Page:Journal of American Folklore vol. 12.djvu/368

 36 Journal of American Folk-Lore.

the ugly spider, in which body she is destined to work on at her beautiful web forever, 1 or in that instance where the Father of the Gods, abhorring the fraudulent Cercopians, transforms them into monkeys. 2

Each race, as De Gubernatis emphasizes, uses the animals most familiar in imputing to the gods their transformations. Thus in India it is the serpent, or perhaps the elephant or ape that plays the title role. While in Europe the hero is the fox, 3 in Japan the cat, 4 in the United States the rabbit, and among the American Indians 5 the bird, particularly the American eagle and the serpent. Primi- tively these disguised gods acted their parts among the clouds, while the arch enemy lived in some foul subterranean cavern.

It is natural that the pastoral Aryans should conceive of the vast all-producing vault of heaven as a cow, the wind as the omnipotent fecundating bull, and the stars as cows which are driven off in flight by the sun's rays. 6 Not only the gods but, as Apuleius 7 relates, the minor spirits, like witches, may by the use of ointments assume the forms of owls, wolves, and other animals. Here must be placed the phenomena of lycanthropy, that terrible aberration in which men suppose themselves transformed into wolves or other animals, and as such do violence to their fellows. Not only in the Middle Ages did these werewolves run riot during bloody lycanthropic epidemics, but the disease still exists with occasional outbreaks.

From the minor mythic creations and men, as subjects of trans- formation, to the animals and plants themselves in such a role is a natural step. The oft-quoted famous trees of Scotland and the Orkney Islands, whose remarkable fruit, resembling geese, would upon touching the water become feathered and swim off, and the marvellous Tartarian shrub upon whose top grows a lamb, were testi- fied to by many eyewitnesses in the credulous days of Pope Pius II. of the last half of the fifteenth century. In Japan 8 when a tree at- tains the age of one thousand years, its spirit takes on the human form.

In 1678 Father Kircher 9 demonstrated the transformation of or- chids into birds, apes, and men, and in 1749 De Maillet 10 published his belief that all the animals on land and the birds of the air are born of creatures who live in the sea. In the mind of this philoso- pher there must be a likeness between parent and offspring, so the birds arise from flying-fishes, lions from sea-lions, and man himself

1 Book vi. fable 1. 2 Book xiv. fable 2.

3 Zoological Mythology, New York, 1872. 4 Mrs. Etsu I. Sugimoto.

5 Brinton, The Myths of the New World. 6 De Gubernatis /. c.

7 Bohn's ed. pp. 62, 63. s From Mrs. Etsu I. Sugimoto.

9 Mundus Subterraneus, Amsterdam, 167S. 10 Telliamed, Basle, 1749.

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