Note 124.1 — Chapter XX · THE MEDUSA-WITCH IN SAGA AND SUPERSTITION.

On the island of Sardinia, near the village of Tresnuraghes, in the district of Oristano, are two stones, once a peasant and his ox. This unhappy man was ploughing on the vigil of Saint Mark, and neglected to doff his cap when the saint’s colossal statue was carried by in procession. Being remonstrated with by one of the confraternity, he answered that he did not worship a piece of wood. What could be expected after such profanity, but that he and his ox should be turned to stone? A similar judgment is recorded as the origin of a monolith standing near the church of Saint Constantine, on the side of a hill in the district of Sedilo, on the same island. It is the custom there to perform a ceremony called S’ardia, or the Guard, which consists in a cavalcade of about a hundred persons running at full speed thrice around the church, and then flinging themselves down the valley upon a sacred enclosure containing a cross. This enclosure they encompass in the same manner. The spectacle, considered as a religious rite, is doubtless grotesque enough; and a woman who once witnessed it was profane enough to burst out laughing. She stands there still, never to laugh again.124.1 A bridal train on the Frisian island of Sylt once met an old woman who recognised the bride as a witch, and called out to warn the party. The leader replied: “If our bride be a witch, I would that we might all sink down here and rise up again grey stones.” No sooner said than done; and the identical stones were on view up to the early years of this century.125.1 So it is related of an unwilling bride from the village of Bonese, in Altmark, that when she arrived with her cavalcade on the boundary of the district of Markau, where she was to wed the son of a rich magistrate, she sprang from her seat after an altercation with her kinsmen and exclaimed: “Rather will I be turned to stone than overstep the boundary of Markau!” and she alighted on the ground a stone. Round that stone at midnight, when the full moon sheds her rays, the many-coloured bridal ribbons gleam even yet.125.2 Sometimes the catastrophe is occasioned by the mere breach of a taboo. Such is the case in a story told by the Lapps concerning the origin of the Aniov Islands. Three giants who were shamans determined to cut a piece of land off Norway and bring it away with all its reindeer and other wealth in order to increase their own stores. They succeeded in doing so, and were conveying it round to its destination, when their mother dreamed she saw them returning. She ran out of the hut and, hearing a noise, cried: “See! my children are coming, they bring goods, oxen, reindeer; they spoke truth.” But she thus violated the rule of strict silence during the performance of magical rites, and was punished by being turned, together with the whole parish, into stone, while her sons and the reindeer they had stolen were drowned, and the land they had cut off became two islands.125.3 Another woman underwent the like transformation in the island of Coll, off the western coast of Scotland. She was gathering shellfish when the tide rose, and “finding no other means of escape made a last effort by climbing the rocks. When at the top, and almost out of danger, she said: ‘I am safe now, in spite of God and men!’ ” Her blasphemy was immediately avenged by her conversion into a stone, which now forms part of the rock whence the headland of Cailleach Point (the Old Wife’s Headland) takes its name.126.1