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CHAPTER X

CUPRA

Ex eo tempore . . . illum sic concubisse secum, ut viri cum fœminis solent, nec percipiente viro, cum simul in lecto essent,"--BODINUS, lib. 2, capit. 7

OF this spirit all that I know is given in the following strange story:--

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There is in this a little, as it were, of Cupid and Psyche, which beautiful myth doubtless grew out of some rude and simple old story of a girl and a spirit lover. I have no doubt that the tale as here given is a mere fragment. As among the Red Indians, we find loose pieces of stories, sometimes fitted into one another.

It cannot fail to strike the reader that there is a very loose moral tone--a gay and festive sensuousness evident in these tales. These folletti are all, when not terrible, very much like the Fauns and Sylvans, spirits of yore, from whom they are, beyond all doubt, legitimately descended. In fact the spirit of Dyonisia, the Worship of Bacchus and Venus, and of Pan--of Dryads and Oreads, and a multitude of hard-drinking, free-loving, rakish divinities, all of whom, from great Jove himself down to the Satyrs, set the example of embracing every pretty woman who came in their way, could hardly be wanting among people who still actually invoke these deities by their old names. And this is--inter alia--a strong confirmation of the heathen antiquity of all this Tuscan lore.

I deem this thing well worth dwelling on, that while in the folk-lore and fairytales of the rest of Europe there is but little account of fairies, brownies, elves, and Sylvan goblins seducing maidens and abusing wives, it is in the Romagna at the present day their chief mission or amusement. A ringing melody of forest glee does not come more surely from the Waldhorn of a hunter when sounded by

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some skilful woodcraftsman than a tale which is "naughty, but nice," to youthful sinners, comes when conversation turns on these mysterious beings. I could have made a very distinguished acquaintance indeed--namely, that of the Lord Chancellor--had I published in a book all the Merrie Tales of the kind which I have, or could have, heard of such "shoking" culpabilities--which seem to be almost the only kind of abilities now manifested by these " geniuses." In all which they are true as steel to the traditions of their ancestors, the dii minores, the minor or sylvan gods, of whom Pico della Mirandola--whose tomb is not far off from here--informs us that "Saint Augustin declares in the fifteenth book of the City of God, that 'the Silvani and Fauni have many times sinned with women, who, however, greatly desired it, the end thereof being that they lay with them. And that certain demons, called by the French Dusii, went about continually seeking such carnal iniquity, and--mettendola ad effetto--putting it into effect.'"

All of these, as I have shown in chapters on them--Fauns, Silvani, and Dusii--still live in the Romagnola. There the contadina maiden half fears and half hopes in the forest shades, as twilight falls, to meet with a handsome, roguish, leering, laughing lover; there, it may be, among reedy rocks, will rise from the whitening water of the headlong stream some irresistible Elf. Ma--che volete? Girls will be girls!

This Cupra tale is much like one in BODINUS, where, however, the devil himself is the lover, and a girl of twelve his bonne fortune. They may both have come from a common source.

According to PRELLER (Römische Mythologie), there was on the coast of Picenum a goddess named Cupra, who is supposed to be a Juno, of Etruscan origin. Her temple was renewed by Hadrian. "But the name is probably to be explained by the Sabine word cyprus (good), whence the Vicus Cyprius in Rome and a Mars Cyprius in Umbria." I do not feel authorised to suggest any connection between these names and that of the Cupra in the story. Nor do I insist on any positive identity of any of my discoveries with ancient ones. There may have been, for aught I know, mistakes or misunderstandings as regards any or all these names. I have simply written down what I gathered, and I dare say there will be correctors enough in due time to verify or disprove it all.

All of the old Etrusco-Roman deities were in pairs, male and female, hence possibly the modern confusion as to certain names. They also "crossed" one another. "Thalna, or Cupra," says George Dennis (The Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria, 1878), "was the Etruscan Hera or Juno, and her principal shrines seen, to have been at Veii, Falerii, and Perusia. Like her counterpart among the Greeks and Romans, she appears to have been worshipped under other forms,

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according to her various attributes, as Feronia, Uni, Eilithya-Lucothea." The incident of the leaves connects Cupra with classic lore. Gerard (Gottheit: der Etrusker, p. 40) thinks Thalna is descriptive of Cupra as a goddess of births and light. We learn the name of Cupra from Strabo, v., p. 241. Of which Noel des Vergers says in L'Etrurie et les Etrusques, Paris, 1862, that:--

WALNUT WITCHES

It is probable that one of the earliest supernatural conceptions formed by man was that of the T'abu, or Taboo. It was that if the witch, or shaman, or conjuror wished to guard, or keep, or protect a certain property from depredators, he by magic power or spells caused the person trespassing to suffer. If a sorcerer or a chief had a valuable weapon or ornament, spells were pronounced over it to protect it, and if it were stolen some mysterious disease soon after attacked the thief. By a little judicious poisoning here and there of suspected offenders, the taboo of course soon came to be firmly believed in and dreaded. Naturally enough it was extended to trees bearing valuable fruit, fields and their crops, wives and cattle. Then in time everything belonging to priests and chiefs was tabooed. In the Pacific islands at the present day where the natives have not been civilised, it often happens that a man who has eaten fruit, or even touched an article belonging to a chief, though he did not know at the time that it was prohibited, will soon die of mere fear. The laws of taboo in Fiji and many other places were so numerous and intricate that if written out they would make a work quite as extensive and difficult to master as Blackstone's Commentary. Little by little it entered into every relation of life. Wherever the power of the priest came--and it went

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everywhere--there was the terrible taboo. It sat by every fireside--it was with man when he awoke in the night; there were kinds of food which must not he eaten, certain positions which must not be assumed, thoughts which must not be entertained. There were words which must never be spoken, names of the dead which must never be uttered; and as people were named from things, therefore language was continually changing. Over all and under all and through all was the taboo, or will of the priest.

In CATLIN'S great work on the North American Indians there is the portrait of a Chippeway emaciated to a living skeleton. There was, about fifty years since, in his country, in a remote place, a vast mass of virgin copper, which was regarded with superstitious reverence. The sorcerers of the tribe had decreed that any Indian who should guide a white man to this great nugget would surely be accursed and die. One man, tempted by gifts, and in an hour of temporary freethought, broke the ban and led a white trader to the mysterious manitou. Then came the reaction. He believed himself to be accursed, and so pined away. A traveller in Fiji has recorded that a native having once by mere accident touched something which belonged to a chief, and learned that it was taboo, died in a few days from terror.

An accurate and impartial history of the development of taboo, or prohibition, would be the history of religion and of the human race. As regards church property it became known as sacrilege--the conversion of sacred things to secular uses. The exempla of the preachers of the Middle Ages show us the doctrine of taboo carried to the extremes of absurdity. RABELAIS ridiculed these extravagances, but the shafts of his wit fell back blunted, even as the arrows of the scoffer missed the mark when shot at a leaf taken from the Holy Decretals. But taboo is yet strong everywhere. I can remember that once when I was a very small boy I unwittingly--this was in a New England village--injured a pamphlet or book which had been lent by the local clergyman. "Don't you know," exclaimed a lady who was reproving me, "that that book belongs to Dr. L------?" And I was aghast, for I felt that the crime was far greater than if the injured property had belonged to one of the laity.

