The Mysteries of All Nations Part 47

A Hohenzollern legend was brought to mind in Germany through a serious illness of the Emperor, who, however, fortunately recovered, and continues to adorn his exalted position. The legend runs thus:--

Many years ago there was a Hohenzollern Princess (a widow with two children), who fell in love with a foreign Prince--rich, handsome, and brave. She sent him a proposition of marriage; but the Prince declined her suit, explaining that "four eyes" stood between him and acceptance. He referred to his parents, whose consent he could not obtain. But the Princess understood him to refer to the four eyes of her two children--to his unwillingness, in fact, to become a stepfather. So she suffocated the infant obstacles, and wrote to her lover that the way was clear. He was stricken with horror at the cruel deed, and died cursing her bloodthirsty rashness. The Princess, in her turn, became overwhelmed with remorse. After lingering a day or two in indescribable anguish, she too died, and was buried under the old castle at Berlin; but not to rest quietly in her unhappy grave. At rare intervals she appears at midnight, clad in white, gliding, ghost like, about the castle; and the apparition always forebodes the death of some member of the Hohenzollern family. The white lady has been seen, we are a.s.sured, three times within about a year--once just before the death of Prince Albrecht; again, to announce the end of Prince Adalbert; and the last time while Queen Elizabeth lay on her deathbed.

We have shown that the great Napoleon Bonaparte was superst.i.tious in the highest degree; and so was his mother before him. Both believed in fate or destiny. She was surrounded by luxury and pomp; but her solicitude about her son, and the belief that his glory could not last, rendered her miserable. The divorce of Josephine, the retreat from Russia, the exile to Elba, the final overthrow at Waterloo, and the banishment to St. Helena, were heavy blows; but she was prepared for them. While the sun of the Emperor's fortunes blazed in the zenith, she shivered under the shadow of her fear; and her fear proved prophetic. She witnessed the downfall of every one of her children; but she bore her adversity with dignity and resignation, and died in her eighty-seventh year.

Indeed not only were Napoleon and his mother superst.i.tious, but the whole Bonaparte family were believers in fate. Napoleon III. says in his will, "With regard to my son" (the late Prince Imperial, who perished at the hands of Zulus), "let him keep, as a talisman, the seal attached to my watch." True to the traditions of his family, the young Prince put trust in amulets. When the Prince's body was discovered (here we have a double case of superst.i.tion), it lay stripped of all its clothing, but there were left with the body a locket and a gold amulet, admittedly the seal bequeathed to him by his Imperial father, as the Zulus were afraid they were charms--articles they stand in great dread of.

Thinking of Prince Napoleon's untimely death, brings the Zulu character to remembrance. Among the Zulus a belief prevails that kindly and angry spirits hover around them--the former endeavouring to do them good; the latter trying to do them harm. Zulus also believe in divine smoke, witchcraft, and dreams. Whenever a charge of witchcraft is made against any one, no mercy is shown him. Such an accusation affords a pretext to a king or chief for getting rid of an obnoxious person and acquiring his substance. The Inyanga, like our witch-finder of old, has no difficulty in bringing home guilt to the unfortunate accused. A Zulu judge, before p.r.o.nouncing sentence, pretends that he consults the divine oracles of his nation. When a Zulu sneezes he says, "I am blessed, and the ancestral spirit is with me." So he praises the family manes, and ends by asking blessings, such as cattle and wives.

In September 1879 official news came from Sir Garnet Wolseley that King Cetewayo had been captured, that the Zulu war had come to an end, and that the following were among the terms of peace, signed by the chiefs of Zululand: "I will not tolerate the employment of witch doctors, or the practice known as smelling out, or any practices of witchcraft."

Not unfrequently the representatives of Great Britain, in concluding peace with heathen nations, have, as in the case of the Zulus, to respect the superst.i.tious notions of the people they have to deal with, so as to make the agreement more binding in the minds of the heathen contracting parties.

On one occasion the Ashantees put up a fetish to stop the advance of the British army. It consisted of a kid transfixed through the throat and heart, and staked to the ground; six cooking-pots, inverted, were stuck on stakes round the kid, and, a few feet from it, another kid was found buried: this, according to Ashantee custom, had been buried alive. A similar fetish had been put up at a river near Moinsey to stop the British troops. The advancing army found almost every turn of the road to Cooma.s.sie strewn with fetish doc.u.ments. Near Fommanah nearly every tree had a white rag fastened to it as a charm. On the King hearing of the British victory, he went to pour libation to the spirits of his ancestors, and to ask their a.s.sistance against the enemies of his country.

The Shah of Persia has numerous talismans, exceeding two hundred in number. We give details of four of them. One is a gold star, supposed to have been possessed by the legendary Rustem. It is called Merzoum, and has the reputation of making conspirators immediately confess.

When the Shah's brother was accused of treason some time since, the star was shown him, and, terrified and overcome by remorse, he avowed his iniquities. His confession was, of course, attributed to its efficacy. He was banished. The next important talisman is a cube of amber, which, we are told, fell from heaven in Mohammed's time. It is supposed to render the Shah invulnerable, and he wears it about his neck. Another is a little box of gold, set in emeralds, and blessed by the Prophet. It renders the Royal Family invisible as long as they are celibates. Another is a diamond set in one of the Shah's scimitars, which renders its possessor invincible; and there is also a dagger with the same property, but it is ordained that those who use it shall perish by it. It is therefore carefully kept shut up in a sandal-wood box, on which is engraved a verse of the Koran.

