reign of Tiberius, on that day when, on the hill of Calvary, at
Jerusalem in Syria, Jesus Christ died as a malefactor, on the
cross--"And it was about the sixth hour, and there was a darkness all
over the earth"--Thamus, an Egyptian pilot, was guiding a ship near
the islands of Paxae in the Ionian Sea; and to him came a great voice,
saying, "Go! make everywhere the proclamation, _Great Pan is dead!_"
And from the poop of his ship, when, in great heaviness of heart,
because for him the joy of the world seemed to have passed away,
Thamus had reached Palodes, he shouted aloud the words that he had
been told. Then, from all the earth there arose a sound of great
lamentation, and the sea and the trees, the hills, and all the
creatures of Pan sighed in sobbing unison an echo of the pilot's
words--"_Pan is dead--Pan is dead._"
"The lonely mountains o'er
And the resounding shore,
A voice of weeping heard, and loud lament;
From haunted spring and dale
Edg'd with poplar pale,
The parting genius is with sighing sent;
With flow'r-inwoven tresses torn,
The Nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn."
Milton.
Pan was dead, and the gods died with him.
"Gods of Hellas, gods of Hellas,
Can ye listen in your silence?
Can your mystic voices tell us
Where ye hide? In floating islands,
With a wind that evermore
Keeps you out of sight of shore?
Pan, Pan is dead.
* * * * *
Gods! we vainly do adjure you,--
Ye return nor voice nor sign!
Not a votary could secure you
Even a grave for your Divine!
Not a grave to show thereby,
'_Here these grey old gods do lie,_'
Pan, Pan is dead."
E. B. Browning.
Pan is dead. In the old Hellenistic sense Pan is gone forever. Yet
until Nature has ceased to be, the thing we call Pan must remain a
living entity. Some there be who call his music, when he makes all
humanity dance to his piping, "_Joie de vivre_," and De Musset speaks
of "_Le vin de la jeunesse_" which ferments "_dans les veines de
Dieu_." It is Pan who inspires Seumas, the old islander, of whom Fiona
Macleod writes, and who, looking towards the sea at sunrise, says,
"Every morning like this I take my hat off to the beauty of the
world."
Half of the flesh and half of the spirit is Pan. There are some who
have never come into contact with him, who know him only as the emblem
of Paganism, a cruel thing, more beast than man, trampling, with
goat's feet, on the gentlest flowers of spring. They know not the
meaning of "the Green Fire of Life," nor have they ever known Pan's
moods of tender sadness. Never to them has come in the forest, where
the great grey trunks of the beeches rise from a carpet of primroses
and blue hyacinths, and the slender silver beeches are the guardian
angels of the starry wood-anemones, and the sunbeams slant through the
oak and beech leaves of tender green and play on the dead amber leaves
of a year that is gone, the whisper of little feet that cannot be
seen, the piercing sweet music from very far away, that fills the
heart with gladness and yet with a strange pain--the ache of the
_Weltschmerz_--the echo of the pipes of Pan.
"... Oftenest in the dark woods I hear him sing
Dim, half-remembered things, where the old mosses cling
To the old trees, and the faint wandering eddies bring
The phantom echoes of a phantom spring."
Fiona Macleod.
LORELEI
"Ich weiss nicht, was soll es bedeuten,
Dass ich so traurig bin;
Ein Maerchen aus alten Zeiten,
Das kommt mir nicht aus dem Sinn.
* * * * *
Die schoenste Jungfrau sitzet
Dort oben wunderbar,
Ihr gold'nes Geschmeide blitzet,
Sie kaemmt ihr gold'nes Haar.
Sie kaemmt es mit gold'nem Kamme,
Und singt ein Lied dabei;
Das hat eine wundersame,
Gewaltige Melodei."
Heine.
In every land, North and South, East and West, from sea to sea, myth
and legend hand down to us as cruel and malignant creatures, who
ceaselessly seek to slay man's body and to destroy his soul, the
half-human children of the restless sea and of the fiercely running
streams.
In Scotland and in Australia, in every part of Europe, we have tales
of horrible formless things which frequent lonely rivers and lochs and
marshes, and to meet which must mean Death. And equal in malignity
with them, and infinitely more dangerous, are the beautiful beings who
would seem to claim descent from Lilith, the soulless wife of Adam.
