terror. Fishers of Fifeshire.we are told, "look on all maukens (hares) to be devils and witches, and if they but see a sight of a dead mauken, it sets them a trembling".[1] In Russia and Brittany the hare inspires disgust and loathing.[2] Among the Indians of Huarochiri the creature was cursed by their divine ancestor, "so he ran away and is still running".[3] In Finland the hare must never be called "bad" during the hunting season.[4]
(4) Hares have power over marriages. Thus, in Russian popular tradition, the hare meeting the nuptial car is a presage of bad omen for the newly wedded pair.[5]
V. But the superstition which most strikingly places the hare upon the left hand is that which associated him with those adherents of fallen gods and broken idols, the professors of the Black Art. Ever since the prince of necromancers, "the wondrous Michael Scott," was turned into a hare by the witch of Falsehope, and hunted by his own hounds, this harmless creature has been most closely associated with witchcraft and magic. "The Hare", says Henderson, in his Notes on the Folk-lore of the Northern Counties of England, "is the most common disguise of the witch in all the northern countries of Europe."[6] Many instances are given by Henderson, and others may be found in Thorpe's Mythology, Sir Walter Scott's Demonology and Witchcraft, and elsewhere.[7]
- ↑ F.-L. Journal, i, 87.
- ↑ Elton, op. cit., 286; Figuier, Primitive Man (Tylor), 268.
- ↑ A. Lang, op. cit., i, 177.
- ↑ Folk-Lore, ii, 246.
- ↑ De Gubernatis, op. cit., ii, 81-2.
- ↑ Henderson, op. cit., p. 168.
- ↑ Thorpe, iii, 278; Scott (Morley's Universal Library), pp. 203, 213, 233; F.-L. Journal, vii, 284-5; Folk- and Hero-Tales from Argyllshire, F.-L. S., 1889, pp. 87-89, 454; Atkinson's Forty Years in a Moorland Parish, 2nd edit., 1891, pp. 88-92. "The witch", says Canon Atkinson, "under the form of a hare, is of perpetual recurrence in all the copious witch-lore of the district." (Ibid., p. 87.) See Moore's Folk-lore of the Isle of Man, London, 1891, pp. 95, 147.
