Marcu Beza-Paganism in Roumanian Folklore 1928

PAGANISM
IN
ROUMANIAN FOLKLORE
BY MARCU BEZA
LeEturer
at King's College
London University
***
With Illus lrations
1928
LONDON & TORONTO
T. M. DENT & SONS LTD.
NEW YORK : E. P. DUTTON & CO.
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PAGANISM
in
ROUMANIAN FOLKLORE
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BUCHAREST IN WINTER.
From a painting by Marius Bunescu.
[Fro,' ltsplece.
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411 rights reserved
Printed in Great Britain
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Preface
ALMOST all the following papers were first pub-
lished in periodicals, such as The Quest, The Slavonic
Review, and others, after having been delivered as
public lectures at King's College, London Uni-
versity. This is one reason why they have taken
a rather literary shape ; another stronger reason is
that the matters dealt with in these papers are not
mere abstractions to me, but things real and fresh,
giving colour and joy to one's innermost life.
In my childhood, I myself prayed to the moon, I
myself accompanied the procession of the bride-
goddess to the various fountains, and I often wore
a disguise for the ritual dances.
No doubt faded remnants of such pagan usages
linger also in other parts of the world. I have tried
to correlate some of these with the Roumanian
customs, though only casuallynot because I do
not appreciate the comparative method ; on the
contrary, I have added a chapter on " Scottish and
Roumanian Ballads," which is little else but a study
in parallelisms, and which shows of what advantage
such a method might be.
M. B.
[v]
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Contents
CHAP. PAGI
I. CHRISTMAS AND NEW YEAR
II. THE MOON 16

III. THE PAPARUDE AND KALOJAN 27
IV. THE HOBBY-HORSE DANCE . 37
V. ST. JOHN'S EVE 54
VI. THE SACRED MARRIAGE-I . 70
VII. THE SACRED MARRIAGE-II 95
VIII. THE CREATION 118
IX. THE FLOOD 130
X. SCOTTISH AND ROUMANIAN BALLADS 145
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Illustrations
BUCHAREST IN WINTER . . . Frontispiece
THE STAR Facing page 3
BUHAIU; CAPRA; SORCOVA; SORCOVA; BREZAIA Page I I
CAROLSINGERS ; ANGELS AND SHEPHERDS Facing page 14
MUMMERS WITH BUHAIU AND DRUM . )7 )3 19

BOYS CARRYING WHAT IS CALLED A BETHLEHEM
ARK . Facing page 21
FOUNTAIN Page 26
CHRISTMAS CUSTOMS PLAY REPRESENTED AT THE

NATIONAL THEATRE OF CERNAUTZI, BUKOVINA
Facing page 28
KALOJAN 30
HEAD OF HELIOS ,, ,, 33
BRONZE WORKS 1) )) 39
VILLAGE CEMETERY ; HOBBYHORSE DANCERS AT A
FAIR . Facing page 42
HOBBYHORSE . Page 45
GIPSY DANCER AND FLOWERSELLER . Facing page 48
CALUSAR ; ALUGUCIAR, HIGHLANDS OF MACEDONIA Page 52

[ ix ]
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ILLUSTRATIONS
(Continued)
SHEPHERD Facing page 56
FAIRYTALE . . f2 ,, 65
SPINNING /) ,, 8o
COUNTRY VIEW . . . ,, ,, 113
DRIVERS, HIGHLANDS OF MACEDONIA . ,, 128
WELL . Page 129
TOA CA ,, 131
WAYSIDE CROSS ,, 161
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PAGANISM IN ROUMANIAN
FOLKLORE
I
CHRISTMAS AND NEW YEAR
I TURN my mind back a few years, and I fancy

myself walking in the streets of Bucharest at the
approach of Christmas. All is covered in white ;
the glittering flakes of snow fall incessantly. Every
now and then sledges pass with a merry tinkling.
In front of the shop windows people gather, wonder-
ing at the many beautiful things displayed there.
Conspicuous among the crowds by their dress are
the newly arrived peasants, come to make their
purchases. There is everywhere a hasty, unusual
bustle, which gradually diminishes as the night
draws near, though it is kept up and prolonged a
good while after nightfall in the cafs. Now the
snow flashes here and there under the lights
steady street-lights and wandering lights of the
B [I ]
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sleighs. Detached tunes of gipsy music linger in
the air. At the quieter corners one catches, as in
sleep, a subdued little dissyllabic cry ; and on looking
round, there is the chestnut-roaster with his lamp
and his purple-red fire, which conveys such a
pleasant, warm feeling.
Apart from some local touches, as one might
judge, the scene is here similar to that of any great
city in England. Nor is there much difference in
the practice attending the festival. The inter-
change of greetings and presents is customary here,
too, as is the charmingly starlit Christmas-tree with
some of the more refined classes.
In the very early morning, about three o'clock,
the birth of the Divine Child is heralded by the bells.
Bucharest possesses numerous churches, and they
all contribute to the beauty of the town as seen from
a distance.
" The metal plates which cover the domes of the
two hundred churches," writes J. W. Ozanne in
his book, Three Tears in Roumania, " reflecting
the dazzling rays of the brilliant sun, produce an
effect which may be described as splendid." From
all these churches, then, great and little bells begin
ringing at once on Christmas mornnot with the
grand harmony, overpowering to the extent of being
somewhat oppressive, of the Russian bells ; neither
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TIIE STAR.
(See page 13.)
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have they, as in England, that distant, veiled sound
which gives one the impression of coming from far
beyond realities. Here in the cold, yet very often
bright, atmosphere, they ring so cheerfully and
clear, these many, many bells.
But in order to see the real Roumanian Christmas
one has to get into the country. A sledge takes
one there easily. As soon as it is out of town,
swifter and swifter it glides on amidst the snow-
wrapt plains, where from time to time silhouettes
of wells appear with their long beams pointing
towards the sky like fantastic birds. The villages
are hardly seenthey are rather guessed at by
the smoke rising from them. One enters them
usually through rows of trees, all white with frost
and icicles, standing by rivulets smitten into
silence. And in silence, -too, save for the cawing
of the rooks, lie the scattered huts ; nay, those
of the more secluded parts seem quite lost under
the snows. Having little or no intercourse with
the outside, friends and neighbours assemble
here to do work together on many of the winter
nights. Then, around the warm hearth, whilst
their hands are usefully engaged, what laughter and
fun and story-telling ! As in one of the most
popular of their folk-tales the pearls miraculously
string themselves, so the stories grow and link with
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each othera whole pageant of wondrous creatures.
At times a pause ensues of a sudden. They start
and listen. Strange knocks are heard on the
window ; now the wind roars with something of evil
foreboding. And there comes a dread, mainly of
those malignant, dark spirits who, during the time
before Epiphany, haunt every place.
The larger villages are filled with the mixed
noises of the markets. A picturesque sight these 1
On little wooden stalls pitched without order, in
Oriental fashion, are exhibited for sale any objects
one might require. Prices are cried out. Men
and women come, bargain loudly, ramble about,
mingle together, people of all conditionsthe toiler
of the land, the mountain shepherd in his sheepskin
cloak, and the ever-tramping gipsy. Everyone
is getting ready. Not only for Christmas. They
follow so close upon it, all the other winter festivals :
New Year's Day, on which St. Basil is also cele-
brated, and Epiphany, and St. John the Baptist.
Besides, people have fasted now for six whole weeks,
and naturally these great days are made the occasion
for a jolly good feastingfeasting mainly on pork
and turkey.
And among the boys, in their own busy world,
how many preparations 1 They join together in
small bands, and on Christmas Eve they go from
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house to house singing carols. These bear a special
name of colinde. Composed largely in blank verse,
they are of much interest, not only for their peculiar
blending of Pagan and Christian ideas, but likewise
for allusions they contain to the life and circum-
stances of yore. The most familiar is the one
beginning :
" To-night, great night,
White flowers !
The great night of Christmas,
White flowers ! "
Or that given by V. Alexandri in his Folk-Poems :

" Arise, great boyars, arise,
White flowers ! . . .71
Their singing ends up with a loud, hearty greeting

by the whole band :
" Good-morning to the old Christmas 1 " Upon
which they ask, and are given, besides fruit or
money, a kind of home-made cake.
The custom differs somewhat in Macedonia
amongst the Roumanians as well as amongst the
Greeks and Slays, for here the boys are provided
with sticks or clubs, and they knock hard at the
doors, shouting : " Colinde, colinde ! " to which
they add a few simple verses. I give those used in
the village of Clisur a :
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" Colinde, colinde,
Christ was born
In the stable of oxen
For fear of the Jews.
The horse uncovered Him,
The ox did cover Him."
The last words allude to the relation of the Virgin
Mary with the two animals. It is told by the people
that, after the Child's birth in the stable, Mary
covered Him with hay. Both the ox and the horse
then stirred from their place, and Mary bade them
be still. The ox obeyed, breathed even to keep the
Child warm, whereupon Mary blessed him that he
should be always content and quiet ; whilst the
horse not only disregarded Mary's request, but
stamped on the ground, neighed and pulled the hay
from over the Babe, so that Mary cursed him never
to find rest and satisfaction.
This is but an episode in the eventful journey of
Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem. If one examines
the Christmas carols carefully, one finds many other
points of interest. Thus one of them tells how,
when on the road, Mary was seized with pains,
and lay down under a poplar tree, which did not
withhold its rustling, and Mary cursed it that it
should shake and tremble for ever, be it calm or
windy weather. Mary then rose and walked until
she found her most needed rest under the evergreen
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and ever-blessed fir tree. Later on Mary came to
Bethlehem, and knocked everywhere for shelter,
but no one would accept her. At last she chanced
upon the palace of one Cr4ciun, where she was
allowed to enter the stables. As a matter of fact,
Criiciuna word of doubtful originmeans Christ-
mas, and we thus have a simple personification of a
cruel power adverse to the holy Babe's birth. An
idea seems to cling here that is reminiscent of the
opposition between the old spirit of decay and the
new fertilising spirit. This pagan background is
also emphasised by a number of carols. I shall
refer especially to one of the many variants.
The Lady Mary, wearing the black robes of a
nun, wanders through the world in search of her
Son. She arrives at the waters of Jordan, where she
addresses the godfather of Jesus :
" Listen, John,
St. John !
Hast thou seen
Or hast thou heard
Of my Son,
The Lord of Heaven
And of earth ? "
St. John tells her what he himself has heard with
his ears concerning the Crucifixion, and advises
her to go to the fountain of Pilat, if she wishes to
get a glimpse of her Son. Mary goes thither sobbing
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and crying ; and when at last she reaches that place
and sees her Son " like a luminous morning star,"
she asks Him :
" 0, thou flower of basilic,
Why hast Thou allowed Thyself
To fall into the hands of strangers,
In the land of the heathen ! "
Jesus then explains that He has done it for the
sake of the world, and gives a glowing picture of the
benefits to arise :
" The fields will be seen
Green with grass,
And the fountains with cold water,
And whoever dies
Will belong to God ! " I
Now, in the image of Mary here does one not
recognise that of the ancient Mother Goddess in
search of her beloved Osiris or Adonis or Dionysos,
whose death and resurrection bring about the revival
of nature ? We know that the mysteries of the
latter included certain rituals such as dances in the
shape of animals, sounding of drums and cymbals,
and mimetic thunder. This was produced by a
bull-roarerthe Greek /S(Sizflosa piece of wood
with a string through it. A similar device with
1 See Folk-Lore, Vol. XXXIV, No. I, 1923, Dr. M.
Gaster's article, " Roumanian Popular Legends of the Lady
Mary."
[8]
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all its magical significance enters into to-day's
practices in Roumania, when wandering about the
houses is taken up again on St. Basil's Day. It
consists of a little bucket provided with a well-
stretched skin, through which one or more horse-
hairs are inserted. The pulling of the hairs pro-
duces a deep sound like the lowing of a bullock ;
hence its name after that of the animal itself
buhaiu. Add to this the cracking of lashes and the
continuous ringing of sheepbells. In the absence
of one of the instruments, any other object, such
as a broken scythe or a pork-bladder filled with
grains, would answer the purpose. Of course,
there are kind people who seem to enjoy, if not
the music, at least the fun and good cheer of its
producers. But some object to this kind of thing,
do not like to be annoyed at a time when, as they
would say, the chickens have already gone to sleep.
Ion Creanga, a well-known Roumanian writer, tells
us, in his Recollections from Childhood, that, entering
a house with the whole band on a New Year's Eve,
their first accents caught the ears of the householder
just at the moment she was raking the fire of the kiln
to put the cakes in, and out she rushed after them with
the burning poker and not less burning language.
To the combined music of the aforesaid para-
phernaliathat is, the buhaiu, the cracking of whips
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and ringing of bellsare sung or recited or even
shouted different poems bearing on the prosperous
harvest to come, a vivid symbol of which is also
sometimes displayed in the shape of a decorated
plough driven by oxen.
This fertility ceremony is further enhanced by
the fact that some of the boys hold in their right
hands rods decked with paper flowers called
sorcova ; they approach and tap one with the
greeting :
" May you live
And flourish
Like an apple tree
Or a pear tree
In time of spring;
Like a stem of rose,
Strong as iron,
Gleaming as steel,
Swift as the arrow." 1
Sorcova is probably derived from soorva, the
Slavonic for boughs, and in some parts of Macedonia
is replaced by a real green bough from an olive tree.
With regard to the animal disguises mentioned above
as an element of the Dionysian ritual, it is to be
noted that nowadays in Roumania the carol-singers
are sometimes accompanied by bogeys known as
brezaia, capra or turcathat is, men with the head
of a goat or bull and a long beak which claps now
1 Given also in Princess Bibescu's Isvor, p. 204, London.
[ 10
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BUHAIU.
CAPRA.
7
41it
flov.
;3401
SORCOVA.
SORCOVA. BREZAIA.
[ II ]
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and again, when pulled by a string. They go
from house to house, and dance and recite verses,
mostly of a satirical turn.
On Christmas Eve and the following days until
Epiphany, one would also meet in the streets groups
of boys carrying a huge star, and singing :
" Who receives the star,
The bright, beautiful star ? "
It is made of coloured paper, illuminated from
within, and representing scenes connected with the
birth of Christ. In company with the star, a
mumming play is very often produced. The
essential characters who take part in it are those well
known in St. Matthew's Gospel : Herod the King,
with one or two officials, the three Magi, and a
heavenly messenger.' I remember that when at
school I impersonated this last character, attired as
an angel with white thin tights, two large wings, a
wooden sword, and a good many little bells. I can-
not understand to the present day the significance of
those bells. I was supposed to arrive, or rather to
emerge, suddenly ; yet such a lot of tinkling-tinkling
went round before my appearance. And there I was
a very poor angel, indeed! As few people invited
1 An interesting play of the kind is given in Graiul si
Folklorul Maramurefului,by Tache Papahagi, pp. 183-201,
Bucureti, 1925.
[ 13 3
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us indoors, my lips trembled with cold till I became
speechless, with no thought save to return quickly
to the protection of my coat.
Long afterwards, these performances were the
subject of much laughter and parody amongst us in
school. We made great fun, I recollect, of one of
the playersa simple fellow, who took himself very
seriously, with a long, dark robe, and a hand on his
yarn-beard, used to say, in a deeply conscious voice :
" I remember, too, the words of the Prophet
Balaam. . . ."
No doubt, both the star and the mumming are of a
medixval date. Various later influences entered
also in all the other customs ; but their true origin
and meaning could be traced far back. The great
Roman festivals of Saturnalia and Opalia were
celebrated in a very similar way. And there is a
sense of pleasure, touched with a certain melancholy,
to look in Latin authors for such revealing passages
on the subject, and see how the same old conceptions
underlie these customs, in spite of the tremendous
gulf of time which separates us from them.
In Martial, for instance, one finds an epigram
about the usual eating of pork on Christmas :
" This pig, fed on acorns among foaming wild
boars, will make you a merry Saturnalia." Macro-
bius says that some people used to send each other
[41
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CAROL-SINGERS.
(See page 5 )
ANGELS AND SHEPHERDS.

Scene from a Nativity Play
(See page 13)
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placentas. These are but the special Christmas
cakes of our days, to which the carol-singers allude,
thinking on how they are going to be received :
" With a cake of pure flour,
On the cake the jug of wine,
To have the feast complete ! "
Once a big cake of the sort, nicely adorned, was
laid with a kind of ceremony upon the table, and
left there for many days, as is still done by a section
of the Vlachs in Macedoniathe whole proceeding
being reminiscent of Ovid's description in the
Fasti : " Something of the ancient use had come
down to our years ; a pure platter bears the food
offered to Vesta. . . ."
Even the manner in which these cakes are made
presents a striking resemblance to what Ovid further
points out : " In old days the peasant baked only the
grain in ovensthe goddess of kilns having, too, her
own rites. The hearth itself used to bake the bread,
covered over with ashes, and the potsherd laid upon
the hot ground."
Could ever the author of these lines have thought
that, long after him, a new people would arise to
keep on the customs and traditions, and even the
tongue of his own people, in a remote land, where he
himself had voiced the sorrows of an exile in the full
cadences of his Tristia and Epistuhe ex Ponta ?
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II
THE MOON
Through its magic light and its influence on

earthly creatures and things, the moon has of
old given rise to various legends and super-
stitions. A number of these are still to be found
among the Roumanians. And, though in some
cases they have lost any sort of meaning, while
in others they appear travestied in Christian garb,
they are none the less vestiges of a bygone pagan
world.
In Roumanian folk tradition the moon is a
beautiful maiden, sister of the sun. Thus a popular
Christmas carol alludes to her as
" The little sister of the sun,
The Fairies' little niece,
The beauty of beauties."
A ballad of Transylvania sings with regard to the

moon :
" Only the sister of the sun
Stands at the gate of paradise."
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THE MOON
Again, a folk-story belonging to the Roumanians
of Macedonia tells about a bridegroom named
Birbicusha, how on the very night of the wedding he
was carried away by the fairies. The bride, in great
despair, set out to find him. On her way she
arrived at the palace of the Sun-God, who answered
to all her inquiries : " My daughter, I know nothing
of this rape, for I shine only by day, and Birbi-
cusha was stolen away by night. But I can give
thee advice. Go to the Moon-Goddess, my sister ;
she dwells on the other side of the world."
There is a Roumanian legend in verse which
speaks of the sun's attempt at an incestuous union
with his own sister, the moon. I give an abbreviated
translation :
For nine years the sun went in search of a bride.
He rushed through the sky and over the earth, but
nowhere could he find one to match in beauty his
sister Ileana-Sanziana. And he spoke to her :
" Little sister, gold-haired Ileana, let us plight
our troth together."
" 0 thou bright one, who has ever seen, who has
ever heard of a brother wedding his own sister ? "
The sun darkened and mounted to the throne of
God, praying that he might be allowed to marry her.
The Lord showed him both hell and paradise,
and then bade him choose between the two. The
c [ 17 1
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THE MOON
sun made answer : " Better hell than I should ever
be alone, without my sister Ileana."
Thereupon the sun descended to earth. He
came to his sister and decked her with a jewelled
robe and the crown of a queen. They two repaired
to the church. During the ceremony all of a sudden
the candles went out, the saints hid themselves, the
priests fell on their knees, and the unfortunate bride
saw a hand stretched outa hand that seized hold
of her and cast her into the sea, where she became
a golden barbel. The sun rose towards the west
and flung himself into the waters after his sister.
But the Lord took the fish in his hand, threw it
up and changed it into the moon. Then he said
in a thundering voice that they should gaze on
each other from afar across the skies and never
meet again. So it is that when the moon shines,
the sun sets ; when the sun rises, the moon hides in
the sea.
In a variant of the same legend, collected by G.
Dem. Teodorescu,1 Ileana consents to marry the
sun on condition that he would build an iron bridge
over the Black Sea and a ladder reaching the sky.
At once the sun carried out this task ; climbed to
heaven, and there met Adam and Eve, who led
him through hell and paradise.
1 Poesii Populare, p. io. Bucure5ti, 1885.
[ is ]
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Ethnographical Museum of Cluj.
(See page 9.)
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THE MOON
In both versions one has to note that such
Christian elements as the Church, the saints, priests,
were interwoven into the story at a later date and are
of no real import ; the only essential is the relation
of the moon to the sun. And on this point the
remote, primeval origin of the Roumanian legend
could be exhaustively shown. In G. Dem. Teo-
dorescu there is a passage which thus describes
the moon :
" Ileana
Sanziana,
The queen of flowers
And the carnations,
The sister of the sun,
The foam of the milk."
Sanziana strikes me as no other. than Santa Diana,
corresponding to the Greek Artemis, who in course
of time came to be considered a Moon-Goddess,
sister of the Sun-God Apollo. As for the union in
wedlock of a brother and sister, it formed one of the
deeply rooted conceptions in many an old religion, and
reflected, no doubt, a social custom once prevalent.
The powerful Egyptian goddess Isis was the sister
and wife of the god Osiris; the Greek goddess Hera
likewise enjoyed the favour of being both sister and
wife to the greatest among deities, Zeus ; and their
marriage often recurs in glowing classical descrip-
tions. It constituted what is known in the Eleu-
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THE MOON
sinian mysteries as lepOs ycip.os, sacred marriage,
dramatically enacted before the people. One hears
of a like representation in Knossos by the queen and
king, masked as a cow and bull respectively, which
symbolised the love of Pasiphae, the " all-shining "
or the moon, for a marvellous white bull rising out
of the seathat is, the sun. Furthermore, Dictynna,
an ancient Cretan goddess somewhat akin to Diana,
was conceived as a shy virgin who entered the sea in
order to escape the embrace of the sun, her lover.'
Here the very picture of the moon plunging into
the waters before her pursuer, the sunstrikingly
similar to our own Sanziana, but an image which
could hardly occur to a people not in contact with
the seaspeaks a good deal for the far-away,
strange origin of the Roumanian legend.
Now I pass on to the superstitions about the
moon. Dr. Johnson, in his Yourney to the Western
Islands of Scotland, says that the Highlanders used to
expect better crops of grain by sowing their seed in
the moon's increase. Such exactly is the belief of
the Roumanian peasant, and with regard also to
fruit-bearing trees ; but plants or vegetables whose
essential parts grow under the earth, such as onions,
have to be sown during the waning moona
practice implying the idea of lunar sympathy. If a
1 See J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, IV, pp. 72-73.
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BOYS CARRYING WHAT IS CALLED A BETHLEHEM ARK.
(See page xo.)
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THE MOON
woman is busy at her spinning-wheel, she ought to
cease work at the appearance of the new moon ;
not even a brooding hen is to be allowed to sit on her
eggs at that time. Children hail the new moon
loudly with the words :
" Moon, new moon,
Cut the bread in two
And give us,
Half to thee,
Health to me ! "
Housewives at the sight of the new moon ride on

