A Book of Myths
In Scotland and in Australia, in every part of Europe, we have tales
of horrible formless things which frequent lonely rivers and lochs and
marshes, and to meet which must mean Death. And equal in malignity
with them, and infinitely more dangerous, are the beautiful beings who
would seem to claim descent from Lilith, the soulless wife of Adam.
Such were the sirens who would have compassed the destruction of
Odysseus. Such are the mermaids, to wed with one of whom must bring
unutterable woe upon any of the sons of men. In lonely far-off places
by the sea there still are tales of exquisite melodies heard in the
gloaming, or at night when the moon makes a silver pathway across the
water; still are there stories of women whose home is in the depths of
the ocean, and who come to charm away men's souls by their beauty and
by their pitiful longing for human love.
Those who have looked on the yellow-green waters of the Seine, or who
have seen the more turbid, more powerful Thames sweeping her serious,
majestic way down towards the open ocean, at Westminster, or at London
Bridge, can perhaps realise something of that inwardness of things
that made the people of the past, and that makes the mentally
uncontrolled people of the present, feel a fateful power calling upon
them to listen to the insistence of the exacting waters, and to
surrender their lives and their souls forever to a thing that called
and which would brook no denial. In the Morgue, or in a mortuary by
the river-side, their poor bodies have lain when the rivers have
worked their will with them, and "Suicide," "Death by drowning," or
"By Misadventure" have been the verdicts given. We live in a too
practical, too utterly common-sensical age to conceive a poor woman
with nothing on earth left to live for, being lured down to the Shades
by a creature of the water, or a man who longs for death seeing a
beautiful daughter of a river-god beckoning to him to come where he
will find peace everlasting.
Yet ever we war with the sea. All of us know her seductive charm, but
all of us fear her. The boundary line between our fear of the fierce,
remorseless, ever-seeking, cruel waves that lap up life swiftly as a
thirsty beast laps water, and the old belief in cruel sea-creatures
that sought constantly for the human things that were to be their
prey, is a very narrow one. And once we have seen the sea in a rage,
flinging herself in terrible anger against the poor, frail toy that
the hands of men have made and that was intended to rule and to resist
her, foaming and frothing over the decks of the thing that carries
human lives, we can understand much of the old pagan belief. If one
has watched a river in spate, red as with blood, rushing triumphantly
over all resistance, smashing down the trees that baulk it, sweeping
away each poor, helpless thing, brute or human, that it encounters,
dealing out ruin and death, and proceeding superbly on to carry its
trophies of disaster to the bosom of the Ocean Mother, very easy is it
to see from whence came those old tales of cruelty, of irresistible
strength, of desire.
Many are the tales of sea-maidens who have stolen men's lives from
them and sent their bodies to move up and down amidst the wrack, like
broken toys with which a child has grown tired of playing and cast
away in weariness. In an eighth-century chronicle concerning St.
Fechin, we read of evil powers whose rage is "seen in that watery fury
and their hellish hate and turbulence in the beating of the sea
against the rocks." "The bitter gifts of our lord Poseidon" is the
name given to them by one of the earliest poets of Greece[7] and a
poet of our own time--poet of the sea, of running water, and of lonely
places--quotes from the saying of a fisherman of the isle of Ulva
words that show why simple minds have so many times materialised the
restless, devouring element into the form of a woman who is very
beautiful, but whose tender mercies are very cruel. "She is like a
woman of the old tales whose beauty is dreadful," said Seumas, the
islander, "and who breaks your heart at last whether she smiles or
frowns. But she doesn't care about that, or whether you are hurt or
not. It's because she has no heart, being all a wild water."[8]
Treacherous, beautiful, remorseless, that is how men regard the sea
and the rushing rivers, of whom the sirens and mermaids of old
tradition have come to stand as symbols. Treacherous and pitiless, yet
with a fascination that can draw even the moon and the stars to her
breast:
"Once I sat upon a promontory,
And heard a mermaid, on a dolphin's back,
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath,
That the rude sea grew civil at her song;
And certain stars shot madly from their spheres,
To hear the sea-maid's music."
Shakespeare.
Very many are the stories of the women of the sea and of the rivers,
but that one who must forever hold her own, because Heine has
immortalised her in song, is the river maiden of the Rhine--the
Lorelei.
Near St. Goar, there rises out of the waters of the Rhine a
perpendicular rock, some four hundred feet high. Many a boatman in
bygone days there met his death, and the echo which it possesses is
still a mournful one. Those who know the great river, under which lies
hid the treasure of the Nibelungs, with its "gleaming towns by the
river-side and the green vineyards combed along the hills," and who
have felt the romance of the rugged crags, crowned by ruined castles,
that stand like fantastic and very ancient sentries to guard its
channel, can well understand how easy of belief was the legend of the
Lorelei.
Down the green waters came the boatman's frail craft, ever drawing
nearer to the perilous rock. All his care and all his skill were
required to avert a very visible danger. But high above him, from the
rock round which the swirling eddies splashed and foamed, there came a
voice.
"Her voice was like the voice the stars
Had when they sang together."
