Note 143.3 — Chapter XX · THE MEDUSA-WITCH IN SAGA AND SUPERSTITION.

The power of petrification is, however, usually regarded as equivalent to that of striking dead with a glance. This is expressed, as we have already seen,143.3 in the case of Balor of Tory Island. A long list of stories wherein a glance is credited with this terrible might could be culled from every nation, beginning with that of Isis punishing at Byblos an unlucky boy who disturbed her in her grief.143.4 In some cases, as in a variant of the tale of Balor, the baleful eye not only slays but reduces its victim to ashes.143.5 The elephant head of the Hindu god, Ganesa, is a substitute for his original head burned to cinders by the gaze of Sani. Nor is the murderous property confined to supernatural beings. Witches, who of course partake of more than ordinary human qualities, are credited with it. Men of special holiness have sometimes the fatal gift, like Rabbi Juda in rabbinical tradition, who thus killed four-and-twenty of his scholars in a single day;144.1 or a Samoan high-priest of the heavenly gods, whose very look was poison; “if he looked at a cocoa-nut tree it died, and if he glanced at a bread-fruit tree it also withered away.”144.2 Various writers, classic and mediæval, have told us of the women of a certain Scythian tribe, of the Sardinians, or of a remote island in the ocean, whose glance is death.144.3 To such writers we owe the fable of the Catoblepas, or Downlooker, an animal “so wicked and so venomous that no man may behold it right in the face, but he die anon without remedy.” Some of the soldiers of Marius in his expedition against Jugurtha, not knowing the creature and attacking it incautiously, were slain by the eye of this terrible beast.144.4 In various parts of Asia and Africa serpents also have naturally been reputed to possess the same horrible gift; while countries like Spain have not yet parted with the belief in the basilisk.144.5 Among American tribes the superstition and the stories of the deadly glance are found in similar terms to those of the Old World. I have already mentioned the Quiché gods petrified by the sun. The Cegihas have a tale of a mysterious being called Two Faces that slew every one who looked at it.145.1 The Ts’ets’āut of British Columbia account for the prohibition to a man to look at his adult sister by a legend of one of their fore-elders who married his sister. Their brothers were ashamed, tied them together by way of punishment, and deserted them. But the man broke the ropes; and having killed a ram, an ewe and a kid of the mountain-goats, he clad himself, his wife and their child in the skins, and they assumed the shape of goats. “He had acquired the power of killing everything by a glance of his eyes. One day his tribe came up the river for the purpose of hunting, and he killed them. Then he travelled all over the world, leaving signs of his presence everywhere, such as remarkable rocks.”145.2 Iroquois traditions tell of an Onondaga chief, named Tododäho, whose head was covered with tangled serpents, and whose angry look sufficed to strike the beholders dead. He submitted, however, to be tamed, and to have the serpents combed out of his locks.145.3 But the saga which presents the closest parallel to the incident of the Slaughter of the Gorgon comes to us from Brazil, and comes with every mark of indigenous growth. Some of the Brazilian tribes tell of a bird which kills with a look. The story goes that a hunter succeeded in slaying one, and cut off its head, without the dreadful eye being turned upon him. Like Perseus, he killed his game thenceforward by turning the eye upon it. “His wife, not dreaming of its destructive power, however, once turned it toward her husband and killed him, and then accidentally turned it toward herself and died.”146.1