X. THE WEIRD OF THE WANDERER.

There is one class of survivals from the fatalistic ideas of all so-called paganisms which have always been very strong in the popular mind of Europe. It was a creed in which all ancient faiths converged, that an irresistible power was lodged in any officially-uttered curse. The word once solemnly spoken, became the weird, the fatum, and not even the tongue that spake could revoke it. Oftenest the dooms that represented this belief in the Middle Ages were supposed to come from Heaven in response to some defiant invocation, or blasphemous challenge like that of the Flying Dutchman. It is a notable fact for the antiquarian that in the year 1881 the courts of England should be trying a case involving the question of whether a lecturer took out his watch and gave the deity, whose existence he denied, five minutes to strike him dead. That is an old myth normally fixed on misbelievers; and it is probable that the motives for selecting that particular slander for judicial denial, if traced out, would be found connected with the ancient superstition that such words must have the eternal effect of real natural forces. From the ancient patriarchalism, which has so many political and social survivals in Europe, came the idea that a father’s curse (or blessing) carried with it the fatal forces of the universe. More universal still was the potency supposed to attend the word of a priest, however casual. This notion is still met with in the many stories of persons said to have died soon after ridiculing the proceedings of “revivalists.”

Grässe has collected some examples of such superstitions in Europe, beginning so far back as the legend of Domitilla, the grand-daughter of Domitian. In her room, after she had become a Christian, her husband introduced dancers to win her back to the world and to himself: he began showing them how to dance, but could not stop; and after dancing two days and nights, died. Such “dances” are now familiar in folk-lore, and are associated with some of the stone circles of England. In Kolbeck, near Halbustadt, there is a legend that, in the year 1012, a peasant named Albrecht and fifteen others who danced before the Church on Christmas while Mass was going on, were ordered by the priest to dance for a year. The Bishop of Cologne had to come and release these dancers, who had worn a deep hole in the ground. In the same vein is the story of “the merry smith of Jüterbogk,” a small survival of Sisyphus. A remarkable story of this kind is that of Freiburg (A. Müller, Theatr. Freiburg Chron., 1633). An irritable father, Lorent Richter, ordered his son of fourteen years to do something: the boy hesitated, standing in the middle of the room. “Cursed boy,” cried the father, “may you stand there for ever!” The boy remained standing there, propped by supports, and after many years the priests, by many prayers, could only secure the small commutation of a removal to a corner where he would not be so much in the way of the household. “At last the kind God a little altered the punishment by allowing him to sit during the last six months of the year, and also to lie in a bed placed near him. When asked what he did, he answered that he was punished by God the Lord for his sins; that he left all to His will; and trusted in the merits of Christ to obtain final happiness.” After seven years—a number associated with many famous sleepers—the boy “was relieved, 11th Sept., 1552.” His footprints were pointed out on the floor for a hundred years. The father had wished to obliterate this memento of his anger, but the authorities decided that the footprints should remain as a warning to wrathful parents and disobedient children.

The great majority of “dooms” known to Northern paganism have exchanged connotations with the legend of the Wandering Jew. The sentence pronounced upon such royal huntsmen or robber-knights as Dyterbjernat of Danzig, Diedrick of Bern, Duke Abel the fratricide (Schleswig), and others, is usually of this character. In the Netherlands it is the story of a son who refused to listen to his father’s Christian advice, but called his dogs into the wood: the father cried, “Hunt, then, for ever!” and so he hunts on, and his voice, mingled with the baying of dogs, is heard in the woods about the Castle of Wynedal. In Thuringia, it is Hakelnberg who would not listen to the priest, who bade him “hunt until the last day.” These formulas of the curse are related to that of the Jew legend: the primitive pagan legend is different, e.g. the hunt long known as the Horlething, on the banks of the Wye. It was said King Herla went to the marriage feast of a dwarf: when he returned to his palace he found that he had been in the mountain with the dwarf two hundred years, and was under a doom to ride on until the day of judgment. The visit to the dwarfs festival simply meant a relapse into paganism.

