Note 105.1 — Chapter IX · WITCHCRAFT: SYMPATHETIC MAGIC.

This is a superstition familiar to us in the classic tale of Meleager. When Althæa gave birth to him she was visited by the three Fates, who placed a billet of wood on the fire and bespelled her child to live until it was consumed. She snatched the brand from the flames, extinguished them with water and kept it safely until the day she beheld her two brothers brought home from the hunting of the Calydonian boar, both dead by Meleager’s hand. In the madness of her anger she fetched it forth, and after a struggle between her love as a mother and her love as a sister she cast it on the fire. Meleager absent and unwitting felt his entrails burning, and died in torture when the brand was consumed. The writer of a work, ascribed to Plutarch, on Parallels between the Romans and the Greeks, quotes in a fragmentary way from Menyllus a story of one Mamercus, a son of Mars by Sylvia the wife of Septimius Marcellus. Mamercus’ life was by his divine father bound up with a spear, which was burnt by his mother under somewhat similar provocation to that of Althæa. The tale is yet current in Epirus, in the Vosges, and among the Germans both in Germany and Transylvania; and a few years ago I heard from the lips of a collier on the wild upland between the vale of Neath and the vale of Swansea a legend of a man named John Gethin, who had been overcome with fright on raising the Devil and so put himself into the enemy’s power. A fight ensued between the conjurer who accompanied him and the Devil for Gethin’s body. The conjurer pulled and the Devil pulled, until the unfortunate man was nearly torn in two. The conjurer at length obtained from his adversary permission to keep him so long as a candle which was part of his conjuring apparatus lasted. The candle was instantly blown out, but though it was kept in a cool place it wasted away, and with it John Gethin’s life, so that when he died the candle was found to be entirely consumed. His body vanished; and the coffin buried in the parish churchyard at Ystradgynlais, on the borders of Brecknockshire and Glamorganshire, contained nothing but clay.105.1 In the province of Posen it is said that every man has a burning taper which is set up in a certain grove; and when it goes out, the life of the man to whom it belongs goes out too.105.2 This is the foundation of an incident in a folktale known in many parts of Europe, wherein Death takes a man down into his own abode and shows him an array of candles which are the lives of men, some long, some short, and some on the point of extinction.