Curiosities of Superstition, and Sketches of Some Unrevealed Religions

The preservation of health and the prolongation of life are necessarily objects of interest to all mankind, and it was natural enough that around them should flourish a rank growth of superstitions.

To ailing or diseased persons all kinds of potions, pills, and powders were administered in the past as they are in the present; but whereas we are now content with the mystic characters endorsed on his formula by the physician, our ancestors were not satisfied unless certain mystical words, numbers, or ceremonies accompanied them. The sign of the cross was in constant requisition; or the medicine was to be taken according to mystical numbers – thrice or nine times, as the case might be. For hooping-cough was prescribed a draught from the horn of a living ox, nine times repeated. The patient was also put “nine several times” in the miller’s hopper.

The importance ascribed to the figure of a circle is probably a relic of the influence of the old sun-worship. Consumptive invalids, or children suffering from hectic fever, were thrice passed through a circular wreath of woodbine, cut during the increase of the March moon, and let down over the body from head to foot. We read of a sorceress who healed sundry women by “taking a garland of green woodbine, and causing the patient to pass thrice through it.” Afterwards, the garland was cut in nine pieces, which were cast into the fire – generally an indispensable particular in ceremonies of this kind. Another passed her patient through a heap of green yarn, which the nurse shook, and then divided it into nine pieces, which were buried in the lands of three owners. A certain Thomas Grieve directed a patient to pass thrice through a heap of yarn, which he duly burned. He also cured the wife of a Michael Glanis by having a hole broken on the north side of the chimney, and putting a hoop of yarn thrice through it, and taking it back at the door; and thereafter compelling the patient to go nine times through the said hoop of yarn.

White of Selborne tells us of a custom, prevalent in his time in the south of England, of stripping feeble and diseased children, and transmitting them head foremost through an artificial cleft in a young tree, the several parts of which were held forcibly asunder. The wound was then bound up carefully, and it was expected that the child would recover as the tree healed. If the cleft did not unite, the remedy proved abortive; and if the tree were cut down, the patient relapsed or died.

Borlase speaks of a similar custom in Cornwall, except that a perforated stone was used instead of a cleft tree.

In Persia, according to Alexander, passage through a long fissure or crevice in a rock, by crawling on hands and knees, is employed as a test of legitimate birth. And in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem, to pass between the pillars supporting an altar and the neighbouring wall, was practised as a like test. It has been suggested, as the meaning of these various transmissions through cleft, aperture, skein of yarn, and garland, that they are symbolical of regeneration; a second birth, whereby a living soul is cleansed from its former impurities and imperfections. Wilford speaks of a sanctified fissure in a rock in the East, to which pilgrims resort “for the purpose of regeneration, by the efficacy of a passage through this sacred type.”

The faculty of divining events, passing at a distance from the seer, or of passively receiving a knowledge that such events are taking place, is the well-known “second sight,” which plays so important a part in many Scottish stories. “In the stricter acceptation of this faculty,” we are told, “contemporary objects and incidents are beheld at the time, however remote their locality, but neither those which have passed, nor those which have yet to come. If extending to futurity, the subject of the vision is about to be realised. Therefore the second sight borders only on prognostication. It is affirmed to be more peculiar to Scotland, for very faint analogy to such a property has been claimed for other countries: and that the highlanders chiefly, together with the inhabitants of the insular districts, or that portion of the kingdom less advanced, have enjoyed it in the highest perfection. Marvellous to be told, they have said that their cattle are gifted with it as well as themselves.”

The faculty was one which knew no distinction of age or sex, or class; it was enjoyed by man and woman, young and old, rich and poor, high-born and plebeians, and in many cases was inherited. It might occasionally be imparted by a gifted person, or acquired by study and preparation. It is a proof, were proof needed, of the living influence of the imagination, that the vision beheld by one individual only, might be revealed to a companion visionary, thus confirmed in his belief in the value of his new prerogative; simply by the pressure of the seer’s right foot on the novice’s left, holding one hand on his head, while he was admonished to look over the master’s right shoulder. Thus, Lilly, the astrologer – Butler’s “hight Sidrophel” – relates how one John Scott desired William Hodges, an astrologer in Staffordshire, to show him the person and features of the person he should marry. Hodges carried him into a field not far from his home; pulled out his magic crystal; bade Scott set his foot against his, and after awhile desired him to inspect the crystal, and observe what he saw there. Of course he saw exactly what his fevered wishes were resolved to see.

