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MAGIC CUDGELS:

another. A good sound cudgelling does the business quite well enough, and so the divine spear is found in its last stage of transformation as the "stick out of the bag" of a well-known story.* A lad sets out on a journey, having in his possession three wonderful things,—a buck-goat that spits gold, a hen that lays golden eggs, and a table that covers itself, without anybody's help, with the choicest food. A rascally innkeeper steals these treasures from the lad, and puts worthless trash in their place; but a stick, that jumps out of a bag in which it is usually concealed, goes to work of its own accord upon the innkeeper's back, and with such effect that the lad gets his own again. The stick then returns of itself to its owner's hand.

The table in this story is the all-nourishing cloud. The buck-goat is another emblem of the clouds, and the gold it spits is the golden light of the sun that streams through the fleecy coverings of the sky. The hen's golden egg is the sun itself. The demon of darkness has stolen these things; the cloud gives no rain, but hangs dusky in the sky, veiling the light of the sun. Then the lightning spear of the ancient storm-god Odin leaps out from the bag that concealed it (the cloud again), the robber

* Wolf, I., p. 12.

MAGIC CUDGELS.

211

falls, the rain patters down, the sun shines once

more.

The asvattha rod of the Atharvaveda incantation and its equivalent, the spear of Odin, are in fact wish-rods especially adapted for bringing victory to their possessor. They have also another comic counterpart in a sort of wish-rod, which serves for administering a drubbing at a distance. With such a hazel implement, cut and prepared with the proper formalities, one has only to lay an old garment on a molehill or on a threshold, name the person intended, and whack away. He will feel every blow as sorely as though he were actually under the stick, and if the old garment is beaten into holes, so will it be with the skin of the absent sufferer.

CHAPTER VIII.

MYTHICAL DRINKING VESSELS, SIEVES, CAULDRONS, AND OTHER UTENSILS -WITCHES-COWS-HARES-CATS-NIGHTMARES.

THE train of thought by which the Aryans and the Greeks were led to the discovery of casks and winebutts in the clouds (p. 36) could not fail to provide the denizens of the sky with many other utensils, such as urns and pitchers, cups, drinking-horns, cauldrons, and even sieves. The Grecian Naiads were originally cloud-nymphs, who poured out the rain-water from their urns; and the sieves in which the Danaids were ultimately condemned to draw water in Tartarus were those which they had used of yore to pour down the mild rain upon the earth. Originally the daughters of Danaus were cloudgoddesses, and were honoured for having enriched Argos with springs, and changed its arid territory into a well-watered land (p. 142).* The goddess Holda has been seen in the Harz going up a steep hill with a bottomless pail of gold from which water * Strabo, p. c. 371.

SIEVES IN THE SKY.

213

flowed incessantly; and Meister Pfriem is described in one of Grimm's popular tales as entering heaven, where he finds two angels engaged in drawing water in a perforated vessel. There was even a tribe of water-spirits, the Draci of Languedoc, old cloud-gods, like the rest of their order, whose hands were said. to be perforated like colanders.* Water poured through a sieve was so obvious and apt an image of the rain, that other primitive peoples, as well as the Aryans, could hardly have failed to seize it. The Finnish goddess Untar sends all kinds of fine vapours down upon the earth through a sieve.

The connection of the sieve with the clouds and the rain accounts for much that even Grimm was forced to leave unexplained, when he summed up the mythology of the subject with the unsatisfactory remark, that “the sieve appears to be a sacred archaic implement to which marvellous powers were attributed." It possessed those powers because, like the chark, it was invented and used by gods. The Greeks, Romans, Germans, and Slaves employed it in divination and in solemn ordeals. "The vulgar in many parts," says Brockett, "have an abominable practice of using a riddle and a pair of scissors

* Liebrecht, p. 135.

+D. M. 1066.

Glossary of North Country Words, s. v.

in divination. If they have had anything stolen from them the riddle and shears are sure to be resorted to. A similar mode of discovering thieves or others suspected of any crime prevailed among the Greeks (Potter's Gr. Antiq. i., 352). In Northumberland, young people turn the riddle for the purpose of amusing themselves with the foolish idea of raising their lovers. It is done between open doors at midnight, and in the dark."

There was extant in Pliny's time a spell (precatio) by means of which Tuccia, an unchaste vestal, carried water in a sieve. In one of Grimm's popular tales a good boy performs the same feat without spilling a drop; and it is a Hindu belief that an innocent person can confute his accusers by holding water in his hand in the shape of a solid ball.*

The ancient Poles presaged victory from water carried in a sieve. When Conrad made war upon his brother Wlodislas in 1209, the latter had with. him a wise woman-a pythoness, the chronicler calls her—who marched before his troops carrying in a sieve water drawn from a river. It did not run through, and from that portent she promised them victory. But it was a false prophecy, and she herself fell at the first onset.†