india-rubber, one of his men disappeared, and, notwithstanding all their endeavours, nothing could be found of him but a quantity of blood. The next day another man disappeared, and in searching for him more blood was found. All the people got alarmed, and Akondogo sent for a great doctor to drink the mboundou, and solve the mystery of these two deaths. To the horror and astonishment of the old chief, the doctor declared it was Akondogo's own child (his nephew and heir), Akosho, who had killed the two men. Akosho was sent for, and, when asked by the chief, answered that it was truly he who had committed the murders; that he could not help it, for he had been turned into a leopard, and his heart longed for blood; and that after each deed he had turned into a man again. Akondogo loved his boy so much that he would not believe his own confession, until the boy took him to a place in the forest where lay the two bodies, one with the head cut off, and the other with the belly torn open. Upon this, Akondogo gave orders to seize the lad. He was bound with ropes, taken to the village, and then tied in a horizontal position to a post, and burnt slowly to death, all the people standing by until he expired.' "I must say the end of the story seemed to me too horrible to listen to. I shuddered, and was ready to curse the race that was capable of committing such acts. But on careful enquiry, I found it was a case of monomania with the boy Akosho, and that he really was the murderer of the two men. It is probable that the superstitious belief of these morbidly imaginative Africans in the transformation of men into leopards, being early instilled into the minds of their children, is the direct cause of murders being committed under the influence of it. The boy himself, as well as Akondogo and all the people, believed he had really turned into a leopard, and the cruel punishment was partly in vengeance for witchcraft, and partly to prevent the committal of more crimes by the boy in a similar way, for, say they, the man has a spirit of witchcraft." Again, after informing us that the Ashango people believed (not knowing that he was really wounded in his disastrous retreat from their country), that he, being "Oguisi," or "the spirit," was invulnerable, and that their poisoned arrows glanced from his body without doing him any injury, he further adds, that Magonga, one of his native guides, said "he had heard that at one time I had turned myself into a leopard, had hid myself in a tree, and had sprung upon the Mouaou people as they came to make war upon my men; that at other times I turned myself into a gorilla, or into an elephant, and struck terror and death among the Mouaou and Mobana. Magongo finished his story by asking me for a war fetich,' for he said I must possess the art of making fetiches, or I and my men could not have escaped so miraculously." It is necessary to remind the reader that Du Chaillu and others have failed to find any remains of ancient civilization on the western coast of Equatorial Africa, and that he expressly states his belief in the native tradition that the ancestors of the present tribes migrated from the east. The Rev. G. W. Cox, in his "Mythology of the Aryan Nations," referring to the origin of Greek "Lykanthropy," says,-" The question to be answered is, whence came the notions that men were changed into wolves, bears, and birds, and not into lions, fishes, or reptiles; and to this question Comparative Mythology seems to me to furnish a complete answer; nor can I disavow my belief that this loathsome vampire superstition was in the first instance purely the result of a verbal equivocation which, as we have seen, has furnished so fruitful a source of myths." Mr. Cox regards the superstition to have originated in that confusion between Leukos bright, as a general epithet, and the same word Lukos as a special name for the wolf, from which sprung first the myth of the transformation of Lycâôn, and then probably the widespread superstition of Lykanthropy." Respecting the Eastern origin of this superstition, Kelly says,"The were-wolf tradition has not been discovered with certainty amongst the Hindoos, but there is no European nation of Aryan descent in which it has not existed from time immemorial. Hence. it is certain that the tradition itself, or the germs of it more or less developed, must have been brought by them all from Arya; and if Dr. Schwartz has not actually proved his case, he seems at least to have conjectured rightly in assigning, as one of these germs, the Aryan conception of the howling wind as a wolf. The Maruts and other beings who were busy in the storm assumed various shapes. The human form was proper to many or all of them, for they were identical with the Pitris or Fathers, and it would have been a very natural thought, when a storm broke out suddenly, that one or more of these people of the air had turned into wolves for the occasion. It was also a primæval notion that there were dogs and wolves amongst the dwellers in hell; and Weber, who has shown that this belief was entertained by the early Hindoos, is of opinion that these infernal animals were real were-wolves, that is to say, men upon whom such a transformation had been inflicted as a punishment." The darkness of night is personified by the wolf in the folk-lore of the Teutonic nations. It is the Fenris of the Edda. In this sense the mythic wolf and "Little Red Riding Hood" are transparent enough. The ruddy glow of the evening sunlight is extinguished in the darkness of night. The Rev. G. W. Cox says that in one version of the story "Little Red Cap escapes his malice as Memnon rises again from Hades." This resurrection typifies the dawn springing from the darkness of the night on the following morning, The Greek myth developed into the story that Zeus, when visiting