Making every allowance for the natural limitations and necessities of Evolution, taboo was productive of some good but also of great evil. At present, its old mission being worked out among enlightened people, the bad is predominant under the influences of the Church it was so freely, so recklessly, and so unscrupulously applied that millions of lives were crushed by it or made needlessly miserable. It enforced celibacy; it compelled injudicious charity, which enlarged the area of poverty instead of relieving it; it made idleness, coloured by superstition,

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holy; it exalted in every way the worthless idle shaman, or sorcerer, above the productive citizen; it laid great curses and eternal damnation on trifling offences, on no offences, and on the exercise of natural human rights and privileges. And it still contrives to do so to an extent which few realise. For the prohibition or punishment, or causing suffering in any form whatever, when it is applied to anything which is not in itself wrong, is taboo. But what is wrong? That which injures others. And what are injuries? Firstly, those which the law defines as to person and property, directly or indirectly, in law or equity. Secondly, those which are conventional and spring out of our artificial social conditions. These are mostly of the feelings, or sentimental--regarding which it becomes us to exercise the strictest discipline over ourselves, and to make the utmost allowance for others.

It is as regards these conventional and sentimental wrongs in social relations, and in really artificial matters, that taboo, be it religious or secular, makes its tyranny most keenly felt. Not to wander too widely from the subject, I can only say that a vast amount of all social injustice does not spring, as is generally assumed, or supposed, from unavoidable current causes, but from mere custom and use derived from tradition. He who will look carefully, honestly, and above all boldly, into this, will be astonished to learn how powerful still is the old shaman of the very earliest stage of barbarism. The demon of the Threshold--he who lay in wait at the very entrance of the first hut of humanity--is still lurking by thine though thou seest him not.

It would be interesting to know how many objects which were regarded as accursed and bedevilled owed their evil repute in the beginning to taboo. During the Middle Ages, and indeed from earlier times, the walnut-tree was regarded as being dear to demons and specially chosen by witches as a place of meeting. Among the Romans it typified darkness or evil, hence it was believed that if it stood near an oak they mutually injured one another, because the latter was sacred to Jove, the god of lightning, the principle of light (NORK, Realwörterbuch, vol. iii., p. 387. FRIEDRICH). In the earliest mythologies the nut was an erotic symbol. On the bridal night the married pair among the Jews praise God for planting the nut-tree in the Garden of Eden; and among the Romans it was a custom spargere nuces to scatter nuts on such occasions. "But as sensual passion is a allied to sin, it is plain that the walnut-tree is also a demoniac symbol. The Rabbis declared that the devil chose it for a favourite resting-place, and advised people never to sleep under it, because every twig thereof has nine leaves, and on every leaf dwells a devil." (FRIEDRICH, Symbolik, p. 315).

BUNSEN (Rom. iii., 3, 210), tells us that there once stood in the Piazza della

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Chiesa del Populo a great walnut-tree whose leaves were so infested by devils that Pope PASCHAL the Second cursed it, had it cut down, and a church built where it had stood--an act quite becoming a shaman or voodoo in every respect. Maledicta sis o nuce! " Be thou d----d, oh walnut-tree, root and branch, nuts and bark, und to hell vit you! "

All of this rubbish of eroticism, diablerie and darkness, doubtlessly gathered about the tree from many sources, but the beginning of it all was that some early sorcerer, to save his walnuts, informed his neighbours that the tree was tabooed and that devils sat on it to torment those who should rob it. I have heard of a German preacher of the mob who explained the origin of evil by the fact that, "Eve did rop a Baumgart" (or orchard), and I know a perfectly authentic case of theology in the nursery, in which a small girl, being asked why God forbade Adam and Eve to eat the apples, replied that He wanted them for pies, but was corrected by another, who told her, "No-that He wanted to keep them for his winter apples"--that kind being usually prohibited to children. However, in any case it was the first taboo on record; and because simple Adam and Eve had been created of a heedless curious human nature, and not wise enough to resist Satan, the incarnate spirit of genius and evil, their descendants have been damned eternally to hell by hundreds of millions. Which cheerful myth in no respect invalidates the many great truths which abound in the Bible, as PAINE and INGERSOLL argue--nay, it contains a great truth: that idle curiosity and childish disobedience are a great source of evil. The Jews regarded unflinching, unconditional obedience, with no allowance for human weakness, as the law of laws. It was well for them as they were, but it was going too far to make it all in all. It had held Egypt together in good condition for thousands of years, and MOSES, who was a great student of laws, applied it. But it is not applicable to England. or America, or indeed to any republic, or semi-republic, to-day. Freethought now has its rights, and is a law like others.

But to return to our trysting-tree--the walnut. As all the witches of Germany were accustomed to assemble on the Blocksberg, so those of all Italy had their rendezvous or sabbat, or, in Italian, treguenda, at a great walnut-tree in Benevento.

This terrible tree is mentioned by many writers on witchcraft, and allusions to it are very common in Italian literature, but I never met with anything in detail till I found a pamphlet--De Nuce Maga Beneventana--which is by PETER PIPERNUS, and forms a supplement to his work De Effectibus Magicis, of which I have elsewhere written. In which, as it never rains but it pours, I met with such an excess of information that I had some trouble in condensing it, the work being composed on the picturesque, but not lucid principle, followed by

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PRÆTORIUS, of writing down anything whatever about everything which comes into one's head, on slips of paper, which are then thrown into a basket without numbers, and set up by the printer as they occur. So, after eight pages of skimblc-skamble, including a short essay on the sins of keeping bad company and of telling indecent stories, or comicas fabulas de stupris virginum, we see a gleam of coming day in a chapter on Nuts in general, with the comforting assurance that, as a tree, the walnut is endowed by Nature with both good and bad qualities--of which chapter we may note that if the walnut really does possess the extraordinary number of medical and other virtues ascribed to it by PIPERNUS, it is no wonder that it was supposed to be in the highest degree supernatural--albeit not a word is said in it of catsup or pickles. Could the men of old have foreseen the sauces of to-day, and the part which walnuts would play in them all, Heaven only knows what witchcraft they would have ascribed to them!

Finally we come to the fact that from the testimony and traditions recorded in the manuscripts of an old witch-trial, and from information gathered by many holy Inquisitors, that it was believed in the fraternity of sorcerers that not only from the times of the Lombards, but even from those of the ancient Samnites, there had ever been at Benevento an immense walnut-tree which was in leaf all the year (the same talc was told of old Druidical and German oaks), the nuts of which were of a pyramidal form, "qua tragularibus lineis emittebat." These nuts sold for a high price, people believing that they protected against accidents, earthquakes, and cured epilepsy, also that they were sure to produce male offspring, retentis intra matricem nucleis. And they were also valuable amulets against witchcraft, though used by witches in much deviltry. I think that we have here a hint of the curious triangular nuts which come from the East, and of which such numbers are sold in Florence, made into rosaries. These are also carried singly as magical amulets. There is a variety of them found in China which exactly resembles the head of a buffalo, horns and all. I have specimens of both kinds.

Next we have the topography of the region where the tree grew--for PIPERNUS approaches the enemy very gradually--and finally of the field in which this King of Darkness stands, as our author puts it very neatly, "more like a Nox than a Nux." Which pun of darkness casts, however, not a little light on the tenebrific nature of this tree, and its noxious nature, with the suggestion that it was the mere resemblance of name which drew to it an association with the powers of the underworld. PIPERNUS gives us a long array of causes why the nut-tree was dreaded by Christians, and loved by witches, the only sensible one of which is that it was of yore, because of its dense shade, sacred to Proserpine, Night, and the Infernal Gods.

