Chapter 34

ne per me grando dicatur laedere mundo.
Let her body be taken off the gallows and burnt, and the ashes be strown on water, lest, being scattered in air, it should breed clouds, drought and hail. Just so the devil's ashes are strown to awaken storm and tempest, p. 1071-3; the Chronicon S. Bertini states that Richilde, before her fight with Robert the Frisian, threw dust in the air against the Frisians with formulas of imprecation, but it fell back on her own head in token of her speedy overthrow. She meant, like Thorgerðr and Irpa, to destroy the enemy by tempest. Justinger's Chron. of Bern p. 205 relates how a woman, secretly sent for by a Count of Kyburg, who promised not to betray her, stood on the battlements of his castle, and uttering hidden words, raised clouds, rain and storm, which scattered his foes (A.D. 1382). The witches of Norway still proceed exactly as the Vinlanders were said to do (p. 640): they tie up wind and foul weather in a bag, and at the proper moment undo the knots, exclaiming 'wind, in the devil's name!' then a storm rushes out, lays waste the land, and overturns ships at sea. By Hartlieb's account (Sup. H, cap. 34), old women sacrifice to devils, that they may make hail and shower. According to German records of the 16-17 cent., witches assemble in crowds by waterbrooks or lakes, and flog the water with rods, till a fog rises, which gradually thickens into black clouds; on these clouds they are borne up, and then guide them toward the spots to which they mean mischief. They also place magic pots in the water, and stir them round. (93) The windsack is mentioned a few times (Voigt 131). They make blue lights trickle into the water, throw flintstones into the air, or trundle barrels whose bursting begets tempest. They gather oak-leaves in a man's shirt, and when it is full, hang it on a tree: a wind springs up directly, that drives all rain away, and keeps the weather fine. Out of a small piece of cloud a witch made a deal of bad weather (Arx Buchsgau p. 103). A violent thunderstorm lasted so long, that a huntsman on the highway loaded his gun with a consecrated bullet, and shot it off into the middle of the blackest cloud; out of it (as out of the ship, p. 638) a naked female fell dead to the ground, and the storm blew over in a moment (Mone's Anz. 4, 309). In Carinthia the people shoot at storm-clouds, to scare away the evil spirits that hold counsel in them. The parson being credited with power to charm the weather, the women bring apronfuls of hailstones into his house: 'there, that's his rightful tithe of the weather, as he did not see good to keep it away'; Sartori's Journ. in Austria 2, 153-4. In some parts of France whole families are suspected of having the hereditary power to raise a storm: they meet on the lake-side, not less than three at a time, and lash the water up with horrible cries; this is done at night before sunrise, and a violent storm is the immediate consequence, Mém. de l'acad. celt. 2, 206-7. Such people are called meneurs des nuées, Mém. des antiq. 1, 244. In Germany witches were commonly called, by way of insult, wettermacherin, wetterhexe, wetterkatze, donnerkatze, nebelhexe, strahlhexe, blitzhexe, zessenmacherin (from the old zessa, storm), and earlier, wolkengüsse, cloud-gushes, Ms. 2, 140. The OHG. Wolchandrût, a woman's name in Trad. Fuld. 2, 101, need have had none but perfectly innocent associations: the valkyr either rides in the clouds or sprinkles from them fertilizing dew; so even the strewing of ashes on the field may originally have increased their fertility. Occasionally feldfrau and feldspinnerin are used of a witch; is it because she passes over field and meadow, or spins magic threads? (conf. p. 1099). Who knows but that the popular saying, when it snows, 'the old wives are shaking their coats out' (de aule wiver schüddet den pels ut, Strodtm. p. 336), is, properly understood, identical with that on p. 268: 'dame Holle is making her bed'? Goddess, valkyr, witch: the regular gradation of such myths. To the Greeks Zeus himself was still nefelhgereta, to the Serbs the vila gathers clouds. In Scandinavia too, hail and hurricane proceed from those half-goddesses Thorgerðr and Irpa, not as injurious to crops, but perilous to armies; (94) Sn. 175 makes a sorceress bear the very name El, procella (95) (see Suppl.).

But sometimes the aim of sorcery is not so much to destroy the produce, as to get possession of it, to carry it off the field, either to one's own garner, or that of a favourite. (96) Even the Romans speak of this: 'satas alio traducere messes,' Virg. Ecl. 8, 99; 'cantus vicinis fruges traducit ab agris,' Tibull. i. 8, 19. People fancied, that when unholden walked through a vineyard and shook the vines, the grapes came out of the neighbour's plot into theirs (Hartm. segenspr. 341). An old dalesman gave his granddaughter a staff, and told her to stick it in the corn at a certain spot in a field; the girl on her way was overtaken by a shower, took refuge under an oak, and left the staff standing there: when she got home, she found a great heap of oak-leaves in her grandfather's loft (ibid. p. 342). We also hear of vine-shoots being boiled in a pot, probably to spoil the vineyard. The poison-herbs of witches boil and evaporate under the open sky.