pokers through the rooms and repeatwhile sweeping:
" Go out, ye flies, for the moon is getting married
and is inviting you all to the feast! "
But these practices are rather in the way of a joke.
Very different is the case with the Roumanians of
Macedonia. I still remember how my grandmother
used to approach me in a soft whisper : " Come,
dear, the new moon ! " Then she would put a
loaf of bread or a specially-prepared cake on my
head, and a silver coin in my pocket, and at the same
time give me two brass vessels filled with water to
hold. All these objects naturally stood for symbols
of prosperity, and the water of the vessels was known
as apei muta or apb" nenceputa, speechless, virgin
water. Making me turn round three times and
look straight at the moon, my grandmother would
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THE MOON
slowly utter, with deep religious solemnity, the
verses, which I murmured after her :
" Luna, lima, noau,
Ghine cat aroau ;
Caa-arina 'n vale
Punga li tate;
Cab.' sprung 'n casa,
Abaci oamini pri measa;
Tine ca mine
Tic) ca tine ! "
It is most difficult to translate these lines, because
they are all elliptical. I try, however, to give their
exact meaning :
" Moon, new moon, let goodness be like the dew ; as
much sand in the river, so the purse of the father; as the
cinders in the house, so many guests at our table; thou like
me, and I like thee ! "
Such addresses are not merely poetical fancies
roused by the wandering beauty of the moon. Nor
are they simple forms of sympathetic magic, as one
would be more inclined to believe. There enters
into them, I think, a pale, far-off remembrance of
religious worship.
Among the Roumanians of Macedonia one is
warned to be careful not to speak when out of doors
during the moon's increase, lest one should catch
an illness or fall under one of the spells that are then
cast in the bright air. For then is the most pro-
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THE MOON
pitious time for sorceries ; then the witches ride
stark naked on long distaffs to the deep valleys or
up into the high places, either to draw the moon
down or to gather the lunar fluid that affects one's
brain.
But the moon that exercises such a disturbing,
dangerous influence possesses in herself too a high
curative power. Even the water of a spring in
which she bathes her white cold beams is en-
dowed with healing properties.Therefore on many
occasions one beseeches the moon, and appeals to
her as to a good fairy or to an old protecting god-
dess, to drive away one's ills or evil spells.
In this connection we have a real masterpiece of a
Roumanian folk-charm.' It is clad in the usual
Christian atmosphere, with prayers to the Virgin
Mary, credo recitations and so on, all of which are
but later additions. In order to realise its pagan
character and trace it back to its line of descent, I
shall put it parallel with two other ancient invocations
to the Moon-Goddess. First the Orphic hymn to
Artemis, charged with that shadowy sense of old
rituals, which begins :
1 Found in De spargerea fermecelor, a scarce pamphlet
of the eighteenth century. I am indebted to Dr. M. Gaster
for the communication of the charm, which has since been
reproduced in Din Folklorul Romanic by Tache Papahagi,
pp. 166-168, Bucureti, 1923.
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THE MOON
MOW p,cu, c, Pao-lava, du 3s TroAvu5vvile Koopn,
" Hear me, queen, celebrated daughter of Zeus! "
and in a characteristic manner ends :
" Come, auspicious goddess, friendly to all mysteries,
bringing good fruits on earth, gentle peace and health with
lovely hair, and banish unto the tops of mountains sickness
and grief ! "
Then Apuleius in The Golden Ass, writing at a time
of mythological confusion, when the original Moon-
Goddess of the Greeks and Romans was merged in
various other divinities, whether she be Dame Ceres,
celestial Venus or Proserpinewhoever she may be,
says Apuleius :
" 0 blessed queen of heaven, Thou, which dost luminate
all the cities of the earth by Thy feminine light; Thou,
which nourishest all the seeds of the world by Thy damp
heat, giving Thy changing light according to the wander-
ings, near or far, of the sun ; by whatsoever name or fashion
or shape it is lawful to call upon Thee, I pray Thee to
end my great travail and misery and raise up my fallen hopes,
and deliver me from the wretched fortune which so long
time pursued me. Grant peace and rest, if it please Thee,
to my adversities, for I have endured enough labour and
peril." 1
Now one could better appreciate the Roumanian

incantation :
1 W. Adlington's translation in the Loeb Classical
Library, pp. 541-2.
[ 24 ]
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THE MOON
" A new moon has put on a crown of precious gems.
Luminous moon, who art in heaven and seest everything on
the earth, I find no rest in my home from the hatred of my
enemies who have risen up with great wickedness against
me and against my house ; and thou too, bright moon, shalt
have no peace either, unless thou takest the spell and charm
from our house, and from our table, and from my face, and
from the face of my wife, and from our property, and from
our wealth. Luminous moon, whether the spell has been
cast by a man or by a woman or by a youth, take the spell
from our house and from my wealth and from my cattle,
and from my garden, and from my orchard, and from all my
things 1 . . ."
Here follows the enumeration of the various kinds

of spells. One remembers the witches' scene in
Macbeth : the boiling cauldron holds about twenty-
three elements to be numbered in the making of that
dreadful charm, cooled with a baboon's blood. In
our incantation one finds a spell of no less than
ninety-nine forms, some of which are :
" Spell with the egg of a strangled hen,
Spell with the rope of a hanged man,
Spell with the claw of a blind rat,
Spell with a dead man's hand,
Spell with the skin of a snake,
Spell with the dust of a grave,
Spell with the hair of the dead,
Spell with the brains of a magpie," etc.
The invocation then is taken up again in a renewed

[25]
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THE MOON
and last appeal, not devoid of a quaint warmth of
feeling :
" 0 luminous moon, luminous moon, come and take away
the spell and the desolation, and the hatred from the world,
and from my house, and from my table, and from my garden,
and from my vineyard, and from my craft, and from my trade,
and from my purse, and drive it away to wild mountains and
forests ; and us and our children and those who shall be born
unto us hereafter, leave us clean and pure like refined gold
and like the sun that shines brilliantly in the skies ! "
FOUNTAIN.
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III
THE PAPARUDE AND KALOJAN
THERE exists an old custom known under the

name of Kalojan, spelt in Roumanian Caloian, which
is mentioned in a few lines by Sir James Frazer.
The author of The Golden Bough knew it only from
allusions made by occasional travellers in Roumania ;
therefore he was unable to give it that full significance
which no doubt it deserves. He ranges the Kalojan
among other usual practices for making rain, based
upon sympathetic magic. It will be seen to what
extent this might be granted. First, let me say
that, for the obvious purpose of procuring rain, one
finds in Roumania another widespread custom
I mean the Paparude.
In time of drought, a girl, usually a gipsy, being
stripped of her clothes, and then dressed only in
leaves, weeds and flowers, goes through the village.
At each doorway people drench her with water,
while she dances and singstogether with a whole
escort of otherssuch songs as are purported to
bring down the much-needed rain :
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ii Paparuda-ruda,
Come and wet us,
That rain may fall,
With water pails:
To make the corn grow
As high as the hedges,
To increase the crop
And fill up the barns."
Among the Roumanians of Macedonia the
custom is identical, except for the version of the
song which, being shorter and less known, I give
also in the original :
" Pirpiruna,
Saraduna,
Da ploaie, da,
S'creasca agrale,
AgrAle Viiile,
Ierghile slivAzile ! "
Translation :
"Pirpiruna, saraduna, give rain, give, for the fields
to growthe fields and the vines, the grass and the
meadows !"
The Vlach name for Paparuda is Pirpiruna ; hence

the expression : " S'feace pirpiruna," he or she was
made Pirpiruna, used for someone who has been
thoroughly soaked in the rain. The word means a
poppy, and I am at a loss to account for the connec-
[ z8 ]
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CHRISTMAS CUSTOMS PLAY REPRESENTED AT THE NATIONAL THEATRE OF CERNAUTZI, BUKOVINA.
(See pages 5-14 )
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tion with this particular flower ; but a hint of interest
might be gathered from Zagor, a district of Epirus,
where the poppy is considered essential in the adorn-
ment of the Pirpiruna. The term in Greek being
also Trep7repotiva, a diminutive from Treprepta, John
Lawson propounded a Greek derivation.' In my
judgment he has lost sight of the fact that the
custom is not to be met with in Greece or in the
Greek Islands ; therefore it is more likely that the
Greeks borrowed it from other people living in
Thessaly, Macedonia, Epirus, and even Dalmatia.
In some of these places the principal role of the
Paparuda is taken by a young man, this resembling
the practice in India, where a boy is clad in green
and hailed as the King of Rain.2
Now, in contrast to the Paparuda, which is
generally observed at any time of drought, the
Kalojan has a fixed date, and thus presents the
character of a ritual. On the Monday before the
Assumption groups of maidens make from clay the
figure of a youth, which they place in a small coffin.
A pall is thrown over it, and flowers and various
aromatic plants such as basil, mint and so forth by
way of embellishment. Then they slowly raise the
1 Modern Greek Folklore, p. 24, Cambridge, Igio.
2 The Golden Bough, Vol. I, p. 275.
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coffinone of the girls personifying the priest,
another the deacon, a third carrying the flag of
mourning, exactly as is done at a real funeral ; and
thus, with loud singing, with tears, with burning
of incense and lighted candles, they go in procession
to a secluded spot under poplars or under thorn
bushes, where they bury the Kalojan. On the
third day, at dawn, the girls meet again and proceed
to unearth the youth of clay, singing a melancholy
strain of lament for him as they did before :
" Jan, Kalojan,
As our tears drop,
May the rain drop
Night and day
To fill the ditches
And all the grass."
or
" Jan, Kalojan,
Go to Heaven,
Open the gates
And let loose the rains
To run down like streams
Night and day
For the crops to grow !"
One would easily deduce from this that Kalojan

is nothing but a rain charm ; however, there is
another version of the song which, being the one
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-
o A
N.,
KALOJAN.
(See page 29)
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most used, throws quite a different light on the
matter. It runs thusI give the Roumanian
text first :
LL
Coloiene, Iene,
Ma-ta te-a carat
Prin *urea deasa
Cu inima arsa,
Prin p'adurea rara.
Cu inima-amara.
Iene, Caloiene,
Ma-ta ca to plange
Cu lacrami de sange !"
Translation :
" Jan, Kalojan,
Your mother sought you,
Broken-hearted,
Through deep woods
And through the glades;
Jan, Kalojan,
With burning tears
Your mother weeps for you I "
In order to realise the true meaning of the song,

one has to bear in mind what happens to Kalojan
before as well as after his burial, because the cere-
mony does not end there. Once unearthed, he is
borne away further and thrown into running water
or a well. Then all the company who lamented him
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return to one of the village inns and feast and dance
together, proclaiming with joy that Kalojan is not
dead, Kalojan has risen from the grave I
Looking carefully into all the features of this
custom, does not one recognise that this Kalojan
is the same characteristic figure of the ancient
world whose death and resurrection symbolised
the decay and revival of nature itself ? One
remembers the words of Ezekiel in the Bible :
" Then he brought me to the door of the gate of the
Lord's house which was towards the north ; and
behold, there sat the women weeping for Tammuz."
No doubt this was a deity foreign to the House of
Judah, brought over from Babylon, and whether
called Tammuz or Attis, Osiris or Adonis, he was
always represented as the divine lover of a goddess
and worshipped everywhere in the likeness of an
image, after which people used to mourn and rejoice.
Of course, the rite differed in detail from place to
place ; and were one to ask of which exactly among
these gods our Kalojan is a direct descendant, one
could hardly answer. For in course of time such a
medley of pagan influences grew up which are
somewhat reflected in the various monuments found
in Roumania as a result of excavations. Side by
side with clay idols of Aphrodite in the Bucharest
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HEAD OF HELios.
Dobruija Excavations.
(See page 32.)
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Museum one would see two marble bas-reliefs of
the Persian sun-god Mithras and the typical rustic
deity of the Romans, Sylvanus, and also a statue
in marble of Isis.
Take the song of Kalojan. There is mention of a
mother who runs through the woods wailing for the
lost youth. And she is none other than the great
earth-goddess Cybele, looked upon by the Phrygians
as both mother and spouse of the beautiful Attis.
In other points the festival of Kalojan resembles that
of old Osiris. The Egyptians believed him to
be a man-god whom his brother, through a wicked
device, contrived to murder, scattering his body
into forty pieces. But his faithful sister, deeply
sorrowing, went in search of these ; one by one
she gathered the limbs, put them together and
imparted new life to Osiris. Such stories of the
divine couplethe fatal quest of Isis, the finding of
the dismembered body, the joy over its resurrection,
all were dramatically enacted every year at the
religious centres of Egypt. So far, we know that
an image of Osiris was made of earth, put into a
wooden coffin and carried to the grave. Later
accounts, such as that given by Theocritus of
the festival in Alexandria, strongly influenced
by Greeks to the extent of replacing Osiris and
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Isis by Adonis and Aphrodite, tell us of two effigies
representing the divine pair, whose sacred union
was celebrated on one day, and on the following
morning one of the effigies, that of " the thrice-
beloved Adonis, beloved even in the nether world,"
in the very words of Theocritus :
O TptOtAvros. "A8covtg i3 ici)v 'Ax4povTt (PEI:Tat,
was borne by lamenting women and cast into the
sea.
All these various elements are found exactly in
the description I gave of our custom, to which I
have to add that in some parts of Roumania, after
having been unearthed, the Kalojan is torn up
into many pieces and thrown into a river or well ;
in other parts two figures of clay are moulded, just
as was done in Alexandria, one of which is com-
mitted to the waters, whilst the company of maidens
cry with joy :
" The father of Sun is dead and the mother of Rain is
risen from the dead ! "
This last feature dates, I think, from a later period,
when Osiris came to symbolise death and Isis life.
I pass on now to the derivation of the name which
has puzzled many a philologist. Why Kalojan ?
The Tammuz of Babylon comes from an older
form, Dumuzi, or more fully Dumuzi-absu, which
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means " True son of the waters " ; on the other
hand, an inscription found at the temple of Phi le
an inscription on a picture representing the dead
Osirisreads as follows :
" This is the form of him one may not name, Osiris of
the mysteries, who springs from the returning waters." 1
These two instances show that from the very
beginning our god-lover had, and continued later
to have, a direct connection with water. On the
advent of Christianity that same god, be he Tammuz,
Adonis, Attis or Osiris, as well as his ritual, was
still in great favour among the people ; and the
fathers of the Church thought better to deal with
him as they did with other pagan deities ; namely,
to replace them with similar figures of Christianity :
so that Adonis became John, St. John, whose very
surname of Baptist speaks enough for his relation
to water. To this day women in Western Russia
on the day of this same saint make a figure from
branches, grass and herbs to represent John the
Baptist, which they throw into the water.2 There-
fore I hold that Kalojan is the Christian equivalent
of Adonis, coming from Kalo-Jan. By way of
analogy, John, the eldest son of Alexios IV and
1 See Jane Ellen Harrison's Ancient Art and Ritual,
Home University Library, pp. 17-19.
2 The Golden Bough, Vol. I, p. 277.
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partner of the throne of Trebizond, was called
" Kalojan," on account of his handsome appear-
ance.' For the same reason, I suppose, the sur-
name of " Kalojan " was given to the Vlacho-
Bulgarian Emperor Johannitza.
Thus, both in details of the practice and in
derivation of the name, Kalojan is a direct survival
of the ancient Adonis ritual.
1 Trebizond, by W. Miller, p. 81, London, 1926.
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IV
THE HOBBY-HORSE DANCE
ONE has, no doubt, heard of the old English

dance called the Hobby-horse. Once widespread,
it had already begun to fall into oblivion in Shake-
speare's time, as Hamlet testifies :
" For 0, for 0, the hobby-horse is forgot."
But in Roumania the dance continues in its
original form even to this day, being closely con-
nected with the feast of All Souls. I shall first
deal with the latter ; seeing that the feast not only
throws light on the meaning of the dance, but is
also in itself of high importance. For the All
Souls' festival involves the people's conception of
life-beyonda conception too deeply hidden in the
affections to be reached by cold reasoning and
queries. The seeker has to look for a solemn, rare
occasion when it may burst upon him unexpectedly,
as happened to myself once.
One summer afternoon, whilst journeying along
the highlands of Macedonia, I beheld through the
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trembling sunlight men and horses gathered round
a certain spot. I inquired of a muleteer who passed
me running :
" What is it ? "
" A dead traveller. I am taking the news to
the monastery."
I then drew near to see. Among high ferns lay
the deada man with a fair, large face. His lips
were tightly closed ; the upper lip, slightly turned
in, gave him a bewildered expression, as if he were
asking : " What has come to me ? " The men
standing around began to tell how it happened.
While on the road they saw someone making desper-
ate signs with both hands. They hastened up.
But when they arrived it was all over. Then they
shut his eyes and turned his face eastwards. One
of them added, pointing to the dead : " Strong he
was a while ago and full of plans. . . . As for
death, no thought. But who thinks of death ? "
The others gave no answer. Over their faces
there passed a dark shadow of perplexity.
" As if he never existed I " remarked one. " And
who knows, had he any pain ? There are people
who suffer. . . ."
" Yes, in case of illness. But when death takes
one suddenly, one opens his mouth and out the
soul flies."
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BRONZE WORKS.
Dobrudja Excavations.
(See page 32.)
www.dacoromanica.ro
" I have often wondered," began a rather shy
man, who had hitherto kept silent, " what might
the soul be ? A breath ? And does it feel ?
They say it meets other souls gone before, and
they recognise each other. But how is one to
know ? Whoever has come back to tell ? Besides,
where do they dwell, since people have died and
died for ages ? "
" You think there is little space up there 1 "
observed another, raising his hand towards the sky.
The sun was just setting, and tinged with crimson
the clouds that seemed to shape a giant entrance to
the world of mysteries. Beneath the clouds num-
bers of birds came into sight. One of them
detached itself from the others, flew nearer and,
in silence, scarce moving its wings, circled above us.
An old man whispered : " It might be the soul of
the dead. Thus they hover till they pass the
bridges."
The last sentence is reminiscent of the ancient
idea of the soul's taking on the form of a bird, in
which guise it wanders about and visits the places
known to it in life. Naturally, it haunts first its
own dwelling. Therefore, for three consecutive
nights after burial the peasants are careful to put
out for the deceased, on the very spot in the house
where his body was laid, a vessel of wine or water
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and a cake. This fact points to the folk-belief in
the preservation of the soul's individuality and, to a
certain extent, of its continued earthly needs. What
this belief is may be dimly apprehended from the
following Roumanian folk-story.
Death once came to take away a man who was
very unwilling to go, and who begged successfully
to be allowed to live a little longer. After a year
Death appeared again, and now drove him forcibly
away through the woods. He wept bitterly all the
time and all the way. He looked at himself and
said : " Oh, poor body, how I have nourished you,
bathed you and clothed you, that I should now
perish ! " Thus he grieved ; for outside the body,
he thought, the soul could never live. They
arrived thus at a great water. Here the man begged
to drink once more. But, as he stooped, Death
took his soul away. The body fell down in the
mud.
It happened some time after that the soul was
taken back to the same water by a guardian angel.
The angel asked :
" Do you recognise what is there on the other
bank ? "
" No, my angel, it looks like a corpse."
" Let us cross ! "
When they drew near, the soul was in mighty fear
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of its own former body. The angel said : " Now,
enter it again I " The soul then began to cry
aloud, praying not to be put back in the corpse.
" Oh, how foolish I was, wishing to remain in it !
How ugly it is, and how free am I now 1 "
The water in this tale reminds us of Acheron.
Other pagan suggestions, coloured mostly by an
Orphic influence, can be gathered from the funeral
dirges. It is still the custom in Roumania for
women to dress in black and chant beautiful im-
provised lamentations. One by one they approach
the dead ; seizing the occasion, they advise him as
to the right path to take ; they tell him of such
things as a cool fountain under a great apple-tree
in blossom, where he may enjoy resting a little
and refreshing himself with a drink ; for very
hard and far-distant is the journey to the other
world. Several sky-zones stretch out one above the
other with their bridges and toll-houses, where
malignant demons lie in wait to snatch the dead
from his course.
But once arrived at his blessed, last abode, he
does not altogether sever connection with those left
behind. He returns sometimes in the shape of a
snake or, according to a still stranger belief of the
Macedonian Roumanians, in the guise of a spider.
Both these creatures are looked upon by the folk
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with great awe. One would prefer to see the dead
as his own self. In spite of the oft-repeated saying :
" The dead with dead and the living with living,"
when the departed is accompanied in solemn pro-
cession to the churchyard, the mourners bid him
be mindful, not of the running rivers perishing in
the sea, but of the sun that goes down and rises
again. They even point out the most propitious
days for such visits. Some of the dirges expressly
say :
" Come, dear one, at All Souls; for the day is then long
And you have time to commune with us."
The feast of All Souls falls on Whit Sunday, when
people go to the cemetery after the church service.
It is both touching and picturesque to catch a
glimpse of the scene on such an occasion : groups
of women in black amidst clouds of burning incense
and lighted candles ; rich tributes of flowers,
especially roses, laid on the graves ; offerings of
drink and food, chiefly a dish of boiled grain. In
Macedonia they also bring a special cake covered
with walnut and rose leaves.
But the most characteristic feature among the
Roumanians everywhere is the display of variously
shaped rose-bedecked pots. These take us back
to the Roman Rosaliahence our own Rusalii.
This term, I suppose, has passed from the Latin-
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VILLAGE CEMETERY.
(See page 42 )
HOBBY-HORSE DANCERS AT A FAIR.

