Strange Survivals

In the Elder Edda, a collection of very ancient songs relating to the Norse gods and heroes, who were the same as the gods and heroes of our Anglo-Saxon forefathers, is one mysterious poem, supposed to be sung by Odin (Woden) himself as he hangs in the world-tree, a self-immolated victim, between heaven and earth for nine nights.

“I knew that I hung
In the wind-rocked tree
Nine whole nights,
Wounded with a spear;
And to Odin offered
Myself to myself,
On that tree,
Of which no one knows
From what root it springs.”

As he thus hangs, himself the sacrifice offered to himself as god, he composes a song of twice nine runes, and the result of the twelfth is: —

“If on a tree I see
A corpse swinging by a halter,
I can so grave runes
And them write
That that man shall with me
Walk and converse.”

That is to say, every victim hung on a tree becomes one of Odin’s band, with whom he rides in the storm blast over the earth.

Unfortunately, the myth connected with this curious poem is not preserved; but we can gather so much from it, that Odin was said to have immolated himself to himself by hanging in the world-tree, and that thenceforth he claimed all men who had been hung as members of his band.

In one of the early Norse sagas we have a story about a king called Vikarr, who desired to dedicate himself to the god, and so he had a gallows erected before his palace, and got a friend to fasten a halter round his neck and hang him on the gallows. Another tells of a woman who, to gain her husband’s love, hung her son to the god to obtain his assistance so as to brew a good vat of ale. At Lethra, in Denmark, every nine years ninety-nine men, and as many horses, were hung in honour of the god; and at Upsala numerous human victims swung by the neck about the image of Odin. After their great victory over the Romans the Cymbri and Teutons hung all their captives as a thank-offering to their gods; and after the slaughter of the legions of Varus the horses of the Romans were found hung on the trees on the scene of defeat.

Indeed, one of the names of Odin was the Hanging God, either because he hung himself, or because he had victims hung to him.

The world-tree, the great tree in which he hung, the tree which supports heaven and earth, was called Yggdrasil, which means Ogre’s horse, for one of the names of Odin was Yggr or Ogre, to express his love of human sacrifices; and all the old nursery tales and rhymes concerning ogres have reference to this great god of the English people. Jack mounts the beanstalk, and above the clouds enters the land of the Ogre, with his one eye, who devours men. Jack the Giant Killer, who lives in Cornwall, represents the British Christian fighting against the Pagan Saxon, impersonated as the great man-eating ogre.

“Fee-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman.
Whether he be alive, or whether he be dead,
I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.”

In this again we have a reference to Woden or Odin, who was also called the Miller; for the mutter or roll of the thunder was supposed to be the working of his quern, grinding up his human victims for his meal.

Originally, victims were either freewill offerings, or were chosen from among the best in the land. So we hear of a Norse king every ten years sacrificing one of his sons, and of the Swedes, in time of famine, sacrificing their king, but it became general to offer the prisoners taken in war, and when these lacked, to sacrifice those who lay in prison condemned for crimes.

In one of the Norse sagas, we are told of a king’s daughter that, on hearing of the death of her father in battle, she went to the valley dedicated to the gods and there hung herself. Her father, having died in battle, went to Walhalla to Odin, and her only chance of being with him in the spirit world was to hang herself to the honour of Odin, who would then receive her among his elect, and so associate her with her father. If she were to die in her bed, she would go down to the nether world of Hela.

It is curious that in the West of England there are fields, generally situated in lonely spots, that go by the name of gallows’-traps, and the popular saying concerning them is that whoever sets foot in them is predestined to die on the gibbet. The probable origin of this superstition is that these were actual traps for the unwary, in which to catch victims for sacrifice.

In certain districts a parcel of land was set apart to the god, and it was agreed that whosoever set foot on it should be sacrificed. Usually this was a stranger, unaware of the sacredness of the ground he trod. He was seized and hung to Woden. We cannot say for certain that this is the origin of the gallows-traps, but it is the most probable explanation of their origin, and of the superstitious dread of them still existing among the people.

In France and Germany the wheel was used as the instrument of death as frequently as the gallows; those executed on the wheel were set upon poles, the wheel horizontal, and their broken limbs intertwined among the spokes. Originally they were thus put to death as oblations to the sun-god, whose symbol was the wheel. Little by little the idea of sacrifice in these executions disappeared. When Germans, Franks, and Anglo-Saxons became Christian, human sacrifices ceased as a matter of course, but as it was still necessary to put malefactors to death, the same kind of death was adjudged to them as before Christianity was professed. The gradual process whereby human sacrifices were changed in the classic world is well known to us. At first every victim was a freewill offering, and even a beast was obliged to appear so. To make the ox seem to consent to its despatch, drops of oil or water were put into its ears, that it might nod and shake its head. Prisoners taken in war, then criminals, were substituted for persons voluntarily devoting themselves to death to the honour of the gods. When it came to the execution of criminals, the idea of sacrifice readily evaporated.

