THE HALF-WAY WORLDS.
Having decided, very early in his earthly career, to acknowledge a
supernatural world, Man promptly set to work to people it after his
own image. One not providing scope for his quickening imagination, he
added another to it, supplementing the heavenly by the infernal, good
by evil--if, indeed, as is more probable, he did not rather deduce good
out of evil. But just as there are many stages between high noon and
midnight, so to the world he saw and those he imagined he added yet
others which should act as their connecting links. Between the divine
and the human he placed the semi-divine, between the human and the
infernal the half-human. He mated God with Man and both with Devil, and
dowered them with a numerous family, God-Man, Man-Devil, God-Devil,
and so on, until the possibilities of his earlier imagination were
exhausted. Each has his own world--and the stars cannot rival them in
number; each world has its cities and its nations, differing in all
things save one--that all alike feel, act, think, after the manner of
mankind. So is it, again, with the other universe of half-way worlds,
filling the space between the human and the bestial--centaur, satyr,
were-wolf, or mermaid, all alike reflect the human imagination that has
evolved them--to nondescript bodies they unite the reflected mind of
man.
Conforming to the general rule, the witch is but one dweller in a
half-way world that is thickly populated and in itself forms one of an
intricate star-group. Externally at least, its orbit nearly coincides
with that of our human world, in that its inhabitants are for the most
part of human origins acquiring those attributes which raise them
above--or degrade them below--the commonalty subsequently to their
birth. This not invariably--nothing is invariable to the imagination.
Thus the fairies, although not human beings, may yet be witches--demons
also, unless many grave and reverend authorities lie. Under certain
conditions they may even become human beings, as mermaids may--many
a man has married a fairy wife--and it is an open question whether
they have altogether lost their hope of Heaven, as witches invariably
have. As witches, they must be regarded as belonging to the White,
or beneficent, type; for although, as Mercutio has told us, they may
sometimes play unkind pranks upon the idle or undeserving, they have
always a kindly eye for the virtuous, and frequently devote themselves
altogether to good works, as in the case of Lob-lie-by-the-Fire, and
others equally difficult to catalogue. For the more we investigate
the various orbits of the half-way worlds, the more do we find them
inextricably interwoven. The Western Fairy or Oriental Djinn may
partake of half-a-hundred different natures--may pervade half the
imaginative universe--and as does the Fairy, so does the Witch. Hecate,
a goddess, was yet no less notorious a witch than was Mother Shipton,
a human being of no elevated rank. The were-wolf, though usually of
human parentage, might yet have been born a wolf and obtained the power
of taking human shape from some subsequent external cause. The Beast
in the fairy story, though at heart a youthful Prince of considerable
attractions, once transmogrified might have remained a Beast for good
and all but for his fortunate encounter with Beauty's father. Who shall
say exactly in which world to place, how to class beyond possibility of
confusion, Circe--witch, goddess, and woman, and the men she turned to
swine--or the fairies and mermaids who have, usually for love, divested
themselves of their extra-human attributes and become more or less
permanently women--or those human children who, stolen by the fairies,
have become fairies for good and all--or how distinguish between all
of these and the ladies with romantic names and uncertain aspirates who
deal out destinies in modern Bond Street.
Even if we agree to confine the witch to the narrowest limits, to
regard her, that is to say, as primarily a human being and only
incidentally possessed of superhuman powers and attributes, there still
remain many difficulties in the way of exact classification. Her powers
are varied, and by no means always common to every individual. Or,
again, she has the power to turn herself corporeally into a wolf or a
cat--which brings her into line with the were-wolf, just as the cat or
wolf may under certain circumstances transform themselves, permanently
or otherwise, into a human witch. She may acquire the mind of a wolf
without its body; on the other hand, many a beautiful princess has
been transformed into a white doe by witchcraft. So with her male
colleagues--sorcerer, magician, wizard, warlock, male-witch, diviner,
and the rest of the great family. We may reach firm ground by agreeing
to recognise only such as are of human origin, though by so doing we
rule out many of the most eminent--the great Merlin himself among them.
But even so, it is impossible to dogmatise as to where the one begins,
the other ends. There have been many male-witches--more particularly in
Scotland--as distinguished from wizards. Wizard and warlock again, if
it be safe to regard them as distinct species, though differing from
magician and sorcerer, are yet very difficult of disentanglement. The
position is complicated by the fact that, just as a man may be clerk,
singer, cricketer, forger, philanthropist, and stamp-collector at one
and the same time, so might one professor of the Black Art take half a
dozen shapes at the same time or spread over his career.