Ceremonies of a more fantastic character were sometimes involved, and round the novice’s body was coiled a hair rope with which a corpse had been bound to its bier. He was then required to look through a hole left by the removal of a fir knot; and, on stooping, he was instructed to look back between his legs, until an advancing funeral procession should cross the boundary of the estates of two different owners. The inconvenience of this complicated performance is obvious; it might also be dangerous; for if the wind changed while the novice was girded with the mystical cord, he was liable to the penalty of death.

A seer gifted with this wonderful faculty could not divest himself of it, though often he would fain have done so. However acquired, it was a perilous endowment, fraught with physical and mental suffering, and reputed to be no gift from on high, but to have come from the Father of Evil.

The objects seen were generally sad and sorrowful; calamities to persons or nations. Woodrow says that before the Marquis of Argyll went to London in 1660, he was playing “at the bullets,” or bowls, with some Scottish gentlemen; when one of them, as the Marquis stooped down to lift the bullet, “fell pale,” and said to those about him: “Bless me, what is this I see? my lord with his head off, and all his shoulder full of blood?”

On one occasion, a gentleman joined a company, all of whom were very frank and cheerful. He had no sooner entered than one of the guests, who had not previously known him, showed much depression of spirit. Without taking any notice of it the new-comer quickly rose, and went his way. The other thereupon showed great concern, and wished he would remain; for he saw him, he said, with a shroud up to his neck, and he knew that this sign foreboded his death. In vain some of the company would have persuaded the doomed man to take warning, but he departed, and having ridden a short distance, he and his horse fell, and he broke his neck.

On the morning of the battle of Bothwell Bridge, that sore defeat to the Covenanters – so vigorously described by Scott in his “Old Mortality” – Mr. John Cameron, minister at Lochhead in Kintyre, fell into a fit of melancholy, so that Mr. Morison, of his elders, observing him through his chamber door, sore weeping and wringing his hands, knocked until he opened to him. Then he asked what was the matter? Were his wife and children well? “Little matter for them,” he answered; “our friends at Bothwell are gone.” Mr. Morison told him it might be a mistake, and the offcome of his gloomy thoughts: “No, no,” said he, “I see them flying as clearly as I see the wall.” As near as they could calculate by the accounts they afterwards obtained, this incident at the Lochhead of Kintyre was contemporaneous with the flight of the Covenanters at Bothwell.

Munro, the Scotch soldier of fortune, who bore himself so gallantly in the wars of Gustavus Adolphus, tells a story of a vision that was seen by a soldier of his company on the morning of the storm of Stralsund in 1628. One Murdo Macleod, born in Assen, a soldier of tall stature and valiant courage, being sleeping on his watch, awoke at break of day, and “jogged” two of his comrades lying by him, much to their indignation at his “stirring them.” He replied: “Before long, you shall be otherwise stirred.” A soldier called Allan Tough, a Lochaber man, recommending his soul to God, asked him what he had seen: “That you shall never behold your country again.” The other replied, the loss was but small, if the rest of the company were well. He answered: “No, for there was great hurt and dearth of many very near.” The other again asked, what others he had seen who would perish. He then told by name sundry of his comrades who would be killed. The other asked, what would become of himself. Eventually, he described by their clothes all the officers who would be hurt. “A pretty quick boy near by,” asked him, what would become of the Major (that is, Munro himself?) “He would be shot, but not deadly,” was the answer, – and so it proved.

A good deal is said of this Taisch, or “Second Sight,” in Dr. Johnson’s “Journey to the Hebrides,” and some striking anecdotes are told. It was just the thing to interest his moody temperament, with its terrible dread of death and its longing to lift the curtain that hides from us the Unseen. He seems, however, to have been unable to convince himself of the actual existence of such a power; all the evidence he could collect failed to advance his curiosity to conviction, so that he could not believe, while remaining willing to believe. To use the noble words of Goethe, nobly rendered by Coleridge:

“As the sun,Ere it is risen, sometimes paints its imageIn the atmosphere, so often do the spiritsOf great events stride on before the events,And in To-day already walks To-morrow.”