(See page 47)
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speaking element in the Balkans to the Byzantines
and to the Slays. It does not follow, however,
that the festival itself originated in Italy and nowhere
else. For to the present day certain regions of
Thrace are famous for the growing of roses ; and
when they are in flower it is an enchanting experience
to journey down the Struma Valley towards ancient
Philippi. Great rose-gardens lie on all sides, as
they did once in bygone times, when the perfumed
beauty of the rose, no doubt, predominated in the
Orphic mysteries, with their central belief in
immortality. The rose-festival has even left a
number of tokens on the funeral monuments.
As more significant I would mention a Greek
inscription of A.D. 138, discovered in Histria,
Dobrudjaa region famous for the immigration of
Thracian colonists, called Bessi, who may have
brought hither the Dionysian rites. It tells of one
Artemidor, donor of a thousand dinars to the council
of elders in Histria " for the adorning wih roses "
(as. 13o8tcri.uip).1 For this purpose special, richly-
endowed associations were also formed, which are
again testified to by numerous inscriptions, all
showing how highly the Rosalia were esteemed in
the eyes of the people. The rose was a fitting
symbol of life's brief span ; and, as in its fading the
1 Vasile Parvan, Tara Noastrii, p. ioi, Bucureti, 1923.
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rose kept some of its perfume, so did the remem-
brance of the departed endure. They were invoked
and prayed to share with the living the food and
drink brought overa strange repast this of life
and death together, considered as two aspects of the
same endless, unknown process.
Identical scenes are witnessed nowadays at our
own feast of All Souls, savouring often of too much
jollity. But we have to remember that the revels
of Dionysos were also held at the Greek zinthesteria
essentially a festival of the Dead. This feast lasted
for three days, one of which was considered unlucky ;
for then it was that ghosts went about, and by way
of protection people used to chew buckthorn.'
This side of the zinthesteria is also reflected in
our Rusalii. A number of malignant spirits, bear-
ing the name of the feast itself, haunt the place,
ready for every kind of mischief. They are generally
figured in the shape of three female divinities.
Once upon a time, so runs a rather simple tradition,
they were three damsels at the court of Alexander
the Great. When the Emperor gave his horse
drink from a bottle of living water, they drank
too ; and so they became immortal. Another
tradition says that deep resentment embitters them
1 See Jane E. Harrison's Prolegomena to the Study of Greek
Religion, pp. 39-40, Cambridge, 1922.
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against mankind ; for, when maidens in their
former life, they were not paid sufficient attention.
And thus to-day at the Rusalii they wander about,
chiefly round the fountains and the crossways,
raise whirlwinds and sing to lure folk to their doom.
HOBBY-HORSE.
As protection against them, people are warned to

hang on the doors or windows a bunch of worm-
wood or to wear it in the belt. Some other plants
can also be used with good effect, such as lovage
and hedge-hyssop.
But the highest magic power is possessed by the
Hobby-horse dancers, whose chief characteristic
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feature is being grouped into a sort of brotherhood
under a leader to initiate them. As to how this
initiation is managed, I will mention two of the most
important proceedings.
At early morning the dancers meet out in the
country at a certain mound at the crossways. Here
the leader raises his sword and crosses it with the
club of one of the dancers. Under sword and club
a sculptured horse's head is shown. Then, all
together, to a special bagpipe tune known as the
sunrise-song, they dance three times round the
mound. In some parts of Roumania the dancers
meet at nine boundaries, and fill a jug with. water
from nine springs, halting at the far side of the
crossways. The leader then ties a garter of bells
to the ankles of each dancer. Then in a circle,
whilst the leader sprinkles them with the water
brought from the nine springs, they all pray to a
certain Irodeasa, supposed to be their guardian
goddess. Afterwards, during the dancing, when-
ever they are offered drinks, they empty their first
glass out as a libation to this Irodeasa.
In both methods of initiation there are a number
of striking elements, of which let me mention for the
present only that of the flag-making. The dancers
cut a pole from the woods, and decorate its upper
end with multi-coloured ribbons ; they also attach
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to it a handkerchief with wormwood and garlic
sure charms against evil spirits. That the flag
itself has a magic purpose is seen by the fact that
it is thrown into the river after the nine-day's
dance.
When all preparations are completed, the dancers
go round the streets from village to village, all
attired in their best national costumes, with such
additional adornments as laces, flowers and many
bells. They must always be in odd numbers, from
seven to eleven, and include the following principal
characters, besides the leader :
(I) A Flag-bearer. (2) A Dumb Dancer, so
called on account of his keeping silent during the
dance. He often wears a mask, and dresses in
accordance with his part, corresponding to that of
the English Fool. He also carries, like the leader,
a sword or a whip, which he lashes round the
dancers to scare away the spirits. (3) A Hobby-
horsethat is, a wooden horse's head borne by a
dancer and entirely or partly hidden under a kind
of framework. Rarely seen to-day, it must once
have been general.
In addition, we learn from old records that
another animal, usually a goat, was likewise repre-
sented, a relic of which is still to be observed in the
form of a hare-skin fixed on a piece of wood to
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resemble a beak, and displayed by one of the men.
As for the dancing itself, the strangeness of the
figures, which are now and again accompanied by a
brandishing of clubs, is really surprising.
At a certain point the dance turns into acting.
The leader touches with his sword one of the dancers,
who at once feigns dizziness and falls down. All
then gather round and exchange remarks to show
that the dancer is dead. Accordingly they take
him away a short distance, one or two performers
being left behind to lament him ; and the dancing
resumes when the supposed dead man comes to
life again.
The last scene here carries us back to that world-
wide god of death and resurrectionin our case no
other than Dionysos. It is well known that this god
was worshipped by various associations, which,
under the name of Kouretes in Crete, Korybantes
in Phrygia, Salii in Italy, Satyrs in Thrace, con-
stituted special colleges endowed with magical
virtues. They enacted, mostly in pantomimic
dances, the life-story of their hero, who, being
connected with the idea of fertility, had passed
through many and various shapes, from a humble
tree-spirit to the splendour of a sun-god. It is
to this latter that we found our dancers devoting
their initial dance, as the Korybantes once did, and
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GIPSY DANCER AND FLOWER-SELLER.
From a painting by Luchian.
(See page 27.)
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were for this reason called by Strabo " Children of
the Sun."
Dionysos was also closely associated with a
mother-goddess, who is represented on many vases
as rising out of an earthen mound. I think it is her
own shadow that lingers still in the Roumanian
Irodeasa, mentioned above, together with sprinkling
of water, libations, dancing in a circle round a
mound at cross-ways ; for all of these particulars
entered into the ancient Dionysian religious
practices. To the water-rite particularly Euripides
refers in the Bacch,e, which I mention for the reason
that it so vividly reflects a form of worship prac-
tised by womenthe Maenads. In the Descriptio
Moldavi,e,a book of the Roumanian historian
Cantemir of the eighteenth century, moreover,
the following passage refers to the Hobby-horse
dancers :
" They dress like women ; on their heads they put crowns
of wormwood leaves and flowers. They speak in a thin,
feminine voice and, in order not to be recognised, cover their
faces with white veils."
Now what was the meaning of all this ? Were

the dancers, without being aware of it, trying to
impersonate the ancient Maenads, as to-day they
impersonate the male followers of Dionysosthe
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half-horse, half-men Satyrs ? There is certainly no
better explanation. Out of the motley crowd
of Dionysian worshippers it is the Satyr-element
that has prevailed in our own survival, and left
behind, as it were a symbol, the hobby-horse,
and its very name as well, derived as it is from the
Roumanian ad-us, little horse, and the suffix -ar
calusar.
This contention of mine becomes clearer when
compared with the same custom as practised by the
Roumanians of Macedonia. Here it occurs in
winter, between New Year's Day and Epiphany, a
period dreaded for the appearance of Callicanzari
monstrous creatures, vaguely conceived as half-men,
half-beasts, no doubt the counterpart of the Rusalii
in Roumania. There is a complete similarity of
namealuguciar, the Roumanian for " little horse,"
being replaced by the Greek alogo with the
diminutive uciu.
The organisation of the Hobby-horse dancers
consists of small or large bodies, never in even
numbers. Each member goes about with a club
or a wooden sword, except two of them who carry
real swordsthe leader and the so-called bubuiar.
May not this last term come from babutzus, the
Byzantine babutzicarius, meaning " mad," " fool " ?
My interpretation would perfectly suit his part ;
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for this character wears a skin mask, a peasant
cloak and numerous bells round his waist, and
his task is to make as much noise as he possibly
can.
Other leading characters are : (4) A bridegroom.
(5) Someone in feminine attire, representing the
bride. (6) A doctor, in the sense of a primitive
magician. (7) A woman with a doll in her arms,
supposed to be her baby. (8) A man with black-
ened face. (9) A few others, masked as goats,
bears and so forth. It is clear that such disguises
are made to serve some other purpose than a
simple dance. Indeed, they go with a mumming
drama.
The man with the black face tries either to steal
the baby doll or to pay improper attentions to the
bride, which infuriates the bridegroom. A combat
follows. The bridegroom is killed ; and, while he
is being lamented, the doctor intervenes and brings
him back to life. There is even a more complete
version of the performance. The baby doll seems
to have something supernatural about it. Suddenly,
as in fairy tales, he grows into a young man and
wishes to get married. A bride is found for him,
and a priest also appears for the wedding, when a
quarrel ensues between the two protagonists, the
rest proceeding as above : the bridegroom is killed,
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then restored to life, and all ends happily in a merry
dance.
Here we have the ancient god of fertility in a
CALU;AR. ALLIGUCIAR, HIGHLANDS

OF MACEDONIA.
regular folk-play, which, containing all the elements

of a Dionysian ritual, has survived down the cen-
turies ; for it has always possessed magical intention
and been in keeping as well with the taste of the
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people. Both the dancing and the queer disguises
have helped them to forget themselves, taken them
away from every-day life and restrictions and brought
them closer to nature, plunging them into rapturous
joy, such as one might catch an echo of in the
beautiful lines of Euripides :
" And all the mountain felt
And worshipped with them, and the wild things knelt
And ramped and gloried, and the wilderness
Was filled with moving voices and dim stress." 1
1 Professor Gilbert Murray's translation of the Bacchee.

Since the above appeared in the Quest, I came into touch
with Percy Maylam's Hooden Horse, Canterbury, 1909.
The description in it, as well as the photographs of hobby-
horse forms used until very recently in East Kent, show
a manifest similarity and identity of origin with the
Roumanian custom.
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V
ST. JOHN'S EVE
FROM very ancient days the twenty-fourth of June,

-being the Summer Solstice, impressed the people to
the extent of celebrating it by various festivals.
These, naturally, in course of time disappeared
altogether in some countries ; in others, however,
traces of them still linger, and, though associated
with St. John the Baptist, are entirely pagan and
no doubt of a highly interesting order. I am
acquainted with many such old remnants referring
to Midsummer ; but I find them nowhere so
thoroughly upheld as amongst the retired, out-of-
the-way Roumanians in Macedonia. And, as the
latter have not yet been given due attention, I
thought that in dealing with them I might also
bring forward some suggestions towards the ex-
planation Sir James Frazer tries to arrive at in The
Golden Bough.
In order to trace back the custom I am going to
relate, I shall compare it first to the same one as
practised in Greece, the land of classical tradition.
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ST. JOHN'S EVE
A traveller, Sonnini de Magnoncourt, in his book
Voyage en Grace et en Turquie, published more than
a century ago, tells us that on St. John's Eve the
girls form themselves into parties and send a boy
to fetch water from the spring. With this water,
known as dplA__Tr vEp6because the bearer is not
allowed to speak on the waythey fill a vessel, into
which every one of them drops an apple. The vessel
is covered and left for the night in the open air.
The following day each girl takes her own apple
out of it ; and then, among other things, after
having washed her hands with the water, they go
out into the road, where the first name heard by
chance is considered as that of the future husband.
Now, this is one of the methods of divination
very usual in antiquity. It is mentioned, for in-
stance, in the Odyssey, when the hero, in a beggar's
disguise, accepts as of good omen some words
uttered in his presence :
cis etp' gOav, xciipev U KAE7)5Ovt 8ios- '05vacials.
" So they spoke, and goodly Odysseus gladdened in

the presage." 1
This very term of KAnadni, except for the shifting
of the accent in KA7j8ova, is applied in Greece to
the custom of St. John's Day, which, though no
1 Book XVIII, verse 117.
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ST. JOHN'S EVE
longer observed as described by the French traveller,
still preserves a connection with the old superstitious
way of fortune-telling. Nowadays, instead of apples,
the girls throw into the vessel such tokens as rings,
beads and the like. Afterwards, when the vessel is
uncovered, the boy who fetched the water or one
of the girls plunges the hand in and, drawing out
the tokens one by one, recites or sings various
couplets which have the power to predict every
girl her good or bad luck.'
The ceremony of the KA0ova is limited in Greece
to family circles, and is more or less considered as
an amusing game. But it is different with the
Roumanians in Macedonia ; here it assumes the
form of a high festival, and there enter into it
some new features which give the whole proceedings
another character and significance. I shall describe
the celebration as I often witnessed it myself in the
village of Clisura, perched up on the top of a
mountain, whence on clear days one can dimly see
in the distance the abode of ancient gods.
On St. John's Eve the maidens as well as the
young married women make up numerous parties
and go out in search of a certain creeping plant.
Whilst the woods and the meadows resound with
1 Described at length by G. F. Abbot in his Macedonian
Folklore, pp. 53-7, Cambridge, 1903.
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'!":1
P 4
,
. t
449Yth
k. dt
LAC
f
,
_43
SHEPHERD.
From a painting by II Strimbulescu.
(See page 63 )
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ST. JOHN'S EVE
their singing, each one puts a mark on that par-
ticular plant when foundties it with a bit of red
woollen thread and hides it under green leaves.
At the same time they gather garlands of such
flowers as sweet-scented melilot, amaranth and the
aromatic blossoms of a plant. Returning home
with these, they begin to prepare what is called the
galeata. It consists of a brazen jug, beautifully
ornamented with flowers, into which every one of
them throws a trinket, mostly of silver coins. Now
a procession is formed and the galeata is taken out ;
at the moment of starting the girls sing together a
song :
" Come along, my friends,
To visit the fountains . . ."
which is soon changed for another one, used when

a bride leaves the house of her parents :
" Look how beautiful she is, white and rosy like a high-
born lady; look at her breast, how she seems like a chosen
ram. . . ."
The simile here might not appeal to many of my

readers ; but, I assure them, the silky whiteness of
a ram on the high pastures is a thing worth being
compared with.
As they pace on there follows a song which is
special to the occasion :
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ST. JOHN'S EVE
" Where are you off, so bedecked, my little one, with
your bridal veil and your gold-threads on, and your fingers
full of rings, my beautiful one ? "
" I go to my nine brothersnine unmarried brothers . . ."
At the fountain a little boy, after throwing

a coin into the trough, takes some water in the
jug and throws it away three times, just as is
customary at a wedding, whilst the others sing
around :
" Fill, sister; empty, brother, to give water to the

thirsty one. . . ."
They proceed to three fountains in turn, repeating

the same performance, and return from the third
one with water in the jug. Then comes the fasten-
ing of the g.21" leata with a padlock and putting it to
sleep, as they say. Next morning, before sunrise,
the girls and young women, dressed in their best
attire, go to fetch the plants which were marked
and hidden on the previous evening. They twine
these round their heads, being very good for the
hair ; hence the name cusit4 braid, of that plant.
Afterwards they walk through the village from house
to house with songs and merrimentevery ga7eata
being guarded by young men with drawn wooden
swords, since there is manifest antagonism among
the groups. In the evening they go through the
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ST. JOHN'S EVE
process of taking out the trinkets as we have seen
it done by the Greeks.i
Except for the common point of divination pro-
vided in this last part, one meets throughout the
ceremony with a number of elements which need
elucidation.
First, the gathering of plants. It is a widespread
superstition that on the twenty-fourth of June
certain plants acquire a magic or supernatural power.
These plants, of course, vary in different places.
Thus, in France, most particularly associated with
St. John's Day is the wormwood, to which the old
French saying refers : " Herbe Saint Jean, to portes
bonne encontre." In Germany, the St. John's wort
is considered efficacious against evil spirits, some-
times being termed on this account " Fuga Dae-
monum." People in various parts of Spain used to
collect vervain on St. John's Day ; this and other
flowers, Lockhart tells us in his Spanish Ballads,
served to encircle the heads of young women early
in the morning, and from the duration of the dew
upon them, according as it remained a long or a
short time, they could augur the constancy of their
lovers.
1 A description of the custom, as practised in Samarina,
in the Pindus region, is given by A. J. B. Wace and M. S.
Thompson in Nomads of the Balkans, pp. 13o-2, London,
1914.
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ST. JOHN'S EVE
Next, we have the coin thrown into the water
and the locking of the galeata. Both become clearer
if one considers what is done at a real wedding.
On the Saturday night previous to the marriage
ceremony the bride and bridegroom are conducted
in two separate processions to the fountains. The
parties might meet on the way, but each carries
out its own task. On either side there is dancing
and music ; and, while the strong notes of the
clarionet and the gentler ones of the lute and the
deep sounds of the drum mingle with the uninter-
rupted songs, a jug is filled with water, after some
coins have been cast infilled and emptied three
times at three successive fountains. The jug is
then carried home and kept under padlock till
Tuesday night, when the wedded pair come together.
I inquired of the women why they do this. "You
see," they answered smilingly, " we lock up the
spells "in the Vlach dialect " inclidem ama'ghili "
from the Greek payeia, magic, which, of course,
can endanger and prevent any wedlock joys.
I mentioned above a little boy in relation to the
fountain procedure. He goes by the name of fartat,
and his is an interesting part, which I remember to
have played once myself. Being on the man's side,
I was supposed to help him somehow even in his
courting. While still affianced he could not visit
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ST. JOHN'S EVE
his dear one aloneI had to be present myself. I
felt now and again unconsciously embarrassed ; but
grown-up people, who knew things better, whis-
pered into my ears not to heed those two much,
and try to amuse myself by looking out of the
windows, by watching the flies around or by stealing
out of the room for one or two minutes. In some
of the nomad sections of the Roumanians it is this
boy who goes with the whole singing company to
fill the jug at the fountains. One of his essentials
is to have both parents alive. In this as well as in
other characteristics he bears a resemblance to what
many literary, pictorial and sculptural monuments
of yore represent to us in the guise of Eros. Such,
for instance, as that picturesque, beautifully sound-
ing description of Aristophanes in the Birds :
O 8' et,utOctAis- "Epws
xpvcrenrrepos' 7)vlas
crave wctAciPrOvovs',
ZnvOs" mipoxos. yciluov
-rijs' T' E738attto vos "Hpas%
The first epithet, ditMaA7js', has the meaning of

