in the divining rod certainly is (in Germany rods are hidden under
babies' clothes when they are baptised), we naturally expect to find
traces of it in ancient times and among savages all over the modern
world. We have already examined in 'The Bull-Roarer' a very similar
example. We saw that there is a magical instrument--a small
fish-shaped piece of thin flat wood tied to a thong--which, when
whirled in the air, produces a strange noise, a compound of roar and
buzz. This instrument is sacred among the natives of Australia, where
it is used to call together the men, and to frighten away the women
from the religious mysteries of the males. The same instrument is
employed for similar purposes in New Mexico, and in South Africa and
New Zealand--parts of the world very widely distant from each other,
and inhabited by very diverse races. It has also been lately
discovered that the Greeks used this toy, which they called ~rhombos~,
in the Mysteries of Dionysus, and possibly it may be identical with
the _mystica vannus Iacchi_ (Virgil, _Georgics_, i. 166). The
conclusion drawn by the ethnologist is that this object, called
_turndun_ by the Australians, is a very early savage invention,
probably discovered and applied to religious purposes in various
separate centres, and retained from the age of savagery in the mystic
rites of Greeks and perhaps of Romans. Well, do we find anything
analogous in the case of the divining rod?
Future researches may increase our knowledge, but at present little or
nothing is known of the divining rod in classical ages, and not very
much (though that little is significant) among uncivilised races. It
is true that in all countries rods or wands, the Latin _virga_, have a
magical power. Virgil obtained his mediaeval repute as a wizard because
his name was erroneously connected with _virgula_, the magic wand. But
we do not actually know that the ancient wand of the enchantress
Circe, in Homer, or the wand of Hermes, was used, like the divining
rod, to indicate the whereabouts of hidden wealth or water. In the
Homeric hymn to Hermes (line 529), Apollo thus describes the
_caduceus_, or wand of Hermes: 'Thereafter will I give thee a lovely
wand of wealth and riches, a golden wand with three leaves, which
shall keep thee ever unharmed.' In later art this wand, or _caduceus_,
is usually entwined with serpents; but on one vase, at least, the wand
of Hermes is simply the forked twig of our rustic miners and
water-finders. The same form is found on an engraved Etruscan
mirror.[182]
Now, was a wand of this form used in classical times to discover
hidden objects of value? That wands were used by Scythians and Germans
in various methods of casting lots is certain; but that is not the
same thing as the working of the twig. Cicero speaks of a fabled wand
by which wealth can be procured; but he says nothing of the method of
its use, and possibly was only thinking of the rod of Hermes, as
described in the Homeric hymn already quoted. There was a Roman
_satura_, by Varro, called 'Virgula Divina'; fragments remain, but
throw no light on the subject. A passage usually quoted from Seneca
has no more to do with the divining rod than with the telephone. Pliny
is a writer extremely fond of marvels; yet when he describes the
various modes of finding wells of water, he says nothing about the
divining wand. The isolated texts from Scripture which are usually
referred to clearly indicate wands of a different sort, if we except
Hosea iv. 12, the passage used as motto by the author of _Lettres qui
decouvrent l'illusion des Philosophes sur la Baguette_ (1696). This
text is translated in our Bible, 'My people ask counsel at their
stocks, _and their staff declareth unto them_.' Now, we have here no
reference to the search for wells and minerals, but to a form of
divination for which the modern twig has ceased to be applied. In
rural England people use the wand to find water, but not to give
advice, or to detect thieves or murderers; but, as we shall see, the
rod has been very much used for these purposes within the last three
centuries.
This brings us to the moral powers of the twig; and here we find some
assistance in our inquiry from the practices of uncivilised races. In
1719 John Bell was travelling across Asia; he fell in with a Russian
merchant, who told him of a custom common among the Mongols. The
Russian had lost certain pieces of cloth, which were stolen out of his
tent. The Kutuchtu Lama ordered the proper steps to be taken to find
out the thief. 'One of the Lamas took a bench with four feet, and
after turning it in several directions, at last it pointed directly to
the tent where the stolen goods were concealed. The Lama now mounted
across the bench, and soon carried it, or, as was commonly believed,
it carried him, to the very tent, where he ordered the damask to be
produced. The demand was directly complied with; for it is vain in
such cases to offer any excuse.'[183] Here we have not a wand, indeed,
but a wooden object which turned in the direction, not of water or
minerals, but of human guilt. A better instance is given by the Rev.
