Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/148

 138 Chann against the Child-stealing Witch.

illness has been retained in the first charm together with the epical narrative, and instead of mystical names, the names of the illnesses are given in full. We shall soon be able to understand how these illnesses have crept into the charm. The meaningless names, such as in the third charm, have in some versions a definite meaning, in others popular etymology has supplied a translation to these curious names, so that in a Russian version, where almost every incident is retained, the Evil Spirit, which has there nothing to do with children or women in child-bed, is the embodi- ment of fever, and each name represents a different stage of that illness. We would have thus at least two distinct types to be kept asunder carefully, the child-stealing type and the fever or other illness type. However attractive this last type may be, I cannot deal with it here adequately. I will only mention, just because there appear in it so many mysterious names, the old Latin conjuration published by Vassiliev in his Anecdota Grxco-Byzantina, pp. Ixvii.-viii., together with a Greek parallel of the fifteenth century. There are also other availing charms which read almost like a literal translation, and from which that element had been borrowed and amalgamated with the child-stealing

type- Passing on from the oral literature with which I have dealt hitherto to the written, we find the absolute counter- part of the last charm in manuscripts from the sixteenth century on almost to the time when it was printed for the first time in 1874. I possess no less than fourteen Rumanian manuscripts of this charm where the witch is regularly called Avestitza. The contents are almost identical with the last- mentioned oral charm ; the names, however, differ very con- siderably, and in some they have a decidedly Slavonic form. In a few of these manuscripts we find now another name added to that of the Archangel Michael, namely, the holy Sisoe. The text begins with the words, " I, the servant of the Lord, the holy Sisoe, coming down from the Mount of