As of old, superst.i.tion prevails all over India. Semi-religious ceremonies are gone through in seasons of drought, to procure rain. At other times means are taken to propitiate the G.o.ds, to subdue enemies, and to secure good fortune to individuals, households, and communities. There are Indian princes who regularly consult their fortune-tellers regarding public and private affairs.

A curious bathing fair was held at Ajudhia, in Oude, in February 1878.

When a peculiar conjunction of the planets takes place (which occurs only once in eighty years), the natives rush in crowds to the river, as they believe that if they manage to bathe and go through certain ceremonies in four minutes and a half, they will obtain the remission of their own sins and those of millions of their ancestors. On this occasion the rush to the river turned out so great that numbers were trodden under foot, and sixty-five persons lost their lives.

The mysterious lights in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, which are believed by mariners to be warnings of great tempests and shipwreck, were unusually brilliant in 1878. It is said to be a fact, established by the experience of a century, that when these lights blaze brightly in the summer nights, the phenomena are invariably followed by great storms. They give the appearance to spectators on the sh.o.r.e of a ship on fire. The fire itself seems to consist of blue and yellow flames, now dancing high above the water, and then flickering, paling, and dying out, only to spring up again with fresh brilliancy. If a boat approaches, it flits away, moving further out, and is pursued in vain.

The lights are plainly visible from the sh.o.r.e from midnight until two in the morning. They appear to come from the sea sh.o.r.eward, and at dawn retire gradually, and are lost in the morning mist. Paradis, the French pilot, who took charge of the British Fleet under Admiral Sir Hovenden Walker when it sailed up the St. Lawrence to seize Quebec in 1711, declared he saw one of these lights before that armada was shattered by a dreadful gale on the 22d of August. The light, he said, danced before his vessel all the way up the gulf. Every great wreck that has taken place there since Sir Hovenden Walker's calamity has been preceded, if tradition is to be believed, by these mysterious lights, and they have thus warned the mariner of fatal storms.

In July last (1879) a woman, known as the Queen of Hearts, who had attained the age of one hundred years, and who had been known for three quarters of a century as a fortune-teller, died in Vienna.

Apparently gifted with the faculty of prescience, intimately acquainted with the shuffling of cards, deeply learned in the lore of the prophetic lines traced by the graver of Fate upon human hands and feet, this lady devoted her days to the unravelling of the tangled secrets of the future, charging those whose curiosity prompted them to pry into the regions of the unknown, five ducats per revelation. As many of the leading ladies of the Austrian aristocracy were among her clients, and the accuracy of her forecasts having earned for her a mighty reputation throughout the realms of the Hapsburgs, she contrived to ama.s.s a handsome fortune. "Herz-Dame" was a person of extraordinary ac.u.men, and a physiognomist of the highest order. Her sources of private information were numerous, and her ramifications are believed to have permeated every cla.s.s of Austrian society.

A comparatively recent instance of superst.i.tion in America is that of an old Indian woman being suspected of witchcraft, and stoned to death in Pine Nut Valley, Nevada; and in another part of the world, far separated from America, a similar act of superst.i.tion was committed, in which a human creature fell a victim to the gross delusions of her neighbours. We refer to a case of witch-burning in Russia. In October 1879 seventeen peasants were tried for burning to death a supposed witch, who resided near Nijni-Novgorod. Of the accused persons, fourteen were acquitted, and three sentenced to church penances--sentences which, if rigorously carried out, will not be easily borne.

A Leipsic writer gives an account of a number of superst.i.tious artists, some of which are very curious. Tietjens, for instance, believed that the person would speedily die who shook hands with her over the threshold at parting; Rachel thought she gained her greatest successes immediately after she had met a funeral; Bellini would not permit a new work to be brought out if on the day announced he was first greeted by a man, and "La Somnambula" was several times thus postponed; Meyerbeer regularly washed his hands before beginning an overture; and a noted _tragedienne_ never plays unless she has a white mouse in her bosom.

But these eccentricities can hardly compare with the strange belief and doings of Hogarth, the celebrated painter and engraver, particularly towards the close of his long life. A few months before he was seized with the malady which cut him off, he commenced his "End of all Things." A few of his intimate friends looked upon his picture as prophetic; and so he seemed to regard it himself. The artist worked with diligence, seemingly with an apprehension that he would not live to complete the piece. Finish it, however, he did in a masterly style, grouping everything that could denote the end of all things. Prominent were a broken bottle, an old broom, a bow unstrung, the b.u.t.t-end of an old musket, a crown tumbled in pieces, towers in ruins, the moon in her wane, the map of the globe burning, Phbus and his horses dead in the clouds, a vessel wrecked, Time with his hourgla.s.s and scythe broken, a tobacco-pipe in his mouth, the last puff of smoke going out; a play-book, with _Exeunt Omnes_ on one of the open pages; an empty purse, and a statute of bankruptcy taken out against nature.

"So far so good," said Hogarth. "Nothing remains but this,"--taking his pencil and dashing off the similitude of a painter's palette broken. "FINIS!" exclaimed the artist; "_the deed is done_--ALL IS OVER." Hogarth never handled pencil again, and within a month of the completion of this picture he was no more.