Such were the sirens who would have compassed the destruction of
Odysseus. Such are the mermaids, to wed with one of whom must bring
unutterable woe upon any of the sons of men. In lonely far-off places
by the sea there still are tales of exquisite melodies heard in the
gloaming, or at night when the moon makes a silver pathway across the
water; still are there stories of women whose home is in the depths of
the ocean, and who come to charm away men's souls by their beauty and
by their pitiful longing for human love.
Those who have looked on the yellow-green waters of the Seine, or who
have seen the more turbid, more powerful Thames sweeping her serious,
majestic way down towards the open ocean, at Westminster, or at London
Bridge, can perhaps realise something of that inwardness of things
that made the people of the past, and that makes the mentally
uncontrolled people of the present, feel a fateful power calling upon
them to listen to the insistence of the exacting waters, and to
surrender their lives and their souls forever to a thing that called
and which would brook no denial. In the Morgue, or in a mortuary by
the river-side, their poor bodies have lain when the rivers have
worked their will with them, and "Suicide," "Death by drowning," or
"By Misadventure" have been the verdicts given. We live in a too
practical, too utterly common-sensical age to conceive a poor woman
with nothing on earth left to live for, being lured down to the Shades
by a creature of the water, or a man who longs for death seeing a
beautiful daughter of a river-god beckoning to him to come where he
will find peace everlasting.
Yet ever we war with the sea. All of us know her seductive charm, but
all of us fear her. The boundary line between our fear of the fierce,
remorseless, ever-seeking, cruel waves that lap up life swiftly as a
thirsty beast laps water, and the old belief in cruel sea-creatures
that sought constantly for the human things that were to be their
prey, is a very narrow one. And once we have seen the sea in a rage,
flinging herself in terrible anger against the poor, frail toy that
the hands of men have made and that was intended to rule and to resist
her, foaming and frothing over the decks of the thing that carries
human lives, we can understand much of the old pagan belief. If one
has watched a river in spate, red as with blood, rushing triumphantly
over all resistance, smashing down the trees that baulk it, sweeping
away each poor, helpless thing, brute or human, that it encounters,
dealing out ruin and death, and proceeding superbly on to carry its
trophies of disaster to the bosom of the Ocean Mother, very easy is it
to see from whence came those old tales of cruelty, of irresistible
strength, of desire.
Many are the tales of sea-maidens who have stolen men's lives from
them and sent their bodies to move up and down amidst the wrack, like
broken toys with which a child has grown tired of playing and cast
away in weariness. In an eighth-century chronicle concerning St.
Fechin, we read of evil powers whose rage is "seen in that watery fury
and their hellish hate and turbulence in the beating of the sea
against the rocks." "The bitter gifts of our lord Poseidon" is the
name given to them by one of the earliest poets of Greece[7] and a
poet of our own time--poet of the sea, of running water, and of lonely
places--quotes from the saying of a fisherman of the isle of Ulva
words that show why simple minds have so many times materialised the
restless, devouring element into the form of a woman who is very
beautiful, but whose tender mercies are very cruel. "She is like a
woman of the old tales whose beauty is dreadful," said Seumas, the
islander, "and who breaks your heart at last whether she smiles or
frowns. But she doesn't care about that, or whether you are hurt or
not. It's because she has no heart, being all a wild water."[8]
Treacherous, beautiful, remorseless, that is how men regard the sea
and the rushing rivers, of whom the sirens and mermaids of old
tradition have come to stand as symbols. Treacherous and pitiless, yet
with a fascination that can draw even the moon and the stars to her
breast:
"Once I sat upon a promontory,
And heard a mermaid, on a dolphin's back,
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath,
That the rude sea grew civil at her song;
And certain stars shot madly from their spheres,
To hear the sea-maid's music."
Shakespeare.
Very many are the stories of the women of the sea and of the rivers,
but that one who must forever hold her own, because Heine has
immortalised her in song, is the river maiden of the Rhine--the
Lorelei.
Near St. Goar, there rises out of the waters of the Rhine a
perpendicular rock, some four hundred feet high. Many a boatman in
bygone days there met his death, and the echo which it possesses is
still a mournful one. Those who know the great river, under which lies
hid the treasure of the Nibelungs, with its "gleaming towns by the
river-side and the green vineyards combed along the hills," and who
have felt the romance of the rugged crags, crowned by ruined castles,
that stand like fantastic and very ancient sentries to guard its
channel, can well understand how easy of belief was the legend of the
Lorelei.
Down the green waters came the boatman's frail craft, ever drawing
nearer to the perilous rock. All his care and all his skill were
required to avert a very visible danger. But high above him, from the
rock round which the swirling eddies splashed and foamed, there came a
voice.
