that there is a region called Magonia, whence ships come in the clouds to take on board the fruits of the earth which have been beaten down by storm and hail. The aerial navigators carry on a regular traffic in that way with the storm-making wizards, pay them for the corn they have thrashed with wind and hail, and ship it off to Magonia.*

Gervase of Tilbury† relates, that as the people were coming out from a church in England, on a dark cloudy day, they saw a ship's anchor fastened in a heap of stones, with its cable reaching up from it to the clouds. Presently they saw the cable strained, as if the crew were trying to haul it up, but it still stuck fast. Voices were then heard above the clouds, apparently in clamorous debate, and a sailor came sliding down the cable. As soon as he touched the ground the crowd gathered round him, and he died, like a man drowned at sea, suffocated by our damp thick atmosphere. An hour afterwards his shipmates cut their cable and sailed away; and the anchor they had left behind was made into fastenings and ornaments for the church door, in memory of the wondrous event. The same author tells another tale to the like effect. A native of Bristol

* D. M. 604.

In his Otia Imperialia, composed about A.D. 1211.

THE SKY SEA.

13

sailed from that port for Ireland, leaving his wife and family at home. His ship was driven far out of its course to the remote parts of the ocean, and there it chanced that his knife fell overboard, as he was cleaning it one day after dinner. At that very

moment his wife was seated at table with her children in their house at Bristol, and behold! the knife fell through an open skylight, and stuck in the table before her. She recognised it immediately; and when her husband came home long afterwards they compared notes, and found that the time when the knife had fallen from his hand corresponded exactly with that in which it had been so strangely recovered. "Who, then," exclaims Gervase, "after such evidence as this, will doubt the existence of a sea above this earth of ours, situated in the air or over it?" Such a sea is still known to Celtic tradition. If our fathers have not lied," say the peasants of La Vendée, "there are birds that know the way of the upper sea, and may no doubt carry a message to the blessed in Paradise."*

The elemental nature of the early Aryan gods, however obscured in the monstrous growths of the later Hindu theology, is most transparent in the Rig Veda, the oldest collection of writings extant in

* Huber, "Skizzen aus der Vendee." Berlin, 1853. p. 65.

any Indo-European tongue. It was put together somewhere about the year 1400 B.C., and consists of the hymns chanted by the southern branch of the Aryans, after they had passed the Indian Caucasus, and descended into the plain of the Seven Rivers (the Indus, the Punjaub or Five Rivers, and the Sarasvati), thence to overrun all India. The Sanscrit tongue in which the Vedas are written is the sacred language of India: that is to say, the oldest language, the one which was spoken, as the Hindus believe, by the gods themselves, when gods and men were in frequent fellowship with each other, from the time when Yama descended from heaven to become the first of mortals. This ancient tongue may not be the very one which was spoken by the common ancestors of Hindus and Europeans, but at least it is its nearest and purest derivative, nor is there any reason to believe that it is removed from it by more than a few degrees. Hence the supreme importance of the Sanscrit vocabulary and literature as a key to the languages and the supernatural lore of ancient and modern Europe.

The divinities worshipped [in the Rig Veda] are not unknown to later [Hindu] systems; but they there perform very subordinate parts; whilst those deities who are the great gods-the dii majores-of

THE VEDIC PANTHEON.

15

the subsequent period, are either wholly unnamed in the Veda or are noticed in a different and inferior capacity.

The far larger number of hymns

in the first book are dedicated to Agni and Indra, the deities or personifications of Fire and Firmament."* Indra has for friends and followers the Maruts, or spirits of the winds, whose host consists, at least in part, of the souls of the pious dead; and the Ribhus, who are of similar origin, but whose element is rather that of the sunbeams or the lightning, though they too rule the winds, and sing like the Maruts the loud song of the storm. Their name means the "artificers," and not even the divine workman of Olympus was more skilled than they in all kinds of handicraft. The armour and weapons of the gods, the chariot of the Asvins (deities of the dawn), the thunderbolt and the lightning steed of Indra, were of their workmanship. They made their old decrepid parents young and supple-jointed again. But the feat for which they are most renowned is the revival of the slaughtered cow on which the gods had feasted. Out of the hide alone these wonder-working Ribhus reproduced the perfect living animal; and this they did not once, but again and again. In other words, out of a small portion of the

* Wilson, Translation of Rig Veda.

16

THE TWELVE NIGHTS.

imperishable cloud that had melted away in rain and seemed destroyed, they reproduced its whole form and substance. Similar feats were ascribed to the Northern thunder-god Thor, whose practice it was to kill the two buck goats that drew his car, cook them for supper, and bring them to life again in the morning by touching them with his hammer.

In the gloomy season of the winter solstice the Ribhus sleep for twelve days in the house of the sun-god Savitar; then they wake up, and prepare the earth to clothe itself anew with vegetation, and the frozen waters to flow again. It appears certain, from some passages in the Vedas, that twelve nights about the winter solstice were regarded as prefiguring the character of the weather for the whole year. A Sanscrit text is noticed by Weber, which says expressly, "The Twelve Nights are an image of the year." The very same belief exists at this day in Northern Germany. The peasants say that the calendar for the whole year is made in the twelve days between Christmas and Epiphany, and that as the weather is on each of those days so will it be on the corresponding month of the ensuing year. They believe also that whatever one dreams on any