There is indeed but one pinnacle of solid rock jutting out from the
great quagmire of shifting uncertainty--witch, wizard, were-wolf,
or whatsoever their sub-division--one and all unite in one great
certainty: that of inevitable damnation. Whatever their form, however
divergent their powers, to that one conclusion they must come at last.
And thus, and only thus, we may know them--posthumously.
It is true that certain arbitrary lines may be drawn to localise the
witch proper, even though the rules be chiefly made up of exceptions.
Thus she is, for the most part, feminine. The Scots male-witch, and
those elsewhere occurrent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
might as correctly be termed wizards or warlocks, for any absolute
proof to the contrary. The witch, again, has seldom risen to such
heights in the profession as have her male competitors. The magician
belongs, as we have seen, to a later stage of human development than
does the witch, but, once evolved, he soon left her far behind; it
is true that he was able to avail himself of the store of knowledge
by her so slowly and painfully acquired. With its aid he soon raised
himself to the highest rank in the profession--approaching it from the
scientific standpoint, and leaving her to muddle along empirically
and by rule of thumb. Nor was he content until he had made himself
master of the Devil--using Satan and all his imps for his own private
ends--while the less enterprising witch never rose to be more than the
Devil's servant, or at best his humble partner in ill-doing.
The Magician, whatsoever his own private failings, has certainly
deserved well of posterity. Just as the quack and the Bond Street sybil
are representatives of the witch in the direct line, so, from the
alchemist and the sorcerer are descended the great scientists of our
own day--an impious brood indeed, who deny that their own father was
aught but an impostor and a charlatan. The proprietor of, let us say,
"Dr. Parabole's Pellets," is own brother--illegitimate though he be--to
the discoverer of the Röntgen ray. The researches of the old-time
sorcerer into the Forbidden, whatever their immediate profit, at least
pointed out the direction for more profitable researches. Merlin,
Cornelius Agrippa, or Albertus Magnus, had they been born in our day,
would certainly have achieved the Fellowship of the Royal Society--and
with good reason. It is to the search after the philosopher's stone and
the elixir vitæ that we owe the discovery of radium. It was only by
calling in the aid of the Devil that mankind acquired the prescience of
a God.
The witch proper, on the other hand, did not trouble herself with
research work. Having attained that dominion over her fellows dear
to the heart of woman, she was content to rest upon her laurels.
Certain incantations or charms, learned by rote, the understanding
of the effect and cure of certain poisons--these were sufficient
stock-in-trade to convince her neighbours, and perhaps herself.
Doubtless Dr. Parabole, however aware in the beginning of the
worthlessness of his own pills, comes after years of strenuous
advertising to believe in them. He may stop short of taking them
himself--at least he will prescribe them to his dearest friend in
absolute good faith. So with the witch, his grandmother. Many, no
doubt, of the millions offered up as sacrifice to the All-Merciful,
were guiltless even in intention; many more allowed themselves to be
convinced of their own sinfulness by the suspicions of their neighbours
or the strenuous arguments of their judge-persecutors; many were
hysterical, epileptic, or insane. But the larger proportion, it is
scarcely too much to say, only lacked the power while cherishing the
intention--witches they were in everything but witchcraft.
We thus may briefly state the difference between the witch and the
magician as that the one professed powers in which she might herself
believe or not believe, inherited or received by her, and by her
passed on to her successors without any attempt to augment them. The
magician, on the other hand, was actually a student of the mysteries
he professed, and thus, if we leave aside his professional hocus-pocus
devilry, cannot be considered as altogether an impostor. With the
alchemist and the astrologer, more often than not combining the three
characters in his one person, he stands at the head of the profession
of which the witch--male or female--brings up the rear. Another
distinction is drawn by sixteenth-century authorities between witches
and conjurers on the one side, and sorcerers and enchanters on the
other--in that while the two first-mentioned have personal relations
with the Devil, their colleagues deal only in medicines and charms,
without, of necessity, calling up apparitions at all. It is to be noted
in this connection that the sorcerer often leads Devil and devilkin by
the nose, in more senses than one--devils having extremely delicate
noses, and being thus easily soothed and enticed by fumigations, a
peculiarity of which every competent sorcerer avails himself. Thus,
Saint Dunstan, and those other saints of whom it is recorded that
they literally led the Devil by the nose, using red-hot pincers for
the purpose, were but following the path pointed out for them by
professors of the Art Magical.