This it is not difficult to accept. It seems fitting that presages should herald the death of kings and the revolutions of nations; but the mind cannot convince itself that the spirits of the dead will cross the shadowy borders to foretell the trivial accidents that chequer ordinary lives. Yet, as Johnson says: “A man on a journey far from home falls from a horse; another who is perhaps at work about the house, sees him bleeding on the ground, commonly with a landscape of the place where the accident befalls him. Another seer, driving home his cattle, or wandering in idleness, or musing in the sunshine, is suddenly surprised by the appearance of a bridal ceremony or funeral procession, and counts the mourners or attendants, of whom, if he knows them, he relates the names, if he knows them not he can describe the dresses.”

Woodrow tells of “a popish lady,” living near Boroughbridge, who dreamed that she saw a coach, and a lady in it, almost lost in the river. She directed her servants to watch during two nights, to guard against an accident, but nothing happened. “On the third night, pretty late, the Lady Shawfield came, and of a sudden the coach was overturned, and filled with water. The coachman got upon one of the horses, to save his life. The good and religious Lady Shawfield was for some time under water: and upon the cry rising, the popish lady’s servants came to their assistance. With much difficulty, the coach and lady in it were got out of the water.” And the Lady Shawfield, being laid upon the bank, gradually recovered her senses.

In the early months of the Commonwealth, while Mackenzie of Tarbat, afterwards Earl of Cromarty, was riding in a field among his tenants, who were manuring barley, a stranger “called that way on his foot, and stopped likewise, and said to the countrymen, ‘You need not be so busy about that barley, for I see the Englishmen’s horses tethered among it; and other parts mowed down for them.’ Tarbet asked him how he knew them to be Englishmen, and if he had ever seen any of them? He said, ‘No; but he saw them strangers, and heard the English were in Scotland, and guessed it could be no other than they.’ In the month of July, the thing happened directly as the man said he saw it.”

The influence exercised on the imagination by events in which we are deeply interested, and the manner in which our hopes or fears are mistaken for predictions, may be illustrated by two examples from antiquity. On the day that Cæsar and Pompey contended at Pharsalia for the mastery of the world, Cornelius, a priest and patrician of Padua, declared, under a sudden impulse of passion, that he beheld the eddies and currents of a desperate battle, and the fall and flight of many of the combatants, eventually exclaiming: “Cæsar has conquered!” His hearers laughed at him, but his words were afterwards verified, and it appeared that he had foretold not only the day, but the incidents, and the result of the famous battle in Thessaly. The anecdote is related on the authority of the “Noctes Atticæ” of Aulus Gellius.

Dio Cassius tells a similar story about the assassination of the Emperor Domitian at Rome, by his freedman Stephanus. “It is to be admired,” he says, “that, as accurately proved by persons in either place, Apollonius Thyanæus, ascending an eminence at Ephesus or elsewhere, cried out before the multitude: ‘Well done, Stephanus, well done! Strike the murderer! thou hast struck him, thou hast wounded him, he is slain!’” But it may well be supposed that a secret understanding existed between Apollonius and the murderer.

From “second sight” we pass on to “prediction” or “divination,” another of the superstitious modes by which humanity has endeavoured to read the book of the Future. In the north this power of prophecy was largely assumed by women, a circumstance of which Scott has made ample and picturesque use in more than one of his admirable fictions.

A woman foretold the tragical end of James I. of Scotland, in 1436. In the early stage of a journey from Edinburgh to Leith, and in the midst of the way, arose a woman of Ireland, who claimed to be a soothsayer, and as soon as she saw the king, she cried with a loud voice, saying, “My lord king, an ye pass this water, ye shall never turn again to live.” The king was astonished at her words, for but shortly before he had fallen in with a prophecy, that in the self-same year the King of Scots should be slain. And as he rode onward, he called to him one of his knights, and commanded him to return and speak with this woman, and ask of her what she would, and what she meant by her loud crying: and she began and told him what would befall the king if he passed that water. The king asked her how she knew so much, and she said that Huthart told her so. “Sire,” quoth the knight, “men may gallantly talk, nor take heed of yonder woman’s words, for she is but a drunken fool, and wots not what she saith.” And so with his folk he passed the water called the Scottish Sea, towards S. John’s town [Perth,] about four miles from the country of the wild Scots, and there, in a convent of Black Friars, outside the town, he held a great feast. In the course of the revel came “the said woman of Ireland, who called herself a divineress,” and made several vain attempts to gain access to the king. Meanwhile the conspirators matured their plot, removed the king’s guards, attacked him, and slew him.70