Lycaon, was fed by his numerous sons with human flesh, and that he, in his anger at such treatment, turned them all into wolves. Similar transformations are frequent in the classical myths. Kirke turned the followers of Odysseus into swine, and Calisto was turned into a bear by the anger of Artemis. This were-wolf, or man-wolf, myth, from the Anglo-Saxon wer, a man, has doubtless undergone much change and mutilation in its descent to modern times. The earlier Apollo of the Greeks, at the time of Homer even, was not the Sun-god he afterwards became. He was the "god of the summer storms," and, as such, he himself appeared in the form of a wolf. His mother, Latona, as Kelly observes, was regarded as "the dark storm-cloud, escorted at Jove's command by the Northwind," and she "came as a she-wolf from Lycia to the place where she was delivered of her twins. In mythical language, Apollo was the son of Zeus; that is to say, he was Zeus in another form. The two gods were, in fact, like Indra and Rhudra, only different personifications of the same cycle of natural pheno mena." The Laureate, in his recent poem, "The Coming of Arthur," has the following beautiful poetic illustration of that which, no doubt, underlies much of the were-wolf superstitions:"— Thick with wet woods, and many a beast therein, And none or few to scare or chase the beast; CHAPTER XII. SACRED AND OMINOUS BIRDS, ETC. The fatal cuckoo, on yon spreading tree, Cowley. AMONGST the various lightning birds of the Aryan mythology, some were regarded as portentous of evil; others, as the robin, the stork, and the woodpecker, on the contrary, were regarded with favour, and especially protected. The red breast of the robin, the red legs of the stork, and the red mutch of the woodpecker, were believed to result from their lightning origin. In Germany the robin is held in as much regard as it is in England. The Anglo-Saxon name, Hrodhbeorht, or Hrodhbriht, signifies flamebright, which was one of the appellations of Thor. In illustration of the reverence paid to the redbreast, a writer in "Notes and Queries" relates the following beautiful story, which he had from his nurse, a native of Carmarthenshire :— "Far, far away, is a land of woe, darkness, spirits of evil, and fire. Day by day does the little bird bear in his bill a drop of water to quench the flame. So near to the burning stream does he fly, that his dear little feathers are scorched; and hence he is named Bronrhuddyn (i.e., breast-burned, or breast-scorched), To serve little children, the robin dares approach the infernal pit. No good child will hurt the devoted benefactor of man. The robin returns from the land of fire, and therefore he feels the cold of winter far more than his brother birds. He shivers in the brumal blast; hungry he chirps before your door. Oh! my child, then, in gratitude throw a few crumbs to poor redbreast." I have not to this day forgotten the sense of shame and sorrow with which I was overwhelmed, when, as a boy, being permitted for the first time to discharge a fowling-piece at a small bird in a shrubbery, I discovered that the feathered songster whose life I had taken was a robin-redbreast. The stork is, in Germany especially, ever a welcome guest, and wheels (sun emblems) are placed on the roofs of houses in Hesse, in order to encourage the storks to build their nests thereupon. Their presence is supposed to render the building safe against the ravages of fire. Mannhardt mentions an instance in which, to avenge the abstraction of her young, it is said a stork carried a flaming brand in her beak, threw it into the nest, and thus set the house on fire. The German name for stork, Grimm says, is literally child or soulbringer. Hence the belief that the advent of infants is presided over by this bird, which obtains so largely in Denmark and Germany. Amongst the remains of birds and animals consumed as food by the framers of the Danish "kjökkenmöddings," or shell-mounds, the absence of the bones of the domestic fowl, two species of swallow, the sparrow and the stork, has been commented upon by several archæologists. This is attributable, doubtless, to the sacred character with which they were invested by the inhabitants of the district when the said mounds were formed. For a similar reason, as has been previously observed, no bones of the hare have been found in these ancient "kitchen-middens." Amongst the birds of evil omen, the owl appears to rank with the foremost. Bourne says, "If an owl, which is reckoned a most abominable and unlucky bird, send forth its hoarse and dismal voice, it is an omen of the approach of some terrible thing; that some dire calamity and some great misfortune is near at hand." Chaucer speaks of the "owl eke that of deth the bode bringeth." Amongst the Romans its appearance was regarded as a most certain portent of death. In the year 312, on the day on which Constantine saw the vision of the cross in the heavens, with the legend "In hoc signo vinces," Zosimus, the pagan historian, informs us that his opponent, Maxentius, was disconcerted by the adverse portent of a flight of owls. Speaking of the prodigies which were said to accompany the passing away of Augustus Cæsar, Xiphilinus says that an "owl sung on the top of the Curia." Our Elizabethan and later poets often refer to this superstition. In one of Reed's old plays we have :— When screech owls croak upon the chimney tops, It's certain then you of a corse shall hear. Spencer speaks of "the ill-fac'd owl, death's dreadful messenger," and Pennant, when describing what is called the tawny owl, says, "this is what we call the screech owl, to which the folly of superstition had given the power of presaging death by its cries." Shakspere makes Lennox say, on the night of the murder of Duncan, that— The obscure bird Clamoured the livelong night. |