The Book of Were-Wolves by Sabine Baring-Gould (free ebook novel .TXT) 📖

his own lay as dead upon

the ground. At the same moment, however, the hunchback deserted his

body, and possessed himself of that which had been the king’s, and

shouting farewell to the dismayed monarch, he rode back to the palace,

where he was received with royal honours. But it was not long before

the queen and one of the ministers discovered that a screw was

somewhere loose, and when the quondam king, but now Brahmin, arrived

and told his tale, a plot was laid for the recovery of his body. The

queen asked her false husband whether it were possible to make her

parrot talk, and he in a moment of uxorious weakness promised to make

it speak. He laid his body aside, and sent his soul into the parrot.

Immediately the true king jumped out of his Brahmin body and resumed

that which was legitimately his own, and then proceeded, with the

queen, to wring the neck of the parrot.

 

But besides the doctrine of metempsychosis, which proved such a

fertile mother of fable, there was another article of popular

mythology which gave rise to stories of transformation. Among the

abundant superstitions existing relative to transformation, three

shapes seem to have been pre-eminently affected—that of the swan,

that of the wolf, and that of the serpent. In many of the stories of

those transformed, it is evident that the individual who changes shape

is regarded with superstitious reverence, as a being of a higher

order—of a divine nature. In Christian countries, everything relating

to heathen mythology was regarded with a suspicious eye by the clergy,

and any miraculous powers not sanctioned by the church were attributed

to the evil one. The heathen gods became devils, and the marvels

related of them were supposed to be effected by diabolic agency. A

case of transformation which had shown the power of an ancient god,

was in Christian times considered as an instance of witchcraft. Thus

stories of transformation fell into bad odour, and those who changed

shapes were no longer regarded as heavenly beings, commanding

reverence, but as miserable witches deserving the stake.

 

In the infancy of the world, when natural phenomena were

ill-understood, expressions which to us are poetical were of a real

significance. When we speak of thunder rolling, we use an expression

which conveys no further idea than a certain likeness observed between

the detonations and the roll of a vehicle; but to the uninstructed

mind it was more. The primæval savage knew not what caused thunder,

and tracing the resemblance between it and the sound of wheels, he at

once concluded that the chariot of the gods was going abroad, or that

the celestial spirits were enjoying a game of bowls.

 

We speak of fleecy clouds, because they appear to us soft and light as

wool, but the first men tracing the same resemblance, believed the

light vapours to be flocks of heavenly sheep. Or we say that the

clouds are flying: the savage used the same expression, as he looked

up at the mackerel sky, and saw in it flights of swans coursing over

the heavenly lake. Once more, we creep nearer to the winter fire,

shivering at the wind, which we remark is howling around the house,

and yet we do not suppose that the wind has a voice. The wild primæval

men thought that it had, and because dogs and wolves howl, and the

wind howled, and because they had seen dogs and wolves, they concluded

that the storm-wind was a night-hound, or a monstrous wolf, racing

over the country in the darkness of the winter night, ravening for

prey.

 

Along with the rise of this system of explaining the operations of

nature by analogies in the bestial world, another conclusion forced

itself on the untaught mind. The flocks which strayed in heaven were

no earthly sheep, but were the property of spiritual beings, and were

themselves perhaps spiritual; the swans which flew aloft, far above

the topmost peak of the Himalaya, were no ordinary swans, but were

divine and heavenly. The wolf which howled so wildly in the long

winter night, the hounds, whose bay sounded so. dismally through the

shaking black forest, were no mundane wolves and hounds, but issued

from the home of a divine hunter, and were themselves wondrous,

supernatural beings of godlike race.

 

And so, the clouds having become swans, the swan-clouds were next

believed to be divine beings, valkyries, apsaras, and the like, seen

by mortals in their feather-dresses, but appearing among the gods as

damsels. The storm-wind having been supposed to be a wolf, next was

taken to be a tempestuous god, who delighted to hunt on earth in

lupine form.

 

I have mentioned also the serpent shape, as being one very favourite

in mythology. The ancient people saw the forked and writhing

lightning, and supposed it to be a heavenly fiery serpent, a serpent

which had godlike powers, which was in fact a divine being,

manifesting himself to mortals under that form. Among the North

American Indians, the lightning is still regarded as the great

serpent, and the thunder is supposed to be his hissing.

 

“Ah!” exclaimed a Magdeburg peasant to a German professor, during a

thunderstorm, as a vivid forked gleam shot to earth, “what a glorious

snake was that!” And this resemblance did not escape the Greeks.

 

{Greek é!likes d? e?klámpousi steroph~s ksápuroi}.

 

Æsch. Prom. 1064.

 

{Greek _drákonta pursónwton, ó!s á?platon a?mfeliktòs

é!lik? e?froúrei, ktanw’n_}.

 

Eurip. Herc. F. 395.

 

And according to Aristotle, {Greek e!likíai} are the lightnings,

{Greek grammoeidw~s ferómenoi}.

 

It is so difficult for us to unlearn all we know of the nature of

meteorological phenomena, so hard for us to look upon atmospheric

changes as though we knew nothing of the laws that govern them, that

we are disposed to treat such explanations of popular myths as I have

given above, as fantastic and improbable.

