CHAPTER VIII. MYTHICAL DRINKING VESSELS, SIEVES, CAULDRONS, AND OTHER TENSILS -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. 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.+ A sieve, as a symbol of the clouds, is used as an appropriate vehicle by witches, nightmares, and other elfish beings in their excursions over sea and land. “But in a sieve I'll thither sail," says the first witch in "Macbeth" (act 1, sc. 3). 3). Stories of voyages performed in this way are still common enough in Germany. A man, for instance, was going through a field of corn, found a sieve on the path, and took it with him. He had not gone far when a young lady hurried after him, and hunted up and down as if looking for something, ejaculating all the time, "How my children are crying in England!" The man thought he would lay down the sieve and see what would follow; but hardly had he done so ere sieve and lady had vanished.* In the case of another damsel of the same species the usual exclamation is thus varied: "My sieve rim; my sieve rim! how my mother is calling me in England!"† At the sound of her mother's voice the daughter immediately thinks of her sieve, as an earthly lady would call for her carriage when she was in haste to set out on a journey. Seeing that the nectar and ambrosia of the Olympic gods were what mortals call rain-water, * Kuhn, u. Schwartz, Ndd. 262. we know what to think of the golden urns and beakers of their cupbearers Ganymede and Iris. These vessels must have come from the same workshop, and been of the same material, as the golden cup which was given to Hercules by the sun-god Helios, and which also served the hero as a ship to convey him across the ocean, in like manner as the Apas (p. 21) and other heavenly navigators were borne in their cloud-ships over the waters on high. Out of the same plastic material were formed the horn of the river-god Acheloos, and the magic horn of the nymph Amaltheia, for which Acheloos is said to have exchanged his own when the latter was broken off in his combat with Hercules. According to another legend, Amaltheia's horn was one which had been lost by the goat of that name that had suckled Zeus, and the god made it a cornucopia. Both legends amount to the same thing, the essential fact being that the one horn or the other passed intr the possession of the Naiads or rain-goddesses, in whose hands it became a horn of abundance, for out of it they poured down the rain which is the source of all wealth and plenty. The Wishmays or Valkyries, the manes of whose horses dropped dew upon the earth, filled the drinking-horns for the gods and the warriors in Odin's |