally
for these.
As a sacrifice was offered when the foundations of a house were laid,
so was a sacrifice offered when the roof was completed. The roof was
especially subject to the assaults of the wind, and the wind was among
the Northmen and Germans, Odin, Woden, or Wuotan. Moreover, in high
buildings, there was a liability to their being struck by lightning,
and the thunder-god Thorr had to be propitiated to stave off a fire.
The farmhouses in the Black Forest to the present day are protected
from lightning by poles with bunches of flowers and leaves on the top,
that have been carried to church on Palm Sunday, and are then taken
home and affixed to the gable, where they stand throughout the year.
The bunch represents the old oblation offered annually to the God of
the Storm.[7] Horses were especially regarded as sacred animals by
the Germans, the Norsemen, and by the Slaves. Tacitus tells us that
white horses were kept by the ancient Germans in groves sacred to
the gods; and gave auguries by neighing. The Icelandic sagas contain
many allusions to the old dedication of horses to the gods. Among the
Slaves, horses were likewise esteemed sacred animals; swords were
planted in the ground, and a horse was led over them. Auguries were
taken by the way in which he went, whether avoiding or touching the
blades. In like manner the fate of prisoners was determined by the
actions of an oracular horse. When a horse was killed at a sacrifice,
its flesh was eaten. St. Jerome speaks of the Vandals and other
Germanic races as horse-eaters, and St. Boniface forbade his Thuringian
converts to eat horse-flesh.
The eating of this sort of meat was a sacramental token of allegiance
to Odin. When Hakon, Athelstan’s foster-son, who had been baptised in
England, refused to partake of the sacrificial banquet of horse-flesh
at the annual Council in Norway, the Bonders threatened to kill him. A
compromise was arrived at, so odd that it deserves giving in the words
of the saga: “The Bonders pressed the King strongly to eat horse-flesh;
and as he would not do so, they wanted him to drink the soup; as he
declined, they insisted that he should taste the gravy; and on his
refusal, were about to lay hands on him. Earl Sigurd made peace by
inducing the King to hold his mouth over the handle of the kettle
upon which the fat steam of the boiled horse-flesh had settled; and
the King laid a linen cloth over the handle, and then gaped above it,
and so returned to his throne; but neither party was satisfied with
this.” This was at the harvest gathering. At Yule, discontent became
so threatening, that King Hakon was forced to appease the ferment by
eating some bits of horse’s liver.
Giraldus Cambrensis says of the Irish that in Ulster a king is thus
created: “A white mare is led into the midst of the people, is killed,
cut to pieces and boiled; then a bath is prepared of the broth. Into
this the King gets, and sitting in it, he eats of the flesh, the people
also standing round partake of it. He is also required to drink of the
broth in which he has bathed, lapping it with his mouth.” (“Topography
of Ireland,” c. xxv.) This is, perhaps, the origin of the Irish
expression, “a broth of a boy.”
Tacitus tells us that after a defeat of the Chatti, their conquerors
sacrificed horses, ate their flesh, and hung up their heads in trees,
or affixed them to poles, as offerings to Wuotan. So, after the
defeat of Varus and his legions, when Cæcina visited the scene of the
disaster, he found the heads of the horses affixed to the branches and
trunks of the trees. Gregory the Great, in a letter to Queen Brunehild,
exhorted her not to suffer the Franks thus to expose the heads of
animals offered in sacrifice. At the beginning of the fifth century,
St. Germanus, who was addicted to the chase before he was made Bishop
of Auxerre, was wont to hang up the heads and antlers of the game
killed in hunting in a huge pear-tree in the midst of Auxerre, as an
oblation to Odin, regardless of the reproof of his bishop, Amator, who,
to put an end to this continuance of a heathenish ceremony, cut down
the tree.
Adam of Bremen tells of the custom of hanging men, horses, and dogs
at Upsala; and a Christian who visited the place counted seventy-two
bodies. In Zeeland, in the eleventh century, every ninth year, men,
horses, dogs, and cocks were thus sacrificed, as Dietmar (Bishop of
Merseburg) tells us. Saxo, the grammarian, at the end of the twelfth
century, describes how horses’ heads were set up on poles, with
pieces of wood stuck in their jaws to keep them open. The object was
to produce terror in the minds of enemies, and to drive away evil
spirits and the pestilence. For this reason it was, in addition to
the practical one already adduced, that the heads of horses, men, and
other creatures which had been sacrificed to Odin were fastened to the
gables of houses. The creature offered to the god became, so to speak,
incorporate in the god, partook of the Divine power, and its skull
acted as a protection to the house, because that skull in some sort
represented the god.