 

But among the ancients all solutions of natural problems were

tentative, and it is only after the failure of every attempt made to

explain these phenomena on supernatural grounds that we have been

driven to the discovery of the true interpretation. Yet among the

vulgar a vast amount of mythology remains, and is used still to

explain atmospheric mysteries. The other day a Yorkshire girl, when

asked why she was not afraid of thunder, replied because it was only

her Father’s voice; what knew she of the rushing together of air to

fill the vacuum caused by the transit of the electric fluid? to her

the thunder-clap was the utterance of the Almighty. Still in North

Germany does the peasant say of thunder, that the angels are playing

skittles aloft, and of the snow, that they are shaking up the

feather-beds in heaven.

 

The myth of the dragon is one which admits, perhaps more than any

other, of identification with a meteorological phenomenon, and

presents to us as well the phase of transition from theriomorphosis to

anthropomorphosis.

 

The dragon of popular mythology is nothing else than the thunderstorm,

rising at the horizon, rushing with expanded, winnowing, black pennons

across the sky, darting out its forked fiery tongue, and belching

fire. In a Slovakian legend, the dragon sleeps in a mountain cave

through the winter months, but, at the equinox, bursts forth—“In a

moment the heaven was darkened and became black as pitch, only

illumined by the fire which flashed from dragon’s jaws and eyes. The

earth shuddered, the stones rattled down the mountain sides into the

glens. Right and left, left and right, did the dragon lash his tail,

overthrowing pines and beeches, snapping them as rods. He evacuated

such floods of water that the mountain torrents were full. But after a

while his power was exhausted, he lashed no more with his tail,

ejected no more water, and spat no more fire.”

 

I think it is impossible not to see in this description, a spring-tide

thunderstorm. But to make it more evident that the untaught mind did

regard such a storm as a dragon, I think the following quotation from

John of Brompton’s Chronicle will convince the most sceptical:

“Another remarkable thing is this, that took place during a certain

month in the Gulf of Satalia (on the coast of Pamphylia). There

appeared a great and black dragon which came in clouds, and let down

his head into the water, whilst his tail seemed turned to the sky; and

the dragon drew the water to him by drinking, with such avidity, that,

if any ship, even though laden with men or any other heavy articles,

had been near him when drinking, it would nevertheless have been

sucked up and carried on high. In order however to avoid this danger,

it is necessary, when people see it, at once to make a great uproar,

and to shout and hammer tables, so that the dragon, hearing the noise,

and the voices of those shouting, may withdraw himself far off. Some

people, however, assert that this is not a dragon, but the sun drawing

up the waters of the sea; which seems more probable.” [1] Such is

John of Brompton’s account of a waterspout. In Greek mythology the

dragon of the storm has begun to undergo anthropomorphosis. Typhus is

the son of Tartarus and Terra; the storm rising from the horizon may

well be supposed to issue from the earth’s womb, and its

characteristics are sufficient to decide its paternity. Typhus, the

whirlwind or typhoon, has a hundred dragon or serpent heads, the long

writhing strive of vapour which run before the hurricane cloud. He

belches fire, that is, lightnings issue from the clouds, and his

roaring is like the howling of wild dogs. Typhus ascends to heaven to

make war on the gods, who fly from him in various fantastic shapes;

who cannot see in this ascent the hurricane climbing up the vault of

sky, and in the flying gods, the many fleeting fragments of white

cloud which are seen drifting across the heavens before the gale!

 

[1. Apud TWYSDEN, Hist. Anglicæ Script. x. 1652. p. 1216.]

 

Typhus, according to Hesiod, is the father of all bad winds, which

destroy with rain and tempest, all in fact which went among the Greeks

by the name of {Greek laílaps}, bringing injury to the agriculturist

and peril to the voyager.

 

{Greek

_?Ek dè Tufwéos é?st? a?némwn ménos u!gròn á?eptwn,

nósfi Nótou Boréw te, kaì a?rgéstew Zefúrou te.

oí! ge mèn e?n ðeófin geneh`, ðnhtoïs még? ó?neiar.

ai! d? á?llai mapsau~rai e?pipneíousi ðalassan.

ai! d? h?‘toi píptousai e?s heroeideá pónton,

ph~ma méga ðnhtoi~si, kakh~j ðúousin a?éllhj.

á?llote d? á?llai a?eísi, diaskidna~si te nh~as,

naútas te fðeírousi. kakou~ d? ou? gígnetai a?lkh`

a?ndrásin, oí! keínhjsi sinántwntai katà pónton.

ai! d? aû? kaì katà gai~an a?peíriton, a?nðemóessan

é?rg? e?ratà fðeírousi xamaigenéwn a?nðrw’pwn,

pimpleu~sai kóniós te kaì a?rgaléou kolosurtou~

_

}

Hesiod. Theog. 870, seq.

 

In both modern Greek and Lithuanian household mythology the dragon or

drake has become an ogre, a gigantic man with few of the dracontine

attributes remaining. Von Hahn, in his _Griechische und Albanesische

Märchen_, tells many tales of drakes, and in all, the old

characteristics have been lost, and the drake is simply a gigantic man

with magical and superhuman powers.

 

It is the same among the Lithuanian peasantry. A dragon walks on two

legs, talks, flirts with a lady, and marries her. He retains his evil

disposition, but has sloughed off his scales and wings.

 

Such is the change which has taken place in the popular conception of

the dragon, which is an impersonification of the thunderstorm. A

similar change has taken place in the swan-maiden and werewolf myths.

 

In ancient Indian Vedaic mythology the apsaras were heavenly damsels

who dwelt in the tether, between earth and sun. Their name, which

signifies “the