And when the boatman looked up at the sound of such sweet music, he
beheld a maiden more fair than any he had ever dreamed of. On the rock
she sat, combing her long golden hair with a comb of red gold. Her
limbs were white as foam and her eyes green like the emerald green of
the rushing river. And her red lips smiled on him and her arms were
held out to him in welcome, and the sound of her song thrilled through
the heart of him who listened, and her eyes drew his soul to her arms.
Forgotten was all peril. The rushing stream seized the little boat
and did with it as it willed. And while the boatman still gazed
upwards, intoxicated by her matchless beauty and the magic of her
voice, his boat was swept against the rock, and, with the jar and
crash, knowledge came back to him, and he heard, with broken heart,
the mocking laughter of the Lorelei as he was dragged down as if by a
thousand icy hands, and, with a choking sigh, surrendered his life to
the pitiless river.
To one man only was it granted to see the siren so near that he could
hold her little, cold, white hands, and feel the wondrous golden hair
sweep across his eyes. This was a young fisherman, who met her by the
river and listened to the entrancing songs that she sang for him
alone. Each evening she would tell him where to cast his nets on the
morrow, and he prospered greatly and was a marvel to all others who
fished in the waters of the Rhine. But there came an evening when he
was seen joyously hastening down the river bank in response to the
voice of the Lorelei, that surely never had sounded so honey-sweet
before, and he came back nevermore. They said that the Lorelei had
dragged him down to her coral caves that he might live with her there
forever, and, if it were not so, the rushing water could never whisper
her secret and theirs, of a lifeless plaything that they swept
seawards, and that wore a look of horror and of great wonder in its
dead, wide-open eyes.
It is "ein Maerchen aus alten Zeiten"--a legend of long ago.
But it is a very much older _Maerchen_ that tells us of the warning of
Circe to Odysseus:
"To the Sirens first shalt thou come, who bewitch all men, whosoever
shall come to them. Whoso draws nigh them unwittingly and hears the
sound of the Siren's voice, never doth he see wife or babes stand by
him on his return, nor have they joy at his coming; but the Sirens
enchant him with their clear song."
And until there shall be no more sea and the rivers have ceased to
run, the enchantment that comes from the call of the water to the
hearts of men must go on. Day by day the toll of lives is paid, and
still the cruel daughters of the deep remain unsatisfied. We can hear
their hungry whimper from the rushing river through the night, and the
waves of the sea that thunders along the coast would seem to voice the
insistence of their desire. And we who listen to their ceaseless,
restless moan can say with Heine:
"_Ich weiss nicht, was soll es bedeuten,_
_Dass ich so traurig bin._"
For the sadness of heart, the melancholy that their music brings us is
a mystery which none on this earth may ever unravel.
FOOTNOTES:
[7] Archilochus of Paros.
[8] Fiona Macleod (_The Winged Destiny_).
FREYA, QUEEN OF THE NORTHERN GODS
"Friday's bairn is loving and giving," says the old rhyme that sets
forth the special qualities of the children born on each day of the
week, and to the superstitious who regard Friday as a day of evil
omen, it seems strange that Friday's bairn should be so blessed. But
they forget that before Christianity swept paganism before it, and
taught those who worshipped the northern gods the story of that first
black "Good Friday," the tragedy in which all humanity was involved,
Friday was the day of Freya, "The Beloved," gentle protectress, and
most generous giver of all joys, delights, and pleasures. From her, in
mediaeval times, the high-born women who acted as dispensers to their
lords first took the title _Frouwa_ (=Frau), and when, in its
transition stage, the old heathenism had evolved into a religion of
strong nature worship, overshadowed by fatalism, only thinly veneered
by Christianity, the minds of the Christian converts of Scandinavia,
like those of puzzled children, transferred to the Virgin Mary the
attributes that had formerly been those of their "Lady"--Freya, the
goddess of Love.
Long before the Madonna was worshipped, Freya gave her name to plants,
to flowers, and even to insects, and the child who says to the
beautiful little insect, that he finds on a leaf, "Ladybird, ladybird,
fly away home," is commemorating the name of the Lady, Freya, to whom
his ancestors offered their prayers.
In her home in the Hall of Mists, Freya (or Frigga), wife of Odin the
All Father, sat with her golden distaff spinning the clouds. Orion's
Belt was known as "Frigga's spindle" by the Norsemen, and the men on
the earth, as they watched the great cumulous masses of snowy-white,
golden or silver edged, the fleecy cloudlets of grey, soft as the
feathers on the breast of a dove, or the angry banks of black and
purple, portending a storm, had constant proof of the diligence of
their goddess. She was the protectress of those who sailed the seas,
and the care of children as they came into the world was also hers.
Hers, too, was the happy task of bringing together after death, lovers
whom Death had parted, and to her belonged the glorious task of going
down to the fields of battle where the slain lay strewn like leaves in
autumn and leading to Valhalla the half of the warriors who, as
heroes, had died. Her vision enabled her to look over all the earth,
and she could see into the Future, but she held her knowledge as a
profound secret that none could prevail upon her to betray.