one deprived of neither his father nor his mother ;
the translation then would be :
" And, happy in having both his parents living, the
golden-winged Eros held firm the reins and drove the
wedding-car of Zeus and blessed Hera."
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ST. JOHN'S EVE
On a sarcophagus in the Villa Borghese the same
Eros figures as a guide of Hades, carrying down
his ravished bride, the daughter of Demeter ; on a
cameo in the Vatican, Dionysos drives away with
his Ariadne in a brightly decked chariot, on the
top of which stands Eros ; and in many a vase-
painting one again finds Eros showing a beautiful
youth the way towards the goddess of the under-
world.' All these in one form or another, bringing
together Hades and Kore, Dionysos and Ariadne,
Persephone and Adonis, embody the old and deeply
significant conception of a mystical union between
mortals and deities, which was the foundation of
the Eleusinian and Orphic mysteries. And I recall
them because they have a direct bearing upon my
subject. Indeed, you did not fail to notice how
from beginning to end the ceremony I have described
is strikingly identical with that of a regular wedding.
The flower-crowned galeata stands for the bride ;
nay, in some Roumanian villages a girl is dressed
up as a bride and it is she who carries the ga leata
and goes through all the details of a wedding
ceremony. To whom is she married ? What is
he like, this supposed but unseen bridegroom ? In
the song I mentioned, when the question is put to
her :
1 See J. C. Lawson, Modern Greek Folklore and _Indent
Greek Religion, pp. 597-602, Cambridge, 19 r 0.
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ST. JOHN'S EVE
" Where are you off so bedecked, my little one ? . . ."
the answer comes :
" I go to my nine brothersnine unmarried brothers."
The words reach us like a whisper from a bygone,
veiled past ; those nine figures belong to a shadowy
world of folk-tales and ballads. One more reason
to ask whether there is not in the whole marriage
here a symbolical sense attached to other times.
We know that on Midsummer Day a rather rough
festival was held by the people in Rome to celebrate
the love between the goddess Fortuna and the
legendary King Servius Tullius ; 1 on the other
hand, in Athens the wedding of the Archon's wife
to Dionysos, the wine god, was solemnised every
year in the latter's temple. The doctrine under-
lying these and other similar practices and con-
necting them with the Eleusinian rites still survives
in Roumanian popular tradition, as revealed in the
ballad of Mioritza. A little black ewethe pet of
the flockdiscloses to her master the secret that
two of his associates have planned to kill him.
The shepherd does not seem to take any measures
to prevent the murder. In a mood of resigned
1 Ovid, Fasti, VI, 775-84. The same character is
somehow preserved in Avdela, a village of the Pindus.
Men assemble here in the market-place, one of them is
travestied into a bride, made to ride a donkey, whilst the
others follow with shouts, merriment and rifle-shots.
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ST. JOHN'S EVE
fatalism he only gives instructions as to what is to
be done if he dies. He wishes to be buried by the
sheep-fold, and near to his head are to be placed
his three flutesthe flute of birch-wood, the flute
of bone and the flute of reedsso that the wind
blowing through them may strike forth sweet
melodies. Further, he does not want it to be
known that he was murdered, and so he says to
his little dark ewe :
" But thou, do not tell them of the murder; tell them
only that I have married a beautiful Queen, the bride of the
world ; that at my wedding a star fell. The sun and the
moon held my chaplets. For wedding guests I had the fir
trees and the aspens. For priests, the lofty mountains ; the
birds for minstrelsthousands of birds, and the stars for
torches ! "
" Iar to de omor
Sa nu le spui lor.
Sa le spui curat,
Ca m'am insurat
Cu-o mandna craiasa,
A lumii mireasa ;
Ca la nunta mea
A cazut o stea;
Soarele si luna
Mi-au tinut cununa.
Brazi si paltinasi
I-am avut nuntasi ;
Preoti, muntii marl
Pasari, lautari,
Pasarele mii
i stele faclii I"
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FAIRY-TALE.
From a painting by Kimon Loghi.
(See page 7o.)
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ST. JOHN'S EVE
Both in richness of imagery and in the choice of
words making for exquisite cadences, these lines
are among the highest of literary folk-creations.
One catches in them something far beyond a
fictitious storythe innermost meaning of the
Eleusinian legends. The mystic nuptials, in which
all nature takes a share, are but those of death's
goddess with Adonis, himself a youth of lonely
pastures, very beautiful withal, just as our ballad
hero, about whom we are told that his face is white
as the " froth of milk," his hair dark as " the plume
of the raven," his eyes " like blackberries."
What is given here in the form of narrative verse
is dramatically enacted in the festival of galeata.
The ballad represents the wedded union of a goddess
with a mortal youth ; the festival that of a mortal
maiden with a god, be he Dionysos or any of the
other deities who have not yet lost touch with us.
They might have changed their names, but not
their essential nature. With unimpeached desires
they continue to love, and are happy to be loved by,
human creatures whose ways they haunt. In the
deep green woods, near the cool fountains, in the
grassy valleys and meadows, gods and goddesses
still appear and sing, and dance and keep long
revels. Their world is closed to ours, a boundary
line hardly exists, and we can cross over and approach
them ; but, of course, let us proceed in the spirit
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ST. JOHN'S EVE
of old, with more of a simple impulse than of
bookish wisdom. As reason and cold argument
could not avail one here, I shall try, by means of
direct intuition, to give a glimpse of that world, as
I caught it myself when wandering with my fellow-
drivers.
We had halted on the edge of one of the primaeval
forests the other side of the Saraghiol plain, in
Macedonia. On the hill-tops here the nights are
cold, and, although the drivers had lit a fire, I
trembled scared at this hour of silence at the
unusual appearances of things, while many unin-
telligible whispers floated through the night from
the streams, from the foliage, from all nature sunk
to rest. The sky was absolutely serene. The light
overhead was like a white sheet, against which the
shadows of the mountains were scarcely visible.
" Look there," said the voice of a driver, " on
the hill where many lights burn and flicker. That
is Clisura. Here is Mount Vitchu, and the rock
lower down is Kiatra Schuligan. One might take
it for a vulture, mightn't one ? A large, large
bird . . ."
" It resembles more a giant lying in ambush."
" It is a giant. Many people are frightened
when they see it in the distance. More especially
because below the rock there opens up an abyss,
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ST. JOHN'S EVE
black and deep, whence can be heard all through
the night now bursts of merriment, now laughter
drowned in sobs, terrible roars and sometimes the
sound of pipes and the beating of drumsyes, yes,
the beating of innumerable drums."
" How marvellous ! "
" And once, one night, what did not my eyes
see I From the depths there seemed to come forth
monsters : one, two, threenumbers glided past,
with long necks outstretched, from which hung
bells that went glunguru-glunguru, glunguru-glun-
guru, as the beasts stumbled along. . . . What do
you think ? They were Callicanzari."
The driver ceased talking and seated himself by
his companions. I saw they were all tired, and
lay upon the ground, their sun-burned faces looking
like bronze in the light of the flames. They
exchanged a few words, sighing, and again a long
silence followed, until one said :
" Do you notice it ? This forest makes one
drowsy, as though one might sleep and never wake
again."
Indeed, the dark, damp thicket seemed to exhale
something heavy into the air, a narcotic scent of
plants, of bitter weeds.
" See well to it," added the driver, " that we do
not fall asleep and let the fire die out. God keep
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ST. JOHN'S EVE
us Much may happen, especially as we are not
yet past midnight, and when we are so near to the
Fairies' Spring."
" "What ? " I asked, surprised.
" Do you not know it ? A famous spring which
runs through three mouths, all of stone."
" I have heard talk of it. There is a great deal
said about it. It may be true or it may not."
" Go some time and see it. It is full of white
kerchiefs around, of coloured threads, of tresses of
hair, of coins and other things. Sick folk come
daily, women and girls and children ; they come
before sunrise, bringing gifts, with basil and sweet
cakes in their hands, they kneel and begin :
' My beautiful and white nymphs,
If I have erred
And I have distressed you . .
And the water boils. The drops splash and fall
and play and murmur. And all around grow ferns
tall and thick, and grass-like reeds ; no one treads
them down. There are many willows besides, with
small and glossy leaves, and stems of ivy, long
trails hanging among the branches and coiling like
serpents."
The driver remained lost in thought. Then,
lowering his voice :
" I know a boy who slept here ; and the fairies
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ST. JOHN'S EVE
came and wafted him into the air. A long time
the boy was borne thus, carried along as if by the
wind, with eyes closed, not seeing where he went.
And, believe me, the lad did not get off unharmed.
After some days he passed away for ever."
The surrounding silence seemed troubled. From
time to time there came cold puffs of airfrom far
away, out of the endless night, they passed by, and
then the fire would flicker ; sparks scattered around,
and the forest, with its impenetrable, mysterious
recesses, seemed alight. And yonder was the spring
and the ivy writhing like a serpent, and the fairies
I seemed to see them gliding so lightly in white
groups. One of us whispered :
" Very often they don't do any harm. They
just come out and sing."
" Yes, they sing. I heard them myself in my
young days, and what voices ! . . ."
All were listening to the old driver with attention.
Even the horses drew nearer and, while moving in
and out of the shifting firelight, I could see, as in a
dream, pairs of legs, a flame-flashed head or a
golden mane of silk.
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VI
THE SACRED MARRIAGE-I
IN the preceding pages I have tried to connect some

of the customs and superstitions relating to Mid-
summer with the ancient Eleusinian mysteries. I
shall now further pursue the subject in order to see
how far the fundamental conception of the same
mysteries enters into both the framework and the
texture of Roumanian folk-talesa limited cycle
which refers to the union of mortals with nymphs.
These latter are generally known in Roumanian
by the name of =Me. Though in many points
very similar to the Celtic fairies, they differ from
them in being always represented, not in diminutive
form, but in full stature ; therefore, to avoid con-
fusion, I call them nymphs.
Without a doubt, of all supernatural creatures
they are the most appealing to one's imagination
as well as to one's deeper impulses. People believe
in nymphs, whose fascinating ivory-white beauty
haunts any of the retired woodland springs or
fountains. I know myself of such a fountain. In
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the highlands of Macedonia near the village of
Clissura, following a path to the forest one hears
the sound of its water, hidden as it is and arched
by birch trees. It runs through three stone mouths,
and all around one sees ferns, plants with narcotic
scents, trails of ivy, while close above it there
opens a little grassy lawn. Here the nymphs hold
their revels, and are sometimes willing to bestow
upon a mortal the favour of beholding their divine
beauty. I often heard about a young shepherd
called Gcigu. He played his pipe so exquisitely
that the nymphs used to gather round and dance
and incite him with their merry voices :
" Play, GOgu, for us to dance,
The youngest nymph we'll give you ! "
Whether they kept their promise I cannot tell.
This remains but a fragment in my mind, as does
another scrap of a story. A young shepherdit
might have been the same onefell deeply in love
with the little sister of the nymphs. Night after
night he would lie in hiding to gaze on her when
she glided towards the fountain and, taking off her
fingers the jewelled rings, counted them over to
herself : " One ring, two rings, three rings . . ."
I seem to hear still the far-distant, dream-like
whisper of these words as they were uttered many
a time by my grandmother. " One ring, two rings,
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three rings . . ." Their very sound worked like
a spell to throw wide open the wonder gate of
fairyland, where to this day so many perplexingly
marvellous creatures, things and happenings throng
together that I can hardly detach myself enough to
reduce to a few simple elements the tale with which
I am here concerned.
The nymph with the rings is replaced by many
others. There is a clear pool now instead of a
fountain. And the nymphs dance on, clad in soft,
white raiment. They put off the garments, one by
one, and there for a moment they stand in their
uncovered loveliness, their rich, golden hair shining
in the moonlight, then spring into the pool. No
sooner are they out of sight bathing than the young
shepherd emerges from his hiding-place and seizes
the garments of the nymph of whom he is enamoured.
Thus did a wise woman counsel him : " Keep
watch, and if thou canst steal the garment it is sure
to get her too." The other nymphs, indeed, came
out of the pool, robed themselves, and departed ;
but what could the youngest sister do save yield to
the shepherd's embrace ? They were wedded, and
the nymph, though resigned to her fate, wistfully
sought an opportunity of slipping away to her own
free world. Now it happened once to be a great
festival, and they both went and dancedas mortals
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are used to dance. And the people who knew her
looked at each other, wondering : " Why does she
not dance the enchanting airy dances of the fairies ? "
And the nymph said : " How can I when I have
not my own raiment ? " They all longed to see
her dance, so they prevailed upon the shepherd to
give it back to her this once. But scarcely had she
laid hold of it when she soared into the air and
vanished.
This is the usual version of the tale as found
among the Vlachs in Macedonia. It has a parallel
in Roumania, under the title of Ion Buzdugan,1 and
with slight differences it is spread all over the
Balkans.
It is to be observed that the hero is described in
most of the variants as a handsome young shepherd,
and also as a master-player on the flute, just like
Adonis or Attis, beloved of the goddess in the
ancient mysteries. On the other hand, our nymph
seems to retain her superhuman power only by
means of her garment ; without it she might be at
the mercy of any mortal. A certain analogy to
this incident of the garment-stealing is to be found
in one of the legends of Aphrodite's numerous love
affairs. The fair queen of beauties was bathing
1 Basme, by I. C. Fundescu, pp. 89-96, Bucureti,
1896.
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once in the River Achelous. Hermes saw her, and
could not resist the temptation ; a god himself, of
many devices, and a celestial messenger, he sent an
eagle to carry off her dress, and so Aphrodite had
to submit to his passion, the result of which was
Hermaphroditea strange embodiment of both
sexes.
Instead of the raiment in the different versions
of the nymph tale, one meets simply with a kerchief,
veil or scarf, all possessed of the same magic qualities.
For an equivalent to this, one has to remember the
use made of it by Homer in a passage where
Odysseus, on the point of being drowned, is pre-
sented by the goddess Ino with a veil, clgpoTov,
immortal, as she calls it :
" Take this veil and stretch it beneath thy breast. It is
immortal; there is no fear that thou shalt suffer aught or
perish." 1
As happens in many of the olden myths, in our

tale also the nymph wears now and again the shape
of an animal when first encountering her lover.
Thus in a Vlach version, The Prince and the Fairy
Queen of the Fairies, she is a hind, but how
wonderful :
1 Book V, verses 346-7. A. T. Murray's translation
in the Loeb Library.
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" There was a young prince who loved to go a-hunting.
One day he got up very early, and with his faithful com-
panions he set off for the chase. At the entrance of the
forest they separated, each going his own way. The prince
took a middle path, and looking ahead he saw a hind too
beautiful for words to express. It had round its neck a
string of pearls and on each of its four legs, just below the
knee, a golden filigree bracelet. Seeing such beauty, the
prince was seized with pity and wished to catch it alive.
He rushed hither and thither, but all his efforts were in
vain. At last, when he succeeded with his companions in
surrounding it on all sides, the hind threw itself into a pool.
The prince and his men went up to the pool and stood there
waiting. The daylight faded and twilight fell and they
never moved their eyes from the pool. At midnight, as
they were tired out, sleep overtook them one after the
other. When they woke up they saw there, instead of the
pool, a palace glittering like the morning sun. The prince
very nearly lost his reason because of the surprise which
overwhelmed him. Drawing towards the palace he found
all the doors wide open. He entered, went upstairs and
saw a large room decorated with the most precious things.
And, when he walked in, what did his eyes encounter ! A
royal throne, and on the throne a damsel of about sixteen ;
around her were some dozen damsels, all standing with their
hands crossed on their breasts. The damsel seated on the
throne said to him: " Youth ! Why do you look at me
so breathlessly ? Do you not know me ? I am the hind
of yesterday. It was I whom you pursued the whole day,
and it was I who then threw myself into the pool. I am a
fairy and the queen of the fairies."
In two other stories of the kind, given by P.
Ispirescu, the nymph takes the form of a tortoise
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and of an owl. The latter, as shown by the very
title, The Fairy of the Fairies, reminds one of Diana,
both in character and in her being followed by a
train of six more nymphs. The story runs thus :
Three brothers, the sons of a king, shot arrows in order
to find wives wherever the arrow of each one should alight.
The eldest brother's arrow fell into the palace of a neigh-
bouring emperor, the middle son's into the house of a noble-
man, whilst that of the youngest prince flew towards the
sky and dropped far away into a wild forest. He went to
look for the arrow and, when he took hold of it, suddenly
an owl clung to his shoulder, attended by six other owls.
They all returned home with him. It was night then, and
the prince fell asleep. And what amazement seized him
the next morning ! There close to him lay a damsel
exceedingly fair, and near the bed six more damsels. In a
corner of the room were cast the owl skins, which every
night afterwards they used to shake off from their lovely
bodies. Soon, at the wedding of the eldest brother, the
seven nymphs arrived unexpectedly and joined in the dance.
The prince was overjoyed and proudly happy, for no woman
in the world could compare with his fairy bride. At the
wedding of the second brother the nymph again appeared,
and then in the midst of the feasting, what an awful idea
entered the prince's head ! He ran into his room, snatched
up the owl skins and threw them into the fire. At once a
stir arose among the guests. One of the nymphs said:
" There is danger about ! " Another: " Something is
burning ! " " We are lost ! " cried all. Whereupon they
rushed up into the air, turned into seven doves and flew
away.
In some versions of this tale, pervaded with a

greater sense of beauty, the seven owls are replaced
by seven white birds ; and in direct relation to
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them one finds two incidents which occur very
often, either separately or woven together in the
plot.
First, the incident of the golden apples. In the
garden of an emperor there is a wondrous apple
tree that bears fruit entirely of gold, but no sooner
do they ripen than in the middle of the night they
disappear. The emperor is grieved at heart to the
point of giving up his throne to solve the mystery.
Two of his sons watch in turn, but with no avail ;
the youngest son succeeds at last in catching sight
of the seven nymphs, who come in the guise of
seven birds and steal the golden apples. The
incident is given much space in a popular Roumanian
book, The Story of the Most Handsome zirghir and
Ilena. In English it is used in a somewhat changed
forminstead of the stolen apples the grass being
strangely trodden downby William Morris in
The Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon.
Then there is the incident of the forbidden
chamber. An emperor, before leaving, gives his
son a bunch of keys and tells him : " Thou hast
my permission to open all the chambers of the
palace, except the one which unlocks with the
golden key." When the son is left alone he cannot
refrain from entering that particular chamber, where
he gets a glimpse of the enchanting fairy realm.
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Both incidents are found in the old and to-day
very scarce Arabian romance of Seyf Zu-l-Tezen ;
but with a far greater mastery they are wrought
into the Story of Hasan of El-Basrah, which opens a
vista of unmatched beauty of the same kind. Hasan,
having passed through the forbidden door, comes
to a pool in a pavilion, where he sees the birds
approaching :
They alighted upon a great, beautiful tree, and they went
around it: and he saw among them a great and beautiful
bird, the handsomest among them ; and the rest encompassed
it, attended it as servants ; whereat Hasan wondered. That
bird began to peck the nine others with its bill, and to behave
proudly towards them, and they fled from it, while Hasan
stood diverting himself with the sight of them from a dis-
tance. Then they seated themselves upon the couch, and
each of them rent open its skin with its talons, and came
forth from it; and, lo, it was a dress of feathers. There
came forth from the dresses ten damsels, virgins, who shamed
by their beauty the lustre of the moon ; and when they had
divested themselves, they all descended into the pool, and
washed, and proceeded to play and to jest together ;the
bird who surpassed the others throwing them down and
plunging them in, and they fleeing from her, and unable to
put forth their hands to her. When Hasan beheld her, he
lost his reason, and his mind was captivated, and he knew
that the damsels forbade him not to open the door save on
this account. He became violently enamoured of her by
reason of what he beheld of her beauty and loveliness and
her stature and justness of form, while she was sporting and
jesting and they were sprinkling one another with the water
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Hasan stood looking at them, sighing that he was not with
them; his mind was perplexed by the beauty of the young
damsel, his heart was entangled in the snare of her love,
and he had fallen into the snare: the eye was looking, and
in the heart a fire was burning; for the soul is prone to
evil.'
Hasan then manages to steal the feather dress,
which he hides ; but later she gets possession of it
and departs from him.
This turning of the story into a dramatic separa-
tion, here as well as in all the versions mentioned
above, is brought about through the regaining of
the object in which lies the nymph's supernatural
power. She is anxious to fly from a world where
one has in a way compelled her to live. But there
is another side of the story, when the same separation
comes through the breaking of a compact between
the lovers. A typical example of the latter is the
well-known medimval romance of Melusine :
Raymond, Count of Lusignan, while roaming in
the woods of Colombiers in Poitou, met with three
fairies, one of whom was Melusine. Her rare
beauty won his love at once, and he wished to
marry her. She consented on condition that Ray-
mond should never see her naked, or, according to
another version, should never intrude upon her on
' Ed. W. Lane's translation of The Arabian Nights,
Vol. III, p. 373, London, 1883.
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a Saturday. A spell had been laid on Melusine to
become a serpent every Saturday from the hips
downwards. After having spent some time together,
Raymond, stirred to jealousy by the Saturday retire-
ments of Melusine, concealed himself and surprised
her bathing. Thus, the covenant being transgressed,
Melusine has to leave him for ever.
It is a matter of philosophical reflection how many
things in the world are presented under a prohibitive
or restrictive form first to excite one's desire and
then to make one suffer for having submitted to
their irresistible attraction. The fact springs, no
doubt, from a deep-rooted human characteristic,
which is expressed in countless different stories
going far back into remotest antiquity. Such a
one is found in the Rigveda, the sacred hymn-book
of the Brahmans. It records the love intercourse
of Urvasi, a sort of nymph, with a mortal Pururavas,
to whom she says : " Embrace me three times a
day, but never against my will, and let me never
see you without your royal garments, for this is the
manner of women." Pururavas does not regard
the warning and she returns to her fairy world.
Andrew Lang, commenting on this story,' con-
tends that it evolved out of a need to illustrate a
taboo, an infringement of a nuptial etiquette, which
1 Custom and Myth, pp. 70-8, London, i 884.
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SPINNING.
(See page 126.)
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THE SACRED MARRIAGE
might have existed side by side with various others ;
to take, for instance, a simple onethe husband
and wife refraining from uttering each other's name.
Herodotus speaks of the women of some Ionian
colonists, who made it their custom, which they
bequeathed to their daughters, that none should
ever call her husband by his name :
mu otIvOauarc 13crKrat TOv junnijs. civ8pa.1
To this day, among a section of the Vlachs in

Macedonia, the wives do not pronounce their
husband's names ; in referring to them, they always
use the third pronominal person : " He said so,
he's done so . ." This, of course, suggests to-day
.
rather a turn of amorous bashfulness, but it might

have once been a taboo. I therefore think Andrew
Lang's theory acceptable'; not entirely, however :
it does not cover the whole ground. There are
tales where one is inclined to look for a higher
meaning than the sanction of a custom. In The
Prince and the Fairy-Queen of the Fairies, when the
time comes for the nymph and the prince " to
make one couple," as the story puts it, she says to
him : " Thou must give me thy word of honour
that whatever thou beholdest with thine eyes,
whether good or bad, thou wilt never think thyself
1 Book I, 146.
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entitled to ask ; and thou wilt never think, either,
that thou hast the right to judge the things thou
seest with thy eyes ; but thou must always feign
that thou hast neither understood nor heard, if
thou desirest that we should dwell together. For,
if thou dost not do as I tell thee, then we must live
apart and must never see each other again. But
thou must know that fairies never do anything evil."
The prince agreed. They had a son. Not long
after, the nymph one day clapped her hands, and
there appeared a Lamiathat is, a female monster
whom she ordered : " Take this child out of my
sight 1 " Then she gave birth to a daughter, and
hardly two weeks had elapsed when she caused a
fire to be lit, and therein, amidst the burning flames,
the daughter was thrown. Could the prince say
anything ? But, when finally she deprived of their
provisions a whole army, sent by the prince to war,
he broke out into angry words, whereupon the
nymph forsook him.
This tale has a special importance, for, as far as
I know, it is unique of the Melusine type in Rou-
manian folklore, and it bears a resemblance to a
story found in Mahabharata. Among the heroes
of the Sanscrit epic there is Brishma, the son of a
certain King Santanu. The latter fell in love with
a most beautiful damsel, who said that she was the
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River Ganges and could not possibly marry him
except on condition that he would never inquire of
her doings. To this he consented. The nymph
bore him many children, all of whom she drowned
in the river. Then Brishma was born. And the
king, having implored her to spare at least this
one's life, she suddenly changed into the River
Ganges.'
Of no less interest is another tale belonging to
the Vlachs of Macedonia. A prince encountered
in the woods a she-goat, which was but a nymph.
He knew it, for he had surprised her while taking
off her skin to bathe in a pool. They wedded, and
soon afterwards, notwithstanding her warning that
whenever the goatskin should be lost he would lose
her likewise, the prince burned it. At once she
gave a piercing cry and turned into a spark which,
rising up in the skies, became the Evening Star ;
the prince turned also into a spark, ran after her
and became the Morning Star.
This looks more like a star legend linking up
our nymph tale with the ancient Eleusinian rites.
Both Evening Star and Morning Star are the planet
Venus, identified with Astarte, and it was very likely
the brilliant appearance of Venus that heralded in
1 The Science of Fairy Tales, by Edwin Sidney Hartland,
p. 317, London, 1925.
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various places the beginning of the Adonis festivals.
Also Plutarch tells us, what he was himself told by
the priests in Egypt, that Osiris as well as his
bride-goddess Isis were changed into stars.
This is the only instance of the story ending
there. All the other versions representing the union
of a mortal with a nymph run into a second part.
They seem to be more or less modelled upon
The Story of Hasan El-Basrah. Here, when the
nymph succeeds in getting back the feather dress,
she says before her flight : " 0 mother of my hus-
band, tell him when he comes, that if he wishes to
meet me, he must leave his home . . ." In just
the same circumstances the nymph in the Roumanian
Fairy of Fairies tells her lover : " Until thou hast
accomplished what no man in the world has ever
accomplished, thou shalt not touch me " ; while
from the mouth of another nymph in a Vlach version
one hears these rather puzzling words on her dis-
appearance : " At the fountain of stone with the
marble basin, there wilt thou find me."
Thenceforth the thread of this story is resumed
and the wonders unfold themselves. We see the
hero preparing for a long series of mighty adven-
tures. He takes in his hand the iron staff of the
wayfarer, puts on the iron sandals and forth he sets,
through undreamt-of regions to the ends of the
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world, where no bird has ever flown, where the
spaces are filled with unearthly voices and with far
unearthly silences, devoid even of a breath of wind.
And now and again there are winged horses that
soar to the clouds ; golden palaces springing up
before one in the manner of baffling mirages ;
strange forests of which the boughs resound like so
many strings of music ; airy, creeping and wild-
rambling things endowed with human speech.
Amongst all these the lover passes on and, after
surmounting numerous great obstacles, he at last
reaches his goal by a device which is found in the
typical Story of Hasan El-Basrah and recurs in most
of the versions. As the hero strides along, he chances
upon two youths who dispute with one another
about a leather cap and a rod of brass. He inter-
poses and asks them what is the cause of their
contention.
" We are brothers," said one of them. " Our father died
and bequeathed us this cap and this rod. Each of them has
a wonderful secret property. My brother says: ' None
shall take the rod but I ' and I say: ' None shall take it
!
but I ! ' So judge between us."