Between the witch and the conjurer a wide gulf is fixed. The conjurer
coerces the Devil, against his infernal will, by prayers and the
invocation of God's Holy Name; the witch concludes with him a business
agreement, bartering her body, soul, and obedience for certain more or
less illusory promises. The conjurer is almost invariably beneficent,
the witch usually malignant, though the White Witch exercises her
powers only for good, if sometimes with a certain mischievousness,
while the Grey Witch does good or evil as the fancy takes her, with a
certain bias towards evil. The wizard, again, though often confused
with the male-witch, is in reality a practitioner of great distinction,
possessing supernatural powers of his own attaining, and, like the
magician, constraining the Devil rather than serving him. He also is
capable of useful public service, so much so indeed that Melton, in
his "Astrologastra," published in 1620, includes what may pass as a
Post Office Directory of the wizards of London. He enumerates six of
importance, some by name, as Dr. Forman or "Young Master Olive in
Turnbull Street," others by vaguer designations, as "the cunning man of
the Bankside" or "the chirurgeon with the bag-pipe cheek." He includes
one woman in the list, probably a White Witch.
The Diviners, or peerers into the future, form yet another sub-section
of dabblers in the supernatural--and one which numbers very many
practitioners even in our own day. Naturally enough, seeing that
the desire to influence the future is the obvious corollary to that
of knowing it, the part of diviner was more often than not doubled
with that of witch or sorcerer. Divination is an art of the most
complicated, boasting almost as many branches as medicine itself,
each with its select band of practitioners. Different nations, again,
favoured different methods of divining--thus the Hebrews placed most
confidence in Urim and Thummim; the Greeks were famous for axinomancy,
the machinery for which consisted of an axe poised upon a slate or
otherwise handled. This method was as apt for present as for future
needs, being especially potent in the discovery of criminals. Crime
detection by divination has been--and remains--greatly favoured in the
East. The Hindus, in particular, place greater reliance upon it than
upon the more usual methods of our Occidental police, and many stories
are told of the successes achieved by their practitioners. Nor is this
surprising in cases where the diviner shows such shrewd knowledge of
human nature as in that, oft-quoted, whereby all those under suspicion
of a theft are ranged in a row and presented with mouthfuls of grain,
with the assurance that the guilty man alone will be unable to swallow
it--a phenomenon which nearly always does occur if the thief be among
those present--and not infrequently when he is not! This and similar
stories, though scarcely falling under the heading of divination
proper, are so far pertinent to the subject that they suggest the
explanation of many of its more remarkable successes. Tell a nervous
man that he is destined to commit suicide upon a certain day, and,
granted that he has any faith in your prophetic powers, the odds are
that he will prove the correctness of your prophecy. We may compare
with this the powerful influence of "tapu" upon the South Sea Island
mind. Many natives have died--as has been vouched for by hundreds of
credit-worthy witnesses--for no more tangible reason than fear at
having incurred the curse of desecrating something placed under its
protection. It may be added that the Islanders, observing that white
men do not suffer the same fate, account for it by declaring that the
White Man's Gods, being of a different persuasion from their own,
protect their own votaries.
Divination proper takes almost innumerable forms. Without entering
too closely upon a wide subject, a few examples may be profitably
quoted. Among the best known are Belomancy, or divination by the flight
of arrows, a form much favoured by the Arabs; Bibliomancy (of which
the "Sortes Virgilianæ" is the most familiar example); Oneiromancy
(or divination by dreams, honoured by Archbishop Laud and Lord Bacon
among others); Rhabdomancy (by rods or wands. The "dowser," or
water-finder, whose exploits have aroused so much attention of recent
years, is obviously akin to the Rhabdomancist). Crystallomancy, or
crystal-gazing, was first popularised in this country by the notorious
Dr. Dee, and still finds many votaries in Bond Street and elsewhere.