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Well, as it happened that the good people of Benevento had a great walnut-tree where they worshipped serpents, or "divinity in the likeness of a beast, which is vulgarly called a viper," and what was also horrible, held horse-races in which the riders caught at bunches of sumach suspended in the tree--after the fashion of the profane and ungodly game of flying horses and hand-organ which we have seen at irreligious, worldly-minded, country fairs. There was in Benevento a great saint, Barbatus, to whom these goings-on of the heathen with their great moral show of snakes and races, and the rest of the circus, were a terrible annoyance--for then, as now, two of a trade did never yet agree. Competition was not, with him, the soul of business. The ruler of that region was ROMUALDUS, who was a heathen. And BARBATUS tried to convert him, but he did not convert worth a button. In vain did BARBATUS flourish and coruscate his miracles--et miraculis coruscans--round the head of this impenitent mule--I could almost fancy that Rom must have been a gypsy. His only reply was to the effect that "that cock won't fight." For I must mention that it is also recorded that he kept race-horses and game-cocks--and that there is in bad Latin mournful evidence of the truth of it all.

By and by there were rumours of war in the land. Constantinople--I mean CONSTANTIUS--the emperor, was coming innumera multitudine suorum collecta, with a vast army to wipe out Benevento. Romualdus was a hard fighting man, but as Saint CHRYSOSTOM said, "There is no use in a goat's trying to buck against a bull." He was reduced to extremes, and it was finally found that CONSTANTINE, like a true and gentle Christian, had decreed that on a certain day he would take the city and put every human being in it, utriusque sexus, to death.

Arrepta occasione--BARBATUS saw his opportunity and improved it. He held a grand public meeting, in which he attributed all these troubles to that nasty Viper, and their heathenish horse-races, and wicked walnuts. I dare say, too, that they had wine with their walnuts--but of this the history says nothing. And he ended by telling them that if they would raise their eyes above vipers and walnuts, and the turf, up to heaven, they would all be saved. Whereupon Romualdus said if that would save the town, he, for one, would raise his--and, to cut the tale short, CÆSAR CONSTANTINE and his army, Beneventum non penetrabit--"did not take Beneventum."

And then BARBATUS had a beautiful time. He cut down the walnut-tree, killed the snakes, stopped the horse-races, confiscated all the "poultry" of the cock-fights, threw the gaffs into the river ("they used slasher-gaffs in all pits in those days," Alectromachia, vol. i.), and what with baptizing, confessing, and burying, got to be as rich.

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It is not difficult to see how this miracle was worked. When you are in correspondence with your CONSTANTINE, it is easy to arrange that he should not penetrate to your Beneventum. A chief who, like ROMUALDUS, might be obliged to fight to the death by force of public opinion when it was only a question of war, could nicely compromise on a miracle. The entire history of the progress of Christianity in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, is a chronicle of heathenism extinguished by brute force, or marriages, or by this same old trick of BARBATUS.

The nut-tree was cut down, but the king never dies. It is true, adds PIPERNUS, that there is now in the same place another tall and great walnut-tree, in the hollow of which three men might hide-and near this are sometimes found bones and bits of flesh, the signs of witches' banquets--probably chosen to take the place of the ancient one. As appeared by the testimony of one VIOLANTA, who being interrogated--probably with a rack and red-hot pincers in the Christian manner of 1519 (that being the date)--said that she had been at such a tree. There they worshipped Diana (not the devil--he was only adored in Germany) or Herodias, the goddess of dancing, who, however, as before said, appears in Rabbinical writings as Lilith, who was the Hebrew Diana, or mother of all the witches, and held high revel and "had a good time."

It may be observed that PIPERNUS declared that women became pregnant simply by means of the nuts from this tree. There is no mention of male assistance in this matter. Very recently, as a write, I inquired in Florence if there was any account current of magical properties in walnuts, and was promptly told the following tale, regarding which I had made no suggestions and given no hints whatever. It was written out for me, not by any means in choice Italian.

On hearing this mystical tale I remarked, "Then the lover became father to himself?" "Sicuro--certainly," was the reply. Here I might tell the story of the

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nun who became possessed, or as some say, enceinte, by swallowing a diavoletto, or little devil, in a lettuce leaf, she having taken her salad without first praying, and so on, such tales, suggested by meditations on immaculate conception not being rare. But what is to the purpose is to show that the idea of the walnuts of the tree of Benevento producing such results is ancient and widely spread. The story seems to be a witch parody of the birth of Christ.

The witches of Benevento do not seem to have been by any means a bad lot. In this story they appear as succouring--in a strange way to be sure--a pair of unfortunate lovers, which is certainly the ideal of human benevolence to most young ladies. And in Spain, Ireland, and elsewhere, the fairies have taken from them the credit of a tale which is very much to their credit, and which was attributed to them lang syne. This is the story of the Hunchback who lost his hump. Among the two or three hundred jolly little comediettas in which good-natured, honest dummklug STENTORELLO is the hero, and which are played at present all the time in Florence, there is one called The Witches of Benevento, which is founded on the legend, and I find it in PIPERNUS. Perhaps your memory may be a little rusty--nulladiméno--anyhow, I will tell it, with interpolations.

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I should like to have seen some of those "numerous cases."

It is--as I have before remarked--very remarkable that in Italy there arc two very distinct and contradictory currents of Witch-lore. One is the true old Latin-Etruscan legend, in which the witch is merely a sorceress or enchantress, generally benevolent and kind. She is really a fata, like the French fée, who is always a lady, loving children and helping poor men. There is in this witchcraft nothing to speak of, of selling souls to the devil, and all the loathsome abominations of living only for evil. There are good witches and bad, the old Canidia of Horace still exists, but though she lames donkeys and blasts vines, she does not make a specialty of getting people to hell. The Italians seem to have believed that men could do that abundantly well for themselves, without help.

The other current is of the diabolical sort, and it is due almost entirely to the Church and the priests. This is the kind which caused the witch-mania, with its tortures and burnings. It is very curious that despite all the efforts of Saint Barbato, and an army of theologians after him, the old genial classic associations still survive, and the witches of Benevento are still believed to be a beautiful, gay and festive society, whose queen is Diana--with very little of Hecate-Hexe in her. In proof of this I am supplied with another legend by the same authority as that from whom I obtained the tale of the lamb.

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I have done scant justice to this poem--for a poem it was, as I heard it sung with feeling and expression, and yet there was in it neither metre to speak of nor rhyme to mention, only such as the beautiful Italian language supplies to all who can sing. It does not seem to be known to all that all Italian fairy tales are really poems, and often sung by the contadine--as were all the American Red Indian traditions. The witches of the Walnut-Tree appear in this tale as fairies, but 'tis all one-they are the same charming souls as those who remove Lamberto's hump, and make the young man his own father. I cannot deny that they certainly do manifest a decided disposition to play the most eccentric erotic tricks, and confirm what William Grant Stewart says of the Scotch fairies, that "their appetites are as keen and voluptuous as their inclinations are corrupt and wicked"--wicked here meaning what I once heard another Scotchman define as "vara leecherous." It will be observed that the walnut which produces a child is effectively given in another guise in this tale, and that this, coupled with the assertion of PIPERNUS, induces me to believe that in substance these two tales are

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extremely ancient. They are also valuable in proof of the fact that, in spite of the incessant efforts of the monks to carry out the declaration made in Psalm xcvi. 5, that "all the gods of the Gentiles are devils," there were exceptions in which the beautiful and benevolent spirits of the ancient time survived the Hebrew-Catholic calumnies. It is worth noting that the last half of this talc corresponds exactly with an incident narrated in an Icelandic saga.

