Part 26

ASTR. I cannot think the notion irrational; there are dwarfs and giants even in our days. The Bosgis-men of the Cape, and the Patagonians of South America, prove the existence of beings of another stature; and perchance of another nature, in days long agone. The Laplander and Bushman of the Cape are little more than three feet high; and that there were giants too, is proved by the fossil bones which have been found in the strata of our earth.

CAST. Then we have really dwindled in our growth, and Adam was really a hundred and twenty-three feet nine inches high, and Eve a hundred and eighteen feet nine inches and three quarters, as we are solemnly informed by our profane chronicles? Nay, even the story may be true of the Pict, who bit off the end of the mattock, with which some slave of science was opening his coffin, and thundered forth this exclamation: “I see the degeneracy of your race by the smallness of your little finger.”

IDA. If Evelyn were here, he would ask why we have no skeletons of giants as of lizards in our secondary rocks; and he would tell this learned Theban, Castaly, that Cuvier decided these fossils, which seemed to be the débris of a giant race, to be the bones of elephants. The legends of Athenæus are probably a fable, and the fossils of the pigmies were, I dare say, the petrified skeletons of “span-long, wee unchristen’d bairns.”

Your allusion to the brownies, reminds me of the monstrous errors which have crept into our legends from the mingling of two stories, or the warping of plain facts in natural history. And indeed I interrupt you to recount, in proof of this, some fragments from “Surtees’ Durham.”

“Every castle, tower, or manor-house has its visionary inhabitants. ‘The Cauld Lad of Hilton’ belongs to a very common and numerous class, the brownie or domestic spirit, and seems to have possessed no very distinctive attributes. He was seldom seen, but was heard nightly by the servants who slept in the great hall. If the kitchen had been left in perfect order, they heard him amusing himself by breaking plates and dishes, hurling the pewter in all directions, and throwing every thing into confusion. If, on the contrary, the apartment had been left in disarray, (a practice which the servants found it most prudent to adopt,) the indefatigable goblin arranged every thing with the greatest precision. This poor esprit folet, whose pranks were at all times perfectly harmless, was at length banished from his haunts by the usual expedient of presenting him with a suit of clothes. A green cloak and hood were laid before the kitchen fire, and the domestics sat up watching at a prudent distance. At twelve o’clock the spirit glided gently in, stood by the glowing embers, and surveyed the garments provided for him very attentively, tried them on, and seemed delighted with his appearance, frisking about for some time, and cutting several summersets and gambados, till on hearing the first cock, he twitched his mantle tight about him and disappeared with the usual valediction:

“‘Here’s a cloak, and here’s a hood, The cauld lad of Hilton will do no more good.’”

The genuine Brownie, however, is supposed to be, ab origine, an unembodied spirit; but the boy of Hilton has, with an admixture of English superstition, been identified with the apparition of an unfortunate domestic, whom one of the old chiefs of Hilton slew at some very distant period, in a moment of wrath or intemperance. The baron had, it seems, on an important occasion, ordered his horse, which was not brought out so soon as he expected. He went to the stable, found the boy loitering, and seizing a hay-fork, struck him, though not intentionally, a mortal blow. The story adds, that he covered his victim with straw till night, and then threw him into a pond, where the skeleton of a boy was (in confirmation of the tale) discovered in the last baron’s time.

I am by no means clear that the story may not have its foundation in the fact recorded in the following inquest:

“Coram Johannem King, coron., Wardæ de Chestræ, apud Hilton, 3 Jul. 7 Jac. 1609.” (And here follows a report in Latin.)

Nevertheless, I strongly suspect that the unhousel’d spirit of Roger Skelton, whom in the hay-field the good Hilton ghosted, took the liberty of playing a few of those pranks which are said by writers of grave authority to be the peculiar privilege of those spirits only who are shouldered untimely by violence from their mortal tenements.

“Ling’ring in anguish o’er his mangled clay, The melancholy shadow turn’d away, And follow’d through the twilight grey.”

A free pardon for the above manslaughter appears on the rolls of Bishop James, dated 6th September, 1609.

I will only add that, among the Harleian MSS., the same legend is told with some variations, in which this “cauld lad” is termed the “Pale Boy of Hilton.”

This confusion of our mythology is as conclusive of the fiction of all the mysterious legends of the moderns, as the jumble which the classic poets have made of their monsters. If we read Lempriere, the genealogy of the classic monster is involved in a maze of impious confusion; and the mythology of Chimera, and Echidna, and Typhon, Geryon, and Cerberus, and the Hydra and Bellerophon, and Ortha and the Sphynx, and the Nemæan Lion, and the Minotaur, and the demoniac records of their origin, it is almost profanation even to reflect on.

But when Martianus Capella tells us that devils have aërial bodies, that they live and die, and yet, if cut asunder, soon re-unite; and when Bodine asserts, in his “Solution of Natural Theology,” that spirits and angels are globular, as being of the most perfect shape, I confess I feel more disposed to smile at their imposture than to frown, were it not for their utter worthlessness.