He inquired : " What are the secret properties of these
things ? "
" Whoever puts the cap on his head," they answered, " is
concealed from the eyes of all people; as for the rod, whoever
possesses it and strikes the ground with it, obtains command
and authority over seven tribes of Jinns."
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He then thought of a stratagemand said : " I
will throw a stone, and he who reaches it first shall
take the rod." Away went the stone, and after it
ran the two youths ; while he stuck the cap on his
head and seized the rod, thus leaving them no
object to quarrel about. In the Roumanian Fairy
of the Fairies, besides the cap, one meets with a
pair of sandals and a whip. Whoever puts on the
cap becomes invisible to the devil himself ; whoever
wears the sandals walks on water just as on land ;
and whoever cracks the whip in front of his enemies
turns them all into stones. In the tale of Ion
Buzdugan we have a crown, a kerchief and a pair
of sandals. The objects vary more or less from
one version to another ; but they are all possessed
of the same magic virtues which enable the hero to
fulfil his task and come face to face with his beloved
nymph. She dwells in a realm apart, and it is
essential for us to know whether her person is
everlasting or not. Out of many classical references
I will bring forward only two, as being quite clear
and leaving no doubt on the matter. In the
Homeric hymn To 4phrodite there is the beautiful
passage on the nymphs :
aG p' OVTE Ovirois OUTS deavaroccnv J7rovre
&way /Lay (.(10VC7t Kat appporov ciaap novat.
5
Kai TE p,er KaA3v xopclv c'ppalcravTo.
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" They rank neither with mortals nor with immortals:
long indeed they live, eating heavenly food and treading the
lovely dance among immortals."
Then a fragment of Hesiod is far more definite.
It runs in translation :
" A chattering crow lives out nine generations of aged
men, but a stag's life is four times a crow's and a raven's
life makes three stags old, while the phoenix outlives nine
ravens, but we, the rich-haired Nymphs, daughters of Zeus
the nis-holder, outlive ten phcenixes." 1
According to these lines the length of a nymph's
life would amount to no less than about ten thousand
years ; but what are they compared with eternity ?
In this respect the mythological nymph appears to
be different from our own nymph of the fairy-tale,
who is rather a survival of both Diana and Venus.
Like the two ancient goddesses, she stands for an
ideal, transcendent loveliness ; when forced, there-
forethrough the stealing of her magic dressto
share someone's passion, most anxious is she to free
herself from the trammels of conventions, prejudices
and incessant cares, in which we mortals move.
The contrast between her divine self and the lover
is too evident ; and, as a means of escaping it, she
is made to advance conditions that one is sure to
1 Hugh G. Evelyn-White's translation in the Loeb Clas-
sical Library: Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns and Homerica,
pp. 75 and 425.
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break ; or the rupture comes through her lover
being unable to enter into her mysterious, higher
purposes, such as the incident I mentioned of
throwing her own child into the fire. Sometimes
she only emerges before one's eyes as in a dream
and vanishes ; but once perceived, her mere appear-
ance is enough for one to be seized with an over-
whelming feverish desire akin to madness. See
how she first presents herself to a young shepherd
by the name of Perpelitsa in the beginning of a
Vlach version :
One day Perpelitsa got up early and left his sheep to
graze on a beautiful plain, and accompanied by his dogs he
sat down opposite the sheep under a walnut tree. He took
his flute out of his belt and began to play as usual, and a
great number of birds came on to the branches of the walnut
tree until there was no longer room for any more to perch
on it. At that very moment it chanced that a fairy wedding
was passing by. Seeing the great number of birds and
hearing the sweet strains of the flute, the fairies stood still
with astonishment. If they were surprised at his playing,
they were still more so at the beauty of his countenance.
Perpelitsa raised his eyes, and what did he see then ! Three
fairies so young, so fair, clad simply in a fine shift of un-
bleached silk, and all three were dancing on the tips of their
toes and they fluttered like ribbons. Perpelitsa began to
rub his eyes, but then he heard the fairies speaking to him;
the youngest approached and said: " Go on playing, youth,
so that we can dance, and we will give you what you ask."
And so she danced and laughed and made merry
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with him and with all her soul-enticing beauty
charmed him, then away she fled swiftly ; and with
her fled also the joy and peace of the shepherd ;
driven was he now to seek and seek after her.
Another tale, The Man of Stone, in Ispirescu's col-
lection, shows through the device of the forbidden
chamber a prince on the point of catching a far-
distant glimpse of the nymph :
As soon as the emperor left the town, his son went through
all the rooms of the palace, which were filled with many
precious stones. But he was not content ; finally he arrived
before the door of the golden key. He hesitated a while,
thinking of his father's warning. Curiosity, however, over-
came him and he ended by entering. Once inside, he saw
a telescope ; he could not forbear gazing into it, and in
doing so, his eyes were almost blinded by the sight of a
most glorious palace of gold, more dazzling than the sun
itself. The magic telescope revealed the interior of the
palace, where lived Dame Kiralina, young and sweet as a
garden flower. After having gazed upon her a long time,
he put the telescope back in its place and left the room, his
eyes filled with tears.
Henceforth nothing could banish the nymph's vision
from his thoughts. He lost all pleasure in life.
And all his heart, burning with love, was set upon
finding her. In a further Roumanian tale, versified
by the poet Eminescu with the very characteristic
title of The Bodiless Beauty, the lover tries in vain to
get hold of her. There she stands, alluring beyond
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measure, the enamoured of his soul ; but when he
stretches out his arms, he cannot embrace her, for
she is only a fleeting shadow.
Thus the long quest after the departed nymph
in our fairy-tale appears to have a deeper symbolical
meaning : the unassuaged thirst after a divine
beauty, the passing image of which stirs one's
innermost longings. And it is this meaning of the
story that impressed various writers, to the extent
of working it up into some exquisite piece of litera-
ture. So in Shelley's Alastor, the hero dies in the
utter solitude of his heart for not attaining to a
deeply yearned-for beauty ; Keats'Endymion is driven
into far and wide pursuit of the moon-goddess who
descended to him in a dream ; in The Land East of
the Sun and West of the Moon, heavy with a darkly
poignant sense of death that often haunts William
Morris, the lover seeks out his ideal in a remote
worldthe same whence Yeats' Niam of The Wan-
derings of Usheen also draws her beloved one, and
which our own hero reaches safely at last. Com-
pared with that assigned to the love of Adonis and
Persephone, one has to notice that the Eleusinian
doctrine implied a belief in personal immortality ;
very consistently, therefore, it is through death con-
ceived as nuptials that the blissful union of Adonis
with his divine mistress is achieved. Different is
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the issue in the old folk-story. Here the impossi-
bility of a lasting wedlock between a superhuman
being and a mortal could not be solved but through
the transformation of either of them into the other's
station. Indeed, in some versions we see how the
nymph forgoes her own estate and becomes mortal
like him, because of her great love ; as expressly
stated in The Fairy of the Mountains : " Behold,
prince 1 " she says, " for love of thee I relinquish
my divine power ; but thou also, thou must love
me as I do love thee."
Then comes the second alternative, the bestowing
of immortality upon the hero himself. One reads
in The Odyssey that the goddess-nymph Calypso, in
order to retain her Odysseus whom she dearly
loved, wished to render him immortal and ageless
CIOCIVaTOV Kai cirjpaov. But how, by what means
she would have done it, one is not told. A hint is
given in the Homeric hymn To Demeter, where it
is said the goddess put a child every night in the
fire to make him deathless. The same story is
related by Plutarch in connection with the Egyptian
goddess Isis ; Apollonius Rhodius in The ilrgo-
nautica refers to Thetis, how she used to encircle
Achilles while a baby with flames, so that he might
become immortal. The point is further explained
in Sanscrit literature. I mentioned above the
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amorous intercourse, as found in the Rigveda, of
Urvasi the nymph with a mortal Pururavas, in
which, the latter not having kept to the warning,
she returns to her fairy world. In the Brahmana of
the Tajurveda the story is continued to the effect
that Pururavas sought her long after, and finally,
arriving at a lake where she and her fairy friends
were playing in the shape of birds, Urvasi revealed
herself to him and said : " Come to me the last
night of the year and then shalt thou be with me
for one night . . ." He went and, as he wished
with all his heart to abide in that region of the
fairies, they introduced him to the mysteries of a
sacred fire, which gave him endless life.' Now
this conferring of immortality is not recorded in
the Roumanian folk-tales, except for an allusion in
the Vlach version of The Prince and the Fairy Queen
of the Fairies, where the nymph throws her child
for the child's own benefitinto the burning fire.
Then, no doubt, the lover of our nymph has to
return home sooner or later. Thomas the Rhymer
of the Scottish ballad does it after seven years,
Yeats' Usheen after no less than three hundred years
of wanderings. In a Roumanian tale which opens
Ispirescu's collection no time whatever is fixed, and
1 Selected Essays, by F. Max Muller, Vol. I, pp. 400-10,
London, 1881.
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with good reason ; there is no time in fairyland.
Fdt-Frumos, the Boy-Beautiful or the Prince Charm-
ing of Roumanian folklore, was promised from his
very coming into the world " youth without age
and life without death." As none could give it
him, Prince Charming set off himself to find it.
After long journeyings full of adventures, he arrived
near the palace that held in it the living dream of
his heart's desire :
It was surrounded by a deep forest with innumerable
monsters that kept watch night and day. Prince Charming
mounted his steed and flew over the forest and lo ! from
high above he gained a view of the golden palacea marvel-
lous sight indeed. And in descending, scarcely did he touch
the topmost branch of a tree than the whole forest rang with
the tremendous roar of the monsters. But the fairy mistress
appeared with her two elder sisters as beautiful as herself,
appeased the monsters and sweetly greeted Prince Charming.
She became his bride and asked him to stay with her for ever
and go throughout her domains, except the Vale of Sorrows.
Prince Charming dwelt with her in perfect happiness. More-
over, it happened that one day he did not perceive that he
had entered the Vale of Sorrows. Then suddenly there fell
upon him a strange longing for his father and mother. The
nymph allowed him to depart, though dark forebodings told
them he was not to return any more. Thus Prince Charm-
ing proceeded homeward ; but wherever he passed, the wood
he knew had now become fields of corn, and large towns
stood on what had once been desolate places. On inquiring
about all these, people laughed at him ; and he did not
notice that his beard and his hair had grown white. At
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last he arrived where he had first seen the light of day.
Here too all was utterly changed. And when Prince
Charming saw his father's palace in ruins, he sighed deeply
and with tears in his eyes he tried to recall the glories of that
fallen palace. Round about the place and in every corner
he looked for a vestige of the past. And down he went
into the cellar, the entrance to which was choked with
broken fragments, and everywhere he searched about, and
now he could scarce totter along. And all he found there
was a huge old coffer which he opened, and a voice spoke
to him out of its depths and said: " Welcome, for hadst
thou kept me waiting much longer, I also should have
perished." Then his Death rose up and laid hands upon
him, and Prince Charming instantly fell dead to the ground
and crumbled into dust.'
Here ends the story. It does not give a full picture
of the fairy land. Whoever could ? One gets
instead, simply expressed, and therefore all the
more touchingly, that piercing, intensely deep
melancholy of the passing of time, of things that
change and fade away, of the ever-pervading approach
of deathall these being the stuff out of which
great literature is made.
1 The translation of the whole story is found in R. Nisbet
Bain's Turkish Fairy Tales, pp. 26o-75, London, 1896.
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VII
THE SACRED MARRIAGE-II
THERE is another side of the Sacred Marriage con-

