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a sack, in which he found next morning no cat, but his naked sweetheart. The parson of the parish cured her.*

In standard German the nightmare is called Alp, i. e., Elf. It has many German provincial names, the most current of which is Mahrt, Mårte, or Mahr, different forms of a word which has no relation to the equine species, but is identical with the Sanscrit Marut (p. 17). Sometimes the nightmare appears as a mouse, a weasel, or a toad, but never, I believe, as a horse or mare, except in Fuseli's wellknown engraving, which must have been designed after one of those suppers of half-raw pork from which the artist was wont to draw inspiration. It is a bit of false etymology embodied in a corresponding style of art.

The nightmare, or night-hag,† is equestrian, not equine. It is an old story in England, and still is common in Germany, that they infest stables at night and mount the horses, which are found sweating in their stalls in the morning as after a hard ride. These riders, in all other respects iden

* Tettau und Temme, Ostpreussen, p. 274.

Hag, Anglo-Saxon hægesse, is the German hexe, witch, a word as

applicable to a young and comely woman as to an ugly old crone.

Brand, iii. 147,

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tical with the Mahrts, are in some parts of Germany called Walriderske, i. e., Valkyrs. In some of the tales that are told of them, they still retain their old divine nature; in others they are brought down to the common level of mere earthly witches. If they ride now in stables, without locomotion, it is because they swept of old through the air on their divine coursers. Now they steal by night to the beds of hinds and churls; but there was a time when they descended from Valhalla to conceive, in the embrace of a mortal, the demigod whom they afterwards accompanied to the battle-field, to bear him thence to the hall of Odin.

R

CHAPTER IX.

THE WEREWOLF.

THE werewolf is so called from the Anglo-Saxon wer (Lat. vir) "man" and wolf. The word corresponds exactly to the Greek lycanthropos, Italian lupo mannaro, Portuguese lobis-homem, and means a wolf who is properly a man. Loup-garou, the name given by the French to the same fearful being, is a pleonastic compound, which they have made out of their Romance appellation for the wolf and their old Frankish word gerulf, i. e., werwlf, werewolf. The people of Bretagne have just such another mongrel term, bleiz-garou (from bleiz, wolf); but they have also the purely Celtic terms denvleiz and grekvleiz, meaning man-wolf and woman-wolf.

The werewolf tradition has not been discovered with certainty amongst the Hindus, but there is no European nation of Aryan descent in which it has not existed from time immemorial. Hence it is certain that the tradition itself, or the germs of it more or less developed, must have been brought by

WEREWOLF.

LYCAON.

243

them all from Arya; and if Dr. Schwartz has not actually proved his case, he seems at least to have conjectured rightly in assigning, as one of those germs, the Aryan conception of the howling wind as a wolf.* The Maruts and other beings who were busy in the storm assumed various shapes. The human form was proper to many or all of them, for they were identical with the Pitris or Fathers (p. 15), and it would have been a very natural thought, when a storm broke out suddenly, that one or more of those people of the air had been turned into wolves for the occasion. It was also a primæval notion that there were dogs and wolves among the dwellers in hell, and Weber, who has shown that this belief was entertained by the early Hindus,† is of opinion that these infernal animals were real werewolves, that is to say, men upon whom such a transformation had been inflicted as a punishment.

The oldest werewolf story on record is that of Lycaon, king of Arcadia, in which however the legend of the werewolf proper is mixed up with another, and apparently a less ancient one, relating to the practice of sacrificing human victims, which seems to have prevailed more extensively and to a

* Ursprung, p. 118.

Indische Studien, i. 412.

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later period in Arcadia than in other parts of Greece. Lycaon is said to have been turned into a wolf by Zeus Lycaios, as a punishment for having offered a human victim to the god; and after Lycaon's time, according to a tradition recorded by Pausanias, Plato, and Pliny, similar transformations continued to be things of common occurrence on the same spot. One of the race of Anthos (probably a priestly family) was periodically chosen by lot and taken to an Arcadian lake, where he hung up his clothes on an oak. Then he swam across the lake, was changed into a wolf, and roamed the wilderness for nine years in company with other wolves. At the end of that time, if he had not tasted human flesh in the interval, he swam back again, found his clothes where he had left them, and recovered his original form, only with this difference, that it was nine years older.

It is certain that in Greece as well as in Arya the wolf was in early times a symbol of the stormy winds. It was sacred above all other animals to Apollo, who was surnamed after it Lycaios, or the wolf-god. This fact has much perplexed many learned men, and given them a world of trouble in striving to explain why an animal that figures so often and so naturally as a type of winter, night,

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