H. Rowley, in his account of the Mauganja.[184] A thief had stolen
some corn. The medicine-man, or sorcerer, produced two sticks, which
he gave to four young men, two holding each stick. The medicine-man
danced and sang a magical incantation, while a zebra-tail and a rattle
were shaken over the holders of the sticks. 'After a while, the men
with the sticks had spasmodic twitchings of the arms and legs; these
increased nearly to convulsions.... According to the native idea, _it
was the sticks which were possessed primarily_, and through them the
men, _who could hardly hold them_. The sticks whirled and dragged the
men round and round like mad, through bush and thorny shrub, and over
every obstacle; nothing stopped them; their bodies were torn and
bleeding. At last they came back to the assembly, whirled round again,
and rushed down the path to fall panting and exhausted in the hut of
one of a chief's wives. The sticks, rolling to her very feet,
denounced her as a thief. She denied it; but the medicine-man
answered, "The spirit has declared her guilty; the spirit never
lies."' The woman, however, was acquitted, after a proxy trial by
ordeal: a cock, used as her proxy, threw up the _muavi_, or
ordeal-poison.
Here the points to be noted are, first, the violent movement of the
sticks, which the men could hardly hold; next, the physical agitation
of the men. The former point is illustrated by the confession of a
civil engineer writing in the _Times_. This gentleman had seen the rod
successfully used for water; he was asked to try it himself, and he
determined that it should not twist in his hands 'if an ocean rolled
under his feet.' Twist it did, however, in spite of all his efforts to
hold it, when he came above a concealed spring. Another example is
quoted in the _Quarterly Review_, vol. xxii. p. 374. A narrator, in
whom the editor 'had implicit confidence,' mentions how, when a lady
held the twig just over a hidden well, 'the twig turned so quick as
to snap, breaking near her fingers.' There seems to be no indiscretion
in saying, as the statement has often been printed before, that the
lady spoken of in the _Quarterly Review_ was Lady Milbanke, mother of
the wife of Byron. Dr. Hutton, the geologist, is quoted as a witness
of her success in the search for water with the divining rod. He says
that, in an experiment at Woolwich, 'the twigs twisted themselves off
below her fingers which were considerably indented by so forcibly
holding the rods between them.'[185] Next, the violent excitement of
the four young men of the Mauganja is paralleled by the physical
experience of the lady quoted in the _Quarterly Review_. 'A degree of
agitation was visible in her face when she first made the experiment;
she says this agitation was great' when she began to practise the art,
or whatever we are to call it. Again, in _Lettres qui decouvrent
l'illusion_ (p. 93), we read that Jacques Aymar (who discovered the
Lyons murderer in 1692) _se sent tout emu_--feels greatly
agitated--when he comes on that of which he is in search. On page 97
of the same volume, the body of the man who holds the divining rod is
described as 'violently agitated.' When Aymar entered the room where
the murder, to be described later, was committed, 'his pulse rose as
if he were in a burning fever, and the wand turned rapidly in his
hands' (_Lettres_, p. 107). But the most singular parallel to the
performance of the African wizard must be quoted from a curious
pamphlet already referred to, a translation of the old French _Verge
de Jacob_, written, annotated, and published by a Mr. Thomas Welton.
Mr. Welton seems to have been a believer in mesmerism, animal
magnetism, and similar doctrines, but the coincidence of his story
with that of the African sorcerer is none the less remarkable. It is a
coincidence which must almost certainly be 'undesigned.' Mr. Welton's
wife was what modern occult philosophers call a 'Sensitive.' In 1851,
he wished her to try an experiment with the rod in a garden, and sent
a maid-servant to bring 'a certain stick that stood behind the parlour
door. In great terror she brought it to the garden, her hand firmly
clutched on the stick, nor could she let it go....' The stick was
given to Mrs. Welton, 'and it drew her with very considerable force to
nearly the centre of the garden, to a bed of poppies, where she
stopped.' Here water was found, and the gardener, who had given up his
lease as there was no well in the garden, had the lease renewed.