We are told of witches bathing naked in the sand (97) or in the corn; I know not for what purpose; Superst. I, 519 speaks of rolling naked in the flax. Three witches were seen going to a field of rye, laying aside their garments, and bathing in the corn with their hair hanging loose. When witnesses approached, two vanished suddenly, leaving their clothes behind, the third huddled her smock on (Voigt 130-2). Has this to do with cornwives and rye-aunts p. 477?

Witches and sorcerers use various implements, of which for the most part no exact description is given. Of the wand with which the old magicians are usually armed, I find no mention in our tales, for when the wishing-rod is named, it is as a higher and noble instrument; yet the staff or stick that witches are said to ride may originally have been carried in the hand. I also find the stick spoken of as the wizard's third leg (Mone's Anz. 7, 426). In Bavarian records the so-called making of mice or pigs (fackel for ferkel) is often mentioned: the witch has a four-legged implement, dark-yellow, hard and stiff; this she holds under a figure of a mouse or pig that she has made out of a napkin, and says 'Run away, and come back to me!' the figure becomes a live animal, and runs away; probably to fetch her something of other people's. Hence a witch is called a maus-schlägerin, mouse-beater, and a wizard maus-schlägel. In North German trials the expression is müse-maker, and the process is different: the witch boils magic herbs, then cries, 'Mouse, mouse, come out in devil's name!' and the beasts come jumping out of the pot (Laffert's Relat. crim. p. 57-9). It reminds one of the destructive mice created by Apollo Smintheus in his wrath, and the devastations of lemings in Lapland; so that this plague may with perfect right take its place with the desolating storm and hail, although our witch-trials say hardly anything of the damage done by the magic beasts (conf. Klausen's Aeneas p. 73-5). One Nethl. story in Wolf no. 401 relates how a young girl flung two pellets of earth one after the other, and in a moment the whole field swarmed with mice. Swedish tradition tells of a bjäraan or bare, which (says Ihre, dial. lex. 18a) was a milking-pail made by tying together nine sorts of stolen weaver's knots. You let three drops of blood fall into it out of your little finger, and said:

på jorden (on earth) skal tu för mig springa,

i Blåkulla skal jag för thig brinna!
The name comes from the vessel conveying (bära) milk and other things to the houses of the devil-worshippers. Hülphers (Fierde saml. om Angermanland. Vesteräs 1780, p. 310) describes it as a round ball made of rags, tow and juniper, etc., and used in several magic tricks: it ran out and brought things in. It starts off the moment the sender cuts his left little finger and lets the blood fall on it:

smör och ost (butter and cheese) skal du mig bringa,

och derför (skal jag) i helfvetet brinna (in hell-fire burn)!
Who can help thinking of Goethe's Magician's Apprentice with his water-fetching broom?

Of the same kind seems to have been the Icelandic snackr, which commonly means a weaver's spool. It is made, says Biörn, of a dead man's rib in the shape of a snake, and wrapt in gray wool; it sucks at the witch's breast, after which it can suck other people's cattle dry, and bring their milk home (98) (see Suppl.).

Of wider diffusion is sorcery with the sieve, which I shall speak of by and by; and with wax figures, to which if you did anything while uttering secret words, it took effect on absent persons. The was figure (atzmann) was either hung up in the air, plunged in water, fomented at the fire, or stabbed with needles and buried under the door-sill: the person aimed at feels all the hurts inflicted on the figure (Sup. G, line 28; H, cap. 79). (99) In Aw. 2, 55 a travelling student says:

Mit wunderlîchen sachen

lêr ich sie (I teach her) denne machen

von wahs einen kobolt,

wil sie daz er ir werde holt (he grow kind to her),

und töuf' ez (100) in den brunnen,

und leg in an die sunnen;
but counter-agencies make the danger recoil on the conjuror himself. (101) Magic figures can also be baked of dough or lime, and wrought out of metal, but wax made by the sacred bee (p. 696) appears the most appropriate; their manufacture is a mimicry of divine creation (p. 570), but it succeeds only up to a certain point. In Pulci's Morgante 21, 73 a witch possesses an image made of the pure wax of young bees (delle prime api), and having every limb except one rib: (102) the witch's own vitality is bound up with the figure, and when Malagigi melts it at a slow fire, she dwindles away. That such figures were sometimes baptized, is shown by a sermon of Berthold's (Cod. pal. 35 fol. 27b): 'so nimpt diu her und tauft ein wachs, diu ein holz, diu ein tôtenpein (dead man's bone), allez daz sie domit bezouber;' (103) and this proves the connection of magical appliances with superstitious healing appliances. As the sick and the restored used to consecrate and hang up in churches an image or a limb of wax, so by images the witch maimed and killed. No doubt this kind of conjuring goes back to the oldest times; we find it in Ovid, Amor. iii. 7, 29:

