Legends Of Florence Part 37

"Now, Cain greatly loved G.o.d; he was good towards G.o.d, more so than Abel, because Abel, having become rich, never spoke more unto the Lord; and Abel would gladly have become a wizard himself.

"Then Cain began to think how he could slay Abel and become a merchant in his place, and so went forth to cut wood.

"One day he called his brother Abel, and said to him: 'Thou art so rich, while I am poor, and all my work avails me little.' And with that he gave Abel a blow with a knife, and dressed himself in his garments, and took a bundle of thorns on his back, and thus clad he took Abel's place as merchant, believing that no one would recognise him as Cain.

"And while thus buying and selling he met the merchant-wizard who had foretold the seven years of famine and of abundance. And he said, 'Oh, good day, Abel,' to make Cain believe that he was not discovered. But the oxen who were present all began to chant in chorus:

"'Non chiamate questo, Abele!

E Chaino, non lo vedete, Per la gola della monete Il fratello ammazato, E dei suoi panni e vest.i.to.

O Chaino or siei chiamato Alla presenza del gran Dio, Che a morte ti 'a condannato Che di richezza eri a.s.setato.'

"'Do not call that person Abel; It is Cain, do you not see it?

Cain who, for the greed of money, Treacherously slew his brother, And then clad him in his garments.

Now, O Cain! thou wilt be summoned Speedily unto the presence Of the Lord, who has condemned thee Unto death for thy great avarice.'

"Cain came before G.o.d.

"'O gran Dio di clemenza Voi che siete grande, buono, Velo chiedo a voi perdone, Per il bene vi ho valuto, Un instante vi ho dimenticato Ma ne sono molto pent.i.to, Di aver ammazato Abele il fratello mio.'

"'O great G.o.d of endless mercy, Thou who art so good and mighty, Grant, I pray thee, grant me pardon For the good I did while living!

Truly once, but for an instant, I forgot myself, but deeply I since then have long repented That I slew my brother Abel.'

"But G.o.d replied: {265}

"A punishment thou shalt have because thou didst slay thy brother from a desire to become rich. Likewise thou didst meddle with witchcraft and sorceries, as did thy brother. And Abel made much money and was very rich, because he did not love G.o.d, but sorcerers. Albeit, ever good he never did evil things, and many good, wherefore G.o.d pardoned him. But thou shalt not be pardoned because thou didst imbrue thy lands in human blood, and, what is worse, in thy own brother's blood.

"The punishment which I inflict is this:

"The thorns {266} which thou didst put upon thy brother are now for thee.

"Thou shalt be imprisoned in the moon, and from that place shalt behold the good and the evil of all mankind.

"And the bundle of thorns shall never leave thee, and every time when any one shall conjure thee, the thorns shall sting thee cruelly; they shall draw thy blood.

"And thus shalt thou be compelled to do that which shall be required of thee by the sorcerers or by conjuring, and if they ask of thee that which thou wilt not give, then the thorns shall goad thee until the sorceries shall cease."

This is clearly enough no common popular nursery tale, such as make up collections of Tuscan tales or popular legends, gathered from pious or picturesque peasants. Through it all runs a deep current of dark heresy, the deliberate contravention of accepted Scripture, and chiefly the spell of sorcery and deadly witchcraft. It is a perfect and curious specimen of a kind of forbidden literature which was common during the Middle Ages, and which is now extremely rare. This literature or lore was the predecessor of Protestantism, and was the rock on which it was based.

There have always been in the world since time began certain good people whose taste or fate it was to be invariably on the wrong side, or in the opposition; like the Irishman just landed from a ship in America, who, being asked how he would vote, replied, "Against the Government, of course, whatever it is," they are always at war with the powers that be.

