The Book of Were-Wolves by Sabine Baring-Gould (best desktop ebook reader .txt) 📕

>bringing some large pieces of willow-bark, which she laid at the feet

of the warrior and his guest. While the warrior-beaver was chewing the

willow, and the Osage was pretending to do so, they fell to talking

over many matters, particularly the wars of the beavers with the

otters, and their frequent victories over them. He told our father by

what means the beavers felled large trees, and moved them to the

places where they wished to make dams; how they raised to an erect

position the poles for their lodges, and how they plastered them so as

to keep out rain. Then he spoke of their employments when they had

buried the hatchet; of the peace and happiness and tranquillity they

enjoyed when gathered into companies, they rested from their labours,

and passed their time in talking and feasting, and bathing, and

playing the game of bones, and making love. All the while the young

beaver-maiden sat with her eyes fixed upon the Osage, at every pause

moving a little nearer, till at length she was at his side with her

forepaw upon his arm; a minute more and she had placed it around his

neck, and was rubbing her soft furry cheek against his. Our ancestor,

on his part, betrayed no disinclination to receive her caresses, but

returned them with equal ardour. The old beaver seeing what was going

on, turned his back upon them, and suffered them to be as kind to each

other as they pleased. At last, turning quickly round, while the

maiden, suspecting what was coming, and pretending to be abashed, ran

behind her mother, he said, ‘To end this foolery, what say you to

marrying my daughter? She is well brought up, and is the most

industrious girl in the village. She will flap more wall with her tail

in a day than any maiden in the nation; she will gnaw down a larger

tree betwixt the rising of the sun and the coming of the shadows than

many a smart beaver of the other sex. As for her wit, try her at the

game of the dish, and see who gets up master; and for cleanliness,

look at her petticoat?’ Our father answered that he did not doubt that

she was industrious and cleanly, able to gnaw down a very large tree,

and to use her tail to very good purpose; that he loved her much, and

wished to make her the mother of his children. And thereupon the

bargain was concluded.”

 

These two stories, the one taken from Icelandic saga, the other from

American Indian tradition, shew clearly the oneness which the

uncultivated mind believes to exist between the soul of man and the

soul of beast. The same sentiments actuate both man and brute, and if

their actions are unlike, it is because of the difference in their

formation. The soul within is identical, but the external accidents of

body are unlike.

 

Among many rude as well as cultivated people, the body is regarded as

a mere garment wrapped around the soul. The Buddist looks upon

identity as existing in the soul alone, and the body as no more

constituting identity, than the clothes he puts on or takes off. He

exists as a spirit; for convenience he vests himself in a body;

sometimes that body is human, sometimes it is bestial. As his soul

rises in the spiritual scale, the nobler is the animal form which it

tenants. Budda himself passed through various stages of existence; in

one he was a hare, and his soul being noble, led him to immolate

himself, in order that he might offer hospitality to Indra, who, in

the form of an old man, craved of him food and shelter. The Buddist

regards animals with reverence; an ancestor may be tenanting the body

of the ox he is driving, or a descendant may be running at his side

barking, and wagging his tail. When he falls into an ecstasy, his soul

is leaving his body for a little while, it is laying aside its raiment

of flesh and blood and bone, to return to it once more when the trance

is over. But this idea is not confined to Buddists, it is common

everywhere. The spirit or soul is supposed to be imprisoned in the

body, the body is but the lantern through which the spirit shines,

“the corruptible body” is believed to “press down the soul,” and the

soul is unable to attain to perfect happiness till it has shuffled off

this earthy coil. Butler regards the members of the body as so many

instruments used by the soul for the purpose of seeing, hearing,

feeling, &c., just as we use telescopes or crutches, and which may be

rejected without injury to our individuality.

 

The late Mr. J. Holloway, of the Bank of England, brother to the

engraver of that name, related of himself that, being one night in

bed, and unable to sleep, he had fixed his eyes and thoughts with

uncommon intensity on a beautiful star that was shining in at the

window, when he suddenly found his spirit released from his body and

soaring into space. But instantly seized with anxiety for the anguish

of his wife, if she discovered his body apparently dead beside her, he

returned, and re-entered it with difficulty. He described that

returning as a returning from light into darkness, and that whilst the

spirit was free, he was alternately in the light or the dark,

accordingly as his thoughts were with his wife or with the star.

Popular mythology in most lands regards the soul as oppressed by the

body, and its liberation is considered a deliverance from the “burden”

of the flesh. Whether the soul is at all able to act or express itself

without a body, any more than a fire is able to make cloth without the

apparatus of boiler and machinery, is a question which has not

commended itself to the popular mind. But it may be remarked that the

Christian religion alone is that which raises the body to a dignity

equal to that of the soul, and gives it a hope of ennoblement and

resurrection never dreamed of in any mythological system.