That the myth of the Wandering Jew was interwoven with that of the Demon Huntsman of Germany (which is called Aaskarreya in Norway), there can be no doubt. “Perhaps,” says Karl Blind, “one of the clearest proofs of the phantom figure of the Wandering Jew having been grafted upon that of the great Wanderer and World-hunter, Wodan, is to be found in a tale of the Hartz Mountains. There it is said that the Wild Huntsman careers ‘over the seven mountain-towns every seven years.’ The reason given for his ceaseless wanderings is, that ‘he would not allow our Lord Jesus Christ to quench his thirst at a river, nor at a water-trough for cattle, from both of which he drove him away, telling him that he ought to drink from a horse-pond.’ For this reason the Wild Huntsman must wander about for ever, and feed upon horseflesh. And whoever calls out after him, when his ghostly chase comes by, will see the Wild Huntsman turn round, and be compelled by him to eat horseflesh too. No allusion whatever is made in this tale to a Jew, though the name of Christ is pressed into it in a way very like the Ahasuerus legend. We seem to get here a mythic rendering of the struggle between the old Germanic faith and the Christian religion. The ‘horse-pond’ and the ‘horseflesh’ are, to all appearances, references to our horse-worshipping, horse-sacrificing, horseflesh-eating forefathers, who came to Britain under the leadership of Hengist and Horsa. To call out after the eternal Huntsman entails the danger of being forced by him to eat horseflesh—that is, to return to the old creed. The Holy Supper of the Teutonic tribes consisted of horseflesh and mead. When Christianity came in, the eating of horseflesh was abolished as a heathen custom. But at German witches’ banquets—in other words, at secret festive ceremonies in which the pagan traditions were still kept up—there continued for a long time a custom of drinking from horse-shoes.”⁠[27]

We have in this sentence last quoted from Mr. Blind’s able article a suggestion of the probable origin of the horse-shoe as a charm against witches. To the pagan Teuton it was as sacred an emblem as to the Christian his cross. While the Christians still believed in the power of the Wild Huntsman and his train to work them mischief, they might naturally show this symbol of pagan orthodoxy over their doors to induce the witches to pass on and visit their wrath on the openly disloyal.

This article in The Gentleman’s Magazine contains an original speculation and theory concerning two remarkable problems connected with our legend. How is it that the name Cartaphilus was replaced by Ahasuerus? How did the “doorkeeper” of the thirteenth century become the “shoemaker” of the sixteenth century legend? Mr. Blind, with a creditable caution, suggests that the name may have been a modification of As-Vidar. This god (As) Vidar was in the Scandinavian mythology the symbol of everlasting force: he was the deity who was alone to survive the universal destruction of Ragnarök, “Twilight of the Gods.” In the Prose Edda it is written: “The Wolf (Fenris) swallows Odin, but at that instant Vidar advances, and setting his foot on the monster’s lower jaw, seizes the other with his hand, and thus tears and rends him till he dies. Vidar is able to do this because he wears shoes for which stuff has been gathering in all ages, namely, the shreds of leather which are cut off to form the toes and heels of shoes; and it is on this account that those who would render a service to the Æsir (gods) should take care to throw such shreds away.” It is said there are (or were) preserved in the Government Library at Berne traditional relics left by the Wandering Jew, his staff and pair of shoes. These shoes are said, by an early local authority, to be “uncommonly large and made of a hundred snips—a shoemaker’s master-piece, because patched together with the utmost labour, diligence, and cleverness out of so many shreds of leather.” A similar pair of shoes are said to have also been left by Ahasuerus at Ulm.

It may be remarked that the name given to the Wandering Jew in the Praxis Alchymine of Libavius, viz., Buttadæus, may possibly refer to the boot (A. S. butte) of the Wanderer, and it may have been that deus was added. Whether it meant the “booted god,” or the man who struck God with a boot, or bouter dieu (to push God), must remain doubtful. It is a striking coincidence, if no more, that, in Talmudic legend, Enoch also was a shoemaker, who with every stitch exclaimed, “The Lord and His Majesty be praised!”

