Custom and Myth 11

Custom and Myth 11

With the sixteenth canto we return to Wainamoinen, who, like all epic

heroes, visits the place of the dead, Tuonela. The maidens who play the

part of Charon are with difficulty induced to ferry over a man bearing no

mark of death by fire or sword or water. Once among the dead,

Wainamoinen refuses--being wiser than Psyche or Persephone--to taste of

drink. This 'taboo' is found in Japanese, Melanesian, and Red Indian

accounts of the homes of the dead. Thus the hero is able to return and

behold the stars. Arrived in the upper world, he warns men to 'beware of

perverting innocence, of leading astray the pure of heart; they that do

these things shall be punished eternally in the depths of Tuoni. There

is a place prepared for evil-doers, a bed of stones burning, rocks of

fire, worms and serpents.' This speech throws but little light on the

question of how far a doctrine of rewards and punishments enters into

primitive ideas of a future state. The 'Kalevala,' as we possess it, is

necessarily, though faintly, tinged with Christianity; and the peculiar

vices which are here threatened with punishment are not those which would

have been most likely to occur to the early heathen singers of this

runot.

 

Wainamoinen and Ilmarinen now go together to Pohjola, but the fickle

maiden of the land prefers the young forger of the sampo to his elder and

imperturbable companion. Like a northern Medea, or like the Master-maid

in Dr. Dasent's 'Tales from the Norse,' or like the hero of the Algonquin

tale and the Samoan ballad, she aids her alien lover to accomplish the

tasks assigned to him. He ploughs with a plough of gold the adder-close,

or field of serpents; he bridles the wolf and the bear of the lower

world, and catches the pike that swim in the waters of forgetfulness.

After this, the parents cannot refuse their consent, the wedding-feast is

prepared, and all the world, except the seduisant Lemminkainen, is bidden

to the banquet. The narrative now brings in the ballads that are sung at

a Finnish marriage.

 

First, the son-in-law enters the house of the parents of the bride,

saying, 'Peace abide with you in this illustrious hall.' The mother

answers, 'Peace be with you even in this lowly hut.' Then Wainamoinen

began to sing, and no man was so hardy as to clasp hands and contend with

him in song. Next follow the songs of farewell, the mother telling the

daughter of what she will have to endure in a strange home: 'Thy life was

soft and delicate in thy father's house. Milk and butter were ready to

thy hand; thou wert as a flower of the field, as a strawberry of the

wood; all care was left to the pines of the forest, all wailing to the

wind in the woods of barren lands. But now thou goest to another home,

to an alien mother, to doors that grate strangely on their hinges.' 'My

thoughts,' the maiden replies, 'are as a dark night of autumn, as a

cloudy day of winter; my heart is sadder than the autumn night, more

weary than the winter day.' The maid and the bridegroom are then

lyrically instructed in their duties: the girl is to be long-suffering,

the husband to try five years' gentle treatment before he cuts a willow

wand for his wife's correction. The bridal party sets out for home, a

new feast is spread, and the bridegroom congratulated on the courage he

must have shown in stealing a girl from a hostile tribe.

 

While all is merry, the mischievous Lemminkainen sets out, an unbidden

guest, for Pohjola. On his way he encounters a serpent, which he slays

by the song of serpent-charming. In this 'mystic chain of verse' the

serpent is not addressed as the gentle reptile, god of southern peoples,

but is spoken of with all hatred and loathing: 'Black creeping thing of

the low lands, monster flecked with the colours of death, thou that hast

on thy skin the stain of the sterile soil, get thee forth from the path

of a hero.' After slaying the serpent, Lemminkainen reaches Pohjola,

kills one of his hosts, and fixes his head on one of a thousand stakes

for human skulls that stood about the house, as they might round the hut

of a Dyak in Borneo. He then flees to the isle of Saari, whence he is

driven for his heroic profligacy, and by the hatred of the only girl whom

he has _not_ wronged. This is a very pretty touch of human nature.

 

He now meditates a new incursion into Pohjola. The mother of Pohjola (it

is just worth noticing that the leadership assumed by this woman points

to a state of society when the family was scarcely formed) calls to her

aid 'her child the Frost;' but the frost is put to shame by a hymn of the

invader's, a song against the Cold: 'The serpent was his foster-mother,

the serpent with her barren breasts; the wind of the north rocked his

cradle, and the ice-wind sang him to sleep, in the midst of the wild

marsh-land, where the wells of the waters begin.' It is a curious

instance of the animism, the vivid power of personifying all the beings

and forces of nature, which marks the 'Kalevala,' that the Cold speaks to

Lemminkainen in human voice, and seeks a reconciliation.

