The Book of Were-Wolves - Sabine Baring-Gould (red queen free ebook TXT) 📗
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of the warrior and his guest. While the warrior-beaver was chewing the
willow, and the Osage was pretending to do so, they fell to talking
over many matters, particularly the wars of the beavers with the
otters, and their frequent victories over them. He told our father by
what means the beavers felled large trees, and moved them to the
places where they wished to make dams; how they raised to an erect
position the poles for their lodges, and how they plastered them so as
to keep out rain. Then he spoke of their employments when they had
buried the hatchet; of the peace and happiness and tranquillity they
enjoyed when gathered into companies, they rested from their labours,
and passed their time in talking and feasting, and bathing, and
playing the game of bones, and making love. All the while the young
beaver-maiden sat with her eyes fixed upon the Osage, at every pause
moving a little nearer, till at length she was at his side with her
forepaw upon his arm; a minute more and she had placed it around his
neck, and was rubbing her soft furry cheek against his. Our ancestor,
on his part, betrayed no disinclination to receive her caresses, but
returned them with equal ardour. The old beaver seeing what was going
on, turned his back upon them, and suffered them to be as kind to each
other as they pleased. At last, turning quickly round, while the
maiden, suspecting what was coming, and pretending to be abashed, ran
behind her mother, he said, ‘To end this foolery, what say you to
marrying my daughter? She is well brought up, and is the most
industrious girl in the village. She will flap more wall with her tail
in a day than any maiden in the nation; she will gnaw down a larger
tree betwixt the rising of the sun and the coming of the shadows than
many a smart beaver of the other sex. As for her wit, try her at the
game of the dish, and see who gets up master; and for cleanliness,
look at her petticoat?’ Our father answered that he did not doubt that
she was industrious and cleanly, able to gnaw down a very large tree,
and to use her tail to very good purpose; that he loved her much, and
wished to make her the mother of his children. And thereupon the
bargain was concluded.”
These two stories, the one taken from Icelandic saga, the other from
American Indian tradition, shew clearly the oneness which the
uncultivated mind believes to exist between the soul of man and the
soul of beast. The same sentiments actuate both man and brute, and if
their actions are unlike, it is because of the difference in their
formation. The soul within is identical, but the external accidents of
body are unlike.
Among many rude as well as cultivated people, the body is regarded as
a mere garment wrapped around the soul. The Buddist looks upon
identity as existing in the soul alone, and the body as no more
constituting identity, than the clothes he puts on or takes off. He
exists as a spirit; for convenience he vests himself in a body;
sometimes that body is human, sometimes it is bestial. As his soul
rises in the spiritual scale, the nobler is the animal form which it
tenants. Budda himself passed through various stages of existence; in
one he was a hare, and his soul being noble, led him to immolate
himself, in order that he might offer hospitality to Indra, who, in
the form of an old man, craved of him food and shelter. The Buddist
regards animals with reverence; an ancestor may be tenanting the body
of the ox he is driving, or a descendant may be running at his side
barking, and wagging his tail. When he falls into an ecstasy, his soul
is leaving his body for a little while, it is laying aside its raiment
of flesh and blood and bone, to return to it once more when the trance
is over. But this idea is not confined to Buddists, it is common
everywhere. The spirit or soul is supposed to be imprisoned in the
body, the body is but the lantern through which the spirit shines,
“the corruptible body” is believed to “press down the soul,” and the
soul is unable to attain to perfect happiness till it has shuffled off
this earthy coil. Butler regards the members of the body as so many
instruments used by the soul for the purpose of seeing, hearing,
feeling, &c., just as we use telescopes or crutches, and which may be
rejected without injury to our individuality.
The late Mr. J. Holloway, of the Bank of England, brother to the
engraver of that name, related of himself that, being one night in
bed, and unable to sleep, he had fixed his eyes and thoughts with
uncommon intensity on a beautiful star that was shining in at the
window, when he suddenly found his spirit released from his body and
soaring into space. But instantly seized with anxiety for the anguish
of his wife, if she discovered his body apparently dead beside her, he
returned, and re-entered it with difficulty. He described that
returning as a returning from light into darkness, and that whilst the
spirit was free, he was alternately in the light or the dark,
accordingly as his thoughts were with his wife or with the star.
Popular mythology in most lands regards the soul as oppressed by the
body, and its liberation is considered a deliverance from the “burden”
of the flesh. Whether the soul is at all able to act or express itself
without a body, any more than a fire is able to make cloth without the
apparatus of boiler and machinery, is a question which has not
commended itself to the popular mind. But it may be remarked that the
Christian religion alone is that which raises the body to a dignity
equal to that of the soul, and gives it a hope of ennoblement and
resurrection never dreamed of in any mythological system.