cerning the union of a divinity to a mortal maiden
which has its prototype in Cupid and Psyche. Ac-
cording to the old legend, Psyche was the youngest
daughter of a king, and so exceedingly fair that people
forgot Venus and worshipped her instead. The
goddess became very jealous and, in order to avenge
herself, she asked her winged son Cupid to inspire
Psyche with love for a despicable creature. Cupid
at once flew away, and no sooner did he get a
glimpse of Psyche than he himself fell in love with
her. And he contrived to have Psyche carried to a
strange palace, where she was ministered to by
invisible attendants and charmed on all sides by
soft, dreamy strains of music. As night drew near
Psyche felt herself troubled with both fears and
curious expectations, when her unknown lover
ascended the bed and gathered the first-fruits of his
passion. Henceforth night after night he used to
glide near her in darkness and leave unseen before
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the dawn. No doubt Cupid, aware of Psyche's
thoughts, warned her to abstain from any questions
regarding the shape of his person ; in vain, however,
for she could not escape the snare of her sisters.
They succeeded in persuading Psyche that her
bridegroom was but a hideous monster. And
prompted by them, once while Cupid slept, she
lighted a lamp to look at him, and behold I there
by her side was lying the god of love himself. In
her amazement she let fall a drop of burning oil on
Cupid's shoulder, who then awoke and fled away.
Now the most unhappy Psyche set off on her long
search for Cupid. After many wanderings from
place to place and great difficulties, mostly caused by
Venus, who bade her perform some of the hardest
tasks, at last Zeus took pity, and granted her a
blissful, everlasting union with her lover.
In this beautiful story of love tried by suffering
there is a little episode which I purposely did not
mention, in order to lay more stress on its signific-
ance. At a time of high adoration, Apuleius tells us
that Psyche felt forlorn and cast down. Whilst
her sisters were happily wedded, she was admired
but as a masterpiece of art ; none thought of taking
her to wife. Therefore her father, suspecting the
gods of being angry, went to consult the oracle of
Apollo ; and in obedience to the latter's decree
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Psyche was led with sorrowful mourning, though in
her bridal attire, to the top of a mountain, where she
had to espouse a dreadful monster, as Apuleius
puts it : " saevum atque ferum vipereumque malum." 1
This passage of the oracle appears to be wrapped in
mystery. Intentionally, I believe, with the born
instinct of the story-teller, Apuleius did not identify
the serpent with Psyche's lover, but left at the same
time a vague impression that it might refer to him ;
and thus Psyche was the more inclined to give
credence to the suggestion of her sisters. On the
other hand, the whole matter of the oracle might
have been a plan devised by Cupid in order to hide
his love design and steal Psyche. Such at any rate
is the interpretation given by William Morris
in his versified story of Cupid and Psyche. After
showing us how Cupid surprised and kissed Psyche
in her sleep, then flitted away lost in happy dreams
of love to come, Morris says :
" And now that he might come to this fair end,
He found Apollo, and besought him lend
His throne of divination for a while,
Whereby he did the priestess so beguile,
She gave the cruel answer . . ." 2
Be it as one pleases, in one way or another, the very
1 " Serpent dire and fierce," The Golden Ass, Book IV,
line 36, in Loeb Classical Library.
2 The Earthly Paradise, Part II, p. 20, ed. 1896.
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fact of a serpent being mentioned in relation to the
lover forms a link with the corresponding story of
Roumanian folk-lore in which the serpent figures,
indeed, as a hero. He was adopted, so the story
goes, by a man. At a certain age he begged his
foster-father to proceed to the palace and ask the
king's daughter in marriage. Very surprisingly,
the king consented, after having imposed on the
serpent a number of tasks, such as the building of
three bridges, one of iron, one of silver and one of
gold, which the serpent fulfilled. For some time
things went very well ; because, you see, he was not
like any other serpent : at night he used to take off
his skin and become a youth as handsome as Cupid
himself. On this account his wife was, and would
have remained, happy for long, had she not run
counter to her lover's warning. Taking the advice
of her parents, she burned the serpent's skin.
Whereupon he disappeared, saying : " Foolish wife,
thou shalt not bear a child until I stretch out my
hand over thee." She then went to seek him.
And on her way she passed the abodes of Holy
Monday, Holy Friday and Holy Saturday, who gave
her presentsa golden hen, a golden pig and a
golden dove respectively. By means of these she
succeeded in gaining access to her lost husband and
becoming a mother.
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In a variant of the same story the lover is nothing
else but a pumpkin. The bride's mother, of course,
cannot suffer such a vegetable for a son-in-law, and
induces her daughter to bake the pumpkinan
incident fraught with the same consequences as the
burning of the serpent's skin. The best-known
version is that given in P. Ispirescu's collection, The
Enchanted Pig, the serpent-lover being here replaced
by a pig-lover. One is introduced in the manner
of Cupid and Psyche to a king with three daughters,
of whom the youngest, through the device of a for-
bidden chamber, is made to turn the leaves of a
strange book, where she reads of her predestined
marriage to a pig. And a pig in truth soon entered
the palace, attended by a mighty retinue of other
pigs, and said :
" Hail, 0 King ! May you always be as joyful
as the sunrise on a clear day ! "
" Welcome, friend," replied the king. " What
winds drove you hither ? "
" I have come to ask the hand of your youngest
daughter."
The king marvelled at such words from the mouth
of a pig and, thinking that there was a touch of
sorcery in this, persuaded his daughter to take him.
After the ceremony the pig brought his beautiful
bride to a house amidst the forests. That night
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the princess was very astonished to see a comely
youth lying by her side. And many other nights
passed likewise, without her realising why her
husband should be a youth at night and a pig in the
daytime. One day a witch came and gave her a
thread, whispering : " When your husband is
asleep, tie it around his left leg and never again
will he be a pig." The princess accordingly tied
the thread, but it broke and her husband started up.
" What hast thou done ? " he cried. " Only
three days more and I should have been freed from
this vile enchantment ; now thy hand cannot touch
me till thou hast worn out three pairs of iron sandals
and a staff of steel in seeking me." Then he dis-
appeared. The princess wandered on and on for
three long years, journeying to the far-away regions
of the Moon, the Sun and the Wind, and through
their good counsels she reached her husband at
last.
In various forms this wedlock union of a super-
human being in the guise of an animal to a mortal
maiden is found everywhere under the popular
name of Beauty and the Beast. I shall bring forward
only two examples in order to show its wide field of
distribution as well as its existence in a far-distant
past. Il Pentamerone, an old collection of Neapolitan
folk-tales, contains this story among others :
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A serpent falls in love with a charming damsel,
the daughter of a king. One day he asks her in
marriage. The king promises the hand of his
daughter on certain conditions believed to be
impossible, which, however, the serpent fully carries
out. And now the serpent comes to the palace,
catches his bride, leads her into an inner chamber,
where, shaking off his skin, he becomes a most
graceful youth and takes his fill of love. Mean-
while the king and queen rush in and burn the
serpent's skin. The youth then, changed into a
pigeon, flies out of the window. The princess pro-
ceeds to find him, and on the way she listens to some
birds saying that the serpent-bridegroom was the
son of a king and, because he would not satisfy the
desires of an accursed witch, she turned him into
a serpent for seven years.
The resemblance of the Neapolitan story to the
Roumanian one of the serpent type is obvious,
except for slight differences such as the following :
" The king bade the serpent come into his presence
and the serpent mounted a golden car, drawn by
four elephants caparisoned in jewels and gold, and
came to court." 1 I quote the passage also for the
reason that it seems to point to the Oriental character
1 Sir Richard Burton's translation, Vol. I, p. 170,
London, 1893.
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THE SACRED MARRIAGE
of the tale. Indeed, a similar one does exist in
the ancient Sanscrit book of Panchiatantra:
In the town of Radschagriha lived once a Brahmin
called Devasarman. His wife wept much over her
childlessness when she saw the children of their
neighbours. Then one day the Brahmin said to
her : " My love, cease to grieve ! See, I have
made sacrifice to obtain a son." Thereupon some
invisible being spoke : " The son that shall be
granted unto thee shall surpass all men in beauty,
virtue and happiness." When she heard such
words, the Brahmin's wife was filled with the greatest
delight, and she exclaimed : " Such oracles cannot
err I " In the course of time a serpent was born of
her. And all around cried : " Throw it away 1 "
But she took no notice of them, held it in her arms,
washed it and with motherly care she laid it in a
large clean bowl and fed it, so that in a few days it
grew to its full size. Now as the Brahmin's wife
saw the wedding feast of a neighbour's son, she
wept and said to her husband : " Thou treatest me
very meanly when thou makest no effort to bring
about the marriage of my beloved son." The
Brahmin answered : " My love I Then I must go
down into the depths of Tartarus and speak to
Basuke, King of the Serpents. For who other, 0
foolish one I would give his daughter to a serpent
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to wife ? " Looking at her with very troubled
mien after this, he took food for a journey to strange
lands. And he came to a place named Kukutana-
gara. There in .the house of a friend he was pro-
vided with all things necessary, and spent the night
there too. When he took leave of his friend in the
early dawn and was about to pursue his wanderings,
the latter asked him :
" For what reason didst thou come here and
whither goest thou ? "
" I came to seek a suitable maiden as wife for my
son."
" If that is so I have a most suitable daughter,
and thou standest high in my esteem."
At these words the Brahmin took the maiden
with her servants and returned to his dwelling-place.
But when the inhabitants of his town saw her
beautiful form decked out with all the wondrous
attributes of charm, they rubbed their eyes for love
of her, and said to her retinue : " How could ye
hand over such a jewel of a maiden to a serpent ? "
Then the hearts of all her followers were afraid, and
they said : " She must be snatched away from the
murder planned by the old Brahmin." Said the
maiden, however : " Far from me be such a de-
ception ! For look ye ! That which destiny has
given can nevermore be altered." And further it
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is explained how the serpent is but a youth at night,
and how the charm is broken when the skin is
burnt.'
This speaks a good deal for the antiquity of the
story. To trace its true origin would prove a very
difficult task. One would have to take the investiga-
tions very far back to a stage of society when the line
of demarcation between human beings and animals
was not so clearly traced, when supernatural powers
were attributed to serpents, and so forth. My
aim here is to establish the identity of the folk-tale
with Cupid and Psyche, which itself undoubtedly
must have been a folk-tale dating back many
centuries before it was made known by Apuleius.
The Latin author had taken it from a current popular
tradition and transfigured it by his conscious art into
a literary work, infusing it likewise with some
Platonic ideas very dear to him. Other writers
later on, such as Walter Pater in his shortened but
beautifully pondered version in Marius the Epicurean,
and William Morris in The Earthly Paradise, made
it symbolical of their own conceptions of beauty,'
shared by all contemporary writers of the xsthetic
school. In like manner the Roumanian folk-story
1 Given in Th. Benfey's German translation of the
Panchiatantra under the title of The Brahmin's Enchanted Son,
Vol. II, p. 144
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THE SACRED MARRIAGE
corresponding to Cupid and Psyche has inspired one
of our best writers. Under the title of The Pig's
Tale, Ion Creanga, with fine touches of peasant
humour, blended into a harmonious whole various
elements of the story. Preserving its fairy atmo-
sphere, he created real charactersbe they persons
or animalswho speak and act according to their
own nature, and it all reads like a real novel.
One has to notice that the lover in one of the
stories changes into a star. There is also a Rou-
manian legend which relates how a whole band of
angels were turned into stars by the Almighty for
having walked amongst men and women in the
world and liked their ways.' Now it happens that
such heavenly bodies identified with certain deities
become enamoured of mortal maidens, and we have
thus a cycle of most interesting folk-tales based on
this idea. One of them, found in Transylvania,
presents us with a Beauty who, like that of Shelley's
Sensitive Plant, tends a marvellous garden ; hence
her own surname : " Queen of the Flowers."
None could see her but the Sun. He falls in love,
and sends the Morning Star and the Evening Star
to woo her for him. When they came to the Queen
of Flowers and greeted her, she invited them to sit
1 See M. Garter's Rumanian Bird and Beast Stories,
pp. 73-4, London, 1915.
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THE SACRED MARRIAGE
down. The envoys said : " Not for the sake of
sitting did we come here, but to woo you and
betroth you to the Sun." Then answered the Queen
of the Flowers : " No, I will not take him, for he is
but a wanderer, without his own fireside. By day
he is over the village, by night over the waters."
So they went back to tell the Sun, who grew very
angry, and changed her into the blue flower of
chicory that must always turn towards the sun.
In Bulgaria there are two characteristic stories
belonging to the same category. The first seems
to be a mere fragment, and tells of a mother very
crafty in the casting of spells. She used to catch
serpents alive, pierce them with a white thorn and
mutter : " Just as I pierce these serpents, so may
young men be pierced by love of Radka ! " The
Sun himself could not escape from such a charm, for
we see him encountering Radka while she goes to
fetch water and saying to her : " Radka, my beauti-
ful girl, may God destroy your mother the witch,
because she has enchanted meenchanted me and the
moon, the forest and the grass, the earth and the
water. . . ."
The second tale runs to a greater length, and
pictures to us the Sun on the very point of being
impressed by a beautiful maiden, Grozdanka, so
much so that " three days he trembled, trembled
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and never set." When he returned home, his
mother scolded him for being late. And the Sun
said : " What beauty I have seen, mother, down
there on earth 1 If I cannot take this girl to wife
I will never shine again. Go, mother, to God and
ask of Him whether I may carry off and marry a
living maiden." His mother went and, according
to the Almighty's advice, on St. George's Day a
golden swing was let down to the house of Groz-
danka. As is the custom on that solemn day, old
and young ran to swing for their health. Last
of all came Grozdanka, and her mother began to
swing her. Soon thick clouds fell and the swing
ascended. As it rose, her mother wept and
lamented : " Grozdanka, thy mother's treasure, nine
years have I suckled thee, keep thou silence nine
months ! " But Grozdanka thought she heard that
she must keep silence for nine years, and Grozdanka
spoke not a word all that time to her husband's
mother or to her husband. And the Sun was
grieved that she was mute, and he betrothed himself
to another who was not deprived of speech.
Grozdanka was to be the godmother, Grozdanka
was to marry them. And hardly had she put
the veil on the bride than it took fire of itself.
" Grozdanka," said the bride, " if thou art mute, art
thou blind as well to set my veil on fire ? " And
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Grozdanka burst out laughing. Then she spoke
to the bride : " Listen, young bride, it was not I
who set thy veil on fire any more than I am dumb ;
but my mother, who suckled me for nine years,
bade me keep silence for nine years. Now the
ninth year has come and now I shall begin to talk."
As soon as the Sun and his mother heard her, they
sent away the bride, and Grozdanka was married
to the brilliant Sun.1
The Bulgarian original of this tale is in verse, but
it has a prose counterpart in Roumanian which,
however, towards the end turns into a legend of the
swallow. When the Sun first kisses the maiden, she
at once changes into a swallow and flies away ;
the Sun tries to catch her, but he only gets hold of,
and plucks out, part of the tail : that is why the
swallow has a forked tail.
I now come to the most interesting Roumanian
story of this group. It begins :
A mighty emperor had a daughter who was
already so beautiful as a child that people came from
afar to see her. And as she grew up she grew in
charm and loveliness too, and her fame spread
everywhere. Then the emperor thought in his
pride : she is much too good and beautiful for the
1 Chansons Populaires Bulgares, by Augustus Dozon,
pp. 167-74, Paris, 1875.
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eyes of a mortal, no one shall see her, therefore ;
but I will give her a castle and a garden and she shall
dwell therein. And in his kingdom lay an extensive
valley, separated by high mountains from every
other country. And there the emperor ordered to
be built a marble castle roofed with silver. And
round the castle he had vast gardens made, sur-
rounded by high walls of steel. When all was ready,
the emperor led his daughter into the castle and
ordered her maidens never to open a window. He
then locked the doors with seven locks and at the
entrance of the valley he placed a dragon who should
let no one through.
It happens now, what often happens in fairy tales,
that a king's son hears of the beautiful princess
and decides to win her or die. And step by step we
follow him in his adventurous journey, surmounting
all barriers, using the most wonderful devices such
as horses that fly through the clouds, forests whose
boughs talk to each other and give warning, birds
with magical voices ; and when at last he approaches
the castle with its glittering silver roof and walls of
steel, and we are getting eager to know how he is
to open those doors locked with seven locks, at
once the story shifts to the princess herself, and we
are told that she grew very sad and spoke to her
maidens : " I have now been a year in this palace
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THE SACRED MARRIAGE
and it was then spring outside and it must again be
spring ; but I can no longer see the green woods
and the flowery meadows, because you keep all the
windows closed, and therefore I shall die." All her
maidens were terrified, for they feared the emperor's
wrath if they disobeyed his command, and feared his
anger still more if the princess died. And they
begged her to be cheerful. But the emperor's
daughter paid no heed to them, refused food and
drink and grieved, so that all her beauty vanished.
Thereat her maidens were afflicted and opened the
window in the princess's chamber, and one could
hear the birds sing and see the blue sky and the
green meadow, and the forest air blew in great gusts
into the room. Then the daughter of the emperor
was glad and hastened to the window, and, when she
felt the fresh air of spring, she grew well again and
as beautiful as ever.
At this stage we are aware of someone else enter-
ing the story : a superhuman, legendary spirit, called
smeu, who can assume all shapes. He is then
passing by as wind and, fluttering round the face
and shoulders of the princess, he is seized with a
violent love for her and swears she must be his.
And the next evening he became a star and darted
into the maiden's room. But there he changed to a
handsome, dazzling youth, and said to her : " You
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THE SACRED MARRIAGE
are the most beautiful of women, and no man is
worthy to undo the girdle of your garment ; but
I am mightier than any mortal and my kingdom has
no bounds. Follow me and be mine, and I will lead
you where it is eternal day, high above all the clouds,
into the neighbourhood of the sun." The em-
peror's daughter said : " My eyes hurt when I
look on you, and I cannot bear your splendour ;
if I followed you I should be blinded, and
the neighbourhood of the sun would consume
me. If
The mighty smeu was sad, and changed again to
a star and darted up to heaven. There he stayed the
whole night and looked down on the princess's
chamber ; but his rays were pale and dull, as if they
were deadened by sorrow. And when the next
evening came, the mighty spirit changed himself into
rain and fell into the chamber of the emperor's
daughter. And there he took the form of a beauti-
ful youth whose eyes were as blue as the deep sea,
and whose hair shone in the moonlight like the
scales of a fish. And he spoke to her : " Follow
me and be mine ; I will lead you where no glimmer
of sun penetrates, deep under the bed of the sea ;
there I will give you castles of red coral and white
pearls." The emperor's daughter said : " I grow
cold in your presence, and if I follow you to
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THE SACRED MARRIAGE
your castles of coral and white pearls, where no
ray of sunshine penetrates, then I should die of
cold."
And the mighty spirit said in despair : " What
shall I do to make you love me ? Ask anything you
will, be mine I " The maiden thought how she
could prove the strength of his love and find whether
no sacrifice was too great to win her, and said : " If
I am to follow you and be yours, you must renounce
all your power and immortality and become a mortal
like others, so that I can embrace you without
fear." The spirit gazed on the maiden, and no
sacrifice seemed too great for his love, and he said :
" Be it as you will 1 To-morrow I will fly to the
throne of God and return to Him the immortality
and power which He has bestowed upon me, and
ask Him to change me into a weak mortal, so that
you will become mine."
But next day, before ever the spirit had time to
start on his errand, the son of the king, whom we
left roaming about the castle, managedthrough an
enchanted flower given him by Holy Mother Friday
to steal the heart of the princess and, while they
ran away, the spirit reached the throne of God :
" Lord, I bring Thee back all the power and
immortality Thou hast bestowed upon me. I love
a child of earth, and so I beg Thee, 0 Lord, to let
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COUNTRY VIEW.
(See page 145.)
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THE SACRED MARRIAGE
me become as weak and mortal as she 1 " But the
Lord said : " Thou knowest not what thou askest.
The children of earth are like the foam of the sea
a breath of wind destroys them. And their love is like
a shooting star : it comes from heaven, bright in its
splendour, but it is extinguished as soon as it
touches earth and its life lasts but as a thought."
The spirit, however, repeated his prayer. Then
the Lord said : " Look down 1 " And the spirit
saw the emperor's daughter, who had asked him to
sacrifice his immortality, fleeing in the arms of a
son of earth. Then the god-like being shed a tear,
the first of eternity, and the tear fell to the bottom
of the sea as a wonderful pearl. And it all ends with
the spirit's revenge, which brings about the death of
the lovers.
Under the title of The Maiden in the Golden
Garden this folk-tale was given by Richard Kunish in
a book 1 which fell into the hands of M. Eminescu,
and he, being an exceptionally gifted poet, invested
the story with a deep allegorical meaning, with a
sense of passionate disillusion experienced in his
own life,2 though following some of the episodes
1 Bukarest und Stambul, Skizzen aus Ungarn Raumenien
und der Turkei, Berlin, 1861.
2 Professor N. Iorga, in Trei Ch Zsa tori in Tarile Rombne Ili,
a paper read before the Roumanian Academy on the 1st of
May, 1925.
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THE SACRED MARRIAGE
closely and retaining even the popular ring, when
he begins in Luceafand,
" Once upon a time, as fairy-tales say,
Unlike all that once had been . . ."
to sing of the lovely maiden :

" She was the only child of her parents
And more gracious than all others,
As Mary is among the saints
And the moon among the stars."
In verses charged with artistry Eminescu pro-
ceeds to tell how this daughter of kings comes to
look with increasing wonder night after night at the
Evening Star. And she is so fascinated by its
trembling image in the skies that she stretches out
her arms and callsa dream-surrounded call in
which the poet expresses all the longings and desires
first awakening in a maiden's heart :
" Descend to earth, oh, gentle star,
Gliding along a beam,
Penetrate my home and mind,
Illuminate my life ! "
At her repeated call Hesperus, enamoured like-

wise, comes in the shape of a young sea-lord, with
hair of soft golda dark blue shroud fastened about
his bare shoulders, in his hand a rush-garlanded rod ;
then as a god-like embodiment of the skies, bathed
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THE SACRED MARRIAGE
in sunlight, a crown burning on his dark locks.
But in both cases his face is strangely pale, and
strangely full of thought are his sparkling eyes, and
he appears in everything excelling. I mentioned a
passage in Apuleius where he says that none among
the many worshippers would have married Psyche,
just because of her unusual beauty. Also in a
poem of Yeats, The Shadowy Waters, one sees how
the hero, striving after a divine love, could not be
understood by his woman companion on an endless
journey to perfection ; and, whilst he whispers of a
" love made into an imperishable fire under the
boughs," she asks perplexed :
" Where are these boughs ? Where are the holy woods,
That can change love to imperishable fire ? "
In like manner Eminescu's maiden shrinks back

from the presence of a lover too unearthly, too much
above her. When, therefore, he speaks of his blue
abode in the skies and his coral palace in the deep
of the seas, she answers him :
" Thou art fair as in a dream

An angel might appear,
But by the path thou openest me
I shall never pass along."
And she adds :

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THE SACRED MARRIAGE
" If thou dost wish with earnestness
That I should hold thee dear,
Thou to this planet then descend
And be a mortal like me ! "
In a flight of unsurpassed descriptive beauty,

" A sky of stars beneath him,
Above him a sky of stars."
he reaches God :
" From the dark load of eternity,
Sire, set me free,
And receive throughout the ages
The praise of posterity.
Oh any, any price demand of me,
But give me, Lord, another fate,
For of all life Thou art the source,
And the bestower of death ;
Take back my immortal halo,
And the fire from mine eye,
Grant me in exchange of all
An hour in which to love. . . ."
The Almighty, after telling him what it means to

be divine, asks whom he wishes to die for, and points
down to the earth. There, in the shadows of
approaching night, beneath a row of stately limes,
the maiden is lost in the embraces of her own page,
who could harp to her on the usual strings of love.
Scarcely is his arm around her than she holds him in
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THE SACRED MARRIAGE
both arms, and through her warm kisses, drunk with
pleasure, catching a glimpse of Hesperus, she again
whispers :
" Descend to earth, oh, gentle star,
Gliding along a beam. . . ."
Then he sparkles,
" But not again as in the past
Did he fall from sky to sea
What dost thou care, thou speck of dust,
If it be I, or another ?
Living within thy narrow sphere,
Ruled art thou by destinies,
But in my own world I feel
Immortal and remote."
" Immortal and remote," indeed ; such appears
to be the fate of any high genius in life.
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VIII
THE CREATION
IN a poem touching on the origin of things,

M. Eminescu says :
" In the beginning, when there was neither being
nor non-being ; when all was lack of life and will ;
when nothing was concealed, though it was all con-
cealed ; when penetrated by himself reposed the
unpenetrated one ; was it hollow steep ? abyss ?
or vast extent of water ? No world was there born,
no mind to apprehend it ; for there was a darkness
as a rayless sea. Neither was aught to be seen,
nor eye then to see ; the shadow of things unmade
did not begin yet to unfold, and reconciled to itself
there reigned eternal peace 1 But at once a point
movesthe first, the only one, and lo ! how it makes
of the chaos mother and itself becomes the
father. . . ."
This version of creation, like the Sanscrit one
which has inspired it, is the result of obvious specula-
tion. Nor is the notion of chaos, assumed by such
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THE CREATION
cosmogonies as the Babylonian and the Greek, free
from a certain process of abstraction. One has to
descend to a lower, more primitive state of mind,
in order to get the folk-idea of creationan idea
that rises out of direct observation. Thus a number
of Red Indian tribes in America believe more or less
in the pre-existence of water. And such an old-
remnant conception lingers also among the Rouman-
ian peasantry. In the very beginning there was but
a waste of water, out of which in a whirl or bubble of
foam there rose God Himself. In what circum-
stances and how had this actually happened ? Accord-
ing to one version, God flew dove-like upon the
waters, according to another He sprang in the shape
of a babe from a water-lilythe latter reminding one
of the ancient Egyptian sun-god, who likewise arose
as a naked babe from a lotus-flower.
Now, in dealing with Roumanian folklore, one
has always to bear in mind a strong dualistic influ-
ence, I mean the struggle between good and evil, so
masterfully expressed by Shelley in the Revolt of
Islam :
" Two Powers o'er mortal things dominion hold,
Ruling the world with a divided lot,
Immortal, all-pervading, manifold,
Twin Genii, equal Godwhen life and thought
Sprang forth, they burst the womb of inessential Nought."
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THE CREATION
This doctrine entered Roumania modified,
humanised in a way, by such heretical sects as the
Manicheans and the Bogomils, whose teachings took
deep root in the religious outlook of the people.
Hence the characteristic saying :
" It is well to light a taper to the devil also now
and again," or :
" God is great, but the devil is clever too."
Such ideas, one realises, in the course of time had
no less penetrated and coloured the Roumanian view
of the creation. Instead of God alone emerging on
the face of the waters, one likewise meets the devil
at his side. When the Almighty appears in the
guise of a dove, the devil accompanies Him as a
duckling ; again when the Almighty comes out
from a water-lily, the devil approaches Him and
in quires :
" Who art thou, child ? "
" I am God Sabaoth."
" And that ? "pointing upwards.
" That is the sun, my assistant."
One tradition testifies even to a sort of brother-
hood or fellowship between God and the devil, both
drifting along through the infinity of primmval
waters. How came they to be found together ? No
one could tell. Here the popular no less than the
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THE CREATION
highest mind is confronted with the insoluble per-
plexities of the riddle. Unable to conceive of crea-
tion out of nothing, it has to postulate certain data
from which to proceed. Thus one is presented with
the water, as a primordial substance, and with God
and the devil wandering upon it, until the former
said with a definite purpose :
" Go and fetch some clay from the bottom of the
sea. 11
The devil plunged at once ; but, instead of taking
the clay in God's name, he took it in his own, and
the water washed away the clay. Once more he
plunged in vain. The third time he thought of
using both his and God's name, so that a bit of
clay stuck under the nails of his fingers. Out of this
God made a cake of earth, upon which He sat to
rest awhile. Being very tired, He fell asleep. Then
the devil whispered to himself : " Now is my
chance to get rid of Him. . . ." And he tried to
drown God, but in whatever direction he pushed
the cake of earth it stretched under God further
and further. . . . 1
Another side to be considered is the blending of
a number of animal legends into the account of
1 Given at length by Dr. M. Gaster in his Rumanian Bird
and Beast Stories, pp. 61-2, London, 1915.
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THE CREATION
creation. A simple, primitive mind does not see
any sharp distinction between itself and the sur-
rounding lower creatures ; what is even more, some
of the animals are considered sacredthey are what
is called a totem, viz. an animal or object supposed
to be the direct ancestor of a primitive community
or in which the divine spirit is somehow manifested
or embodied ; and sometimes it is this totem that
distinguishes one tribe from another. One remem-
bers the passage in Bernard Shaw's Cesar and
Cleopatra, when the latter tells of her descent from a
white cat. The author puts it forth as a joke, but
in the light of ancient popular beliefs there is nothing
to make fun about : the white cat was a totem in
Egyptian tradition, therefore no harm of any sort
must befall such an animal. To this effect a warn-
ing is given in a few sententious words, and then
by way of explanation there comes a whole impres-
sive story in which the respective animals are
presented as helpers of God Himself in the making
of the world.
Thus, among the Roumanians it is held a sin
to kill a frog or a tortoise, for the following reason :
In the beginning, when all was water, God asked the
tortoise to dive and ascertain whether any earth could
be found. The tortoise obeyed, and in a short time
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THE CREATION
returned with some clay in its mouth, a sufficient
sign for God to bid the waters retire on both sides
and let the earth come up. One should connect
this legend with the significant part played by the
tortoise in Sanscrit cosmogony, it being considered
as the very symbol of eartha flat plain with the
sky like a dome over it. A similar legend, referring
to the musk-rat instead of the tortoise, is also found
among the North American Indian tribes, the so-
called Iroquois. They believe that, when their
original female ancestress fell from heaven into the
waste of waters, the musk-rat hurried to bring up the
necessary mud to construct an island for her
dwelling.'
According to Roumanian tradition, the hedgehog
had also a share in the work of creation, and it is a
great sin to kill it. When God decided to fashion
the earth, He took a ball of woof and another of
warp, and whilst measuring the heaven, he gave the
latter to the hedgehog to hold. And one version
adds that the hedgehog let the ball loose ; so the earth
exceeded the sky in size.
We have seen that, with the devil's cunning
assistance, the earth expanded into an immense
pancake ; now, with that of the hedgehog, it be-
1 Myths of the New World, by Brinton, pp. 197-8.
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THE CREATION
came even larger than the sky. And the Creator
stood there perplexed, and not less annoyed. All
His good work might have been spoiled, had it not
been for the kind bee. She flew round the hiding-
place of the devil and heard him muttering to himself
as usual. " Hum, clever he pretends to be, this
God ; but look at His doing. Were I God, I should
have crushed the earth in my arms, and so made it
fit the sky 1" The bee then hastened to inform
God, who, following the devil's hint, crushed the
earth into its present form with mountains, hills and
valleys. And God in the meantime rewarded the
bee with a blessing, that henceforth she might pro-
duce the honey, and also the wax for church tapers.
But before reaching God the poor little bee met with
a great misfortune : the devil caught her spying
about and struck her with a whippretty nearly
cutting her in two pieces. That is why to this day
she looks so funny, with hardly any waist at all.
Popular tradition throws back the creation to about
five thousand five hundred years before Christ, and
it is believed to have commenced on a Tuesday.
Therefore one must not proceed on a journey, get
married or start anything on that particular day.
Such refraining is expressed in two characteristic
proverbs : " As if he were born on Tuesday," is
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THE CREATION
said about an unlucky man ; " All things up-
side down and the wedding on a Tuesday," when
all is going wrong. In like manner one must
not finish any work on Saturday, for on that day
God finished the creation of the world ; and on
Sunday, of course, He rested. Consequently, the
latter day has to be glorified with feasting and
jollity. I quote one of the folk-songs which
says :
" Who drinks and makes merry