The names of the Wandering Jew are characteristically various, not to say vagarious; they are also sometimes puzzling. Cartaphilus is pretty certainly κάρτα φίλος, in allusion to the “beloved” disciple; Ahasuerus is perhaps the Hebrew form of Xerxes, though there is nothing in the history of that king to connect him with the Wandering Jew. Several give his name as Gregorius, through a mistake, as M. Paris has pointed out, as to the meaning of Botoreius, who wrote that Jesus stopped “ante tabernam gregorii illius;” the Turkish Spy names him Michob Ader. One name popularly ascribed to him in Brussels is “Isaac Laquedem.” Concerning this Grässe has a note in which he says, “I asked for an explanation of the word, and my friend Dr. Böttcher, the celebrated expert in Hebrew, gave me the following answer, ‘If the name Laquedem is written and pronounced in French (Walloon) “Lakedem,” and is derived from the Hebrew, it can scarcely be anything else but la-kĕdem, i.e., “the former world” [belonging to an anterior world], in which case we must say the use of the prefix “la” is without a parallel in names of later Jews, and therefore the “la,” the French article, may be considered due to a half-learned inventor of names (vide Lacroix, Lamarque, La Loresh. Wolf, Bibl. Hebr. iv. 812).’”

As for the name “Joseph,” given by the Armenian Bishop as the baptismal name of Cartaphilus, there is evidence in the old Chronicle itself that it was derived by association with Joseph of Arimathea, who is said to have wandered through a large part of the world and to have come to Britain in the year 66, where his blossoming staff fixed the site of Glastonbury Abbey.

It is an indication of the steadiness with which every being, however exalted originally, was degraded by coming under the supposed preternatural fate of the Jewish race, that this Joseph of Arimathea, by giving a baptismal name to Cartaphilus, gave the English populace their epithet for the beggars or impostors who were supposed to be the Wandering Jew. He was called “Poor Joe!” Of him, as representing the dregs of the myth, more must be said hereafter. Another example of this degradation is shown in the fact that in various parts of Europe the storm-demon is called Maccabee. The process by which this was brought about has not, to my knowledge, been traced, but the following facts seem to bear on it.

In 2 Maccabæus, v. 2–4, it is written—“Then it happened that through all the city, for the space almost of forty days, there were seen horsemen running in the air, in cloth of gold, and armed with lances like a band of soldiers.... Wherefore every man prayed that that apparition might turn to good.” These apparitions, resembling those said by Josephus to have reappeared at the siege of Jerusalem, were adopted as good Christian omens. Judas Maccabæus also records his vision of the prophet Jeremiah giving him a golden sword to defend the holy people. It is probable that this was the germ of the superstition which proved so fatal to the Christians at the siege of Constantinople (1453). After the capture of the city, men, women and children rushed into the Church of St. Sophia for protection, because of a prophecy that “one day the Turks would enter Constantinople and pursue the Romans as far as the column of Constantine in the square before St. Sophia; but that this would be the term of their calamities; that an angel would descend from heaven with a sword in his hand, and would deliver the empire, with that celestial weapon, to a poor man seated at the foot of the column. ‘Take this sword,’ would he say, ‘and avenge the people of the Lord.’ At these animating words the Turks would instantly fly.... While they expected the descent of the tardy angel, the doors were broken with axes; and, as the Turks encountered no resistance, their bloodless hands were employed in selecting and securing the multitude of their prisoners” (Gibbon, ch. lxviii.).

It looks as if the association of the wild aerial chase with Maccabee, in France and other southern regions, might have resulted from the diffusion of the superstition which drew such a thunderbolt upon the Christians of Constantinople, and its gradual subjection to the demonising doom which rested upon even the brightest figures of Jewish history not wearing the Christian uniform.