 

But the popular creed, in spite of the most emphatic testimony of

Scripture, is that the soul is in bondage so long as it is united to a

body, a creed entirely in accordance with that of Buddism.

 

If the body be but the cage, as a poet [1] of our own has been

pleased to call it, in which dwells the imprisoned soul, it is quite

possible for the soul to change its cage. If the body be but a vesture

clothing the soul, as the Buddist asserts, it is not improbable that

it may occasionally change its vesture.

 

[1. VAUGHN, Sitex Scintillans.]

 

This is self-evident, and thus have arisen the countless tales of

transformation and transmigration which are found all over the world.

That the same view of the body as a mere clothing of the soul was

taken by our Teutonic and Scandinavian ancestors, is evident even from

the etymology of the words leichnam, lîkhama, used to express the

soulless body.

 

I have already spoken of the Norse word hamr, I wish now to make

some further remarks upon it. Hamr is represented in Anglo-Saxon by

hama, homa, in Saxon by hamo, in old High German by hamo, in

old French by homa, hama, to which are related the Gothic

gahamon, ufar-hamon, ana-hamon, {Greek e?ndúesðai}, {Greek

e?pendúesðai}; and-hamon, af-hamon, {Greek a?pekdúein} {Greek

e?kdúesðai?} thence also the old High German hemidi, and the

modern Hemde, garment. In composition we find this word, as

lîk-hagnr, in old Norse; in old High German lîk-hamo, Anglo-Saxon

lîkhama, and flæsc-hama, Old Saxon, lîk-hamo, modern German

Leichnam, a body, i. e. a garment of flesh, precisely as the

bodies of birds are called in old Norse fjaðrhamr, in Anglo-Saxon

feðerhoma, in Old Saxon fetherhamo, or feather-dresses and the

bodies of wolves are called in old Norse ûlfshamr, and seals’ bodies

in Faroëse kôpahamr. The significance of the old verb að hamaz is

now evident; it is to migrate from one body to another, and

hama-skipti is a transmigration of the soul. The method of this

transmigration consisted in simply investing the body with the skin of

the animal into which the soul was to migrate. When Loki, the Northern

god of evil, went in quest of the stolen Idunn, he borrowed of Freyja

her falcon dress, and at once became, to all intents and purposes, a

falcon. Thiassi pursued him as he left Thrymheimr, having first taken

upon him an eagle’s dress, and thereby become an eagle.

 

In order to seek Thor’s lost hammer, Loki borrowed again of Freyja her

feather dress, and as be flew away in it, the feathers sounded as they

winnowed the breeze (_fjaðrhamr dunði_).

 

In like manner Cædmon speaks of an evil spirit flying away in

feather-dress: “þät he mid feðerhomon fleôgan meahte, windan on

wolkne” (Gen. ed. Gr. 417), and of an angel, “þuo þar suogan quam

engil þes alowaldon obhana fun radure faran an feðerhamon” (Hêlj. 171,

23), the very expression made use of when speaking of a bird: “farad

an feðarhamun” (Hêlj. 50,11).

 

The soul, in certain cases, is able to free itself from the body and

to enter that of beast or man—in this form stood the myth in various

theological systems.

 

Among the Finns and Lapps it is not uncommon for a magician to fall

into a cataleptic condition, and during the period his soul is

believed to travel very frequently in bodily form, having assumed that

of any animal most suitable for its purpose. I have given instances in

a former chapter. The same doctrine is evident in most cases of

lycanthropy. The patient is in a state of trance, his body is watched,

and it remains motionless, but his soul has migrated into the carcase

of a wolf, which it vivifies, and in which it runs its course. A

curious Basque story shows that among this strange Turanian people,

cut off by such a flood of Aryan nations from any other members of its

family, the same superstition remains. A huntsman was once engaged in

the chase of it bear among the Pyreneean peaks, when Bruin turned

suddenly on him and hugged him to death, but not before he had dealt

the brute its mortal wound. As the huntsman expired, he breathed his

soul into the body of the bear, and thenceforward ranged the mountains

as a beast.

 

One of the tales of the Sanskrit book of fables, the Pantschatantra,

affords such a remarkable testimony to the Indian belief in

metempsychosis, that I am tempted to give it in abstract.

 

A king was one day passing through the marketplace of his city, when

he observed a hunchbacked merryandrew, whose contortions and jokes

kept the bystanders in a roar of laughter. Amused with the fellow, the

king brought him to his palace. Shortly after, in the hearing of the

clown, a necromancer taught the monarch the art of sending his soul

into a body not his own.

 

Some little while after this, the monarch, anxious to put in practice

his newly acquired knowledge, rode into the forest accompanied by his

fool, who, he believed, had not heard, or, at all events comprehended,

the lesson. They came upon the corpse of a Brahmin lying in the depth

of the jungle, where he had died of thirst. The king, leaving his

horse, performed the requisite ceremony, and instantly his soul had

migrated into the body of the, Brahmin, and