Page:The history of Witchcraft and demonology.djvu/61

 research. An old charm or two, a nonsense rhyme, may now and again repeat some forgotten meaningless word or refrain. Thus in a spell used by the witches of the Basses-Pyrénées, cited by De Lancre (1609), we find mention of the old Basque deity Janicot: “In nomine patrica, Aragueaco Petrica, Gastellaco Ianicot, Equidæ ipordian pot.” Bodin gives a dance-jingle, “Har, har, diable, diable, saute icy, saute là, ioüe icy, ioüe là,” to which the chorus was “sabath sabath.” Miss Murray tells us that the Guernsey version “which is currently reported to be used at the present day,” runs: “Har, har, Hon, Hon, danse ici.” Hon was an old Breton god, and there are still remote districts whose local names recall and may be compounded with that of this ancient deity. It is significant that in one case we have a Basque deity, in the other a Breton; for Basque and Breton are nearly, if obscurely, correlated. Such traces are interesting enough, but by no means unique, hardly singular indeed, since they can be so widely paralleled, and it were idle to base any elaborate argument concerning the continuity of a fully organized cult upon slight and unrelated survivals in dialect place-names and the mere doggerel lilt of a peasant-song.

There is in particular one statement advanced by Miss Murray which goes far to show how in complete unconsciousness she is fitting her material to her theory. She writes: “There is at present nothing to show how much of the Witches’ Mass (in which the bread, the wine, and the candles were black) derived from the Christian ritual and how much belonged to the Dianic cult [the name given to this hypothetical but universal ancient religion]; it is, however, possible that the witches’ service was the earlier form and influenced the Christian.” This last sentence is in truth an amazing assertion. A more flagrant case of hysteron-proteron is hardly imaginable. So self-evident is the absurdity that it refutes itself, and one can only suppose that the words were allowed to remain owing to their having been overlooked in the revision of a long and difficult study, a venial negligence. Every prayer and every gesture of Holy Mass, since the first Mass was celebrated upon the first Maundy Thursday, has been studied in minutest detail by generations of liturgiologists and ceremonialists, whose library is almost infinite in its vastness and extent from the humblest