One remarkable fact remains to be noticed. In all religions the sacrifice becomes identified with the god to whom it is offered, and partakes of his powers.

Whether this be a mere confusion of ideas, or whether there is some logical process at the bottom, we will not stop to consider, but it remains a fact everywhere. The victim is always thought to become invested with some of the attributes of the god.

Now a whole series of superstitions exists connected with men hung; and an executioner till of late years derived a small revenue from the sale of the cord, or other articles connected with the criminal who had been hung, and these relics were preserved, not out of a morbid love of horrors, but out of a real belief that they were beneficial, that they brought with them protection against accidents and ailments. I remember, not ten years ago, being shown by a woman, by no means in the lowest walks of life, a small object in a frame. This she said was a bit of the skin of a certain famous murderer, for which she had given a guinea.

“And what on earth makes you preserve it?” I inquired.

“Oh!” replied the woman, “the house will never catch fire so long as that is in it.”

The mutilation of bodies hung in chains was of frequent occurrence in former times, on account of like beliefs. The hands and feet and hair of the dead were cut off. The former were constantly taken by thieves and burglars, who believed that the hand of the man hung would enable him to open any lock, and enter any house with immunity.

The plunder of the gallows was sought in the first days of Christianity in England by those who were still Pagans at heart, and desired to put themselves under the protection of the old gallows god, Woden, but the original meaning of this robbery of the dead soon faded away, and the practice remained without explanation.

Our word gallows is compound. The old word is galz, and gallows means the low or mound of the gibbet, and we speak of the gallow-tree, or the wood on the gibbet hill. When we remember that the gallows on which Odin hung is called Ogre’s horse, it is interesting to note a popular riddle asked children in Yorkshire. “What is the horse that is ridden that never was foaled, and rid with a bridle that never had bit?” The answer is – The Gallows. A German name for it is the raven’s stone, not only, perhaps, because ravens come to it, but because the raven was the sacred bird of Odin.

Now let us turn to the wheel.

On the Continent, in Germany and in France, breaking on the wheel was a customary mode of execution. The victim was stretched on the wheel, and with a bar of iron his limbs were broken, and then a blow was dealt him across the breast. After that the wheel was set up on a tall pole, with the dead man on it, and left to become the prey to the ravens.

This was a survival of human sacrifices to the sun-god, as hanging is a survival of human sacrifices to the wind-god.

With regard to the solar-wheel, a great deal of very interesting information has been collected by M. Gaidoz.[40 - “Le Dieu Gaulois du Soleil,” Paris, 1886.] He points out that in the museums of France there are a good many monuments that represent the sun-wheel along with the thunderbolt as the symbol of Jupiter, that is to say, the old Gaulish solar-god identified with the Roman deity, Jupiter. Gaulish warriors wore a wheel on their helmets – a wheel was a favourite symbol as a personal ornament, or perhaps as an amulet. The wheel-window in a Gothic minster derives from the solar-wheel.

When Constantine led his legions against Maxentius, he professed to have seen a sign in the heavens, and he believed it to be a token of Christ’s assistance. What he really saw was a mock-sun. He adopted and adapted the sign for his standards, and the Labarum of Constantine became a common Christian symbol. That there was policy in his conduct we can hardly doubt; the symbol he set up gratified the Christians in his army on one side, and the Gauls on the other. To the former it was a sign compounded of the initial letters of Christ, to the latter it was the token of the favour of their solar deity. An addition Constantine certainly made to the six-rayed wheel, but it was not one that materially affected its character.

Among the Sclavonic races in like manner the sun was worshipped, and worshipped with symbols precisely the same.

The solar god of the Sclaves was Swanto Wit or Swato Wit, i. e., Holy Light. The sun was the chief god of the Sclaves, and as the cock crows before sunrise and announces the coming day, the cock was regarded as sacred to the god, and sacrificed to it. The worship of this god consisted in circular dances, called kolos, and the dance was taken to represent the revolution of the planets, the constellations, the seasons about the sun. An old writer says of the dances of Swanto Wit that they were celebrated annually on the feast of St. John the Baptist, that is, on Midsummer Day. “Benches are placed in a circle, and these are leaped over by those who take part in the rite. No one is allowed to be present dressed in red. The entire month that precedes St. John’s Day, the votaries are in an excited condition, and in carrying on their dances they fall a prey to nervous terrors.”[41 - “Scriptores rer. German. Frankof.,” 1718, p. 508.] Another writer tells us that they swung about a fiery wheel in their dances, a symbol of the solar disc.[42 - “Eckhard, Monument. Jutreboc,” p. 59.]