But to return to our Walnut-tree. Janet Ross tells us in her Land of Manfred that Monsignor SCHINOSI gave her the following from a MS. history of Benevento by Nicastro:--

It may be all as true as the other tale, but this account of gold vipers, dragons, and Egyptian idols has a bric-à-brac shop-look which seems to have come--if a look can come--from the rococcanut of some later writer. But it may be all right. Non nobis tantæ componere lites.

WITCHES AND WITCHCRAFT

"It seems to me strange," I remarked one day, "that no men seem to practise witchcraft!"

"Oh, but there are, though," remarked my Head-Collectress. "Why, there is a priest here in Florence who is a streghone."

"Santo! Now, if you had told me there was a thief in the police I should not have been astonished. But he can't be a real wizard."

"Ma si. GESUALDA there knows him. And you can see him yourself if you want to."

I thought on the whole I did not want to. For I knew that, in the first place, I should be introduced as a stregone Inglese, and then something came into my head about one CATO, who marvelled that one agur could look another in the face. Not that I had any fear of mutual smiling or winking--the confessional

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gives a command of countenance beyond words. But I was seized with great admiration of a priest who could be honest enough to call himself by his right name, and asked how he came to practise our noble profession.

"Ah!" cried the witch, with a smile, "he couldn't help himself. He had to become one. He was called in to confess a witch who was dying, and did not know with whom he had to deal. So she got her confession, and then said she had something to leave him. Would he have it? Oh, wouldn't he! Si, sicuro. 'Then,' she cried, 'I leave you my witchcraft!' And before he could say a word she was dead and off, and he found himself a wizard."

Some time after I had written the foregoing sentence I received from another source the following additional authentic information regarding this goblin priest, of whose real existence I have not the least doubt:--

This story is extremely interesting from the mention of the mouse. This was the soul of the witch. Prætorius, in his Anthropodemus Plutonicus, tells a marvellous story of a witch whose soul came out of her mouth as a red mouse, which idea Goethe uses in Faust. As my informant was herself in the sisterhood of sorcery, I have no doubt that she made out as strong a case as was possible to prove that all the power and sanctity of the Church and of Christianity could not avail to remove the awful might of stregoneria. But she believed what she narrated to me, and it is interesting to know that in the city of Florence in the month of January, 1891, there were people who believe in a prehistoric Shamanism which is stronger and mightier than that of the Church. Ages have lapped over ages, the Etruscan and Sabine-Latin and Roman and Christian cults have succeeded one to the other, but through it all the witch and wizard, humble and unnoted, have held their own.

But, in fact, as I became familiar with the real, deeply seated belief in a religion of witchcraft in Tuscany, I found that there is no such great anomaly after all in a priest's being a wizard, for witchcraft is a business, like any other. Or it may come upon you like love, or a cold, or a profession, and you must bear it till you can give it or your practice to somebody else. What is pleasant

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to reflect on is that there is no devil in it. If you lose it you at once become good, and you cannot die till you get rid of it. It is not considered by any means a Christianly, pious possession, but in some strange way the strega works clear of Theology. True, there are witches good and bad, but all whom I ever met belonged entirely to the buone. It was their rivals and enemies who were maladette streghe, et cetera, but the latter I never met. We were all good.

What seems incredible and utterly contradictory to all this is the fact that during the Middle Ages witchcraft, supposed to be based on a compact with the devil, raged in Italy--witness the rubbish written by PICUS DE MIRANDOLA, GRILLANDUS, PETER PIPERNUS, and scores more. And it is absolutely true that before this Hell carnival, and after it, and deep, deep under it, there was alive all the time among the people the old ante-Etrusco-Roman sorcery, and with it another witchcraft which had nothing to do with hell or devils, or original sin or anything Hebrew-Persian-Christian--and it lived, unheeding learned men and priests and their piety.

The witch-mania died, and the Church is dying fast, and yet here, in Tuscany, the witchcraft without a devil or a god--the Shamanism of oldest times with a little later Etruscan-Roman colouring, still survives--as indeed everything in this book indicates. The knowledge inspires a very strange reflection as to what the real nature of the Northern Italian can be like. For such a capacity for survival indicates character. The conservatism of the old Roman was his peculiar trait. It was not a blind adherence like that of the Egyptian to an established order of things, for it was based on common sense. This is strongly manifested in the works of CATO and of VARRO on agriculture. They strictly observed all the old rites; nay, they even taught spells, much like the incantations of the witches. But under it all there was a spirit of independence. CATO says (De Agricultura, c. 3, 5): "Rem divinam, nisi Conpititalibus in conpito aut in foco ne facit--haruspicem, augurem, hariolum, Chaldæum ne quem consulisse velit, segetem ne defrudet, nam id infelix est."

Italy has never wanted in her darkest hours--as in the days of CRESCENTIUS, or in those of the Borgias--for CÆSAR BORGIA aimed at a united Italy; and MACHIAVELLI was a true patriot--a few enlightened minds. So it seems to me that even in this peasant witchcraft which held its own despite the Church, there is a kind of conservatism which will not yield, to the Church, that is to a form of supernaturalism which is too powerful. It is blind, humble, and ignorant, but it has a kind of vitality and of independence which indicates great power.

It is not so very absurd, in the face of hypnotism and the known influences of the imagination (whatever that may be), for ignorant peasants to believe in a limited

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amount of spells and magic. CATO did as much, and he was as sensible a man as ever lived. What is wonderful in it is that his limited amount of superstition has held its own against the stupendous, subtle influence of a far greater superstition. It may be as Marcellus says, Venenum, veneno vincitur.

When I have been asked by people of average ordinary minds "In what do gypsies believe?" it often occurred to me that the proper answer would be "In just what you do--that is, in nothing at all." For the mere indifferent, unthinking admission of the truths of a religion, or the existence of a God, does not constitute faith, and there are very few persons, let us say in London, who, if a new kind of religion should become fashionable, would not fall in to it with very little thought as to its real nature. But a question in science, be it of chemistry, political economy, public health, navigation, or morals, cannot be thus easily acquiesced in, for it demands active intelligence. A priest settles a disputed point in theology very easily by his ipse dixit, but a lawyer cannot clear his client by merely expressing his conviction of his innocence. He must work hard to prove his point.

But however lukewarm an indifferent Christian may be, there is always that to be drawn from his general course of life which shows the faith in which he was born, and so as regards Tuscan or other witches and wizards, While they make no profession of any doctrines, one can deduce from their traditions and spells several curious and very original points, which were doubtless at one time taught or believed in with great zeal. They are as follows:--

The reader will have observed from several passages or anecdotes in this work that witchcraft as it now exists in Italy is utterly unlike the same as it was or is represented to be in Northern Europe. Sometimes the latter as it was taught by priests, with its principle of selling the soul to the devil, and as a thing entirely, vile and diabolical, appears. But this is all Christian. The real stregoneria of Italy, and especially of Tuscany, is in se absolutely heathen. It has nothing to do with pacts with Satan, or hell, or heaven. When the devil, or devils, are mentioned in it, they are under false colours, for they are simply spirits, perhaps evil, but not beings solely intent on destroying souls. According to Roman Catholic, and I may truly add early Protestant, doctrines there are incredible swarms of devils (far outnumbering the good spirits), who are all the time occupied in tempting and damning mankind, in most cases succeeding with great ease.