But the popular creed, in spite of the most emphatic testimony of
Scripture, is that the soul is in bondage so long as it is united to a
body, a creed entirely in accordance with that of Buddism.
If the body be but the cage, as a poet [1] of our own has been
pleased to call it, in which dwells the imprisoned soul, it is quite
possible for the soul to change its cage. If the body be but a vesture
clothing the soul, as the Buddist asserts, it is not improbable that
it may occasionally change its vesture.
[1. VAUGHN, Sitex Scintillans.]
This is self-evident, and thus have arisen the countless tales of
transformation and transmigration which are found all over the world.
That the same view of the body as a mere clothing of the soul was
taken by our Teutonic and Scandinavian ancestors, is evident even from
the etymology of the words leichnam, lîkhama, used to express the
soulless body.
I have already spoken of the Norse word hamr, I wish now to make
some further remarks upon it. Hamr is represented in Anglo-Saxon by
hama, homa, in Saxon by hamo, in old High German by hamo, in
old French by homa, hama, to which are related the Gothic
gahamon, ufar-hamon, ana-hamon, {Greek e?ndúesðai}, {Greek
e?pendúesðai}; and-hamon, af-hamon, {Greek a?pekdúein} {Greek
e?kdúesðai?} thence also the old High German hemidi, and the
modern Hemde, garment. In composition we find this word, as
lîk-hagnr, in old Norse; in old High German lîk-hamo, Anglo-Saxon
lîkhama, and flæsc-hama, Old Saxon, lîk-hamo, modern German
Leichnam, a body, i. e. a garment of flesh, precisely as the
bodies of birds are called in old Norse fjaðrhamr, in Anglo-Saxon
feðerhoma, in Old Saxon fetherhamo, or feather-dresses and the
bodies of wolves are called in old Norse ûlfshamr, and seals’ bodies
in Faroëse kôpahamr. The significance of the old verb að hamaz is
now evident; it is to migrate from one body to another, and
hama-skipti is a transmigration of the soul. The method of this
transmigration consisted in simply investing the body with the skin of
the animal into which the soul was to migrate. When Loki, the Northern
god of evil, went in quest of the stolen Idunn, he borrowed of Freyja
her falcon dress, and at once became, to all intents and purposes, a
falcon. Thiassi pursued him as he left Thrymheimr, having first taken
upon him an eagle’s dress, and thereby become an eagle.
In order to seek Thor’s lost hammer, Loki borrowed again of Freyja her
feather dress, and as be flew away in it, the feathers sounded as they
winnowed the breeze (_fjaðrhamr dunði_).
In like manner Cædmon speaks of an evil spirit flying away in
feather-dress: “þät he mid feðerhomon fleôgan meahte, windan on
wolkne” (Gen. ed. Gr. 417), and of an angel, “þuo þar suogan quam
engil þes alowaldon obhana fun radure faran an feðerhamon” (Hêlj. 171,
23), the very expression made use of when speaking of a bird: “farad
an feðarhamun” (Hêlj. 50,11).
The soul, in certain cases, is able to free itself from the body and
to enter that of beast or man—in this form stood the myth in various
theological systems.
Among the Finns and Lapps it is not uncommon for a magician to fall
into a cataleptic condition, and during the period his soul is
believed to travel very frequently in bodily form, having assumed that
of any animal most suitable for its purpose. I have given instances in
a former chapter. The same doctrine is evident in most cases of
lycanthropy. The patient is in a state of trance, his body is watched,
and it remains motionless, but his soul has migrated into the carcase
of a wolf, which it vivifies, and in which it runs its course. A
curious Basque story shows that among this strange Turanian people,
cut off by such a flood of Aryan nations from any other members of its
family, the same superstition remains. A huntsman was once engaged in
the chase of it bear among the Pyreneean peaks, when Bruin turned
suddenly on him and hugged him to death, but not before he had dealt
the brute its mortal wound. As the huntsman expired, he breathed his
soul into the body of the bear, and thenceforward ranged the mountains
as a beast.
One of the tales of the Sanskrit book of fables, the Pantschatantra,
affords such a remarkable testimony to the Indian belief in
metempsychosis, that I am tempted to give it in abstract.
A king was one day passing through the marketplace of his city, when
he observed a hunchbacked merryandrew, whose contortions and jokes
kept the bystanders in a roar of laughter. Amused with the fellow, the
king brought him to his palace. Shortly after, in the hearing of the
clown, a necromancer taught the monarch the art of sending his soul
into a body not his own.
Some little while after this, the monarch, anxious to put in practice
his newly acquired knowledge, rode into the forest accompanied by his
fool, who, he believed, had not heard, or, at all events comprehended,
the lesson. They came upon the corpse of a Brahmin lying in the depth
of the jungle, where he had died of thirst. The king, leaving his
horse, performed the requisite ceremony, and instantly his soul had
migrated into the body of the, Brahmin, and
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