With Jupiter they would have opposed the t.i.tans; with Prometheus, Jupiter; as early Christians they would have rebelled against the Pagans, and as heretics, Orientalised Templars, Vaudois, illuminati, sorcerers, and witches, they would have undermined the Church, never perceiving that its system or doctrine was, _au fond_, fetish, like their own. Among these rebels it was long the rule to regard those G.o.ds or men who were specially reviled by their foes or oppressors as calumniated. Even Satan was to them "the puir deil;" according to the Taborites, an oppressed elder brother of Christ, or a kind of Man in an Iron Mask kept out of his rights by Jehovah the XIV. These discontented ones deified all who had been devilled, found out that Jezebel had been a _femme incomprise_, and the Scarlet Woman only an interesting highly-coloured variant of the ancient h.o.a.ry myth of Mademoiselle or Miss Salina the Innocent. When Judas was mentioned, they solemnly remarked that there was a great deal to be said on both sides of _that_ question; while others believed that Ananias and Sapphira had been badly sat upon, and deserved to be worshipped as saints of appropriation-a cult, by the way, the secret observance of which has by no means died out at the present day-several great men being regarded in Paris as its last great high priests.

The Cainites, as known by that name to the Church, were a Gnostic sect of the second century, and are first mentioned by Irenaeus, who connects them with the Valentinians, of whom I thought but yesterday when I saw in a church a sarcophagus warranted to contain the corpse of St. Valentine.

They believed that Cain derived his existence from the supreme power, but Abel from the inferior, and that in this respect he was the first of a line which included Esau, Korah, the dwellers in Sodom and Gomorrah, the worshippers of Ashtoreth-Mylitta, or the boundless sensualists, the sorcerers, and witches.

Considering what human nature is, and its instincts to opposition, we can see that there must have been naturally a sect who regarded Cain as a misjudged martyr. Abel appeared to them as the prosperous well-to-do bourgeois, high in favour with the Lord, a man with flocks, while Cain was a tiller of the ground, a poor peasant out of favour. It must be admitted that in the Book of Genesis, in the history of the first murder, we are much reminded of the high priest Chalcas in _La Belle Helene_, where he exclaims, "_Trop de fleurs_!" and expresses a preference for cattle. It is the old story of the socialists and anarchists, which is ever new.

The witches and sorcerers of early times were a widely spread cla.s.s who had retained the beliefs and traditions of heathenism with all its license and romance and charm of the forbidden. At their head were the Promethean Templars, at their tail all the ignorance and superst.i.tion of the time, and in their ranks every one who was oppressed or injured either by the n.o.bility or the Church. They were treated with indescribable cruelty, in most cases worse than beasts of burden, for they were outraged in all their feelings, not at intervals for punishment, but habitually by custom, and they revenged themselves by secret orgies and fancied devil-worship, and occult ties, and stupendous sins, or what they fancied were such. I can seriously conceive-what no writer seems to have considered-that there must have been an immense satisfaction in selling or giving one's self to the devil, or to any power which was at war with their oppressors. So they went by night, at the full moon, and sacrificed to Diana, or "later on" to Satan, and danced and rebelled. It is very well worth noting that we have _all_ our accounts of sorcerers and heretics from Catholic priests, who had every earthly reason for misrepresenting them, and did so. In the vast amount of ancient witchcraft still surviving in Italy there is not much anti-Christianity, but a great deal of early heathenism. Diana, not Satan, is still the real head of the witches. The Italian witch, as the priest Grillandus said, stole oil to make a love-charm. {269} But she did not, and does not say, as he declared, in doing so, "I renounce Christ." There the priest plainly lied. The whole history of the witch mania is an ecclesiastical falsehood, in which such lies were subtly grafted on the truth. But in due time the Church, and the Protestants with them, created a Satanic witchcraft of their own, and it is this after-growth which is now regarded as witchcraft in truth.

Cain-worshippers and witches seem to have been all in the same boat. I think it very likely that in these two traditions which I have given we have a remnant of the actual literature of the Cainites, that Gnostic-revived and mystical sect of the Middle Ages. But I doubt not that its true origin is far older than Christianity, and lost in earliest time.

One last remark. We are told in the tale that Abel, having become rich, "cut" the Lord, or would speak to him no longer. I suppose that he dropped the synagogue and _Yom kippur_, and became a _Reformirter_, and his children in due time _Goyim_. Also that he wanted to become a wizard, which may be a hint that he was "no conjuror." But it is seriously a proof of the navete, and consequent probable antiquity of the tale, that these details are not "wrote sarcastic," nor intended for humour. And it is also interesting to observe how impartially the narrator declares that Cain was "a good man," and how he, in pleading his own cause before the Lord, insists that in killing Abel he only inadvertently forgot himself for an instant. One almost expects to hear him promise that he will not do it again.