The Italian stregoneria is like an endowment. It may be voluntarily assumed by keeping company with witches, studying their lore, and taking part in their enchantments. But this may be done either in a good or evil spirit, and in neither case is the soul to be damned for it in a Christian sense. The witches evidently are not so far advanced in humanity and the religion of illimitable Divine mercy

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and love as to conceive that a soul can be sent to hell eternally for a forgotten Ave Maria, as is beautifully illustrated by a number of well-authenticated Catholic tales. The gift of witchcraft is not indeed for every one. Many long for it, but in fact very few attain it in its upper or higher grades. But one who gets it must keep it till some other person will take it--in which case the witch is, as it were, absolved and washed clean of all her sins. Nay, she can cunningly induce an unsuspicious person to take the power, by pretending to leave her a legacy--the precious legacy being her stregeria. For as she cannot die while she is a witch, and very often desires to do so, either to go to heaven or otherwise occupy herself, it sometimes requires all her ingenuity to work off the commodity. As I have mentioned, there is now a priest in Florence who was thus taken in by a dying witch, who after getting absolution from him, ungratefully swindled him by offering a legacy which he accepted and which turned him into a wizard. And now he runs about town, alternately confessing and conjuring--giving the sacraments I suppose "in either form," like an eclectic doctor who treats his patients either allopathically or homeopathically, just as they prefer.

Italian witchcraft may be lost, in Venice, by the witch's spilling even one drop of blood while she is exercising her supernatural power, or even by being caught at it. In a Florentine story, told in another place, a girl is un-witched by being violently detained from going to the sabbat. All of this indicates a radically different kind of witch from the one described by Sprenger' Bodinus, Wierus, and a thousand other writers.

But what is most remarkable of all is the belief that very great wizards and witches when they die become great spirits, who sweep over the country in clouds or vapours or storms, or wander on earth disguised as mortals. This is precisely the doctrine of North American Red Indians, among whom one hears continually of Glooskaps, Manobozhos, and Hiawathas, once human sorcerers, but never a word of any Great Spirit, except at treaties with the Government and interviews with missionaries, such a being having been quite unknown to them till they heard of him from the whites. In the shamanistic stage, man is always Euhemeristic, and makes his departed friends or great men into spirits.

It is also believed in the Romagna that those who are specially of the strega faith die, but reappear again in human forms. This is a rather obscure esoteric doctrine, known in the witch families but not much talked about. A child is born, when, after due family consultation, some very old and wise strega detects in it a long-departed grandfather by his smile, features, or expression. So the world-old Shamanism of the Grand Lama of Thibet is maintained--that strange and mysterious centre of the world's earliest "religion."

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Dr. O. W. HOLMES has shrewdly observed that when a child is born, some person old enough to have triangulated the descent, can recognise very often the grandparent or great-uncle in the descendant. In the witch families, who cling together and intermarry, these triangulations lead to more frequent discoveries of palingenesis than in others. In one of the strange stories in this book relating to Benevento, a father is born again as his own child, and then marries his second mother. But the spirit of the departed wizard has at times certainly some choice in the matter, and he occasionally elects to be born again as a nobleman or prince. Hence the now and then startling phenomenon of a count or marquis with an unusual amount of intelligence, for which nobody can account, not even on the ground of a clever and handsome German tutor, or a season in London or Paris. There are always some wise men in Italy who are true and honest patriots, and according to the doctrines of stregeria we owe them all to the very ancient and learned if not quite respectable college of wizards, to which, however, if this doctrine be true, the country owes its salvation. At any rate the idea is original, and it might be adopted to advantage in some other countries where the statesmen are certainly no conjurors.

Since writing the above I obtained the following information regarding the transmigration of souls, and the reappearance of ancestors in their descendants. And a precious time I had to disentangle or make sense of it--which may serve as a hint to those who come after the pioneer in such a wilderness, who has made the path straight for them, not to sneer at him for "inaccuracy." Truly my informant was not wanting in faith or zeal, but she was far inferior to a Passamaquoddy Indian who has been trained in tradition in the art of understanding one's self.

In this we may trace the process by which the witch or sorcerer, by being re-born, becomes more powerful, and passes to the higher stage of a spirit. This is extremely interesting, because it gives a clearer understanding of the method by which the man or woman who is feared is developed to a god. It is quite the same in Brahminism, or Buddhism, or Tibetan Shamanism. New incarnations in human form give greater power. This story is the more remarkable because the narrator was perfectly convinced of its truth.

In connection with this tale, the narrator observed that there are witches very good as well as very bad, and an aristocracy far above the vulgar or common kind. She, in fact, impressed it on me that there are the same distinctions in the world of sorcery as in this of ours.

"The belief that men could become gods," writes Mrs. Hamilton Gray (Hist. of Etruria), " is very old Etruscan. In the Acherontic Books of Tages, translated by Labeo, there were certain rites through which the souls of men

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could become gods, entitled "Dii-Animales," because they had been human souls. These were first Penates and Lares, before they could become superior divinities." Which agrees accurately with the modern belief as here set forth.

What is very peculiar is that these devotees believe in two distinct sets or systems of supernatural beings--one of the saints, angels, and the "hierarchy celestial" of the Scriptures, and the other of "the spirits," which latter, when examined, turns out to be the old Etruscan mythology, with such Shamanic additions as have been made to it by the deaths of distinguished wizards. As illustrating both this and the belief in the power of a promise or vow once made to the spirits, I give a curious story, which is the more curious because the woman from whom I obtained it absolutely believed in its truth. Its proper place would perhaps have been among the Spirits, as it was given me to illustrate the manner in which spirits, or folletti, came into existence; but it has a closer relation to what is discussed in this chapter.

ZANCHI

Here we see that a man, by a prayer to the heathen spirits of old, becomes one of them. There is no indication that he was punished--he simply is transferred entirely into another region.

It may be observed from all the incantations in this book, that even the worst of the mischief-making by Italian witches is based on individual ill-feeling. In German or English witchcraft the sorceress acts from "pure cussedness," On general principles, not sparing friend or foe, and doing anything which would please the devil. The Stregone or the strega, acts from jealousy, envy, or personal

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hatred. Or he or she injures a person because of being paid to do it to please a third person. The folletti, or spirits, do mischief, but it is because the peasants never bless them, or, worse still, speak disrespectfully of them. It is said quite exceptionally of Spulviero that, when alive as a wizard, he was so evilly-disposed that he injured every one indifferently. This would have only been his duty, according to the pictures of his class as drawn by the old ecclesiastical witch-doctors. In Italy revenge is almost as deeply cherished as it is in the frontier lands of America--hence we find a great deal of it in witchcraft; but this is mere human nature.

The following sketch of witchcraft is very curious, as giving in fullest form the counter-charm against sorcery. It was partly recited, partly sung or murmured:--

It seems, as if, by the putting the child in the fire, where it sat unharmed, there is a reminscence of Ceres, who did the same with the infant Triptolemus, to make it immortal. (See also the Homeric Hymn to Demeter--jbh) Perhaps the witch did it to make a witch. of it. There is no explanation of the reason, and it seems altogether misplaced and mysterious, unless this be the cause of it. If we take it altogether, this story is as strange--one may say as classical--as any of Roman times.