"Her voice was like the voice the stars
Had when they sang together."
And when the boatman looked up at the sound of such sweet music, he
beheld a maiden more fair than any he had ever dreamed of. On the rock
she sat, combing her long golden hair with a comb of red gold. Her
limbs were white as foam and her eyes green like the emerald green of
the rushing river. And her red lips smiled on him and her arms were
held out to him in welcome, and the sound of her song thrilled through
the heart of him who listened, and her eyes drew his soul to her arms.
Forgotten was all peril. The rushing stream seized the little boat
and did with it as it willed. And while the boatman still gazed
upwards, intoxicated by her matchless beauty and the magic of her
voice, his boat was swept against the rock, and, with the jar and
crash, knowledge came back to him, and he heard, with broken heart,
the mocking laughter of the Lorelei as he was dragged down as if by a
thousand icy hands, and, with a choking sigh, surrendered his life to
the pitiless river.
To one man only was it granted to see the siren so near that he could
hold her little, cold, white hands, and feel the wondrous golden hair
sweep across his eyes. This was a young fisherman, who met her by the
river and listened to the entrancing songs that she sang for him
alone. Each evening she would tell him where to cast his nets on the
morrow, and he prospered greatly and was a marvel to all others who
fished in the waters of the Rhine. But there came an evening when he
was seen joyously hastening down the river bank in response to the
voice of the Lorelei, that surely never had sounded so honey-sweet
before, and he came back nevermore. They said that the Lorelei had
dragged him down to her coral caves that he might live with her there
forever, and, if it were not so, the rushing water could never whisper
her secret and theirs, of a lifeless plaything that they swept
seawards, and that wore a look of horror and of great wonder in its
dead, wide-open eyes.
It is "ein Maerchen aus alten Zeiten"--a legend of long ago.
But it is a very much older _Maerchen_ that tells us of the warning of
Circe to Odysseus:
"To the Sirens first shalt thou come, who bewitch all men, whosoever
shall come to them. Whoso draws nigh them unwittingly and hears the
sound of the Siren's voice, never doth he see wife or babes stand by
him on his return, nor have they joy at his coming; but the Sirens
enchant him with their clear song."
And until there shall be no more sea and the rivers have ceased to
run, the enchantment that comes from the call of the water to the
hearts of men must go on. Day by day the toll of lives is paid, and
still the cruel daughters of the deep remain unsatisfied. We can hear
their hungry whimper from the rushing river through the night, and the
waves of the sea that thunders along the coast would seem to voice the
insistence of their desire. And we who listen to their ceaseless,
restless moan can say with Heine:
"_Ich weiss nicht, was soll es bedeuten,_
_Dass ich so traurig bin._"
For the sadness of heart, the melancholy that their music brings us is
a mystery which none on this earth may ever unravel.
FOOTNOTES:
[7] Archilochus of Paros.
[8] Fiona Macleod (_The Winged Destiny_).
FREYA, QUEEN OF THE NORTHERN GODS
"Friday's bairn is loving and giving," says the old rhyme that sets
forth the special qualities of the children born on each day of the
week, and to the superstitious who regard Friday as a day of evil
omen, it seems strange that Friday's bairn should be so blessed. But
they forget that before Christianity swept paganism before it, and
taught those who worshipped the northern gods the story of that first
black "Good Friday," the tragedy in which all humanity was involved,
Friday was the day of Freya, "The Beloved," gentle protectress, and
most generous giver of all joys, delights, and pleasures. From her, in
mediaeval times, the high-born women who acted as dispensers to their
lords first took the title _Frouwa_ (=Frau), and when, in its
transition stage, the old heathenism had evolved into a religion of
strong nature worship, overshadowed by fatalism, only thinly veneered
by Christianity, the minds of the Christian converts of Scandinavia,
like those of puzzled children, transferred to the Virgin Mary the
attributes that had formerly been those of their "Lady"--Freya, the
goddess of Love.
Long before the Madonna was worshipped, Freya gave her name to plants,
to flowers, and even to insects, and the child who says to the
beautiful little insect, that he finds on a leaf, "Ladybird, ladybird,
fly away home," is commemorating the name of the Lady, Freya, to whom
his ancestors offered their prayers.