In the Egil’s saga, an old Icelandic chief is said to have taken
a post, fixed a horse’s head on the top, and to have recited an
incantation over it which carried a curse on Norway and the King and
Queen; when he turned the head inland, it made all the guardian spirits
of the land to fly. This post he fixed into the side of a mountain,
with the open jaws turned towards Norway.[8] Another Icelander took a
pole, carved a human head at the top, then killed a mare, slit up the
body, inserted the post and set it up with the head looking towards the
residence of an enemy.[9]
These figures were called Nith-stangs, and their original force and
significance became obscured. The nith-stang primarily was the head
of the victim offered in sacrifice, lifted up with an invocation to
the god to look on the sacrifice, and in return carry evil to the
houses of all those who wished ill to the sacrificer. The figure-head
of a war-ship was designed in like manner, to strike terror into the
opponents, and scare away their guardian spirits. The last trace of
the nith-stang as a vehicle of doing ill was at Basle, where the
inhabitants of Great and Little Basle set up figures at their several
ends of the bridge over the Rhine to outrage each other.
[Illustration: _Fig. 6._--A GABLE, GUILDFORD.]
In Ireland we meet with similar ideas. On the death of Laeghaire (King
Lear), his body was carried to Tara and interred with his arms and
cuirass, and with his face turned towards his enemies, as if still
threatening them. Eoghan, King of Connaught, was so buried in Sligo,
and as long as his dead head looked towards Ulster, the Connaught
men were victorious; so the Ulster men disinterred him and buried
him face downwards, and then gained the victory. According to Welsh
tradition, the head of Bran was buried with the face to France, so that
no invasion could come from thence. A Welsh story says that the son of
Lear bade his companions cut off his head, take it to the White Hill
in London, and bury it there, with the face directed towards France.
The head of man and beast, when cut off, was thought to be gifted with
oracular powers, and the piping of the wind in the skulls over the
house gables was interpreted--as he who consulted it desired.
In an account we have of the Wends in the fifteenth century, we are
told that they set up the heads of horses and cows on stakes above
their stables to drive away disease from their cattle, and they put
the skull of a horse under the fodder in the manger to scare away the
hobgoblins who ride horses at night. In Holland, horses’ heads are hung
up over pigstyes, and in Mecklenburg they are placed under the pillows
of the sick to drive away fever. It must be remembered that pest or
fever was formerly, and is still among the superstitious Slaves, held
to be a female deity or spirit of evil.
Now we can understand whence came the headless horses, so common in
superstition, as premonitions of death. Sometimes a horse is heard
galloping along a road or through a street. It is seen to be headless.
It stops before a door, or it strikes the door with its hoof. That is a
sure death token. The reader may recall Albert Dürer’s engraving of the
white horse at a door, waiting for the dead soul to mount it, that it
may bear him away to the doleful realms of Hæla. In Denmark and North
Germany the “Hell-horse” is well known. It has three legs, and is not
necessarily headless. It looks in at a window and neighs for a soul
to mount it. The image of Death on the Pale Horse in the Apocalypse
was not unfamiliar to the Norse and German races. They knew all about
Odin’s white horse that conveyed souls to the drear abode.
Properly, every village, every house had its own hell-horse. Indeed,
it was not unusual to bury a live horse in a churchyard, to serve the
purpose of conveying souls. A vault was recently opened in a church
at Görlitz, which was found to contain a skeleton of a horse only,
and this church and yard had long been believed to be haunted by a
hell-horse. The horse whose head was set up over the gable of a house
was the domestic spirit of the family, retained to carry the souls away.
The child’s hobby-horse is the degraded hell-horse. The grey or white
hobby was one of the essential performers in old May Day mummings, and
this represents the pale horse of Odin, as Robin Hood represents Odin
himself.[10] We see in the hobby-horse the long beam of the principal
with the head at the end. It was copied therefrom, and the copy remains
long after the original has disappeared from among us.
A man was on his way at night from Oldenburg to Heiligenhafen. When
he came near the gallows-hill he saw a white horse standing under it.
He was tired, and jumped on its back. The horse went on with him, but
became larger and larger at every step, and whither that ghostly beast
would have carried him no one can say; but, fortunately, the man flung
himself off the back. In Sweden the village of Hästveda is said to take
its name from häst-hvith, a white horse which haunts the churchyard and
village.
In Bürger’s ballad of Leonore, the dead lover comes riding at night to
the door of the maiden, and persuades her to mount behind him. Then the
horse dashes off.
“How fast, how fast, fly darting past
Hill, mountain, tree, and bower;
Right, left, and right, they fly like light,
Hamlet, and town, and tower.
‘Fear’st thou, my love? The moon shines bright.
Hurrah! the dead ride fast by night,
And dost thou dread the silent dead?’”
They dash past a graveyard in which is a mourning train with a coffin.
But the funeral is interrupted; the dead man must follow horse and
rider.
[Illustration: _Fig. 7._--OLD TEMPLE BAR, WITH TRAITORS’ HEADS.]