Hydromancy, or divination by water, is another variety much favoured
by the Bond Street sybil, a pool of ink sometimes taking the place of
the water. Cheiromancy, or Palmistry, most popular of any, may possess
some claim to respect in its least ambitious form as a means towards
character reading. Divination by playing-cards, another popular method,
is, needless to say, of later, mediæval origin. The Roman augurs, who,
as every schoolboy knows, deduced the future from the flight of birds,
provide yet another example of this universal pastime, perhaps the
least harmful sub-section of the Black Arts.
Among the most brilliant luminaries of the half-way worlds are
those twin-stars inhabited by the Alchemist and the Astrologer. The
pseudo-science of star-reading may be supposed to date from the first
nightfall--and may thus claim a pedigree even older, if only by a
few months or years, than that of Magic proper. Alchemy, despite
its Moorish name, has a scarcely less extended history. It owes its
birth--traditionally, at any rate--to the same Egyptian Man-God who
first introduced witchcraft and magic in their regularised forms to an
expectant world. Its principles having been by him engraved in Punic
characters upon an emerald, were discovered in his tomb by no less a
person than Alexander the Great. It should perhaps be added that doubts
have been cast upon this resurrection. However that may be, it was much
practised by the later Greeks in Constantinople from the fifth century
A.D. until the Moslem conquest of the city. From them the Arabs adopted
it, gave it the name by which it has ever since been known, and became
the most successful of its practitioners.
To attempt any close study of the great alchemists were foreign to my
present purpose, and would entail more space than is at my disposal.
At the same time, so close was their connection, in the eyes of the
vulgar, so intimate their actual relationship with witchcraft, that it
is impossible altogether to ignore them. What is more, they lend to the
witch a reflected respectability such as she can by no means afford to
forgo. They held, in fact, in their own day, much the same position
as do the great inventors and scientists of to-day. Mr. Edison and
Mr. Marconi, had they been born ten centuries since, would certainly
have taken exalted rank as alchemists or magicians. As it is, in ten
centuries a whole world of magical romance will have been very likely
woven about their names, even if they have not been actually exalted to
divinity or inextricably confused with Lucifer and Prometheus. While
some of their predecessors may have actually claimed power over the
supernatural--either in self-deception or for self-aggrandisement--the
great majority undoubtedly had such claims thrust upon them, either
by their contemporaries or by posterity, and would have themselves
claimed nothing higher than to be considered students of the unknown.
The Philosopher's Stone and the Elixir Vitæ may have served indeed
as the ideal goal of their researches, much as they do under their
modern form of the Secret of Life in our own time; but their actual
discoveries, accidental and incidental though they may have been, were
none the less valuable. After such a lapse of time it is as difficult
to draw the line between the alchemist-scientist and the charlatan as
it will be a century hence to distinguish the false from the true among
the "inventors" and "scientists" of to-day, so absolutely do the mists
of tradition obscure the face of history. Leaving out of the question
such purely legendary figures as Merlin, we may class them under three
headings, and briefly consider one example under each. In the first
may be placed the more or less mythical figures of Gebir and Albertus
Magnus, both of whom, so far as it is now possible to judge, owe their
ambiguous reputations entirely to the superstitions of their posterity.
Such a personage as the great Arabian physician Gebir, otherwise
Abou Moussah Djafar, surnamed Al Sofi, or the Wise, living in the
eighth century, was certain to gain the reputation of possessing
supernatural power, even had he not busied himself in the discovery
of the Philosopher's Stone and the Elixir. Though he found neither,
he yet in seeking them made other discoveries little less valuable,
and it is scarcely too much to say, made their discovery possible in
later centuries. Thus, in default of the means of making gold, he gave
us such useful chemicals as nitric acid, nitrate of silver, and oxide
of copper. Incidentally he wrote several hundred treatises on his two
"subjects," an English translation of one, the "Summæ Perfectionis,"
having been published in 1686 by Richard Russell, himself an alchemist
of respectable attainments.
Albertus Magnus, again, gave every excuse to the vulgar for regarding
him as infernally inspired. That is to say, he was a scholar of great
attainments in a day when scholars were chiefly remarkable for their
dense ignorance, and fully deserved some less ambiguous sobriquet than
that bestowed upon him by some writers of "Founder of the Schoolmen."