 

At this part of the epic there is an obvious lacuna. The story goes to

Kullervo, a luckless man, who serves as shepherd to Ilmarinen. Thinking

himself ill-treated by the heroic smith's wife, the shepherd changes his

flock into bears and wolves, which devour their mistress. Then he

returns to his own home, where he learns that his sister has been lost

for many days, and is believed to be dead. Travelling in search of her

he meets a girl, loves her, and all unwittingly commits an inexpiable

offence. 'Then,' says the 'Kalevala,' 'came up the new dawn, and the

maiden spoke, saying, "What is thy race, bold young man, and who is thy

father?" Kullervo said, "I am the wretched son of Kalerva; but tell me,

what is thy race, and who is thy father?" Then said the maiden, "I am

the wretched daughter of Kalerva. Ah! would God that I had died, then

might I have grown with the green grass, and blossomed with the flowers,

and never known this sorrow." With this she sprang into the midst of the

foaming waves, and found peace in Tuoni, and rest in the waters of

forgetfulness.' Then there was no word for Kullervo, but the bitter moan

of the brother in the terrible Scotch ballad of the Bonny Hind, and no

rest but in death by his own sword, where grass grows never on his

sister's tomb.

 

The epic now draws to a close. Ilmarinen seeks a new wife in Pohja, and

endeavours with Wainamoinen's help to recover the mystic sampo. On the

voyage, the Runoia makes a harp out of the bones of a monstrous fish, so

strange a harp that none may play it but himself. When he played, all

four-footed things came about him, and the white birds dropped down 'like

a storm of snow.' The maidens of the sun and the moon paused in their

weaving, and the golden thread fell from their hands. The Ancient One of

the sea-water listened, and the nymphs of the wells forgot to comb their

loose locks with the golden combs. All men and maidens and little

children wept, amid the silent joy of nature; nay, the great harper wept,

and _of his tears were pearls made_.

 

In the war with Pohjola the heroes were victorious, but the sampo was

broken in the fight, and lost in the sea, and that, perhaps, is 'why the

sea is salt.' Fragments were collected, however, and Loutri, furious at

the success of the heroes of Kalevala, sent against them a bear,

destructive as the boar of Calydon. But Wainamoinen despatched the

monster, and the body was brought home with the bear-dance, and the hymn

of the bear. 'Oh, Otso,' cry the singers, 'be not angry that we come

near thee. The bear, the honey-footed bear, was born in lands between

sun and moon, and he died not by men's hands, but of his own will.' The

Finnish savants are probably right, who find here a trace of the beast-

worship which in many lands has placed the bear among the number of the

stars. Propitiation of the bear is practised by Red Indians, by the

Ainos of Japan, and (in the case of the 'native bear') by Australians.

The Red Indians have a myth to prove that the bear is immortal, does not

die, but, after his apparent death, rises again in another body. There

is no trace, however, that the Finns claimed, like the Danes, descent

from the bear. The Lapps, a people of confused belief, worshipped him

along with Thor, Christ, the sun, and the serpent. {176}

 

But another cult, an alien creed, is approaching Kalevala. There is no

part of the epic more strange than the closing canto, which tells in the

wildest language, and through the most exaggerated forms of savage

imagination, the tale of the introduction of Christianity. Marjatta was

a maiden, 'as pure as the dew is, as holy as stars are that live without

stain.' As she fed her flocks, and listened to the singing of the golden

cuckoo, a berry fell into her bosom. After many days she bore a child,

and the people despised and rejected her, and she was thrust forth, and

her babe was born in a stable, and cradled in the manger. Who should

baptize the babe? The god of the wilderness refused, and Wainamoinen

would have had the young child slain. Then the infant rebuked the

ancient Demigod, who fled in anger to the sea, and with his magic song he

built a magic barque, and he sat therein, and took the helm in his hand.

The tide bore him out to sea, and he lifted his voice and sang: 'Times go

by, and suns shall rise and set, and then shall men have need of me, and

shall look for the promise of my coming that I may make a new sampo, and

a new harp, and bring back sunlight and moonshine, and the joy that is

banished from the world.' Then he crossed the waters, and gained the

limits of the sea, and the lower spaces of the sky.

 

Here the strange poem ends at its strangest moment, with the cry, which

must have been uttered so often, but is heard here alone, of a people

reluctantly deserting the gods that it has fashioned in its own likeness,

for a faith that has not sprung from its needs or fears. Yet it

cherishes the hope that this tyranny shall pass over: 'they are gods, and

behold they shall die, and the waves be upon them at last.'