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Witches of a certain class have their homes in wild and strange places. Thus I have been told that--

Information on this subject was often given to me in such a mad, eccentric manner with wild sounds that it is really difficult to convey it by writing. The following was half-sung, half-recited; but the "si, si," or "yes, yes," was always sung, and sometimes with a strange laugh:--

In this wild song, which was not improvised but repeated as if it were well known, and a part of some longer narrative (my informant was very particular as to my putting si, si in the right places), the allusion to boats made of feathers is classical. "Feathers," says FRIEDRICH, "are a symbol of flight and inspiration. So the Muses were represented as having feathers on their heads to express poetic flight and rapture." "They had won them from the Sirens." The allusion to the capons is explained in the chapter on the Spell of the Black Hen.

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But there was in all this mad witch-song a something mocking, and, as it were, unexplained. Perhaps the final recommendation to keep children from feathers--that is, from poetry and inspiration--unless we would have them become witches or lunatics, explains it all. But the reader cannot fail to observe that in many of the incantations which I have given there is an inexplicably wild mysterious spirit, which seems derived from unknown sources, and which differs entirely from those of other countries. There is hardly a trace of it in the gypsy incantations of WLISLOCKI, or in those of the English Book of Fate.

As there are witches good and bad, so they give presents which may bring good or evil fortune; but these must be accepted with great suspicion, or a man may find himself indiavolato, or bedevilled, ere he knows it. If one has unwittingly accepted from some old woman dried chestnuts, or nuts, or almonds, and then suspects she is a witch, they should not be eaten, or he may find himself bewitched.

There is yet another incantation when one has received any gift of eatables from an old woman. Take a broom and put it by the fire, and throw some of the suspected food into the flame and say:--

It may be here observed that witches of the wicked kind work their worst spells by means of giving food, and that this forms a much more prominent feature in Italian sorcery than in any other. Thus they make people into animals or compel them to believe themselves changed into persons of another sex. For this they were famed of old as Fulgosus (lib. 8, cap. 2) relates: "There are in Italy

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certain women, who by certain kinds of food, act on human minds so that they believe themselves to be what they are not." These ideas were probably produced firstly by suggestion or hypnotism, and secondly by administering certain poisons, such as stramonium which causes strange delusions. Fulgosus, indeed, suggests that these are delusions, and that probably the turning men into pigs by Circe, and the Egyptian girl who believed herself to be a mare and was cured by Hilarion, were all cakes baked from the same meal. In which the reader will no doubt agree with him.

The street-boys and canaille, who are as cruel in Italy as in other countries, have a very easy method for ascertaining whether an old woman is a witch. Should you see one in the street, you must follow her, making the sign of the castagna, and cry out many times aloud at her, "Witch, witch, witch! Fico!' (a fig, meaning the sign of the castagna). And if she turns round and answers: "Zident!" (Romagnola, in Italian, Accidente!) "Bad luck to you!" you may be sure she is a witch. But she must reply with this word, and not with any other.

The witch is not so much identified in Italy with the broom as a steed, as in Northern Europe. She generally rides a goat. But she is kept away or exorcised with a broom, which is of very old Latin origin. The broom was anciently a symbol of purification--hence a magic protection against evil spirits who love dirt. Thus VARRO relates that when a child was born, the threshold was touched with a broom, a hatchet, and a pestle, to keep away spirits, which is quite like the Romagnola custom of laying a broom across the door to prevent the entrance of witches. In fact, in every one of the instances which I have collected the only allusion to the broom as regards witches is as a thing which they utterly dread. What Silvanus (regarded as a mischief-making spirit) chiefly dreaded was the broom, the hatchet, and the pestle, or the three principal symbols of culture, cleanliness, and fertility.

Since writing the foregoing I have learned the following, which proves that the whole of the ancient rite as described by VARRO is still observed.

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The pestle, for some reason, is regarded as being very effective in magic.

Witches in Italy as in the Danubian provinces love to dance and rock and fly in wild mazes, chasing one another on the summits of waving branches, and when these move much in but little wind you may be sure that they or the fairies are there.

HAIL AND CLOUD MEN

I think it is WASHINGTON IRVING who describes a man who wished that he were superstitious because he fancied that such a person must live in a kind of fairy-land. WALTER SCOTT, too, was always wanting to believe what his strong Scotch common sense, fortified by education, rejected. And if the faith of the Middle Ages had not taught men that every supernatural conception whatever not included in the teachings of the Church was hellish, and fairies and elves, devils, men might certainly in the old days of belief have been much happier, and surrounded themselves with ever-varying, many-wreathing, golden-starred canopies, recognising a spirit-artist's hand in the dew, decking with liquid pearl the bladed grass, seeing eyes of light in rain-drops, and hearing love-whispers in the breeze. It is worth considering that though CHAUCER wrote that in his time-

Yet that the instant the curse, or ban, of the Church was removed from poetry by the Reformation, Fairy-land revived and flourished in the works of SHAKESPEARE, and indeed in those of hundreds if not thousands of other writers. In truth, although its first causes were dying out, it received such a great development that its real power was greater than ever, like a strawberry-vine, which, dying in one place, sends out its tendrils to another, and from being barren at first, becomes in a few removes fertile, bearing abundant ivory blossoms and coral golden-spotted fruit. Which indeed holds well, because the strawberry is par eminence the fairy-fruit--Jerome Bosch in a picture gives it the power of changing

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men into strange beings. This has been little considered. The Elf, who had been a literal and yet very limited, or almost commonplace being to the peasant, became apotheosised to the refined and cultivated minds of the golden age of English literature into an Ariel. And in sober truth, there is no such exquisite worship of Elfland as is to be found in the works of SHAKESPEARE, HERRICK, DRAYTON, and in innumerable ballads and legends which this fairy Renaissance called to life. Bishop CORBET was quite wrong when he said that the fairies

or Catholic. They were all devils damned under the Church, and only became delightful little deities to the Protestants.

This view may be new to many of my readers, but it is worth seriously considering how very valuable a highly cultivated sense of art, or an instinct for the beautiful, preserves men from evil and revolting influences. The peasantry in Italy to this day do not quite identify witches with the horrible hags of Germany and England, who meet simply to worship the devil. Their chief is not the dirty vulgar Devil but beautiful lady--like Diana. Herein we have the result of a certain refinement of art which even the monks could never quite extinguish.

Not only is it true that a man who believes--like a Red Indian--that every tree and stone has its indwelling spirit, is always in a kind of fairy-land, but what is also worth envying, he is never alone. When he sits in woodland wild 'neath green or russet tree, he knows the presence of the Elves, or sees by many a sign where they have passed. Every relic of the olden time, arrow-heads, pottery, and hollow flints, have been touched by fairy hands, much more those older relics of an older time, rocks, rivers, and forests.

There is to the truly refined or cultivated mind an infinite field for this feeling, if its possessor is very familiar with such lore, for with it we too can live in Fairyland, and--

I do not think that SHAKESPEARE or HERRICK really "believed " in the existence of fairies, but I am very sure that no peasant of the tenth century ever peopled the forests and fields with more beautiful fairies and associations than they did. And, after all, who knows how much life and mystery and fairydom and spirithood really lies hidden in nature--what elements and senses and laws underlying laws not as yet known to us? Sleep on, and dream--it

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is not yet time for man to be quite aroused from his rest--you may lie a little longer!

Read, master, and inwardly digest, oh reader, all this folk-lore of the olden time. It will do you no harm though your mind were as full of fairy fancies as ever that of Don Quixote's was of the dreams of chivalry. For while the childlike charm or poetry is none the less, the historical value and the lessons which it teaches are of very great value. You will have read this book to little purpose if it has not induced you to reflect on the fact that by studying the stupendous errors of the past we learn how much of them still remain, and how few of us realise it.