A Dominican, he held the chair of Theology at Padua in 1222 while
still a young man. Grown weary of a sedentary life, he resigned his
professorship and taught in many of the chief European cities, and more
particularly in Paris, where he lived for three years in company with
his illustrious pupil, Thomas Aquinas. He was at one time appointed
Bishop of Regensburg, but very soon resigned, finding his episcopal
duties interfere with his studies. Of the twenty-five folios from his
pen, one is devoted to alchemy, and he was a magician of the first
class--so, at least, succeeding generations averred, though he himself
very likely had no suspicions thereof. Among other of his possessions
was a brazen statue with the gift of speech, a gift exercised with such
assiduity as to exhaust the patience even of the saintly Thomas Aquinas
himself, so that he was constrained to shatter it to pieces.
Roger Bacon, inventor and owner of an even more famous brazen head,
was no less illustrious a scholar, and as fully deserved his admiring
nickname "The Admirable Doctor," even though he were not in actual
fact the inventor of gunpowder and the telescope, as asserted by his
admirers. A native of Somerset, and born, traditionally, the year
before the signing of Magna Charta, he might have ranked among the
greatest Englishmen had not his reputation as a magician given him
the suggestion of being a myth altogether. Something of a heretic
he was, although in orders, and his writings brought down upon him
the suspicions of the General of the Franciscan Order, to which he
belonged. Pope Clement IV. extended protection to him for a time, even
to the extent of studying his works, and more particularly his "Magnum
Opus," but later the Franciscan General condemned his writings, and he
spent fourteen years in prison, being released only two years before
his death. But his historical achievements were as nothing to his
legendary possession, in partnership with Friar Bungay, of the Talking
Head. Less garrulous than Albertus' statue, it emitted only three
sentences: "Time is. Time was. Time is past." Its last dictum, having
unfortunately for all audience a foolish servant, and being by him held
up to ridicule, it fell to the ground and was smashed to pieces, thus
depriving its inventor of his cherished scheme--by its help to surround
England with a brazen rampart no whit less efficacious against the
assaults of the King's enemies than are our present-day ironclads.
Friar Bacon was not undeserving of the posthumous popularity he
achieved in song and story, for he it was who made magic and
alchemy really popular pursuits in this country. So numerous were
his imitators that rather more than a century after his death--in
1434--the alchemical manufacture of gold and silver was declared a
felony. Twenty-one years later Henry VI., being, as he usually was,
in urgent need of ready money, saw reason to modify the Governmental
attitude, and granted a number of patents--to ecclesiastics as well as
laymen--for seeking after the Philosopher's Stone, with the declared
purpose of paying the Royal debts out of the proceeds. In which design
he was, it is to be feared, disappointed.
Dr. Dee, the friend and gossip of Queen Elizabeth, may be taken as
marking the point at which the alchemist ceases to be an inhabitant
of any half-way world and becomes altogether human. A Londoner by
birth, he was born in 1527, became a B.A. of Cambridge University
and Rector of Upton-upon-Severn. His ecclesiastical duties could not
contain his energies, and so well versed did he become in arts magical
that, upon a waxen effigy of Queen Elizabeth being found in Lincoln's
Inn Fields--and a waxen effigy had only one meaning in Elizabeth's
time--he was employed to counteract the evil spells contained in it,
which he did with such conspicuous success that the Royal Person
suffered no ill-effects whatever. Unfortunately for himself, Dr. Dee
acquired in course of time a disciple, one Edward Kelly. Kelly proved
an apt daunter of demons, but he was totally lacking in the innocent
credulity so noticeable in the character of his reverend mentor. At
his prompting Dr. Dee undertook a Continental tour, which resulted
in disaster of the most overwhelming and the total loss of Dr. Dee's
good name. It is true that he may be considered to have deserved his
fate, for so absolute was his belief in his disciple that when that
_chevalier d'industrie_ received a message from a demoniacal familiar
that it was essential for the success of their alchemical enterprises
that they should exchange wives--Mrs. Dee being as well-favoured as
Mrs. Kelly was the reverse--the doctor accepted the situation with
implicit faith, and agreed to all that the spirits desired.
Among other seekers after the Philosopher's Stone and the Elixir Vitæ
who may be briefly referred to were Alain de l'Isle, otherwise Alanus
de Insulis, notable in that he actually discovered the elixir, if
his contemporaries may be believed, and who so far lived up to his
reputation as to defer his death, which occurred in 1298, until his
110th year; Raymond Lully, who, visiting England in or about 1312,
was provided with a laboratory within the precincts of Westminster
Abbey, where many years later a supply of gold-dust was found; Nicholas
Flamel, who died in 1419, and who gained most of his occult knowledge
from a volume written in Latin by the Patriarch Abraham; and, to come
to later years, William Lilly, a famous English practitioner of the
seventeenth century, and an adept in the use of the divining rod, with
which he sought for hidden treasures in Westminster Abbey, possibly
those left behind him by Raymond Lully.