In her home in the Hall of Mists, Freya (or Frigga), wife of Odin the
All Father, sat with her golden distaff spinning the clouds. Orion's
Belt was known as "Frigga's spindle" by the Norsemen, and the men on
the earth, as they watched the great cumulous masses of snowy-white,
golden or silver edged, the fleecy cloudlets of grey, soft as the
feathers on the breast of a dove, or the angry banks of black and
purple, portending a storm, had constant proof of the diligence of
their goddess. She was the protectress of those who sailed the seas,
and the care of children as they came into the world was also hers.
Hers, too, was the happy task of bringing together after death, lovers
whom Death had parted, and to her belonged the glorious task of going
down to the fields of battle where the slain lay strewn like leaves in
autumn and leading to Valhalla the half of the warriors who, as
heroes, had died. Her vision enabled her to look over all the earth,
and she could see into the Future, but she held her knowledge as a
profound secret that none could prevail upon her to betray.
"Of me the gods are sprung;
And all that is to come I know, but lock
In my own breast, and have to none reveal'd."
Matthew Arnold.
[Illustration: FREYA SAT SPINNING THE CLOUDS]
Thus she came to be pictured crowned with heron plumes, the symbol of
silence--the silence of the lonely marshes where the heron stands in
mutest contemplation--a tall, very stately, very queenly, wholly
beautiful woman, with a bunch of keys at her girdle--symbol of her
protection of the Northern housewife--sometimes clad in snow-white
robes, sometimes in robes of sombre black. And because her care was
for the anxious, weary housewife, for the mother and her new-born
babe, for the storm-tossed mariner, fighting the billows of a hungry
sea, for those whose true and pure love had suffered the crucifixion
of death, and for the glorious dead on the field of battle, it is very
easy to see Freya as her worshippers saw her--an ideal of perfect
womanhood.
But the gods of the Norsemen were never wholly gods. Always they, like
the gods of Greece, endeared themselves to humanity by possessing some
little, or big, human weakness. And Freya is none the less lovable to
the descendants of her worshippers because she possessed the so-called
"feminine weakness" of love of dress. Jewels, too, she loved, and
knowing the wondrous skill of the dwarfs in fashioning exquisite
ornaments, she broke off a piece of gold from the statue of Odin, her
husband, and gave it to them to make into a necklace--the marvellous
jewelled necklace Brisingamen, that in time to come was possessed by
Beowulf. It was so exquisite a thing that it made her beauty twice
more perfect, and Odin loved her doubly much because of it. But when
he discovered that his statue had been tampered with, his wrath was
very great, and furiously he summoned the dwarfs--they who dealt
always with fine metal--and demanded of them which of them had done
him this grievous wrong. But the dwarfs loved Freya, and from them he
got no answer.
Then he placed the statue above the temple gate, and laboured with
guile to devise runes that might give it the power of speech, so that
it might shout aloud the name of the impious robber as the robber went
by. Freya, no longer an omnipotent goddess, but a frightened wife,
trembled before his wrath, and begged the dwarfs to help her. And when
one of them--the most hideous of all--promised that he would prevent
the statue from speaking if Freya would but deign to smile upon him,
the queen of the gods, who had no dread of ugly things, and whose
heart was full of love and of pity, smiled her gentle smile on the
piteous little creature who had never known looks of anything but
horror and disgust from any of the deathless gods. It was for him a
wondrous moment, and the payment was worth Death itself. That night a
deep sleep fell on the guards of Odin's statue, and, while they slept,
the statue was pulled down from its pedestal and smashed into pieces.
The dwarf had fulfilled his part of the bargain.
When Odin next morning discovered the sacrilege, great was his anger,
and when no inquiry could find for him the criminal, he quitted Asgard
in furious wrath. For seven months he stayed away, and in that time
the Ice Giants invaded his realm, and all the land was covered with a
pall of snow, viciously pinched by black frosts, chilled by clinging,
deadening, impenetrable mists. But at the end of seven dreary months
Odin returned, and with him came the blessings of light and of
sunshine, and the Ice Giants in terror fled away.
Well was it for woman or for warrior to gain the favour of Freya, the
Beloved, who knew how to rule even Odin, the All Father, himself. The
Winilers who were warring with the Vandals once sought her aid, and
gained her promise of help. From Hlidskialf, the mighty watch-tower,
highest point in Asgard, from whence Odin and his queen could look
down and behold what was happening all the world over, amongst gods
and men, dwarfs, elves, and giants, and all creatures of their
kingdom, Freya watched the Vandals and the Winilers making ready for
the battle which was to decide forever which people should rule the
other.