In the Bavarian highlands, where the mountain names are many of them of Sclavonic origin, and testify to a Sclavonic race having occupied the Alps, this is still customary. The midsummer dances, and the whirling of fiery wheels, are still in vogue. It is the same elsewhere. A writer on the customs of the Sclaves says: “They give each other a hand, and form a circle, whence the name of the dance, kolo = a circle, or wheel. They take three quick steps or leaps to the left, then a slow stride to the right; but when men alone dance it, after the three quick steps, they stand, and kick with the right leg into the middle of the circle. When the dance is accompanied by singing, one portion of the circle sings one strophe, and the other repeats it. The Sclave dance is most wild; and the same is found among the Carinthians and the Croats.”[43 - “Anton, Versaml. uber Sitten d. alten Slawen,” II. p. 97.] In Dalmatia and Croatia, on St. Vitus’ Day the peasants dance, holding burning pieces of fragrant wood in their hands.

In the reign of Pepin, the father of Charlemagne, the Abbot Fulrad obtained the relics of St. Vitus, a boy-martyr, from Rome, and conveyed them to St. Denis. When the Abbey of New Corbey was founded in Saxony, Warin, the abbot, wrote to Hilduin of St. Denis, to entreat the gift of these relics for his church. Accordingly, in 836, they were conveyed to their new resting-place in Saxony. In 879, the monks of Corbey started on a mission to the Sclaves in Rügen and Pomerania, carrying with them a portion of the relics of St. Vitus. They erected a chapel in Rügen, which they dedicated to the saint. The attempt failed; and when, later, the Rugians were converted, the missionaries supposed that the Swanto Wit, whom they found them worshipping, was this very St. Vitus, in Sclave Swante Vit, whose relics had been laid in Rügen. When, in 1124, Otto, Bishop of Bamberg, laboured for the conversion of the Pomeranians, he took with him a figure of a cock and a silver arm that contained bones of St. Vitus. The Pomeranians reverenced the cock as a sacred being, and when Otto appeared before them, holding up the cock and the silver arm, they prostrated themselves to the cock, and he was gratified at having thus inveigled them into doing honour to the relics of St. Vitus.

Saint Wenceslas, Prince of Bohemia, in 930 destroyed the temple of Swanto Wit at Prague, and erected on its site a church to Swante Vit, i. e., St. Vitus.

When Ancona was besieged by the Christian host under Waldemar I., a prophecy circulated that the city would fall into their hands on St. Vitus’ Day. So it did, and Waldemar at once destroyed the temple of Swanto Wit in the city, and on its ruins erected a church to Swante Vit.

Thus it came to pass that in Sclavonic lands the cultus of St. Vitus usurped the worship of the sun-god. But to return to the dances. As we have seen, the solar dances held in honour of Swanto Wit were held an entire month. St. Vitus’ Day falls on June 15th, very near to Midsummer Day, and as these dances continued in Christian times, and St. Vitus had taken the place of the sun-god, they acquired his name; they were called the dances of St. Vitus.

In 1370 an epidemic of chorœa broke out in Germany, especially along the valley of the Rhine. Young people of both sexes were the victims; they danced, jerked, and fell into hysterical convulsions. Those who saw them were affected in like manner. The phenomenon so much resembled the annual St. Vitus’ dances that the disorder thenceforth took as its special designation, “St. Vitus’ Dance.”

Dancing in a circle was a piece of sacred ritual in honour of the revolving wheel of the sun. In the Bavarian highlands at Midsummer a fiery wheel is waved and rolled down the mountain sides. The same sort of rite was anciently observed at the same time in England. A monk of Winchelscombe, in the reign of Henry VI., gives an account of the popular festivals in his time. He speaks of three sorts of amusements that take place on the vigil of St. John the Baptist. One of these is the whirling of a cart wheel. Another writer of the following century, in his poem, “Regnum papisticum,” gives further details. He says that the country people take an old wheel, surround it with straw, so as completely to cover it, and carry it to a height. At nightfall they set it on fire and roll it down; a monstrous sight, he adds, and one would believe that the sun was rolling down out of heaven.

Exactly the same usage is, or was, common in Belgium. In a charter, by which the Abbess of Epinal ceded a wood to the magistrates of that town in 1505, she made provision that every year, as an acknowledgment, they should furnish “The Wheel of Fortune, and the straw wherewith to cover it.”

Pages might be crowded with illustrations. I must refer the curious to the treatise of M. Gaidoz. Sufficient evidence has been collected that the wheel was the sacred symbol of the sun among the Gauls, the Teutons, and the Sclaves. We can, therefore, see how that an execution on the wheel was in its original conception a sacrifice to the sun.

Long after this was forgotten the wheel remained, as has the gallows with us, as the instrument for the execution of criminals. In Germany, even in cases of decapitation, the person executed was placed on a wheel and his head on a pole, when separated from the body. The last instances of breaking on the wheel were in the first forty years of this century. The fact of the use of the wheel as a means of execution continuing so many hundreds of years after the worship of the sun-god had ceased, and of the gallows with us, for the same purpose, is a very curious and instructive illustration of the persistence of customs of which the original significance is absolutely lost.

XII.

Holes