110

YAMA'S MESSENGER DOGS.

phalia to be a sure token that a funeral will soon pass that way. In the German, as in the Aryan mythology, the dog is an embodiment of the wind, and also an attendant on the dead. It appears in both characters in Odin's wild hunt. Dogs see ghosts,* and when Hel, the goddess of death, goes about, invisible to human eyes, she is seen by the dogs.+

Yama's canine messengers were called Sârameyas; and that very name, put into a Greek form, was borne, as Dr. Kuhn has demonstrated, by Hermeias or Hermes, the messenger of the Grecian gods, who led the shades to Hades.

The fatal significance of the howling dog is notorious, but it is not so generally known that the other Aryan psychopomp, the cow, is sometimes a foretokener of death. A correspondent of "Notes and Queries" gives the following record as written down by him about the time to which it relates:

"A bad omen seems to be drawn from an ox or a cow breaking into a garden. Though I laugh at the superstition, the omen was painfully fulfilled in my case. About the middle of March, 1843, some cattle were driven close to my house, and, the back door

DEATH-OMENS FROM COWS.

111

being open, three got into our little bit of garden and trampled it. When our school-drudge came in the afternoon and asked the cause of the confusion, she expressed great sorrow and apprehension on being told—said it was a bad sign-that we should hear of three deaths within the next six months. Alas! in April we heard of dear J's murder; a fortnight after A died; and to-morrow, August 10, I attend the funeral of my excellent son-in-law. I have just heard of the same omen from another quarter.

"This was added the next day :—

"But what is still more remarkable is, that when I went down to Mr. M- -'s burial, and was mentioning the superstition, they told me that while he was lying ill, a cow got into the front garden, and was driven out with great difficulty."

"What does the 'black cow' signify," asks Grimm,† "in such [German] phrases as 'the black cow is pressing him'; 'the black cow has trodden upon him'?" It is a common saying in Scotland, when a man is ill and not likely to recover, or when he has lost one of his family or kindred by death, "the black ox has tramped upon him." King Oluf Digrbeen was forewarned of a great mortality, in a dream, by a black + D. M. 631, n.

* "Choice Notes," p. 20.

112

THE WORLD OF THE DEAD.

ox that came from the eastward, and went about from house to house, in each of which the majority of the inmates were laid low at the sound of its bellowing.*

The heaven of the Aryans belonged alike to the gods and to the souls of the dead; but gradually, as men came to have a higher sense of the might and majesty of the gods, it seemed fit to separate the realm of shades from the bright abode of the divine rulers of the world. The former was therefore brought down below and placed, sometimes in islands of the far West, sometimes beneath the surface of the earth; but, wherever it was supposed to be, its scenery, bright or sombre, was that which had belonged to it in the sky, and its rulers were gods who had descended with it from the upper regions.†

Niflheimr, the world of mists, beneath one of the roots of the world-tree Yggdrasil, was the dismal realm of Hel or Hela, the Norse and German goddess of death. Cold and gloomy it was, like herself, but Schwartz, p. 271.

* Liebrecht, G. T. p. 92.

Whom Christianity transformed from a person into a place, in like manner as it transformed the goddess Ostara into a season— Easter. "The Christian notion of Hell," says Mr. Dasent, "is that of a place of heat; for in the East, whence Christianity came, heat is often an intolerable torment, and cold, on the other hand, everything that is pleasant and delightful. But to the dweller in the North heat

HELA. NARAKA. NASTROND.

113

of old it was never spoken of as a place of punishment and torment. Those who went to it were not the bad alone, but all who died, even the noblest and the best,-Brynhild for instance, and Baldr. The only apparent exceptions were the heroes who had fallen in battle, and whom Odin gathered to himself in Valhalla.* But the idea of retribution after death for crimes done in the body was not unknown to German paganism. It was a part of the Aryan creed, and the Vedas speak of the goddess Nirriti, and her dreadful world Naraka, the destined abode of all guilty souls. It is not conceivable that such a tradition could have died out, even for a time, among any of the pagan IndoEuropeans, and we know that, according to AngloSaxon belief, "for the perjurer and the secret murderer Nástrond existed, a place of torment and punishment the strand of the dead-filled with foulness, peopled with poisonous serpents, dark, brings with it sensations of joy and comfort, and life without fire has a dreary outlook; so their Hel ruled in a cold region over those who were cowards by implication, while the mead-cup went round, and buge logs blazed and crackled in Valhalla for the brave and beautiful who had dared to die on the field of battle. But under Christianity the extremes of heat and cold have met, and Hel, the cold uncomfortable goddess, is now our Hell, where flames and fires abound, and where the devils abide in everlasting flame."-Popular Tales from the Norse, Introd.

* D.M. p. 764.

114

THE ROAD TO HELA'S REALM.

cold, and gloomy: the kingdom of Hel was Hades, the invisible, the world of shadows; Nástrond was what we call Hell."* Dr. Roth, one of the most distinguished Vedic scholars, is of opinion that the souls of the wicked swelled the host of the Rakshasas (p. 28) as those of the good became members of the community of Ribhus and Maruts. The heaven of the Pitris (p. 18) is often called “the world of good deed, the world of the righteous," and they themselves were spirits of light and ministers of good to men. Hence there is strong reason for inferring, although the fact is nowhere expressly stated, that the inhabitants of the opposite world became spirits of darkness, and confederates of all the evil powers. If this conjecture prove to be well founded, it will have brought to light another remarkable instance of the continuity of Aryan tradition.

Long and dreary was the road to Hel's dark dominion; the descent to it from heaven was a journey of nine days and nine nights for the gods themselves. The greater part of the way lay through morasses and vast moors overgrown with furze and thorns; and that the dead might not pass over them barefoot, a pair of shoes was laid

* Kemble, "Saxons in England," ii. 393.