wives of Deloraine have fed their tailors on nothing but chappit ’taties and kale.[1]
Now it is clear from Kelly’s Indo-European Traditions (p. 229) that witchcraft has always been potent in the dairy, and he accounts for it thus. The Aryan idea that the rain-clouds were the cows of heaven has been well preserved among the northern nations. As Indra used to milk the cloud cows, and churn the milk lakes and fountains with his thunderbolt, so did Thor with his axe. Our ancestors’ mythology has passed into our own superstitions, and so witches of modern days draw milk from the handle of an axe stuck in a doorpost. We find a close parallel to the history of the wife of Deloraine at Caseburg, in North Germany, where a farmer who got no milk from his dairy put the affair in the hands of a Wise-man, and the Wiseman detected the culprit in the person of a neighbour’s wife. This woman had stuck a broom-handle into the wall of her own cow-house which was nearest to the farmer’s dairy. To the handle she had hung a bucket, and was milking the broom-stick, which under her hands yielded a plentiful flow of milk.[2]
The rich dairies of Holland and Belgium are not proof against such evil practices, but the means of redress are well known. They are as follows: “When a sorceress has by her arts milked all the milk from a cow, the cow must soon afterwards be milked again. Let the milk thus obtained be set on the fire and made warm, and then beat with a stick till not a drop remains in the vessel. Any milk that flows over on the ground may also be beaten, for the more beating there is the better, since every stroke given to the milk is received by the sorceress on her back
- ↑ In the curious old volume of sermons in German, by Dr. Johann Geyler von Keysersperg, entitled Die Emeis, preached in Strasbourg A.D. 1508, and published in 1517, is a quaint woodcut of witches milking pump-handles, and a sermon on the iniquity of those old hags who thus drain their neighbours’ cows of milk. That portion of the wife of Deloraine’s story concerning the inability of the apprentice to stop the milk closely resembles the German tale of the magician and his pupil, which Göthe has versified in his Zauberlehrling.—S. B. G.
- ↑ Thorpe’s Mythology, vol. iii. p. 78.
