The Hindu commentators of the Veda certainly lay great stress on the fact that the palasa, one of their lightning-trees, is trident-leaved. The mistletoe branch is forked, like a wish-bone,[47] and so is the stem which bears the forget-me-not or wild scorpion grass. So too the leaves of the Hindu ficus religiosa resemble long spear-heads.[48] But in many cases it is impossible for us to determine with confidence the reasons which may have guided primitive men in their choice of talismanic plants. In the case of some of these stories, it would no doubt be wasting ingenuity to attempt to assign a mythical origin for each point of detail.
The ointment of the dervise, for instance, in the Arabian tale, has probably no special mythical significance, but was rather suggested by the exigencies of the story, in an age when the old mythologies were so far disintegrated and mingled together that any one talisman would serve as well as another the purposes of the narrator. But the lightning-plants of Indo-European folk-lore cannot be thus summarily disposed of;for however difficult it may be for us to perceive any connection between them and the celestial phenomena which they represent, the myths concerning them are so numerous and explicit as to render it certain that some such connection was imagined by the myth-makers. The superstition concerning the hand of glory is not so hard to interpret. In the mythology of the Finns, the storm-cloud is a black man with a bright copper hand; and in Hindustan, Indra Savitar, the deity who slays the demon of the cloud, is golden-handed. The selection of the hand of a man who has been hanged is probably due to the superstition which regarded the storm-god Odin as peculiarly the lord of the gallows. The man who is raised upon the gallows is placed directly in the track of the wild huntsman, who comes with his hounds to carry off the victim; and hence the notion, which, according to Mr. Kelly, is "very common in Germany and not extinct in England," that every suicide by hanging is followed by a storm.
[46] In accordance with the mediaeval "doctrine of signatures," it was maintained "that the hard, stony seeds of the Gromwell must be good for gravel, and the knotty tubers of scrophularia for scrofulous glands; while the scaly pappus of scaliosa showed it to be a specific in leprous diseases, the spotted leaves of pulmonaria that it was a sovereign remedy for tuberculous lungs, and the growth of saxifrage in the fissures of rocks that it would disintegrate stone in the bladder." Prior, Popular Names of British Plants, Introd., p.
xiv. See also Chapiel, La Doctrine des Signatures. Paris, 1866.
[47] Indeed, the wish-bone, or forked clavicle of a fowl, itself belongs to the same family of talismans as the divining-rod.
[48] The ash, on the other hand, has been from time immemorial used for spears in many parts of the Aryan domain. The word oesc meant, in Anglo-Saxon, indifferently "ash-tree," or "spear"; and the same is, or has been, true of the French fresne and the Greek melia. The root of oesc appears in the Sanskrit as, "to throw" or "lance," whence asa, "a bow," and asana, "an arrow." See Pictet, Origines Indo-Europeennes, I.
222.
The paths of comparative mythology are devious, but we have now pursued them long enough I believe, to have arrived at a tolerably clear understanding of the original nature of the divining-rod. Its power of revealing treasures has been sufficiently explained; and its affinity for water results so obviously from the character of the lightning-myth as to need no further comment. But its power of detecting criminals still remains to be accounted for.
In Greek mythology, the being which detects and punishes crime is the Erinys, the prototype of the Latin Fury, figured by late writers as a horrible monster with serpent locks. But this is a degradation of the original conception. The name Erinys did not originally mean Fury, and it cannot be explained from Greek sources alone. It appears in Sanskrit as Saranyu, a word which signifies the light of morning creeping over the sky. And thus we are led to the startling conclusion that, as the light of morning reveals the evil deeds done under the cover of night, so the lovely Dawn, or Erinys, came to be regarded under one aspect as the terrible detector and avenger of iniquity. Yet startling as the conclusion is, it is based on established laws of phonetic change, and cannot be gainsaid.
But what has the avenging daybreak to do with the lightning and the divining-rod? To the modern mind the association is not an obvious one: in antiquity it was otherwise. Myths of the daybreak and myths of the lightning often resemble each other so closely that, except by a delicate philological analysis, it is difficult to distinguish the one from the other. The reason is obvious. In each case the phenomenon to be explained is the struggle between the day-god and one of the demons of darkness. There is essentially no distinction to the mind of the primitive man between the Panis, who steal Indra's bright cows and keep them in a dark cavern all night, and the throttling snake Ahi or Echidna, who imprisons the waters in the stronghold of the thunder-cloud and covers the earth with a short-lived darkness. And so the poisoned arrows of Bellerophon, which slay the storm-dragon, differ in no essential respect from the shafts with which Odysseus slaughters the night-demons who have for ten long hours beset his mansion. Thus the divining-rod, representing as it does the weapon of the god of day, comes legitimately enough by its function of detecting and avenging crime.