Perhaps no symptom of civilisation is more disquieting than the
increasing tendency to compress the half-way worlds--built up by our
forefathers with such lavish expenditure of imagination--into the
narrow limits of that in which we are doomed to spend our working
days--not too joyously. We have seen how the alchemist and the magician
from semi-divine beings, vested with power over gods and men, have by
degrees come to be confounded with the cheap-jack of a country fair.
So it has been with many another denizen of the Unseeable. Consider,
for example, the once formidable giant. Originally gods, or but
little inferior to them, so that Olympus must exercise all its might
to prevail against them; at one time a nation in themselves, located
somewhere in Cornwall, with kings of their own, Corcoran, Blunderbore,
and the rest, aloof from man except when, for their pastime or
appetite, they raided his preserves, vulnerable, indeed, though only to
a superhuman Jack; where are your giants now? Goliath, though defeated
by David, was yet not dishonoured, in that he was warring not against a
puny, sling-armed shepherd, but against the whole might of the Jewish
Jehovah. There were giants on the earth in those days, the Scriptures
tell us, and that in terms giving us to understand that a giant was to
be regarded with respect, if not with admiration. Polyphemus, again,
though outwitted by a mortal, was none the less a figure almost divine,
god-like in his passions and his agony. The whole ancient world teems
with anecdotes, all proving the respectability of the old-time giant.
And to-day? I saw a giant myself some few years back. He was in a
show--and he was known as Goliath. A poor, lean, knock-kneed wavering
creature, half-idiotic, too, with a sickly, apologetic smile, as though
seeking to disarm the inevitable criticism his very existence must
provoke. Yet he was not to blame, poor, anachronistic wretch. Rather it
was the spirit of the age, that preferred to see him, set up for every
fool to jeer at, at sixpence a time, in a showman's booth, rather than
to watch him afar off, his terror magnified by distance, walking across
a lonely heath in the twilight, bearing a princess or a captive knight
along with him as his natural prey. The same spirit that has made the
giant shrink to an absurdity can see only the charlatan beneath the
flowing robes of the astrologer; and has argued the witch even out of
existence.
So it is with the mermaid. They showed one at the same booth wherein
the degenerate giant was mewed. A poor, shrunken, grotesque creature
enough, yet even so it might have passed for a symbol, if no more, had
they been content to leave it to our imagination. Instead they must
explain, even while they pocketed our sixpences, that the whole thing
was a dreary sham, concocted out of the fore-quarters of a monkey and
the tail end of a codfish, the whole welded together by the ingenious
fingers of some Japanese trickmonger. Yet there are those who would
uphold such cruel candour, who would prefer to pay sixpence in order to
see an ape-codfish rather than to remain in blissful ignorance, rather
than imagine that every wave may have its lovely tenant, a sea-maiden
of more than earthly tenderness and beauty. Civilisation prates to
us of dugongs and of manatees, and other fish-beasts that, it says,
rising upon the crest of a wave, sufficiently resemble the human form
to be mistaken for it by credulous, susceptible mariners. But is not
our faith in that tender story of the little mermaid who, for love
of a man, sought the earth in human shape even though she knew that
every step must cause her agony, every foot-mark be outlined with her
blood--is not it better for us to believe that fairy-tale than to cram
our weary brains with all the cynical truths of all the dime-museums or
schools of science between London and San Francisco?
Even those who smile at Neptune and his daughters cannot refuse the
tribute of a shudder to the Man-Beast. For however it be with the
mermaid, the were-wolf is no figment of the imagination. Not the
fanciful alone are convinced that many human beings partake of the
nature of certain beasts. You may pass them by the hundred in every
city street--men and women showing in their faces their kinship with
the horse, the dog, cat, monkey, lion, sparrow. And not in their faces
alone--for their features do but reflect the minds within them--the
man with the sharp, rat-like face nine times out of ten has all the
selfish canning of the rat. We have no need to seek for further
explanation of the centaur myth--to argue that some horseless nation,
seeing horsemen for the first time, accepted the man and his mount
as one and indivisible; there are plenty of men who have as much of
the equine as of the human in their composition. So it is with the
wolf-man--the were-wolf. He exists, and to this day, despite all your
civilising influences. Not among savages alone--or chiefly. He roams
the streets of our great cities, seeking his prey. Perhaps he lives in
the next street to you--a prosperous, respected citizen, with a shop
in Cheapside, a wife and family, and the regard of all his neighbours.