There is, however, a distinct charm in knowledge of what man has really believed, whether it be true or false. I love to look at the knurls or knots in trees, and remember that they are caused by the heads of witches buried near them, and forcing themselves again to life; or to peer through a flint with a hole in it to help my sight, and perhaps see Elves. Or watch the clouds like ships--"sailors of the air"--and think of the "treasures of hail" stored in them!

And this recalls one of the strangest and most daintily beautiful conceptions of the olden time--that there is afar in Cloudland a mysterious city called Magonia, where the hail is manufactured, and whence it is carried in ships which look to us like "clouds sailing along in golden sunset green."

The monks who bedevilled, belittled, and dirtied everything, added to this fancy that these ships were loaded and manned by witches and devils in order to destroy crops, and that for return cargo they were freighted with the fruit thus injured or destroyed. On which subject the tenth-century Archbishop AGOBARD of Lyons delivered himself as follows 1:--

The same bishop relates that he himself once saved the lives of four human beings, three men and a woman, whom the populace wished to stone to death because they believed that they were people from Magonia, who had fallen from a cloud-vessel, having been "shipwrecked" during a thunder-storm. It is to be

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deeply regretted that the bishop did not give us some account of this quartette--how they looked, and what language they spoke. I fancy myself that they would have proved to be gypsies!

"Like ships far off and out at sea!" Reader, is there not a charm in this conception; and will you not sometimes recall it when you sit at evening and look at the rosy, golden sunset--it may be at the trysting-tree-and see the cloudlets steering in the fiery sea, and wish that you two could take passage therein for the beautiful, far-away, forgotten city--for Magonia, whose walls are of aerial amethyst, and citadels of vapoury emerald?

Floating away, away, and ever on: gleaming in glory on the heavenly plane--blending in darkness, glittering in rain, or in hail-diamonds seeking earth again, mingling and changing like all things for ever! Thou hast been there many a time and oft in very truth, and there thou wilt be many time, thou Child of the Mist, or ever Eternity shall end!

Sic vita. But I learn from PRÆTORIUS, in his Anthropodemus Plutonicus, that these Graupenmenschen, or Hail-men of Magonia, are rare elfin-artists, and that now and then they fashion their ware in strange forms, and even enter into their work themselves, or else by magic might cause small fairies to appear in it, in order to mystically forebode strange things.

"Very memorable is that which happened in the year of Christ 1395, when there fell, like a rain of pebbles, wonderful hailstones on which were human faces, both male and female. The former had beards like those of men. The female bore long hair and veils, which were seen by a very credible man, who also had them in his hands, as CRANZIUS declares in Wandal, lib. 9, c. 3.

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Which well-authenticated fact should of itself show that the inhabitants of Magonia were good Christians--"and wider."

From which soon came wars, famines, revelations and revolutions, adulterers and harlots struck dead, and from this it was deduced that--

Which is followed by forty pages of grim and wild prophesying as to what will take place in the year 1666, as foreboded by the hailstones.

I, and it may be you also, oh reader, have seen a great and a small hailstone stuck together, so as to much resemble a Turk's head with a turban; but truly it never occurred to us that there was a volume of political presage therein. We did not even think of the Child of Midnight which, by the way, is a fine term, and might serve for the title of a novel or poem. Yet when you see the cloud-ships far sailing in the sky, you may perchance recall the mysterious city of Magonia, and when hit by a hailstone regard it as done in sport by the fairy artisans of that famed town.

What appears from several authorities is that what seem to us to be "fleeting clouds--sailors of the air," are in reality mysterious barks, or very often spirits, hastening across the sky, the ships and sailors of "cloud-land gorgeous land" bent on errands far away; of which there is a very strange story told by Meteranus (Niederland Histor., b. 28). Firstly be it remembered that as the Norse heroes of Valhalla meet every day to rehearse their ancient duels, and fight and be killed, and then revived, so the mysterious dwellers in the land of air return to earth on the anniversary of some great battle of the olden time, just as in America the battles of Bunker Hill, Concord, Saratoga, and others, even as late as that of Gettysburg, are celebrated by spectral armies, who fight by night the conflict o'er again. So it came to pass that in the land of Angouléme in France, in December, 1608, many small clouds came drifting o'er the sky, looking

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like the pebbles on the strand moved by the rising tide. Then, one by one and two by two, they began to fall, softly and gently as snowflakes, to earth--"One by one and two by two, they to a mighty squadron grew"--and as they touched ground they suddenly became warriors. "All," as Meteranus declares, "were very tall, straight, handsome men, having blue weapons, flags, and everything else cerulean or sky-blue--and of them all were 12,900. And they divided into two armies, and fought from five o'clock in the afternoon till nine, when they all vanished."

But it is mostly in the silent desert or in lonely mountains, in hidden places far beyond the plain, that we see these beings who are corpore aërea, tempore eterna (airy of form, yet with eternal soul), who go fleeting over the sky on mystic errands bent. Sometimes they pause, however, for a time, either of their own free-will or at a sorcerer's spell, and build up, at a thought, cloud-capt towers and gorgeous palaces, rosy and golden in the setting sun, pillared domes, pearly citadels, and rows on rows of battlements, repeated like giant stairs until high lost in the air. To those who are "gifted," these appear to be actually humanly built; and no wonder, for they are only made to seem like clouds to delude mankind. For Magonia truly is--

I had written the foregoing in the city of Florence in May, 1891, when I was conversing one day with a woman who came into the house just as a storm was raging without. And she said: "I was going to the post-office, and as I went some one said to me, 'Truly thou art a witch, for the hailstones leap up from beneath thy feet.'"

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Then we all laughed, and I asked if witches made hail; and this was the answer, which I wrote down, word for word, in Italian:--

Of this Hail-land in heaven I received another history, which is different in a few details, but which, I think, is not less interesting:--

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I have, indeed, a third account in MS. devoted to these captives, but after six readings I have been obliged to give it up as unintelligible. It is only additional testimony. There is something to the effect that the witches have mirrors with which they flash out signals to the boats to return, or with which they make lightning.

Witches on earth sometimes pay visits to this Magonia, or Cloud City land, but they run a risk of being caught or killed in the storms of their own raising. Thus Friedrich Panzer tells us in his Bavarian Tales, that during the first half of the last century there was such a tremendous tempest, with hail, in Forchheim in Upper Franconia, that the people feared lest the whole town should be destroyed. Then the Franciscan brothers met in their cloister garden, when, just as the first blessing was pronounced, lo! a beautiful woman, stark-naked, was thrown headlong from a passing thunderstorm on the grass in their midst; and the holy brothers, greatly amazed at this, doubtless to them, utterly novel sight, drew near, when they recognised in her who had indeed dropped in on them so suddenly, the wife of the town miller, a woman long suspected of witchcraft. Whereupon one of the monks threw a garment over her, and she was brought into the cloister--"By means of which," says the account (somewhat obscurely), "they averted from her the death by fire." Which means, I suppose, that she made so favourable an impression on the Franciscans that they protected their proie inattendue (vide Le Moyen de Parvenir) from being roasted.

