The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (Third Edition, Vol. 11 of 12). Frazer James George

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СКАЧАТЬ out a red or white cloth, with which you have taken care to provide yourself, and catch the magic flower as it falls. The treasure is now yours. Before its marvellous power all doors and locks fly open; it can make the bearer of it invisible; and neither steel nor lead can wound the man who carries it in the right-hand pocket of his coat. That is why people in Swabia say of a thief who cannot be caught, “He must surely have a springwort.”239 The superstition which associates the springwort with the woodpecker is very ancient, for it is recorded by Pliny. It was a vulgar belief, he tells us, that if a shepherd plugged up a woodpecker's nest in the hollow of a tree with a wedge, the bird would bring a herb which caused the wedge to slip out of the hole; Trebius indeed affirmed that the wedge leaped out with a bang, however hard and fast you might have driven it into the tree.240 Another flower which possesses the same remarkable power of bursting open all doors and locks is chicory, provided always that you cut the flower with a piece of gold at noon or midnight on St. James's Day, the twenty-fifth of July. But in cutting it you must be perfectly silent; if you utter a sound, it is all up with you. There was a man who was just about to cut the flower of the chicory, when he looked up and saw a millstone hovering over his head. He fled for his life and fortunately escaped; but had he so much as opened his lips, the millstone would have dropped on him and crushed him as flat as a pancake. However, it is only a rare white variety of the chicory flower which can act as a picklock; the common bright blue flower is perfectly useless for the purpose.241

      The magical virtues ascribed to plants at Midsummer may be thought to be derived from the sun, then at the height of his power and glory. Hence it is possible that the Midsummer bonfires stand in direct relation to the sun.

      Many more examples might perhaps be cited of the marvellous virtues which certain plants have been supposed to acquire at the summer solstice, but the foregoing instances may suffice to prove that the superstition is widely spread, deeply rooted, and therefore probably very ancient in Europe. Why should plants be thought to be endowed with these wonderful properties on the longest day more than on any other day of the year? It seems difficult or impossible to explain such a belief except on the supposition that in some mystic way the plants catch from the sun, then at the full height of his power and glory, some fleeting effluence of radiant light and heat, which invests them for a time with powers above the ordinary for the healing of diseases and the unmasking and baffling of all the evil things that threaten the life of man. That the supposition is not purely hypothetical will appear from a folk-tale, to be noticed later on, in which the magic bloom of the fern is directly derived from the sun at noon on Midsummer Day. And if the magic flowers of Midsummer Eve thus stand in direct relation to the sun, which many of them resemble in shape and colour, blooming in the meadows like little yellow suns fallen from the blue sky, does it not become probable that the bonfires kindled at the same time are the artificial, as the flowers are the natural, imitations of the great celestial fire then blazing in all its strength? At least analogy seems to favour the inference and so far to support Mannhardt's theory, that the bonfires kindled at the popular festivals of Europe, especially at the summer solstice, are intended to reinforce the waning or waxing fires of the sun. Thus if in our enquiry into these fire-festivals the scales of judgment are loaded with the adverse theories of Mannhardt and Westermarck, we may say that the weight, light as it is, of the magic flowers of Midsummer Eve seems to incline the trembling balance back to the side of Mannhardt.

      This consideration tends to bring us back to an intermediate position between the rival theories of Mannhardt and Westermarck.

      Nor is it, perhaps, an argument against Mannhardt's view that the midsummer flowers and plants are so often employed as talismans to break the spells of witchcraft.242 For granted that employment, which is undeniable, we have still to explain it, and that we can hardly do except by reference to the midsummer sun. And what is here said of the midsummer flowers applies equally to the midsummer bonfires. They too are used to destroy the charms of witches and warlocks; but if they can do so, may it not be in part because fires at midsummer are thought to burn with fiercer fury than at other times by sympathy with the fiercer fervour of the sun? This consideration would bring us back to an intermediate position between the opposing theories, namely, to the view that while the purely destructive aspect of fire is generally the most prominent and apparently the most important at these festivals, we must not overlook the additional force which by virtue of homoeopathic or imitative magic the bonfires may be supposed both to derive from and to impart to the sun, especially at the moment of the summer solstice when his strength is greatest and begins to decline, and when accordingly he can at once give and receive help to the greatest advantage.

      Miscellaneous examples of the baleful activity of witches at Midsummer and of the precautions which it is necessary to take against them at that time. Witches in Voigtland. The witches' Sabbath in Prussia on Walpurgis Night and Midsummer Eve. Midsummer Eve a witching time among the South Slavs.

      To conclude this part of our subject it may not be amiss to illustrate by a few more miscellaneous examples the belief that Midsummer Eve is one of the great days of the year in which witches and warlocks pursue their nefarious calling; indeed in this respect Midsummer Eve perhaps stands second only to the famous Walpurgis Night (the Eve of May Day). For instance, in the neighbourhood of Lierre, in Belgium, the people think that on the night of Midsummer Eve all witches and warlocks must repair to a certain field which is indicated to them beforehand. There they hold their infernal Sabbath and are passed in review by a hellish magician, who bestows on them fresh powers. That is why old women are most careful, before going to bed on that night, to stop up doors and windows and every other opening in order to bar out the witches and warlocks, who but for this sage precaution might steal into the house and make the first trial of their new powers on the unfortunate inmates.243 At Rottenburg, in Swabia, people thought that the devil and the witches could do much harm on Midsummer Eve; so they made fast their shutters and bunged up even the chinks and crannies, for wherever air can penetrate, there the devil and witches can worm their way in. All night long, too, from nine in the evening till break of day, the church bells rang to disturb the dreadful beings at their evil work, since there is perhaps no better means of putting the whole devilish crew to flight than the sound of church bells.244 Down to the second half of the nineteenth century the belief in witches was still widespread in Voigtland, a bleak mountainous region of Central Germany. It was especially on the Eve of May Day (Walpurgis), St. Thomas's Day, St. John's Day, and Christmas Eve, as well as on Mondays, that they were dreaded. Then they would come into a neighbour's house to beg, borrow, or steal something, no matter what; but woe to the poor wretch who suffered them to carry away so much as a chip or splinter of wood; for they would certainly use it to his undoing. On these witching nights the witches rode to their Sabbath on baking-forks and the dashers of churns; but if when they were hurtling through the darkness any one standing below addressed one of the witches by name, she would die within the year. To counteract and undo the spells which witches cast on man and beast, people resorted to all kinds of measures. Thus on the before-mentioned days folk made three crosses on the doors of the byres or guarded them by hanging up St. John's wort, marjoram, or other equally powerful talismans. Very often, too, the village youth would carry the war into the enemy's quarters by marching out in a body, cracking whips, firing guns, waving burning besoms, shouting and making an uproar, all for the purpose of frightening and driving away the witches.245 In Prussia witches and warlocks used regularly to assemble twice a year on Walpurgis Night and the Eve of St. John. The places where they held their infernal Sabbath were various; for example, one was Pogdanzig, in the district of Schlochau. They generally rode on a baking-fork, but often on a black three-legged horse, and they took their departure up the chimney with the words, “Up and away and nowhere to stop!” When they were all gathered on the Blocksberg or Mount of the Witches, they held high revelry, feasting first and then dancing on a tight rope lefthanded-wise to the inspiring strains which an old warlock drew from a drum and a pig's head.246 СКАЧАТЬ