 

As the 'Kalevala,' and as all relics of folklore, all Marchen and ballads

prove, the lower mythology--the elemental beliefs of the people--do

survive beneath a thin covering of Christian conformity. There are, in

fact, in religion, as in society, two worlds, of which the one does not

know how the other lives. The class whose literature we inherit, under

whose institutions we live, at whose shrines we worship, has changed as

outworn raiment its manners, its gods, its laws; has looked before and

after, has hoped and forgotten, has advanced from the wilder and grosser

to the purest faith. Beneath the progressive class, and beneath the

waves of this troublesome world, there exists an order whose primitive

form of human life has been far less changeful, a class which has put on

a mere semblance of new faiths, while half-consciously retaining the

remains of immemorial cults.

 

Obviously, as M. Fauriel has pointed out in the case of the modern

Greeks, the life of such folk contains no element of progress, admits no

break in continuity. Conquering armies pass and leave them still reaping

the harvest of field and river; religions appear, and they are baptized

by thousands, but the lower beliefs and dreads that the progressive class

has outgrown remain unchanged.

 

Thus, to take the instance of modern Greece, the high gods of the divine

race of Achilles and Agamemnon are forgotten, but the descendants of the

Penestae, the villeins of Thessaly, still dread the beings of the popular

creed, the Nereids, the Cyclopes, and the Lamia. {178}

 

The last lesson we would attempt to gather from the 'Kalevala' is this:

that a comparison of the _thoroughly popular_ beliefs of all countries,

the beliefs cherished by the non-literary classes whose ballads and fairy

tales have only recently been collected, would probably reveal a general

identity, concealed by diversity of name, among the 'lesser people of the

skies,' the elves, fairies, Cyclopes, giants, nereids, brownies, lamiae.

It could then be shown that some of these spirits survive among the lower

beings of the mythology of what the Germans call a cultur-volk like the

Greeks or Romans. It could also be proved that much of the narrative

element in the classic epics is to be found in a popular or childish form

in primitive fairy tales. The question would then come to be, Have the

higher mythologies been developed, by artistic poets, out of the

materials of a race which remained comparatively untouched by culture; or

are the lower spirits, and the more simple and puerile forms of myth,

degradations of the inventions of a cultivated class?

 

 

 

 

THE DIVINING ROD.

 

 

There is something remarkable, and not flattering to human sagacity, in

the periodical resurrection of superstitions. Houses, for example, go on

being 'haunted' in country districts, and no educated man notices the

circumstance. Then comes a case like that of the Drummer of Tedworth, or

the Cock Lane Ghost, and society is deeply moved, philosophers plunge

into controversy, and he who grubs among the dusty tracts of the past

finds a world of fugitive literature on forgotten bogies. Chairs move

untouched by human hands, and tables walk about in lonely castles of

Savoy, and no one marks them, till a day comes when the furniture of some

American cottage is similarly afflicted, and then a shoddy new religion

is based on the phenomenon. The latest revival among old beliefs is

faith in the divining rod. 'Our liberal shepherds give it a _shorter_

name,' and so do our conservative peasants, calling the 'rod of Jacob'

the 'twig.' To 'work the twig' is rural English for the craft of

Dousterswivel in the 'Antiquary,' and perhaps from this comes our slang

__EXPRESSION__ to 'twig,' or divine, the hidden meaning of another. Recent

correspondence in the newspapers has proved that, whatever may be the

truth about the 'twig,' belief in its powers is still very prevalent.

Respectable people are not ashamed to bear signed witness of its

miraculous powers of detecting springs of water and secret mines. It is

habitually used by the miners in the Mendips, as Mr. Woodward found ten

years ago; and forked hazel divining rods from the Mendips are a

recognised part of ethnological collections. There are two ways of

investigating the facts or fancies about the rod. One is to examine it

in its actual operation--a task of considerable labour, which will

doubtless be undertaken by the Society for Psychical Research; the other,

and easier, way is to study the appearances of the divining wand in

history, and that is what we propose to do in this article.

 

When a superstition or belief is widely spread in Europe, as the faith in

the divining rod certainly is (in Germany rods are hidden under babies'

clothes when they are baptized), 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 [Greek], 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. {183}

 

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 play, by Varro,

called 'Virgula Divina'; but it is lost, and throws 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.' {184a} 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. {184b} 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.'

{186} 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 have thus 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.