We began by giving evidence to show (and much more might be adduced)
that the belief in the divining rod, or in analogous instruments, is
not confined to the European races. The superstition, or whatever we
are to call it, produces the same effects of physical agitation, and
the use of the rod is accompanied with similar phenomena among
Mongols, English people, Frenchmen, and the natives of Central Africa.
The same coincidences are found in almost all superstitious practices,
and in the effects of these practices on believers. The Chinese use a
form of _planchette_, which is half a divining rod--a branch of the
peach tree; and 'spiritualism' is more than three-quarters of the
religion of most savage tribes, a Maori _seance_ being more impressive
than anything the civilised Sludge can offer his credulous patrons.
From these facts different people draw different inferences. Believers
say that the wide distribution of their favourite mysteries is a proof
that 'there is something in them.' The incredulous look on our modern
'twigs' and turning-tables and ghost stories as mere 'survivals' from
the stage of savage culture, or want of culture, when the fancy of
half-starved man was active and his reason uncritical.
The great authority for the modern history of the divining rod is a
work published by M. Chevreuil, in Paris, in 1854. M. Chevreuil,
probably with truth, regarded the wand as much on a par with the
turning-tables, which, in 1854, attracted a good deal of attention. He
studied the topic historically, and his book, with a few accessible
French tracts and letters of the seventeenth century, must here be our
guide. A good deal of M. Chevreuil's learning, it should be said, is
reproduced in Mr. Baring Gould's _Curious Myths of the Middle Ages_,
but the French author is much more exhaustive in his treatment of the
topic. M. Chevreuil could find no earlier book on the twig than the
_Testament du Frere Basil Valentin_, a holy man who flourished (the
twig) about 1413; but whose treatise is possibly apocryphal. According
to Basil Valentin, the twig was regarded with awe by ignorant
labouring men, which is still true. Paracelsus, though he has a
reputation for magical daring, thought the use of the twig 'uncertain
and unlawful'; and Agricola, in his _De Re Metallica_ (1546),
expresses a good deal of scepticism about the use of the rod in
mining. A traveller of 1554 found that the wand was _not_ used--and
this seems to have surprised him--in the mines of Macedonia. Most of
the writers of the sixteenth century accounted for the turning of the
rod by 'sympathy,' which was then as favourite an explanation of
everything as evolution is to-day. In 1630 the Baron de Beau Soleil of
Bohemia (his name sounds rather Bohemian) came to France with his
wife, and made much use of the rod in the search for water and
minerals. The Baroness wrote a little volume on the subject,
afterwards reprinted in a great storehouse of this lore, _La Physique
Occulte_, of Vallemont. Kircher, a Jesuit, made experiments which came
to nothing; but Gaspard Schott, a learned writer, cautiously declined
to say that the Devil was always 'at the bottom of it' when the rod
turned successfully. The problem of the rod was placed before our own
Royal Society by Boyle, in 1666, but the Society was not more
successful here than in dealing with the philosophical difficulty
proposed by Charles II. In 1679 De Saint Romain, deserting the old
hypothesis of secret 'sympathies,' explained the motion of the rod
(supposing it to move) by the action of _corpuscules_. From this time
the question became the playing ground of the Cartesian and other
philosophers. The struggle was between theories of 'atoms,' magnetism,
'corpuscules,' electric effluvia, and so forth, on one side, and the
immediate action of devils or of conscious imposture, on the other.
The controversy, comparatively simple as long as the rod only
indicated hidden water or minerals, was complicated by the revival of
the savage belief that the wand could 'smell out' moral offences. As
long as the twig turned over material objects, you could imagine
sympathies and 'effluvia' at pleasure. But when the wand twirled over
the scene of a murder, or dragged the expert after the traces of the
culprit, fresh explanations were wanted. Le Brun wrote to Malebranche
on July 8, 1689, to tell him that the wand only turned over what the
holder had the _intention_ of discovering.[186] If he were following a
murderer, the wand good-naturedly refused to distract him by turning
over hidden water. On the other hand, Vallemont says that when a
peasant was using the wand to find water, it turned over a spot in a
wood where a murdered woman was buried, and it conducted the peasant
to the murderer's house. These events seem inconsistent with Le Brun's
theory of _intention_. Malebranche replied, in effect, that he had
only heard of the turning of the wand over water and minerals; that it
then turned (if turn it did) by virtue of some such force as
electricity; that, if such force existed, the wand would turn over
open water. But it does not so turn; and, as physical causes are
constant, it follows that the turning of the rod cannot be the result
of a physical cause. The only other explanation is an intelligent
cause--either the will of an impostor, or the action of a spirit. Good
spirits would not meddle with such matters; therefore either the Devil
or an impostor causes the motion of the rod, if it _does_ move at
all. This logic of Malebranche's is not agreeable to believers in the
twig; but there the controversy stood, till, in 1692, Jacques Aymar, a
peasant of Dauphine, by the use of the twig discovered one of the
Lyons murderers.