It is a striking proof of the antiquity of this tradition of Cain, as I have given it, that the witch or wizard sympathy for the first murderer is in it unmistakable. The sending Cain to the moon, instead of h.e.l.l, is understood to be a mitigation of his sentence. In his work on magicians and witches, A.D. 1707, Goldschmidt devotes many pages to set forth what was believed by all the learned of his time, that Cain was the father of all the wizards, and his children, the Cainites, the creators of the _Gaber_, fire-idolators, Cabiri, magic soothsaying, and so forth. So the tradition lived on, utterly forgotten by all good people, and yet it is to me so quaint as to be almost touching to find it still existing, a fragment of an old creed outworn here among poor witches in Florence.

"Sacher Masoch," a Galician novelist, informs us in a romance, "The Legacy of Cain," that the Cainites still exist in Russia, and that their religion is represented by the following charming creed:

"Satan is the master of the world; therefore it is a sin to belong to Church or State, and marriage is also a capital sin. Six things const.i.tute the legacy of Cain: Love, Property, Government, War, and Death. Such was the legacy of Cain, who was condemned to be a wanderer and a fugitive on earth."

I have another apparently very ancient conjuration of a mirror, in two parts. It is of the blackest witchcraft, of the most secret kind, and is only intended to injure an enemy.

From an article in _La Rivista delle Tradizione Popolare_ of July 1894, by F. Montuori, I learn that in a little work by San Prato on "Cain and the Thorns according to Dante and Popular Tradition," Ancona, 1881, which I have not seen, the history of Cain is given much as told by Maddalena.

What is _chiefly_ interesting in the version of Maddalena is, however, wanting in all the folklore on the subject collected by others; it is the manifest trace of Cainism, of sympathy with the first murder, and in its heresy. This opens for us a far wider field of research and valuable historical information than the rather trivial fact that Cain is simply the Man in the Moon.

Merk in _Die Sitten und Gebrauche der Deutschen_, gives (p. 644), from Wolf, a strange legend which is nearly allied to Moon worship by witches, and the mirror:

"There was a man in Kortryk who was called Klare Mone (bright moon), and he got his name from this. One night when sleeping on his balcony he heard many women's voices sweetly singing. They held goblets [there is some confusion here with _glaserne Pfannen_ or gla.s.s panes in the roof from which the man looked; I infer that the witches drank from "gla.s.s pans," _i.e._, metallic mirrors], and as they drank they sang:

"'We are drinking the sweetest of earthly wine, For we drink of the clear and bright moonshine.'

"But as the man approached them, 'with a club to beat or kill them, all vanished.'"

"Which fable teaches," as the wise Flaxius notes, "what indeed this whole book tends to show-that few people know or heed what witches ever really were. Now, that this boor wished to slay the sorceresses with a club, for drinking moonshine, is only what the whole world is doing to all who have _different ideas from ours_ as to what const.i.tutes enjoyment. So in all history, under all creeds, even unto this day, people have been clubbed, hung, tortured, and baked alive, or sent to Coventry for the crime of drinking _moonshine_!"

And so this volume ends, oh reader mine!

"So the visions flee, So the dreams depart; And the sad reality, Now must act its part."

_Ite_, _lector benevole_, _Ite_, _missa est_.

_Printed by_ BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.

_Edinburgh and London_

Footnotes:

{3a} _Nel miglio salotto di recevimento_. This is all an accurate picture of old Florentine customs.

{3b} _Necessita fa la vecchia trottare_. On which proverb Matteo Villani comments as follows: "And thus he truly verified the saying of Valerius Maximus, that 'the wants caused by human weakness are a common bond of security,' all of which is briefly expressed in the French proverb, 'Need makes the old woman (or old age) bestir herself.'"

Valerius Maximus was the prototype of Guicciardini.

{8} "Chiese alla regina di dormir seco." Which was certainly very plain blunt speaking, even for the time.