All the predictions which come true are preserved; we hear nothing of those which fail, for no one has an interest in recording or repeating them; hence an undue importance is gradually attached to what are nothing more than remarkable coincidences. Many others are prophecies “after the event.” Others are based on a careful calculation of probabilities. As in the following example: An Orkney warlock, full of displeasure with James Paplay, a proud and haughty chief, with whose character, doubtless, she was well acquainted, broke forth into a torrent of predictive utterances: “Thou art now the highest man that ever thou shalt be! Thou art gone to shear thy corn, but it shall never do you good! Thou art going to set house with thy wife, – ye shall have no joy of one another. Oil shall not keep you and her; ye shall have such a meit-will [craving,] and shall have nothing to eat, but be fain to eat grass under the stones and wair (sea-weed) under the rocks.” It was seriously asserted that not only were these predictions – or menaces – uttered, but that they were all fulfilled; and it is possible that the prophet may have had something to do with their fulfilment.

A curious anecdote is related of a Scottish minister, who, on the day of the battle of Killiecrankie, was preaching at Anworth, and in his preface before his prayer, according to his usual mode of homely expression, began to this purpose: “Some of you will say, What news, minister? What news about Clavers, who has done so much mischief in this country? That man sets up to be a young Montrose, but as the Lord liveth, he shall be cut short this day. Be not afraid,” added he, “I see them scattered and flying: and as the Lord liveth, and sends this message by me, Claverhouse shall no longer be a terror to God’s people. This day I see him killed – lying a corpse.” And on that day, and at that hour, Claverhouse fell71 (July 27th, 1689.)

In their anxiety to obtain a glimpse of the dread writing in the Book of Fate, men have resorted to divers strange expedients, applying to warlocks and witches, or seeking to wring a response to their questionings from the creatures of the Invisible World. The ceremony known as Taghairm, or “Echo,” seems to have been peculiar to Scotland. The inquirer was wrapped in a cow’s hide, his head being left free, and was carried by assistants to a solitary spot, or left under the liquid arch formed by the “sheeted column’s silvery perpendicular” in waterfall or cataract: there he remained during the watches of the night, with phantoms fluttering round about him, from whence he was supposed to derive the burden of the oracular response he delivered to his comrades on the following day.

It is probable that this ceremony is the relic of some ancient form of ritual. At all events, the skins of animals played an important part in the old worship. When the Thebans slew a cow on the festival of Jupiter Ammon, his image was clothed with the skin: all present in the temple then struck the carcase, which was buried in a consecrated place.

Pausanias records that a temple in honour of the soothsayer Amphiaraus, the reputed son of Apollo, stood in the territory of Oropus in Attica. Votaries who resorted thither for the purpose of divination, underwent certain lustrations, or purifying rites, sacrificed a ram, and, in expectation of seeing visions, slept upon its skin.

Virgil, in one of the most elaborate scenes of the Æneid, represents to us a similar oblation as being offered at a consecrated fountain, where the priest, to prepare himself for the delivery of responses, slept on the skin: —

“Et cæsarum ovium sub nocte silentiPellibus incubuit stratis, somnosque petivit;Multa modis simulacra videt volitantia mirisEt varias audit voces.”72

It seems to have been an important part of the heathen ritual to make use of the skin of the sacrificed animal for the purposes of clothing. Lucian, describing the ceremonies practised in the temple of Hierapolis, says that, on his arrival, the head and eyebrows of the novice were shaved; a sheep was then sacrificed; he knelt on the skin, and covering his own head with the head and feet of the animal, prayed that his offering might be accepted while promising a worthier one.