Though the story of this singular event is pretty well known, it must
here be briefly repeated. No affair can be better authenticated, and
our version is abridged from the 'Relations' of 'Monsieur le Procureur
du Roi, Monsieur l'Abbe de la Garde, Monsieur Panthot, Doyen des
Medecins de Lyon, et Monsieur Aubert, Avocat celebre.'
On July 5, 1692, a vintner and his wife were found dead in the cellar
of their shop at Lyons. They had been killed by blows from a
hedging-knife, and their money had been stolen. The culprits could not
be discovered, and a neighbour took upon him to bring to Lyons a
peasant out of Dauphine, named Jacques Aymar, a man noted for his
skill with the divining rod. The Lieutenant-Criminel and the Procureur
du Roi took Aymar into the cellar, furnishing him with a rod of the
first wood that came to hand. According to the Procureur du Roi, the
rod did not move till Aymar reached the very spot where the crime had
been committed. His pulse then rose, and the wand twisted rapidly.
'Guided by the wand or by some internal sensation,' Aymar now pursued
the track of the assassins, entered the court of the Archbishop's
palace, left the town by the bridge over the Rhone, and followed the
right bank of the river. He reached a gardener's house, which he
declared the men had entered, and some children confessed that three
men (_whom they described_) had come into the house one Sunday
morning. Aymar followed the track up the river, pointed out all the
places where the men had landed, and, to make a long story short,
stopped at last at the door of the prison of Beaucaire. He was
admitted, looked at the prisoners, and picked out as the murderer a
little hunchback (had the children described a hunchback?) who had
just been brought in for a small theft. The hunchback was taken to
Lyons, and he was recognised, on the way, by the people at all the
stages where he had stopped. At Lyons he was examined in the usual
manner, and confessed that he had been an accomplice in the crime, and
had guarded the door. Aymar pursued the other culprits to the coast,
followed them by sea, landed where they had landed, and only desisted
from his search when they crossed the frontier. As for the hunchback,
he was broken on the wheel, being condemned on his own confession. It
does not appear that he was put to the torture to make him confess. If
this had been done his admissions would, of course, have been as
valueless as those of the victims in trials for witchcraft.
This is, in brief, the history of the famous Lyons murders. It must be
added that many experiments were made with Aymar in Paris, and that
they were all failures. He fell into every trap that was set for him;
detected thieves who were innocent, failed to detect the guilty, and
invented absurd excuses; alleging, for example, that the rod would not
indicate a murderer who had confessed, or who was drunk when he
committed his crime. These excuses seem to annihilate the wild
contemporary theory of Chauvin and others, that the body of a murderer
naturally exhales an invisible _matiere meurtriere_--peculiar
indestructible atoms, which may be detected by the expert with the
rod. Something like the same theory, we believe, has been used to
explain the pretended phenomena of haunted houses. But the wildest
philosophical credulity is staggered by a _matiere meurtriere_ which
is disengaged by the body of a sober, but not by that of an
intoxicated, murderer, which survives tempests in the air, and endures
for many years, but is dissipated the moment the murderer confesses.
Believers in Aymar have conjectured that his real powers were
destroyed by the excitements of Paris, and that he took to imposture;
but this is an effort of too easy good-nature. When Vallemont defended
Aymar (1693) in the book called _La Physique Occulte_, he declared
that Aymar was physically affected to an unpleasant extent by _matiere
meurtriere_, but was not thus agitated when he used the rod to
discover minerals. We have seen that, if modern evidence can be
trusted, holders of the rod are occasionally much agitated even when
they are only in search of wells. The story gave rise to a prolonged
controversy, and the case remains a judicial puzzle, but little
elucidated by the confession of the hunchback, who may have been
insane, or morbid, or vexed by constant questioning till he was weary
of his life. He was only nineteen years of age.