Yet all the allegories which adorn our legends are not so remote from truth or nature. The vampires are said to have gloated over the sacrifices of human life, while the gouls and afrits, the hyenas in human shape, not only fed on dead carcases, but, by a special transmigration, took possession of a corpse. On this fable is founded the monstrous legend of “Assuet and Ajut.” I confess it monstrous; but indeed there is little exaggeration even in these tales of horror, if we may believe, for once, Master Edmund Spenser, in that part of his record of the rebellion of Desmond, in Ireland, which treats of the Munster massacre:—“Out of every corner of the woodes and glennes, they came creeping forth upon their handes, for their legges could not bear them; they looked like anatomies of death; they spake like ghostes, crying out of their graves: they eat the dead carrions—happy were they could they find them—yea, and one another soon after, insomuch as the very carcases they spared not to scrape out of their graves.” That episode also, in the “Inferno” of Dante, in which Count Ugolino wears out days and nights in gnawing the skull of an enemy, may well seem a fiction; but even this hellish repast is but a prototype of the savage rage for scalping and cannibalism among the Indian hordes of America.

DEMONOLOGY.

“Be thy intents wicked or charitable, Thou com’st in such a questionable shape—” HAMLET.

ASTR. Now from the holy records, from the creed of the Magus Zoroaster, from the Greek, and Roman, and other legends, how clear is the influence of ethereal beings, of angels and demons, on man’s life; and of the imparted power of exorcism! In allusion to this divine gift to Solomon, Josephus has the following story:—“God also enabled him to learn that skill which expels demons, which is a science useful and sanative to men. And this method is of great force unto this day, for I have seen a certain man of my own country, whose name was Eleazer, releasing people that were demoniacal in the presence of Vespasian, and his sons, and his captains, and the whole multitude of his soldiers. The manner of the cure was this. He put a ring, that had a root of one of those sorts mentioned by Solomon, to the nostrils of the demoniac, after which he drew out the demon through his nostrils; and when the man fell down immediately, he adjured him to return into him no more, making still mention of Solomon, and reciting the incantations which he composed. And when Eleazer would persuade and demonstrate to the spectators that he had such a power, he set a little way off a cup or bason full of water, and commanded the demon, as he went out of the man, to overturn it, and thereby to let the spectators know that he had left the man.”

The gods of the Greeks and the Latins, the lares and lemures, or hearth-spirits, the pagan and the Christian elves, were ever held as delegated agents of the Deity, who worked, not by a fiat, but by an instrument. Such were the Cemies of the American islanders, and the Kitchi and Matchi Manitou of the Indians; and, if we consult Father Borri, we shall learn that in Cochin China Lucifer himself promenaded the streets in human shape.

Psellus records six kinds of devils; and the arrangements of Agrippa, and other theologians, enumerate nine sorts of evil spirits, as you may read in one of old Burton’s eccentric chapters.

The mythology of the Baghvat Geeta, the sacred record of the Hindoo theists, is based on the notion of good and evil spirits, the emblems of virtue and of vice under the will and power of Brahma. Indeed, the Hindoo mythology is but that of the classic in other words. Agnee, the god of fire, Varoon, the god of the ocean, Vayoo, the god of the wind, and Cama, the god of love, are but other names for Jupiter, and Neptune, and Œolus, and Cupid.

The creed of Zoroaster asserts a perpetual conflict between the good and evil deity, the types of religious knowledge and ignorance. The southern Asiatics are people of good principle, and the northern nations people of evil principle. And why may not the Persian thus coincide with Bacon himself, who in his book “De Dignitate,” confesses his belief in good and bad spirits, in charms, and prophecies, and the varieties of natural magic. Or is it inconsistent that the Hindoos should incarnate the malignant disease, small pox, in the person of the deity Mah-ry-umma, of whose lethal influence they lived in abject fear.

IDA. In the holy records, it is true, we read that demons were even permitted to enter the bodies of other beings, and that when they had so established a possession, by divine command they went out of those possessed, as, for sacred example, into the herd of the Gadarenes; that they were also commissioned, for the fulfilment of the inscrutable will of the Creator, to try the endurance of Job, and even to tempt the divinity of the Saviour, and that they were the immediate cause of madness and other sad afflictions.

I do fear, Astrophel, that there is much danger, now, in this embodying of a demon; and that we too often model our modern principles, on the proud presumption of still possessing that miraculous power of exorcism. With sorrow may I confess, that the holy truths of Scripture, so clearly evincing a special purpose, should have been ever warped, by worse than inquisitorial bigotry, into the motive for cruelties unparalleled. From the Scripture histories of demoniac possession have arisen the coercion and cruelties, which once marked with an indelible stain the records of our own madhouses; where chains and lashes, inflicted by the demons of science, have driven the moody wretch into a raving maniac, when a light hand and a smile would have brought back the angel reason to the mind.

Impersonation is the grand source of many similar errors. The demon, which, since the light of the Christian dispensation has brooded in man’s heart and mind, is his own base passion, which incites him to shut his eyes to this holy light, and follow deeds of evil; to be a slavish worshipper in the hall of Arimanes. With this profane homage, we court our evil passions, to betray and destroy the soul. And this is the interpretation of an allegory in the profane legends of the Talmud—that Lilis, the wife of Adam, ere the creation of Eve, brought forth none but demons; the origin, indeed, of moral evil.

There are many popular stories which bear a moral to this end: that the evil spirit is powerless over the heart, if it be not encouraged and invited; and, alas! the alluring masque under which evil looks on us, is often but too certain to charm us to its influence, or we are too thoughtless to beware the danger. Thus the disguised enchanter enters into the palace of the Sultan Mesnar, (in “The Tales of the Genii,”) and thus the gentle Christabel of Coleridge leads the false Geraldine over that threshold, which she could not cross without the help of confiding and unsuspecting innocence.

CAST. The crones of retired villages have not yet yielded their belief in fairy influence.