The Spanish invaders of the New World discovered that the religion of its most civilised race, the Aztecs, was founded upon human sacrifices. The number of victims offered up to the Aztec gods is stated in figures which seem almost incredible. Peculiar to the Aztec kingdom was the horrid ceremony entitled “the flaying of men.” The Aztecs having demanded the daughter of some neighbouring potentate as their queen, she was flayed on the very night of her arrival by command of their deity, and a young man clothed in her skin. In this originated the custom that a captive slave, distinguished by the name, the honours, and the ornaments of the divinity, should be sacrificed after a certain time; and another, clothed with his skin, then exacted contributions for the service of the gods, which no one, says Acosta, dared to refuse.

We have no space to dwell on the various forms of divination that were wont to prevail. Almost everything in nature, from the stars of heaven to the clods of earth, was made to give indications of coming events. The historian of the darker Superstitions of Scotland brings together a few striking illustrations.

If a certain worm in a medicinal spring on the top of a hill in Strathdon, were found alive, it was a sign that the patient would live; and in a well of Ardwacloich, in Appin, if the patient were to die, a dead worm was found in it, and a live one, if he were to recover. In the district of Lorn, the figures assumed by an egg dropped into water were supposed to indicate the appearance of a future spouse. “Also, one of four vessels being filled with pure, and another with muddy water, the third with milk, and the fourth with meal and water; if the diviner blindfold dips his hand in the first, it augurs that his spouse shall be led to the nuptial couch in all her pristine purity; but otherwise if dipping in the second: if finding his way to the milk, a widow shall fall to his lot; and an old woman awaits him from the meal and water. Three vessels are used in the south of Scotland; one of them empty; and should fate direct the diviner hither, it augurs perpetual celibacy.”

A belief in Fairies was widespread, and has survived, in remote districts, down even to our own time:

“Oft fairy elvesWhose midnight revels by a forest sideOr fountain, some belated peasant sees,Or dreams he sees, while overhead the moonSits arbitress, and nearer to the earthWheels her pale course, they on their mirth and danceIntent, with jocund music charm his ear:At once with joy and fear his heart rebounds.”73

It is not easy to reconcile the conflicting details of the disposition, manners, habits, and influence of these liliputian spirits which we meet with in the early writers. But on a general survey it appears that they were very diminutive; in their intercourse with mortals sometimes good-tempered, sometimes malignant; that they loved and married, and had offspring; that they were very merry, and loved to dance upon the green, and fill the air with choral music; that they possessed stores of gold and silver, which they distributed freely; that they were invisible, but could at will present themselves to mortals; that they were very timid, and would inflict a summary punishment upon intruders. Their influence was at its highest on Friday, at noon, and at midnight.

Kirk, the Scotch minister of Aberfoyle, who died in 1688, relates some other particulars of the “good people.” Their substance, he says, is denser than air; too subtle to be pierced, and, like that of Milton’s angels, reuniting when divided, or when any attempt is made to cleave it asunder. Their voice is like unto whistling. They change their places of abode every quarter of the year, floating near the surface of the earth; and persons gifted with the second sight have often had fierce encounters with them. The Highlanders, to preserve themselves and their cattle against them, went regularly to church on the first Sunday of every quarter, though they might not return during the interval. At the name of God or Jesus they vanished into thin air. They were of both sexes, and like mankind, they were mortal.

“Some meagre allusions appear to the Queen of the Fairies, and especially by King James, whose immediate knowledge may have been derived from the vignettes in Olaus Magnus, and the words of his own unhappy subjects, who perished on account of their credulity. Alexoun Perisoma was convicted, on her confession, of repairing to the ‘queen of Elfame,’ with whom she was familiar. Jean Wire (1670) declared that, while she taught a school at Dalkeith, a woman desired to be employed ‘to speik to the Queen of Fairie, and strike ane battell in hir behalf with the said Queen.’” The name of Titania is familiar enough to all lovers of English literature. There was a necromancer or wizard, in the reign of Charles I., who affirmed he had an incantation – “O Micol, Micol, regina Pigmiorum, veni,” – that Titania could not resist. Lilly tells us that when it was tested at Hurst wood, first a gentle murmurous sound was heard; then rose a violent whirlwind, which swelled into a hurricane; and lastly the Fairy Queen appeared in all her radiance.