The wolf in him has never been aroused--may never be. Only, let Fate
or chance so will it, and--well, who can tell us Jack the Ripper's
antecedents? And where in all the annals of lycanthropy can you find a
grimmer instance of the man-wolf than Jack the Ripper?
With the were-wolf we return to closer contact with witchcraft
proper. It is true that the were-wolf was not always bewitched.
Sometimes the tendency was inborn--the man or woman was transformed
into the wolf at each recurrent full moon. In France--and more
particularly in the South, where lycanthropy has always had one of
its strongholds--the liability of certain individuals, especially
if they be born illegitimate, to this inconvenience is still firmly
credited by the popular mind. The were-wolf may be recognised for
that matter, even when in his human form, usually by the shape of his
broad, short-fingered hands and his hairy palm. It is even possible to
effect a permanent cure should the opportunity occur, and that by the
simple means of stabbing him three times in the forehead with a knife
while in his lupine shape. Again, in Scandinavia and elsewhere certain
men could transform themselves into wolves at will--a superstition
arising naturally enough out of traditions of the Berserkers and the
fits of wolfish madness into which they threw themselves. Yet again, as
Herodotus tells us, lycanthropy was sometimes a national observance.
The Neuri, if the Scythians were to be believed, were in the habit of
changing themselves into wolves once a year and remaining in that
shape for several days. But more frequently the change was attributable
to some evil spell cast by a witch. It is true that the wolf was only
one of many animals into whose shape she might condemn a human soul to
enter. Circe is, of course, a classical example; Saint Augustine, in
his "De Civitate Dei," relates how an old lady of his acquaintance used
to turn men into asses by means of enchantments--an example which has
been followed by younger ladies ever since, by the way--while Apuleius'
"Golden Ass" gives us an autobiographical testimony to the efficacy of
certain drugs towards the same end.
Doubtless because the wolf was extirpated in this country at a
comparatively early date English were-wolf legends are few and far
between. They could indeed only become universally current in a
country mainly pastoral and infested by wolves, as, for instance, in
ancient Arcadia, where indeed the were-wolf came into his highest
estate, or in many parts of Eastern and South-Eastern Europe to-day.
In certain Balkan districts the were-wolf shares the attributes of the
vampire, another allied superstition which is by no means without its
foundations of fact. Most people must have, indeed, been acquainted at
some time or other with the modern form of vampire, individuals who
unconsciously feed upon the vitality of those with whom they come into
contact. Many stories have been written, many legends founded upon
this phenomenon, to the truth of which many people have testified from
their own experience. At which point I leave the subject to those with
more scientific knowledge than myself.
In case there should be any who desire to transform themselves into a
wolf without the trouble and expense of resorting to a witch, I will
close this chapter with a spell warranted to produce the desired effect
without any further outlay than the price of a small copper knife. It
is of Russian origin, and is quoted from Sacharow by Mr. Baring Gould.
"He who desires to become an oborot (oborot = 'one transformed' =
were-wolf) let him seek in the forest a hewn-down tree; let him stab
it with a small copper knife and walk round the tree, repeating the
following incantation:
On the sea, on the ocean, on the island, on Bujan,
On the empty pasture gleams the moon, on an ash-stock lying
In a greenwood, in a gloomy vale.
Towards the stock wandereth a shaggy wolf,
Horned cattle seeking for his sharp white fangs;
But the wolf enters not the forest,
But the wolf dives not into the shadowy vale.
Moon, moon, gold-horned moon
Check the flight of bullets, blunt the hunters' knives,
Break the shepherds' cudgels,
Cast wild fear upon all cattle,
On men, on all creeping things,
That they may not catch the grey wolf,
That they may not rend his warm skin!
My word is binding, more binding than sleep,
More binding than the promise of a hero!
"Then he springs thrice over the tree and runs into the forest,
transformed into a wolf."