Never thinks of sin,
God Himself joyed
When He built the world ;
But there was no one
To share in His joy."
Feeling rather lonely, God bethought Himself of

creating some fellow-creatures. He fashioned two
dolls out of clay and breathed life into them.
Another version relates that it was the devil who
first conceived the idea of the two clay dolls ; but he
was unable to give them life, and for this he asked
the help of the Almighty. That is why the body,
with its many temptations, is under the sway of
the devil, whilst the soul is instinct with a divine
spark.
Other stories tell of a separate creation. First
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THE CREATION
Adam was made out of clay, but in the image of God
Himself ; then Eve, in the following circumstances :
God took one of Adam's ribs and left it for a while
to sew up the place from which the rib was taken.
The devil, seeing the rib, transformed himself into
a dog and stole it. When God turned round, He
caught sight of the dog with the rib in its mouth.
He ran and ran after the dog until at cross-paths he
got hold of the dog's tail. Now, the dog pulling
on one side, God on the other, the tail broke loose
altogether, and God, the tail in His hand, threw it
down, infuriated, and said : " Let woman be made
out of this ! "
There is another version of this story which is
also found, almost identically, amongst the Bul-
garian peasants.1
When God created from earth the first man, whom
he called Adam, He breathed upon him : he became
alive and was, like us, a living man. Then the Lord
said to Himself :
" I must give this man a companion, so that he
may have someone to speak with, and so that his
soul shall not be weary."
He called an angel to Him, and spoke thus :
1 See L. Schischmanoff's Legendes Religieuses Bulgares,
pp. 33-4, Paris, 1896.
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THE CREATION
" Listen to what I am telling you, 0 angel. Go
from here into the orchard, where you will find Adam
asleep. Then, very gently, take a rib from his
left side and bring it to me, but do not awaken
him."
The angel bowed before the Lord ; he ran into
the orchard and found the sleeping Adam ; he took
one of his ribs very gently, so that Adam knew
nothing, and brought it to the Lord. But the Lord
had also fallen asleep, and as the angel did not dare
to awaken Him, he stayed by the door, waiting till
He should wake.
Very soon the devil arrived. He went to the
angel and said :
" Why do you stay outside the door instead of
going in ? " and the angel answered : " I dare not
wake the Lord."
" And what have you got in your hand ? "
" Adam's rib."
" I beseech you, angel, let me see it. How is it
made ? "
The angel, unsuspecting, gave it to him, but the
devil ran away with it, and the angel ran after him.
The devil, with the rib in his hand, rushed from
place to place, while the angel pursued him, trying
to snatch it from him. At last the devil hid in a hole,
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THE CREATION
and the angel caught him by the tail. The devil
tried to go down the hole, the angel pulled his tail,
and he pulled and pulled so hard that he pulled it off,
and the devil hid in the hole. " Now what am I to
say to the Lord ? " lamented the angel, as he re-
turned. When he drew near to God he found Him
still asleep. " I'll wake him up," said the angel to
himself, " and He may do what He likes to me, as
long as He does not say, ' Why didn't you wake me
up before ? ' " And the angel cried, " Lord, Lord 1 "
And the Lord answered, with His eyes still shut,
" Oh, go away. Let me sleep in peace. As for
what you have in your hand, let it become even as
I said."
That is how the tail of the devil became woman,
and the name of the woman was Eve.
The diabolical character of woman is further
enhanced by the fact of her amorous relation with
the devil himself. All these incline one to see in
the Roumanian folk-conception a survival of the
ancient Jewish Lilith, the first wife of Adam, as
embodied by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in his picture,
Lady Lilith. Seated on a sofa, with her right hand
she loosens her golden hair, with her left she holds
a mirror in which she contentedly gazes upon her
face and her bare shoulders ; sure of herself, of the
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"Eigq.err" Atri .
::0
,.
1I
I
DRIVERS, HIGHLANDS OF MACEDONIA.

(See page 139)
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THE CREATION
alluring power of her charms, or, in Rossetti's own
words :
" Young while the earth is old,
And, subtly of herself contemplative,
Draws men to watch the bright net she can weave,
Till heart and body and life are in its hold."
WELL.
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IX
THE FLOOD
THE account of the Flood follows generally upon

the lines set out in the Bible. It is when one turns
to details that one meets with an obvious dualism
such as I have explained. God informs Noah,
either directly or through a dream, of the intended
flood and bids him prepare an ark in great secrecy,
without letting anyone, not even his own wife, know
about it. Noah proceeds at once to the building of
the arknot an easy task, as it lasted, according to
different versions, from nine to ninety-nine years.
During this period the devil, whose business it is
to spy on everybody, got very suspicious concerning
Noah ; but he could not find out the place, a secluded
forest, where Noah was preparing the ark. He
therefore tried to win the favours of Noah's wife, as
he did once with Eve. For this purpose the devil
brought her a drink of his own making and asked
her to use it as the means of wresting Noah's secret
from him. One evening, when Noah returned
home rather tired, she incited him to drink again
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THE FLOOD
and again ; and Noah, getting more than cheerful,
disclosed his secret to his wife, and through her
naturally to the devil, who hastened to smash the
ark. The following
day Noah, seeing the
ruin of his long en-
deavours, began to
cry aloud and pray.
God took pity on him
and asked : " Do you
remember the first
tree you struck when
starting work ? "
" Yes, I remem-
ber."
" Then make your-
self a toaththat is,
a wooden bar and a
mallet used in the
monasteries for call-
TOACA.
ing to prayermake
yourself a tooth and go under that same tree."
Noah did as he was told, and with the sounding of
the tooth each one of the scattered pieces of the ark
jumped up and assembled in its former place ; so
the ark rose up there, as it was, before the wondering
eyes of Noah.
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THE FLOOD
Then began the loading of the ark. Noah opened
the door for the pairs of animals to enter. Only his
wife remained behind. Noah said, " Come inside."
She replied, " No." Once more Noah called out to
her, " Come inside." But she again said, " No,"
obstinately. Then Noah, very angry, shouted,
" Come inside, you devil ! " Whereupon the devil
promptly availed himself of the invitation and
jumped in ; and that was in truth what she wanted,
for she loved the devil, and how could she stay
without him ? But, says a proverb, " Do not let
the devil enter your house ! " For no sooner had
he settled in the ark than he turned himself into a
mouse and began to gnaw hard at one of the planks.
Fortunately a lizard noticed the hole, and put its
tail in to stop the leak. Therefore we have to be
grateful to the lizard for thus saving humanity.
Another version says that Noah himself caught the
devil at his evil trick and threw down a fur glove,
which, changing into a cat, ran after the mouse.'
In any case the essential is that the ark withstood
all the dangers of the flood and grounded safely
upon a mountain. Noah then, desirous of ascer-
taining the condition of the waters, sent forth a
1 See Dr. M. Gaster's Rumanian Bird and Beast Stories,
pp. 213-14, London, 1915.
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THE FLOOD
raven. Once out, this bird stayed by a carcass and
returned no more ; that is why Noah cursed him :
" Let carrion henceforth be thy food." Another
story runs as follows :
Noah, anxious at the raven's delay, sent a dove
to look for him. When the raven was found and
questioned by this, he gave answer : " Go and tell
Noah that you have not seen me." In the mean-
time the dove walked in the blood of the carcass,
and so has had red-coloured feet ever since. The
oriental origin of both these stories is proved by the
fact that they are given in a strikingly similar form
by the Arab medimval chronicler, Abu-Djafer
Tabari.1 There is also another version in Roumania
relating to the raven's feathers : they were snow
white when Noah entrusted him with the errand.
But, as he gave no sign of return, Noah cursed him :
" Mayest thou turn as black as my heart "Noah's
heart being black with anger at that moment ; and
thus the raven's feathers changed to coal black.
The central idea of the legend is widely diffused.
It is told even by Ovid in the lines of the Metamor-
phoses beginning : " There was none fairer in all
Thessaly than Coronis of Larissa . . . ," beloved of
1 Birds in Legend, Fable and Folklore, by Ernest Ingersoll,
p. 1 cm, London, 1923.
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THE FLOOD
Apollo, until one day the raven brought news of her
unfaithfulness. Apollo shot the nymph, but at the
same time he punished his own favourite tell-tale
bird by turning it from white to black : inter ayes
albas vetuit consistere corvum.1
The account of the Flood ends in Roumanian as
in the Bible with the appearance of the rainbow,
called, in the beautiful expression of the people, "the
girdle of God," which I mention for the following
strange tradition attached to it : Both ends of the
rainbow drink from two rivers ; whoever proceeds
upon his knees and elbows and reaches either of them
and drinks also from the same water changes his sex
at once, from a boy he becomes a girl, and vice-versa.
There is a further point upon which the Rouman-
ian version of the Flood differs from that of the Bible.
One remembers the sentence : " And the sons of
Noah, that went forth of the Ark, were Shem, and
Ham, and Japhet," then : " These are the three
sons of Noah : and of them was the whole earth
overspread." Instead of three sons, Roumanian
tradition says that Noah's wife had altogether
twenty-four children : twelve by Noah, and twelve
by the devil, who, as I have mentioned, was her
lover ; from the former descend the good people in
the world, from the latter the bad. . . .
1 Book II, 542-632.
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THE FLOOD
An essential and characteristic feature of the
account of the Flood is generally its great antiquity,
implied also in the Roumanian saying : " Since
Noah's time . . . ," meaning a far-remote past.
Indeed, the oldest record we possess of the Flood is
that of Babylonia inscribed on tablets of baked clay ;
half of such a tablet in the Museum of Philadelphia
contains a fragmentary version of the Flood in
Sumerian, viz. in the tongue of a non-Semitic people
who occupied Lower Babylonia about three thou-
sand years before the Christian era. And even this
inscription does nothing but give expression to what
was then current amongst the peoplea living tradi-
tion, which would go further back than three thou-
sand years. Might not such a period correspond
to the date of the Atlantian catastrophe ? When
Plato comes to speak in The Timaus of the story
handed down by an Egyptian priest concerning
Atlantis, he puts its destruction at about nine
thousand years before his time.
Imagine a huge island-continent sunk with all
that innumerable generations had achieved, with all
that human tears and laughter had left upon it
during centuries, all gone under the waters for ever 1
Would not such an appalling disaster have stirred
and deeply impressed the popular imagination
everywhere ? For, like a crushing symbol of terres-
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THE FLOOD
trial vanity, the tale of a such-like catastrophe runs
throughout classical literature and beyond that
from India down to the remotest tribes of America
there is a persistent folk-memory of it. The
Algonquin Indians, for instance, tell how Mani-
bouzho, their god, was once engaged in hunting
when the wolves he used as dogs entered a lake and
disappeared. He followed them, but it suddenly
overflowed and submerged the entire world. The
Tupi-guarani of Brazil say that Monan, the divine
maker, once sent a fire which burnt up all that was
on the surface of the earth. In Mexico likewise
there is a tradition of water having destroyed the
world and men being changed into fish' Now,
according to Plato, the great cataclysm was
brought upon Atlantis by the wickedness and de-
generacy of its inhabitants. And this reason
prevails more or less through all the versions of the
Flood. Quite naturally. For simple people could
not have the mind of certain thinkers and theologians.
These latter, when faced by fearful occurrences such
as in our own times, the earthquakes of Messina,
Philadelphia and recently of Japan, would say :
" Man is unable to enter into the secret designs of
1 The Problem of Atlantis, by Lewis Spence, pp. 94.-6,
London, 1924..
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THE FLOOD
the divinity ; God sometimes acts through catas-
trophes to attain higher purposes." This thesis, by
the way, is embodied in Thomas Parnell's remark-
able poem The Hermit. I quote the lines :
" The Maker justly claims that world he made,
In this the right of Providence is laid;
Its sacred majesty through all depends
On using second means to work his ends. . . ."
Yes, but the people's mind could not reach a similar
degree of, call it as you like, wisdom or sophistica-
tion. They are perplexed by the impossibility of
reconciling the inherent bounty of God with the
breaking out of dreadful misfortunes, and they are
left with the alternative : either God is fighting an
evil spirit, a dragon, who at a certain moment has
the upper hand, or God is inflicting punishment on
mortals for their sins. To the present day, when
the earth trembles, it is said by the peasants in
Roumania that God is looking angrily upon it or
that the earth itself is heavy with human wrongs.
Again, when a fierce wind or storm rages, it is because
a bastard has been born and thrown out, or someone
has committed suicide.
Besides the versions of the general Flood, as shown
in the Bible, there are scattered throughout the
world a number of other accounts relating to special
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THE FLOOD
towns and districts, which again seem to echo dimly
a reminiscence of the lost Atlantis. Such is the
legend of Savannah-La-Mar, so beautifully sung by
De Quincey in his Suspiria de Prof undis : " God
smote Savannah-la-Mar, and in one night, by earth-
quake, removed her, with all her towers standing
and population sleeping from the steadfast founda-
tions of the shore to the coral floors of ocean. . . .
This city, therefore, like a mighty galleon with all
her apparel mounted, streamers flying and tackling
perfect, seems floating along the noiseless depths
of ocean ; and oftentimes in glassy calms, through
the translucid atmosphere of water that now stretches
like an air-woven awning above the silent encamp-
ment, mariners from every clime look down into her
courts and terraces, count her gates and number
the spires of her churches."
Then we have the sunken city of Ys, alluded to
by Renan in the opening of Souvenir d'Enf ance et
de Jeunesse :
" One of the most widespread legends of Brittany
is that of a pretended city of Ys, which at some
unknown epoch is said to have been swallowed up
by the sea. One is shown, at various places on the
shore, the very site of that fabulous city and the
fishermen tell strange tales. In days of tempest,
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THE FLOOD
they assure us, one can see in the hollow of the waves
the tops of its church spires ; in days of calm one
hears the sound of its bells rising from the abyss. . . ."
A similar legend is also told about a city in
Cardigan Bay, Wales, and about Lough Neagh, in
Ireland, whose people were all submerged for their
wickedness. Even in a secluded part of upper
Thessaly I once met with the same legend in peculiar
circumstances, which I shall relate in my own way,
that one may not only realise but feel the darkly
primitive and awful side of it :
The sun had set by the time we reached the edge
of the lakea lake we had never seen before.
" Well, what do you say ? " asked one of our
companions. " To-morrow by midday, please God,
we shall be at Preveza. Let us spend the night
here."
" Good," we answered. The drivers stopped the
horses and began to prepare for the halt. They
lifted down the bundles and pack-saddles and took
off the bridles ; the horses thus unburdened were
set free to graze. Then we spread our cloaks upon
the damp grass and stretched ourselves out as best
we could ; one face downwards, another with his
head on his hand, others with their face uppermost,
their eyes lost in the unknown blue, where the stars
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THE FLOOD
were beginning to appear. The night was calm,
silence and peace prevailed. Only a few light
clouds, like heaps of down, floated above in the pale
light, now approaching, now receding from the
moon. This was the only movement in the whole
surrounding country ; there was nothing else. Not
a murmur, not a living creature ; even fireflies, such
as we had met upon the road, were no longer on the
wing. It was strange. We felt something omin-
ous ; one would have said that evil spirits were
hovering above us. We looked closely at the lake,
it appeared to be dead, sleeping motionless beneath
the moonbeams ; but from time to time, quite sud-
denly, one could see it quiver ; then ripples ran
across the surface, the whole expanse of that sheet of
water came washing up against the banks, breaking
into little waves that splashed mournfully.
" Look ! How restless the lake is getting 1 " one
of the drivers whispered in my ear. " Just when
you do not expect it, and without a breath of wind.
And deep it is, deep. . . . No one has ever explored
it up to now. Fishermen will not come to it, and
its waters know neither rod nor boat."
" But how is that ? "
" I do not know . . . but there must be some-
thing people fear, there must be something ; there's
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THE FLOOD
a pool of the same kind in the Tomor Mountains,
only its waters are darker."
And the man, without waiting to be asked, told
us all he knew about the pool at Tomor in Albania,
whither he used to go with his caravan, a legend
which was followed by others, and then all the
drivers began to relate stories in low voicesold
memories of the past, of their wandering life, spent
for the greater part upon the road ; adventures more
and more wonderful, shadowed by phantoms, ghosts
and wicked fairies who haunt the cross-roads by
night in the neighbourhood of lakes and springs.
Only Mona, grizzled with years, sat somewhat
apart and spoke no word. He must have been
absorbed in some particular thought, for a little later
we saw him lean over towards us and make a sign
with his finger to his lips. " 'Sh ! be silent, is this
the place to speak of ghosts and such things ? "
The old man glanced towards the pool, leaned
over the edge and placed his ear near the water ;
after listening intently, he said slowly and thought-
fully : " Have you muffled the horses' bells ? "
" Yes. Why do you ask ? "
" Never mind. I only wanted to know."
Then, rather as though he were speaking to him-
self : " I thought there were horse bells ringing . . .
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THE FLOOD
but it is not so. Now I call to mind : on the road
from Ianina to Preveza. . . . Yes, yes ; this is the
lake." Mona twice made the sign of the cross :
" Oh, Lord, great are thy wonders I "
" But what is it ? "
" Do you know where we are ? We have chanced
upon the Evil Pool . . . the Priest's Pool ; you
may have heard of it, this is it. People have told
me about it, but I did not believe it. Now I see
for myself. Hear how they ring. . . . And the
water trembles, little whirlpools break the surface
here and there ; it glitters as though with the eyes of
devils. . . . In the middle of the night they begin
to ring and ring. . . ."
" But what are they, old man, that ring ? "
" The bells . . . do you hear them ? "
For a while we waited with attentive ears. The
sound of bells rose from somewhere, from far away,
out of the unknown depths, ceasing for a moment to
begin afresh, now clearer, now more faint, sounding
as in a dream in the silence of the night. We
looked at each other amazed. It really was not an
illusion. I thought of what the driver had said to
me : " No one has ever explored it up to now.
Fishermen will not come near it, and its waters know
neither rod nor boat."
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THE FLOOD
" What ? " I asked. " They are ringing in the
lake ? "
" Yes, my lads. God spares no one ; all are
rewarded after their deeds." The old man nodded
his head several times and crossed himself. " Eh !
Where you now see the lake, a long time ago, in
olden days, there was a famous town, beautiful and
rich, very rich. Such thousands of caravans came
here from distant lands that everyone marvelled,
not so much at the number of caravans as at the
beautiful merchandise they carried through the
world. Day after day fortunes here increased, and
you know that, when money comes in, fear of the
Most High departs and arrogance reigns ; and in
time the people grew wicked and nothing remained
sacred to them. There was at that time, among
others, a priest . . . yes, a priest, who, after com-
mitting many deeds inspired by the Evil One,
turned eyes of desire upon his daughter . . .
" His daughter ? "
" It is as I tell you, my lads. The girl realised
it, and day and night she prayed to Heaven to save
her from evil. Then one feast day the bells chimed,
and the people thronged to church ; a crowd richly
clad, they went to amuse themselves and for no other
reason. The priest was at the altar, and prompted
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THE FLOOD
by his sinful heart, he had ordered the girl to be near
him on one side. And as she knelt there, praying
in the candlelight with her hands clasped, she
looked so beautiful that the priest forgot the service,
his sacred office and that he was the girl's father,
and hastened towards her ; but as he was about to
lay his hands upon her a terrible crash was heard,
and the church and the town, with everybody in it,
was destroyed, and in their place arose this lake in
front of us. And some of the peoplewho knows,
perhaps all of them ?were changed into ghosts,
and they dwell in the lake to this day."
In spite of ourselves we whispered : " They dwell
in the lake to this day 1 "
" And the bells have remained . . . one of God's
wonders, and often at midnight they begin to ring
of themselves."
The driver ceased speaking. In the depths of
the pool everything was reflected : the full moon,
the sky, the bushes on the banks, the light clouds
and the starsa host of burning lights glittered
below, where one could see the church with open
doors, with towers. . . . And the bells. . . . I
think of them to this day ; where could they be ?
For, indeed, they were ringing, ringing, those
bells. . . .
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X
SCOTTISH AND ROUMANIAN BALLADS
LECTURING lately on English literature at the