Night was descending, but in the evening light the two gods beheld the
glitter of spears, the gleam of brass helmets and of swords, and heard
from afar the hoarse shouts of the warriors as they made ready for the
great fight on the morrow. Knowing well that her lord favoured the
Vandals, Freya asked him to tell her which army was to gain the
victory. "The army upon which my eyes shall first rest when I awake at
the dawning," said Odin, full well knowing that his couch was so
placed that he could not fail to see the Vandals when he woke. Well
pleased with his own astuteness, he then retired to rest, and soon
sleep lay heavy on his eyelids. But, while he slept, Freya gently
moved the couch upon which he lay, so that he must open his eyes not
on the army who had won his favour, but on the army that owned hers.
To the Winilers, she gave command to dress up their women as men, and
let them meet the gaze of Odin in the dawning, in full battle array.
"Take thou thy women-folk,
Maidens and wives;
Over your ankles
Lace on the white war-hose;
Over your bosoms
Link up the hard mail-nets;
Over your lips
Plait long tresses with cunning;--
So war beasts full-bearded
King Odin shall deem you,
When off the grey sea-beach
At sunrise ye greet him."
Charles Kingsley.
When the sun sent its first pale green light next morning over grey
sky and sea, Odin awoke, and gazed from his watch-tower at the army on
the beach. And, with great amazement, "What Longbeards are those?" he
cried.
"They are Winilers!" said Freya, in joyous triumph, "but you have
given them a new name. Now must you also give them a gift! Let it be
the victory, I pray you, dear lord of mine."
And Odin, seeing himself outwitted and knowing that honour bade him
follow the Northern custom and give the people he had named a gift,
bestowed on the Longbeards and their men the victory that Freya
craved. Nor was the gift of Odin one for that day alone, for to him
the _Langobarden_ attributed the many victories that led them at last
to find a home in the sunny land of Italy, where beautiful Lombardy
still commemorates by its name the stratagem of Freya, the queen.
With the coming of Christianity, Freya, the Beloved, was cast out
along with all the other old forgotten gods. The people who had loved
and worshipped her were taught that she was an evil thing and that to
worship her was sin. Thus she was banished to the lonely peaks of the
mountains of Norway and of Sweden and to the Brocken in Germany, no
longer a goddess to be loved, but transformed into a malignant power,
full of horror and of wickedness. On Walpurgis Night she led the
witches' revels on the Brocken, and the cats who were said to draw her
car while still she was regarded as a beneficent protectress of the
weak and needy, ceased to be the gentle creatures of Freya the Good,
and came under the ban of religion as the satanic companions of
witches by habit and repute.
One gentle thing only was her memory allowed to keep. When, not as an
omnipotent goddess but as a heart-broken mother, she wept the death of
her dearly-loved son, Baldur the Beautiful, the tears that she shed
were turned, as they fell, into pure gold that is found in the beds of
lonely mountain streams. And we who claim descent from the peoples who
worshipped her--
"Saxon and Norman and Dane are we"--
can surely cleanse her memory from all the ugly impurities of
superstition and remember only the pure gold of the fact that our
warrior ancestors did not only pray to a fierce and mighty god of
battles, but to a woman who was "loving and giving"--the little
child's deification of the mother whom it loves and who holds it very
dear.
THE DEATH OF BALDUR
"I heard a voice, that cried,
'Baldur the Beautiful
Is dead, is dead!'
And through the misty air
Passed like the mournful cry
Of sunward sailing cranes."
Longfellow.
Among the gods of Greece we find gods and goddesses who do unworthy
deeds, but none to act the permanent part of villain of the play. In
the mythology of the Norsemen we have a god who is wholly treacherous
and evil, ever the villain of the piece, cunning, malicious,
vindictive, and cruel--the god Loki. And as his foil, and his victim,
we have Baldur, best of all gods, most beautiful, most greatly
beloved. Baldur was the Galahad of the court of Odin the king, his
father.
"My strength is of the strength of ten,
Because my heart is pure."
No impure thing was to be found in his dwelling; none could impugn his
courage, yet ever he counselled peace, ever was gentle and infinitely
wise, and his beauty was as the beauty of the whitest of all the
flowers of the Northland, called after him _Baldrsbra_. The god of the
Norsemen was essentially a god of battles, and we are told by great
authorities that Baldur was originally a hero who fought on the
earth, and who, in time, came to be deified. Even if it be so, it is
good to think that a race of warriors could worship one whose chief
qualities were wisdom, purity, and love.