The next use of the rod was very much like that of 'tipping' and
turning tables. Experts held it (as did Le Pere Menestrier, 1694),
questions were asked, and the wand answered by turning in various
directions. By way of showing the inconsistency of all philosophies of
the wand, it may be said that one girl found that it turned over
concealed gold if she held gold in her hand, while another found that
it indicated the metal so long as she did _not_ carry gold with her in
the quest. In the search for water, ecclesiastics were particularly
fond of using the rod. The Marechal de Boufflers dug many wells, and
found no water, on the indications of a rod in the hands of the Prieur
de Dorenic, near Guise. In 1700 a cure, near Toulouse, used the wand
to answer questions, which, like _planchette_, it often answered
wrong. The great _sourcier_, or water-finder, of the eighteenth
century was one Bleton. He declared that the rod was a mere index, and
that physical sensations of the searcher communicated themselves to
the wand. This is the reverse of the African theory, that the stick is
inspired, while the men who hold it are only influenced by the stick.
On the whole, Bleton's idea seems the less absurd, but Bleton himself
often failed when watched with scientific care by the incredulous.
Paramelle, who wrote on methods of discovering wells, in 1856, came to
the conclusion that the wand turns in the hands of certain individuals
of peculiar temperament, and that it is very much a matter of chance
whether there are, or are not, wells in the places where it turns.
On the whole, the evidence for the turning of the wand is a shade
better than that for the magical turning of tables. If there are no
phenomena of this sort at all, it is remarkable that the belief in
them is so widely diffused. But if the phenomena are purely
subjective, owing to the conscious or unconscious action of nervous
patients, then they are precisely of the sort which the cunning
medicine-man observes, and makes his profit out of, even in the
earliest stages of society. Once introduced, these practices never die
out among the conservative and unprogressive class of peasants; and,
every now and then, they attract the curiosity of philosophers, or win
the belief of the credulous among the educated classes. Then comes, as
we have lately seen, a revival of ancient superstition. For it were as
easy to pluck the comet out of the sky by the tail, as to eradicate
superstition from the mind of man.
Perhaps one good word may be said for the divining rod. Considering
the chances it has enjoyed, the rod has done less mischief than might
have been expected. It might very well have become, in Europe, as in
Asia and Africa, a kind of ordeal, or method of searching for and
trying malefactors. Men like Jacques Aymar might have played, on a
larger scale, the part of Hopkins, the witch-finder. Aymar was,
indeed, employed by some young men to point out, by help of the wand,
the houses of ladies who had been more frail than faithful. But at the
end of the seventeenth century in France, this research was not
regarded with favour, and put the final touch on the discomfiture of
Aymar. So far as we know, the hunchback of Lyons was the only victim
of the 'twig' who ever suffered in civilised society. It is true that,
in rural England, the movements of a Bible, suspended like a pendulum,
have been thought to point out the guilty. But even that evidence is
not held good enough to go to a jury.
FOOTNOTES:
[182] Preller, _Ausgewaehlte Aufsaetze_, p. 154.
[183] Tylor, _Prim. Cult._, ii. 156. Pinkerton, vii. 357.
[184] _Universities Mission to Central Africa_, p. 217. _Prim. Cult._,
ii. 156, 157.
[185] Quoted in _Jacob's Rod_: London, n.d., a translation of _La
Verge de Jacob_, Lyon, 1693.
[186] _Lettres sur la Baguette_, pp. 106-112.
_HOTTENTOT MYTHOLOGY._
'What makes mythology mythological, in the true sense of the word, is
what is utterly unintelligible, absurd, strange, or miraculous.' So
says Mr. Max Mueller in the January number of the _Nineteenth Century_
for 1882. Men's attention would never have been surprised into the
perpetual study and questioning of mythology if it had been
intelligible and dignified, and if its report had been in accordance
with the reason of civilised and cultivated races. What mythologists
wish to discover is the origin of the countless disgusting, amazing,
and incongruous legends which occur in the myths of all known peoples.
According to Mr. Mueller--