University of Bucharest, I was brought to look more
carefully into both Percy's Reliques and Sir Walter
I found in them a number of
Scott's Minstrelsy.
poems which, either in plot or in characteristic
features, closely resemble certain Roumanian folk-
products ; and the analogies between them seemed
to me to be no mere matter of curiosity, but likely
to interest students of comparative literature.
I begin with Percy's Reliques. Eleventh in
order, we find the ballad of Child of Elle. A knight
receives from his love, together with a silken scarf
and a ring of gold, tidings of her father's decision
to marry her to another man. The knight loses
no time. He goes and induces her to run away.
In their flight they are chased and overtakenfirst
by the rival knight, who is slain, next by the father's
pursuers ; then, as the minstrel has it :
" Her lover he put his home to his mouth,
And blew both loud and shrill,
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And soone he saw his owne merry men
Come ryding over the hill."
Thus all ends in a reconciliation to the advantage
of the lover. This ballad is much similar to the
Roumanian Fata CadiuluiThe Daughter of the Cadi
also a story of successful elopement. But the
subject is further developed in many Roumanian
folk-tales, and the poet Eminescu gave it high
literary expression in his Fairy Prince of the Lime-
Tree, suffused with all the magic of the moonlight
and the sleeping forests, through which the lovers
ride on, as in a dream :
They pass the shadows, fade in the vales, while the horn
full of longing sounds sweetly, sounds heavily.
In Fair Margaret and Sweet William, as well as in
Lord Thomas and Fair Annet, the unfortunate
couples die of unrequited love. They are buried
in a church and, though on opposite sides, the
plants springing up from their graves intertwine,
just as it happens in a Roumanian Ballad, Inelul .ii
Naframa, where the motive of the ring and the scarf
is used, with something of miraculous foreboding
power attached to them. I give an abbreviated
prose translation of it :
There was a Prince young and strong as the fir tree of the
mountains. He wedded a village maiden, with a fair
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beautiful face. In setting out for the camp, the Prince one
day spoke to her:
" My beloved, take this ring and put it on thy finger;
when the ring rusts, know that I am dead."
" And thou," she answered, " take thou my silken scarf,
embroidered with gold; when the gold wears away, know
that I am dead."
Forth he went. On the way he halted by a spring in the
woods. There he gazed upon the scarf. His heart was
broken.
" My valiant soldiers," says he, " wait here and enjoy
yourselves. I left my sword behind."
He turned homewards. Soon he met a rider:
" Good fortune, young brave ! What news ? Whence
comest thou ? "
" My lord, your father has cast your bride into a deep and
wide lake."
" Take then my horse and lead it to my father. If he
should ask what became of me, tell him that I plunged into
the water to seek my beloved one."
The King dried up the lake and there he found them in
each other's arms, lying on the golden sand. They bore
them to the church. The Prince was buried by the altar,
to the east; his bride in the aisle, to the west. And from
him, there grew up a fir tree, bending over the church ;
from hera tender, flowery vine, which spread and mingled
itself with the fir tree.
In the English Ballads, instead of the vine and

the fir tree, one finds a briar and a birch or a briar
and a roseas for instance in Fair Margaret and
Sweet William :
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" Margaret was buryed in the lower chancel,
And William in the higher:
Out of her breast there sprang a rose,
And out of his a briar."
" They grew until they grew unto the church top,
And then they could grow no higher;
And there they tyed in a true lovers' knot,
Which made all the people admire."
This kind of story, which often occurs in folk-
lore, no doubt implies an old superstitious belief
in the soul embodying itself in a tree over one's
grave, and it is also expressive of a high conception
of passionate love, enduring beyond mortal bounds
love instinct with a sense of eternity.
That physical love is stronger than any other
is the theme of a ballad entitled The Maid Freed
from the Gallows, which, though not comprised in
the Reliques, was communicated to Percy after-
wards. One meets in it with a girl who, being
sentenced to death, at the last moment begs the
judge to wait awhile, as she sees her father approach-
ing. Then she addresses the latter :
" 0 father, 0 father, a little of your gold,
And likewise of your fee !
To keep my body from yonder grave,
And my neck from the gallows-tree."
The father refuses to redeem her ; so do all her
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kindred in turnmother, brother and sister ; only
when it comes to the lover he is ready to pay any
amount, flinching from no sacrifice, for, says he :
" I am come to see you saved,
And saved you shall be."
The theme of this ballad is almost identical with
the Roumanian Giurgiu, except for two points : It
is a youth in the latter, not a girl, that is in danger ;
and this is due to the circumstance that, as he slept
under a tree, a serpent fell from the branches and
entered his breast. The youth makes trial of all
his nearest people, calls to them aloud to take out
the serpent ; no one but his sweetheart dares : she
thrusts her bare hand into his breast, and lo 1 instead
of a serpent, there is a beautiful girdle of gold
which is meant to be the reward of true and faithful
love.
In the collection of Roumanian Folk Poems by
Alexandri, the appearance of which was mainly
due to the interest awakened throughout Europe
by Percy's Reliques, one finds a little piece called
BlestemulThe Malediction. I translate it in prose :
A youth and a maiden pass on yonder hill. The youth
sings and fondles his horse; but the maiden sighs wearily and
speaks to him:
" Let me ride, beloved, for I am tired ; the road is rough
and I can go no farther on foot."
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" I would take thee gladly, sweet one, but my horse is
small and weak in the legs. He can hardly bear my own
bodythe body with its sins, the belt with its weapons."
" Hast thou no pity and fear of sin ? Thou hast taken
me from my parents and brought me into the wild woods.
God grant that it may be according to my wish : mayest
thou go on and on till thou fallest into slavery among the
Turks, with thy feet in the stocks and thine arms in chains ;
may the longing for me fill thy heart whenever the road is at
its worst; may thy horse stumble and throw thee on thy
head, may thy right hand wither and thy left hand be
shattered ; mayest thou marry nine times and have nine
sons, marry again and have only one daughter; may they
pass thee whistling, and may she bring thee handfuls of
muddy bitter water, so that thou wouldst drink and drink
and think of my curse."
The poem strikes me as being only fragmentary
in Roumanian. There is no plot in it ; and when
you have read it, you are left somewhat puzzled.
Why are the two found together ? Where are
they going to, and what did the man think of that
simple-minded, quaint imprecation ? Did he smile
and proceed on his way, as though nothing had
happenedhe on horseback and she walking by his
side ? All these gaps become quite clear if one
turns to the English parallel in the Reliques, called
Child Waters. The sin to which the Roumanian
verses allude is explained by the words of Fair
Ellen, when she says that her gown, too wide before,
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is now too straight. He tells her not to worry,
but take two shires of land. She would rather
have the man. Next day Child Waters is bound
northwards. Ellen wishes to accompany him as a
foot page. He agrees, on condition that she shall
shorten her gown and clip her yellow locks. And
thus they proceed :
" She, all the long day Child Waters rode,
Ran barefoote by his side;
Yett was he never soe courteous a knighte,
To say, Ellen, will you ryde ? "
A situation very similar to that of the Roumanian
ballad ; but Child Waters himself is far more
heartless, for he makes the poor girl follow him
even across a broad piece of water. Still he is at
last overcome into marrying her, when he listens
to Fair Ellen's affecting little song, after the child's
birth in the stable :
"Lullabye, mine owne deere child,
Lullabye, dere child, dere;
I wold thy father were a king,
Thy mother layd on a biere."
In The Bailiff's Daughter of Islington, a young
wanderer through London chances to meet his old
sweetheart, whom he does not recognise, having left
her down at Islington seven years ago and not
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having seen her since. He inquires : where was
she born ?
" At Islington," she says.
The youth gets more interested.
" Tell me whether you know the Bailiff's daughter."
" She died, Sir, long ago."
To this comes the answer :
" If she be dead, then take my horse,
My saddle and bridle, also ;
For I will into some farr countrye,
Where noe man shall me knowe."
The girl then confesses that she herself is the
bailiff's daughter and quite ready to marry him.
In his large collection of English and Scottish
Ballads, Professor Child gives eleven variants of this
ballad. What appears in all of them to be only a
faint echo of some bygone incident has in the
corresponding Roumanian ballad the deep, tearful
pathos of reality. The ballad I refer to belongs
to the Vlach population of Epirus and Macedonia.
In these parts a man after getting married goes
abroad to seek a living. It happens sometimes
that he returns after many years' absence, and drops
in unexpectedly like a wanderer from strange lands.
Both his arrival and what follows are sung in a
ballad of which I know three versions in the Vlach
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dialect ; but it exists also among the Greeks and
the Slays, being inspired by conditions which are
similar in all the country lying south of the Danube.
The wife of the wayfarer, meeting him at the foun-
tain or on the road, stands astonished and asks for
evidence :
" If thou art in truth my husband, tell me the fashion of
my house."
" An apple tree grows in the garden and a vine at the
gate."
" That's known of all the neighbours and everyone may
know it ; tell me what signs my body bears, that I may be
assured."
" Thou hast a mole on the chest, another in the armpit." 1
Then, of course, she gives him the welcome of a
husband. The entire scene reminds one of that in
the Odyssey, when Penelope, altogether lost in
bewilderment, speaks to her son Telemachus :
Et 8' ET 87)
E'0-7-' '08VCrEJ3 Kai otKov 1Kciverac, 71 tzciAa vOYe
yvagreq.40' ciAA4Acav Kai Ao'ii.ov EiCITL yap il.aV
0.4jua0', a ail Kai wig, KEKpvEVa t8pEv CI7T5 (MAW V.
" If in very truth he is Odysseus, and has come home, we
two shall surely know one another more certainly; for we
1 The Greek version of the whole poem has been trans-
lated into English by Lucy M. J. Garnett in her Greek Folk
Poesy, Vol. I, p. 191.
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have signs which we two alone know, signs hidden from
others." 1
And indeed, Odysseus proceeds to give a clear,

manifest token of his identity.
I come now to Sir Walter Scott's Minstrelsy of the
Scottish Border. One's attention is drawn here first
of all to that admirable ballad of Lord Randal, which
was already known in Italy some two centuries
ago. It begins :
" 0 where hae ye been, Lord Randal, my son ?
0 where hae ye been, my handsome young man ? "
" I hae been to the wild wood; mother make my bed soon.
For I'm weary wi' hunting, and fain wad lie down."
And in this way, by means of questions and
answers, the story is very skilfully worked up to a
climax ; the mother, who has but a suspicion,
gradually arrives at the dramatic conclusion :
" 0 I fear ye are poison'd, Lord Randal, my son !
O I fear ye are poison'd, my handsome young man ! "
"O yes, I am poison'd; mother make my bed soon,
For I'm sick at the heart, and I fain wad lie down."
No doubt his sweetheart is responsible for the

foul deed, but one is not told the reason of it. If
we turn to the Roumanian version of the ballad,
1 A. T. Murray's trans., Loeb Classical Library,
Odyssey xxiii, 107-10.
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found in Transylvania under the name of Neguta,
instead of an accomplished fact, we are introduced
somehow into the secret cause and preparation of
the murder. A girl, forsaken by her lover, who is
inclined towards another woman, takes counsel
with her mother. The latter advises her to try to
win back the lover, either by a curse or a spell or by
presents :
" Then, my mother, what shall I take him ?
What gift shall I make him ? "
" A handkerchief fine, little daughter,
Bread of white wheat for thy loved one to eat,
And a glass of wine, my daughter."
" And what shall I take her, little mother,
What gift shall I make her ? "
" A kerchief of thorns, little daughter;
A loaf of black bread for her whom he weds,
And a cup of poison, my daughter." 1
Here we see that, in opposition to Lord Randal,
the poison is intended not for the lover, but for
the woman who lured him away.
In Clerk Saunders, another Scottish ballad, we
meet with the device of the hostile brothers, who,
seven or nine in number, play such a large part in
folklore. They kill here the lover of their sister ;
1 Countess Martinengo Cesaresco, Essays in the Study of
Folk Songs, in Everyman's Library, p. 179.
[ 155 1
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as they do in a Roumanian ballad, Mogol T7ornicul.
Intermixed with the story of the seven brothers
there enters also in Clerk Saunders the supernatural
element of the spectrethe same ghastly form,
which, drawn from popular tradition, is to be seen
gliding with a shadowy presence of terror and
mystery through many a literary reproduction,
beginning with Burger's Lenore, rendered into
English by Sir Walter Scott himself. It is an
old widespread belief that one is liable to become
a revenant under certain circumstancesfor instance,
a sudden and violent death, as in Clerk Saunders, or a
strong attachment to persons still living, to whom
one is drawn by the simple power of loveas is the
case in Proud Lady Margaret. Here the dead
returns at night to a lady, in the guise of a gallant
knight. She wonders at the apparition, and he
discloses himself to be her own brother ; then she
wishes to go along with himwhich, of course, is
impossible, for, says the spirit :
" The wee worms are my bedfellows
And cauld clay is my sheets,
And when the stormy winds do blow
My body lies and sleeps."
In a Roumanian version from Macedonia the

story runs as follows : A mother had nine sons and
[ 156 I
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only one daughter, by the name of Giamfichea.
At the instance of the younger brother, Constantine,
she consented to marry the latter to a distant country.
No sooner had she departed than a pestilence broke
out and the mother with her nine sons all perished
leaving behind a desolate house. When Giam-
fichea returned, her brother Constantine stood in
the doorway to greet her. In amazement she
looked at him. She spoke : " My brother, what
is it ?A smell as of damp earth is about thee. . . .
Art thou alive or dead ? And tell me, where are all
the othersmy mother and my brothers ? "
" Down they lie in the ground ; I only rose from the
grave; with deep longing I hastened and came here to meet
thee."
In the Vlach text :
" Cu dor mare frii-alagai,
Viriiu aua di ti-altiptai."
The story forms also the subject of other ballads,
in which the spirit hurries to fetch his sister, driven
by the curse of the mother. This may be compared
with the curse that brought about the visit of the
three dead sailors in the Wife of Usher's Well :
" I wish the wind may never cease,
No fish be in the flood,
Till my three sons come home to me,
In earthly flesh and blood ! "
[ 157 1
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The spectre-ballad is very diffused throughout
Europe and especially in the Balkans. Professor
Politis, who wrote a special monograph, The Popular
Song about the Dead Brother, gives no lesssthan seven-
teen versions of it. Very impressive in some of
these, as well as in a Roumanian one, is the episode
of the spectre riding with his sister, when the birds
hover about and utter aloud in a human tongue
their astonishment :
" Who has ever seen a fair maiden and a dead man riding
together ? "
" Didst hear, my brother Constantine, what the birds are
saying ? "
In the Roumanian collection of Alexandri already
mentioned there is the well-known Cucul ,s-i Turturica
The Cuckoo and the Turtledove, beginning :
" Dulce turturicI,
Dalbl pIsIricI !
Hai sa ne iubim
11
SI ne drIgostim .
I translate it in prose :
" Sweet turtle-dove, little white bird, let us love together ! "
" I should like to, but I fear your mother. She is a
. . ."
witch, and she would scold and scold.
" Dear little turtle-dove, little white bird, do come and
be my love ! "
" No, cuckoo, no ! Ask me no more ; for to be left
alone, I will turn into a reed."
[ x58 ]
www.dacoromanica.ro
" If you turn into a reed, I will change myself into a
shepherd. I will find you and make a flute of the reed,
that I may play on it, and kiss it."
" No, cuckoo, no ! I cannot listen to you ! Ah ! if
it were not for your mother ! But rather than be with her,
I would become a saint's image in church."
" Even then I will follow you. I will change into a
deacon. And there, in the church, I will bow to you and
worship you, saying, ' Little saint's image, turn into a bird
again, and let us love and be together.' "
There are numerous variations of this poem, in

some of which human beings take the place of
birds. They might all be reduced to a simple,
common type, symbolising the conflict between a
tempting and an innocent spirit. In this, one is
inclined to see a concrete example of the old
Zoroastrian doctrine, which, together with other
influences, entered Roumanian folklore, owing
chiefly to the proselytising movement of the Bogomils.
The poem found its way into many countries. In
Provence Mistral used it with much literary skill
in Mireio. Thence, it was introduced by colonists
into Canada. I find a similar version among Sir
Walter Scott's collection, which, like the Vlach one
I collected in Macedonia,' seems to be devoid of
any dualistic tendencies.
1 See my Papers on the Rumanian People and Literature,
P. 49, London, 192o.
[ 159 ]
www.dacoromanica.ro
" 0 gin my love were yon red rose,
That grows upon the castle wa',
And I myself a drap of dew,
Down on that red rose I would fa'.
"O my love's bonny, bonny, bonny;
My love's bonny and fair to see;
Whene'er I look on her weel-faur'd face,
She looks and smiles again to me.
" 0 gin my love were a pickle of wheat,
And growing upon yon lily lee,
And I myself a bonny wee bird,
Awa' wi' that pickle o' wheat I wad flee.
0 my love's bonny, etc.
" 0 gin my love were a coffer o' gowd,
And I the keeper of the key,
I wad open the kist whene'er I list,
And in that coffer I wad be.
0 my love's bonny, etc."
Such parallelisms among the ballads could be
pursued still further. The question arises, how
we are to account for them ? First, the ballads I
quoted are mostly Scottish ; the life of yore in
Scotland, its clan organisation, being similar to that
of the Roumanians in communities known as
Celnicate and Foivodate, a certain likeness is bound
to be reflected also in the popular productions.
On the other hand, a large number of these ballads
are distributed throughout Europe. Having in
each country a peculiar native freshness of their
[ 160 I
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own, they none the less display essential resem-
blances, which would point to a common origin.
This it is hardly possible for us to trace ; for, like
the old coins whose effigies are worn out, so the
ballads do not show who
put them first in currency.
However, by striking a
deep, emotional chord, be-
yond transitory fashions and
conventions, they can be
understood by everyone and
in every age. As a Rou-
manian proverb puts it :
" We are all made of the
same paste," and in spite
of our many divisions and
differences, we have the
same joys and the same
sorrows, and there is the .--
WAYSIDE CROSS.
same ending for all of us.
This simple, everyday truth, which we very often
forget, the ballads through their general appeal
bring home to us in a striking way, as it were a
revelation. And here, as in any high literature, lies
their humanising powera power that makes for the
crumbling of the walls of mistrust and opposition,
as did the old prophetic song for the walls of Jericho.
M [16I ]
www.dacoromanica.ro
A LIST OF SOME BOOKS NOT MENTIONED
IN THE FOOTNOTES BUT OF SPECIAL
INTEREST
APART from the works mentioned in the footnotes I

add a few more of special interest :
OVID DENSUSIANU. Graiul din Tara Hategului : The
appendix containing information on burial customs. Bucu-
resti, 1915.
ROMUL VuIA. " Originea Jocului de Calusari," in
Dacoromania, year-book of the University of Cluj, 1922.
TH. CAPIDAN. " Rusalii," in Dacoromania, year-book of
the University of Cluj, 1924.
P. PAPAHAGI. " Aruguciarii la Aromani," in a periodical,
Graiu Bun, No. 4-5, Bucuresti, 1907.
TUDOR PAMFILE. Povestea Lumii de Demult. Pub-
lished by the Roumanian Academy, 1913.
EMANOIL BUCUTA. Romanii dintre Yidin I; Timoc :
referring partly to All Souls' Day. Bucuresti, 1927.
N. IORGA. Ltoria Literaturii Romdneiti : Chapter I
dealing with Roumanian ballads. Bucuresti, 1925.
MICHEL VULPESCO. Les Coutumes Roumaines Periodiques,
Paris, 1927
PRINTED BY .ttICUARD L,LAY AND SONS, LTD., AT BUNGAY, SUFFOLK,

IN GREAT BRITAIN.
www.dacoromanica.ro
www.dacoromanica.ro

Marcu Beza-Paganism in Roumanian Folklore 1928

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Marcu Beza-Paganism in Roumanian Folklore 1928

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PAGANISM

With Illus lrations

Printed in Great Britain

II. THE MOON 16

THE STAR Facing page 3

BUHAIU; CAPRA; SORCOVA; SORCOVA; BREZAIA Page I I

CAROLSINGERS ; ANGELS AND SHEPHERDS Facing page 14

MUMMERS WITH BUHAIU AND DRUM . )7 )3 19

CHRISTMAS CUSTOMS PLAY REPRESENTED AT THE

GIPSY DANCER AND FLOWERSELLER . Facing page 48

CALUSAR ; ALUGUCIAR, HIGHLANDS OF MACEDONIA Page 52

I TURN my mind back a few years, and I fancy

Or that given by V. Alexandri in his Folk-Poems :

Their singing ends up with a loud, hearty greeting

ANGELS AND SHEPHERDS.

Through its magic light and its influence on

A ballad of Transylvania sings with regard to the

Housewives at the sight of the new moon ride on

Now one could better appreciate the Roumanian

Here follows the enumeration of the various kinds

The invocation then is taken up again in a renewed

THERE exists an old custom known under the

The Vlach name for Paparuda is Pirpiruna ; hence

One would easily deduce from this that Kalojan

In order to realise the true meaning of the song,

ONE has, no doubt, heard of the old English

HOBBY-HORSE DANCERS AT A FAIR.

As protection against them, people are warned to

Now what was the meaning of all this ? Were

CALU;AR. ALLIGUCIAR, HIGHLANDS

regular folk-play, which, containing all the elements

1 Professor Gilbert Murray's translation of the Bacchee.

FROM very ancient days the twenty-fourth of June,

" So they spoke, and goodly Odysseus gladdened in

which is soon changed for another one, used when

The simile here might not appeal to many of my

At the fountain a little boy, after throwing

" Fill, sister; empty, brother, to give water to the

They proceed to three fountains in turn, repeating

The first epithet, ditMaA7js', has the meaning of

IN the preceding pages I have tried to connect some

As happens in many of the olden myths, in our

In some versions of this tale, pervaded with a

To this day, among a section of the Vlachs in

rather a turn of amorous bashfulness, but it might

but I ! ' So judge between us."

THERE is another side of the Sacred Marriage con-

to sing of the lovely maiden :

At her repeated call Hesperus, enamoured like-

In like manner Eminescu's maiden shrinks back

" Thou art fair as in a dream

And she adds :

In a flight of unsurpassed descriptive beauty,

The Almighty, after telling him what it means to

IN a poem touching on the origin of things,

" Who drinks and makes merry

Feeling rather lonely, God bethought Himself of

DRIVERS, HIGHLANDS OF MACEDONIA.

THE account of the Flood follows generally upon

LECTURING lately on English literature at the

In the English Ballads, instead of the vine and

And indeed, Odysseus proceeds to give a clear,

No doubt his sweetheart is responsible for the

In a Roumanian version from Macedonia the