Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/40

 30 The Legends of Krishna.

Gakf, "the great black one," who is a god of riches, like the Hindu Kuvera, " the ugly one," both probably black spirits of the hearth, like Brownie and the Cauld Lad of Hilton.^ Malignant spirits and ghosts are naturally depicted as black, such as the cruel wood-sprite in Terra del Fuego, and the •Ukraine god of evil. Our own Devil and others of his kinsfolk are described as black, and Pausanias speaks of the black ghost of Temesa."

Passing on to Greece, we have the Nocturnal Dionysus and Dionysus of the Black Goatskin, the Black Erinys, the Black Aphrodite, said to be so called because men indulge in vice at night, but who was really a chthonic deity of the grave, and the Black Demeter.^

English tradition supplies us with a black Godiva, who is doubtless a decayed deity of the older paganism."^

In more modern times we have the host of Black Madonnas. a very curious chapter in the history of hagiology.^ The legends given in explanation of their colour are of many kinds. Thus the image of Maria Egyptiaca was entirely covered with hair to represent her dwelling in the desert, " al black over all her body of the grate heat and bren- nynge of the sun," as the Golden Legend describes her.^ Others are said to have been buried in the earth or bogs,

' Gomme, Folklore Relics of Village Life, 88 ; the Mexican Yxtliton or Ixthilton, "the little negro," or "the black-faced," cured children of various diseases. Bancroft, loc. cit., iii., 409.

-Journal of the Anthropological Institute, x. 40 ; xii. , 158, 162 ; xv,, 145 ; Ralston, Russian Fairy Tales, 358 ; Pausanias, vi., 6, 11 ; Frazer, iv. ,

357.

^ Pausanias, i., 40, 6 ; ii., 35, i ; Frazer, ii., 525 seqq. ; Aeschylus, Choeph, 1038 ; Sept. Contra Thebes, 696, 975 ; Euripides, Orestes, 321 ; Electra, 1345 ; Pausanias, viii., 34, 3 ; ii., 2, 4; viii., 6, 5 ; ix., 27, 5 ; Farnell, loc. cit., ii., 649 seqq. ; Pausanias, viii., 5, 8, 42, i ; Frazer, iv., 406.

■* Hartland, Science of Fairy Tales, 85.

^ Grimm, loc. cit., i., 313 ; Inman, Ancient Faiths, ii., 263 ; Brewer, Dictionary of Miracles, 526 ; 9th Series Notes and Queries, ii., 367, 397, 449, 475> 537 ; "i-, 190, 37^ seqq., 452 ; iv., 77, 135, 177, 315.

'■ Fosbroke, Cyclopaedia of Antiquities, {., 102, quoting Golden Legetid, fol. Ixxii.