The conduct of these sorcerers and witches, unfit for heaven and averse to earth, building for themselves starry palaces and rose-red citadels with all the glory Dream to genius yields, reminds me of what Professor Shairp remarks of Shelley, and that very markedly indeed:--

Once in a while one of these dwellers in the violet Nifelheim, or Magonia, escapes and comes down to earth, and is born as a Shelley or a Keats--I think that Mr. J. A. Symonds is really one of them--or a Swinburne, or Ruskin, or Heine, or Carlyle, or Victor Hugo, or anybody else who is magnificently illogical, splendidly rhapsodical, sublimely egoistical (or subjective)--men whose thoughts

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are streamed and dashed with startling hues, and who think showers of stars, and who, when they do teach us something new--

So from old days these hardened stories live as if trenched in ice, like mammoths in Siberia, to the world unknown till some discoverer reveals them, and then there is marvelling here and there that such things could have been so long frozen up. So into time old time returns again, and the ancient medals, thus disinterred, are all the more beautiful for their rust. And it went deeply to my heart that after I had read the story of Magonia, and thought it was a tale utterly dead on earth and embalmed in a chronicle, to find a sorceress in whose faith it lives. It was as if an Egyptian mummy, revived, had suddenly spoken to me, and told me a tale of Thebes, or declared that Cloud-Cuckoo land was a reality which he had known when he beheld--

How deeply (or one may say how terribly) impressed the Italian peasantry are by the belief that hail is caused by devils and witches appears from the following from a London newspaper of September, 1891. It is curious as involving the ancient Roman belief in the sacred power of bells as devil-drivers which was in later times turned to such good account by the priests:--

Truly Marca was much more of a heathen than a Christian. The spirit of old Rome was great in him-he would not yield to feeble modern faith.

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STORIES OF WITCHES AND GOBLINS

Story-telling in the Tuscan Romagna is an institution with observances. The peasants in winter meet together, "perhaps ten, there may be twenty or thirty, around a fire, and first of all recite with due solemnity a rosario, or five paternosters with the aves and other prayers, and then begin to raccontare, or relate tales of fairies, witches and folletti." This very ancient custom is still very generally observed. First of all some old man gives a story, which is commented on, eliciting from the hearers their own reminiscences, then another is suggested, and so the folk-lore is kept alive. In the year 1808 there was published in Bulgnese, or Bolognese--which is, with trifling difference, the same dialect as that which these peasants speak--a translation of Neapolitan fairy tales, which appears to be in the main taken from the Pentamerone of Gian Battista Basile, but which is very much varied to suit new surroundings. Hence the same stories, now known all over Italy, have penetrated to the Romagna. But they have, in the Bolognese region, many of which no traces are to be found in the usual range of Italian legends, and very often even the latter have here either taken of later years, or derived from very ancient sources, elements and characteristics which are quite peculiar, and often bewildering; all of which the folk-lorists of the future will doubtless duly consider and sift even to powder.

The following are a few of the tales which I have heard. I could have given many more--several do indeed occur in other portions of this work--but I have been too much occupied with other subjects, nor indeed would space or the publisher permit further addition.

THE WITCHES AND THE BOAT

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BERNONI tells this story in his narratives of Venetian witches, but less perfectly, since he makes no mention of a lover or of the witches sucking and restoring his blood. In the classical tales of APULEIUS and others, sucking the blood was the chief occupation of the striga, for which reason I think that this may be the earliest version of the tale. In the Venetian story the boat goes to Alexandria and the boatman while there obtains fresh dates and leaves, which he exhibits on returning as a proof of his adventure. The obtaining the mystic clove flowers gives a far better reason for the voyage. HAWTHORNE has written a story in which a boat full of witches, in the form of cats, make such a trip to obtain rosemary, also a witch-herb.

LA VENDETTA DI PIPPO

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I should have omitted this very Bocaccian tale had it not been that it illustrates very strikingly the antipathy of the believers in witchcraft and the spirits of old for the priests. A merely loose, licentious story makes no such deep moral or immoral impression on the Southern European mind as it does on the Northern, but the distinctly placing wizard against priest, or old sorcery against Christianity, is, if the reader will reflect, a very singular incident. It is in this that the point lies for a strega, and it is most remarkable as showing that such antagonism between Shamanism and the Church should still. exist, as it has undoubtedly existed through the ages. I may add that among the tales received after this work had gone to press is one entitled The priest Arrimini, in which a priest becomes a wizard, manifesting, like this narrative, a marked heathen or anti-Christian spirit.

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PISPI

It would not have been worth while to give this vulgar and rather flat tale, had it not been for the name of its hero. PISPI is a typical thief, and in Holland the mandrake, which is there supposed to grow from the droppings of a thief's brain, &c., on the gallows, is called Pisdifje, or little brain-thief. He who has this pisdifje can enter all houses, open all doors, and rob freely, without being detected. This root was called by many names, such as mandrake, mandragora, alraun, gallows, mannikin and earth-mannikin in Germany, and was regarded as a demon and received offerings or a kind of worship. There is of course no rational philological connection between the names of Pispi and Pisdifje, but the connection of associations between these names and the thief who could never be detected, and the root-demon who enables a thief to avoid detection, is very curious indeed. It may be remarked in this connection that the Vocabulario delle Lingue Furbesche--or Vocabulary of Thieves' Tongues--indicates much intercourse in common between the thieves of Northern Italy and those of Germany.

THE WITCH CAT

It has been well said that one half the world does not know how the other half lives, and while collecting these instances of strange superstitions, I am tempted to think that almost one half does not at all understand how the others think, feel, or what is the moral atmosphere which they breathe. We know that there is no truth in anything supernatural, but these others who appear to be so ignorant and indifferent live in a different life, and see and hear--or believe they see and hear--ghosts and marvels and all strange things. Witness the

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following, which the woman who told it to me certainly believed she had witnessed:--

This is interesting because it shows plainly the belief derived from pre-Christian times, that the witch once detected, or stripped in this case literally--of her disguise, can no longer be a witch. Here it is not a question of a soul sold to the devil, but only of power held on a very precarious condition.

Apropos of this subject, I have the following in a letter by Miss Mary A. Owen:--

The negroes in Missouri say some cats are real cats and some are devils, you never can tell "which is which," so for safety it is well to whip them all soundly. The voodoo does not whip her own cat, but she excepts none other. A strange black cat that runs in at one of your doors and out at another, puts "a trick" on somebody in the house. A grown-up black cat which comes and cannot be driven away voodoos the whole house in spite of blows.

THE DWARFS

One day I inquired if there were any Elves, or little dwarfs, in La Romagna and I was at once informed that there were, in these words;--

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Then the pair began Kissing as before; And too other women He made love no more, But married her; the story Now is fairly o'er."

The swallow as the bird of spring brings luck; hence in Tuscany swallows' feathers tied with a red string form an amulet. This story is only a variation from one in Grimm's Kinder und Haus Märchen, but it may be observed that there is in the Tuscan tale more of chiaro-oscuro and incantation. In fact I cannot imagine one of this country without the latter. The magic song enters into everything of the kind. This was probably the case in ancient times in Germany, but as stories become fairy tales for children alone, it naturally disappears, and the narrative alone is then the subject of interest. These Romagnolo stories are all in that state when the narrator--as I have often tested--will tell or sing them just as requested. This is the case among all primitive people in the magic epoch, and I might with truth, had I pleased, have given any story in rude metre as well as prose. Sometimes the rhymes and attempt at metre are unmistakable, and in such cases I have given them in a form as near to the original as I could make it. But in the original, two or even three lines are often run into one and the voice modulated to suit the variation.

THE APPLE-TREE