Sagave punicea defixit nomina cera,

et medium tenues in jecur egit acus?
Compare Horace, Epod. 17, 76: 'movere cereas imagines.' Theocritus 2, 28 has the wax-melting very plainly: wf touton ton kapon egw sun daimoni takw, wj takoiq up erwtoj, but not that it was an image. In Virgil, Ecl. 8, 74 seq., a magic figure (terque haec altaria circum effigiem duco) seems to be made of lime and wax (see Suppl.).

An ancient custom, very similar to this of hanging up and thawing the atzmann, was to cut out the earth or turf on which had rested the foot of one whom you wish to destroy. This erdschnitt as Vintler calls it (Sup. G, 1. 92) is hung in the chimney, and as it begins to wither or dry up, the man too shall waste away (I, 524. 556). It was already known to Burchard (C, p. 200a). To fetch up a comrade from a foreign land, you boil his stockings; or you put his shoes in a new pot, and with it draw water against the current, then boil the shoes in the pot four days long; when they are past, he will come, says Hessian superstition (see Suppl.). You can lame a horse by driving a nail into his recent footprint, and discover a thief by putting tinder in his (I, 978). Pliny 28, 20 says: 'vestigium equi excussum ungula (ut solet plerumque) si quis collectum reponat, singultus remedium esse recordantibus quonam loco id reposuerint;'' a cure for hiccough if you remember where you put it.

Our magicians have also, in common with those of Greece and Rome, the power of assuming an animal shape (in itself a divine attribute, p. 326): the men prefer changing into a wolf or hawk, the women into a cat or swan; to translate it into the language of our heathen time, they addict themselves to the service of Wuotan, of Frouwa. These metamorphoses are either voluntary or compulsory: the higher being in his might puts on the animal shape that suits him, or he dooms a man to wear it in punishment or vengeance. In the stories it is often a mother-in-law or stepmother that transforms children, ON. stiupmôður sköp, Fornald. sög. 1, 31. 58.

Herodotus 4, 105 says of the Neuri, that among Scythians and Greeks settled in Scythia they pass for magicians (gomtej), because once a year every Neurian becomes a wolf for a few days, and then resumes the human form (wj eteoj ekastou apax twn Neurwn ekastoj lukoj ginetai hmeraj oligaj, kai autij opisw ej twuto katistatai). Similar accounts are in Pliny 8, 34. Pomp. Mela 2, 1. Augustine Civ. Dei 18, 17: 'his ego saepe lupum fieri et se condere silvis Moerin......vidi,' Virg. Ecl. 8, 97. A man distinguished by this gift or malady was called lukanqrwpoj, (104) a word-formation to which the AS. werewulf (Leges Canuti, Schmid 1, 148), Engl. werewolf, exactly corresponds; Goth. vairavulfs? OHG. werawolf? MHG. poets have no werewolf. The ON. uses vargr alone (RA. 733. Reinh. xxxvii), verûlfr in Sn. 214b is a sword's name, the Swed. Dan. varulf, varulv, seem formed on a Romance or German model. I find werwolf first in Burchard (Sup. C, p. 198c); though Boniface before him couples 'strigas et fictos lupos credere' (Serm., in Mart. et Dur. 9, 217). The Fr. loup-garou (warou in O. Fr. poems) might seem a distortion of warulf; garulf (Gervase of Tilb. writes gerulphus), but then the Breton dialect has also its bleiz-garou, -garo (fr. bleiz, wolf), and den-vleiz, man-wolf (fr. den, man), grék-vleiz (femme-loup); bisclaveret in Marie de France 1, 178 is apparently a corruption of bleizgarv, as the Norman garwal is of guarwolf. The Pol. wilkotak, wilkotek, Boh. wlkodlak, strictly means wolf-haired, and suggests the hairy wood-sprite, p. 480. The Serv. vukodlac signifies a vampire. From wilks (wolf) the Letton forms wilkats (werewolf), Wilkascha radda ds. 1644.




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