The coasts of illusion

The progress of knowledge has been an advance from poetry to prose. In part it has consisted in forgetting the things that were not so. Through most of the story of mankind everything was fabulous. There were no inanimate objects at the beginning. Sticks and stones had a soul. This belief passed, but some quality of marvel remained—the rhythm of the moon repeated in things terrestrial; the loves and antipathies of the plants; the properties of gems to bring good fortune or ill, to promote fecundity, to test the continence of men and women. There was an unwieldy mass of topographical legends. Every township had its shrine, or wonder-working well, or hill or tree that broke a law of nature. There were strange cures for aches and pains. Illusion was everywhere. The lumber rooms of history are stored with traditions in which is the faint fragrance of faded wonder.

Sea and sky had each their part in the drama of life. To the Celt the voices of the waves carried warning, or sympathy, or prophecy. The ninth wave was larger than those before it, and mystery was in it. It was thought that no man or animal beside the Gallic sea died with a rising tide. The sun sank into the ocean with a hissing sound, and there were races on both sides of the world that heard it. The moon, Pliny said, “is not unjustly regarded as the star of our life.” All seas were purified when it was full, the Nile waxed and waned with it, and sap in trees, and even men’s blood, increased or diminished with its phases. The time of the rising of the Dog Star was a sort of zero hour for many things in nature and husbandry.

The Table of the Sun

There was a Table of the Sun, where the earth itself presided as host. Herodotus was the first to describe it. He says that when Cambyses, the Persian king, was in Egypt, he sent spies into Ethiopia under the pretense of bearing gifts to court, but in reality to see if the table were a fact. The spies came back with various stories—that the Ethiopians drank only milk and water, that they lived to be one hundred and twenty years old, that the Fountain of Youth bubbled up in that country, and that they had seen the Table of the Sun. This was set by direction of the magistrates in a meadow in the outskirts of the capital city, and the people of the land said that the earth itself brought forth the food spread upon the table for all comers. For a full description one may use with advantage the idiomatic paraphrase of Purchas:

“Of the Table of the Sunne thus writeth Friar Luys de Urreta: that the king in a curious braverie, and sumptuous vanitie, caused there to bee set by night in a certain field store of white bread, and the choysest wines; hanged also on the Trees great varietie of Fowles, rost and boyled, and set on the ground, Mutton, Lambe, Veale, Beefe, with many other dainties ready dressed. Travellers and hungry persons which came hither and found this abundance, seeing no bodie which prepared, or which kept the same, ascribed it to Jupiter Hospitalis his bounty and hospitality, shewing himselfe a Protector of poore Travellers, and called this field the Table of the Sunne. The report hereof passed through the world, and brought many Pilgrims from farre Countries, to visit the same. Plato the Prince of Philosophers entred into Aethiopia, led with desire to see this renowned Table and to eate of those delicacies. The Aethiopians, since their Christianity, in zealous detestation of Idolatry, will not so much as name this field, and these ancient Rites.”

It has been suggested that the legend derives from the system of dumb trading between civilized and savage peoples which in Africa antedates history. If this be so, the wheat was supplied by merchants rather than by the king, the magistrates laid down the rules for the voiceless market, and the natives, coming after the merchants had withdrawn, left gold in exchange for what they took away.

The Mountain of Lodestone

Agib, son of a sultan and by his vicissitudes become the Third Calendar of the Arabian Nights, had embarked with all the royal fleet on a tour of his provinces. A storm blew them out of their course, and then by virtue of the iron in the ships they were drawn irresistibly toward a black mountain or mine of adamant that loomed before them. They saw upon it a dome of fine brass and on the dome a brazen horse, carrying a rider who had a plate of lead on his breast, on which talismanic characters were graven. Suddenly “all the nails and iron in the ships flew toward the mountain, where they were fixed, by the violence of the attraction, with a horrible noise; the ships split asunder, and their cargoes sunk into the sea,” with all the men save Agib himself. He gained the shore, climbed to the dome, and slept there, in his sleep receiving good counsel. The next day he shot three arrows of lead from a bow of brass at the brazen horse and its rider. They were toppled over, the sea rose and engulfed the mountain, and Agib was ferried off to fresh adventures.

Some Bedouin or Persian story-teller of the bazaars may have added the detail of the heaven-kissing statue and its overthrow, but the body of the narrative is one of the oldest of legends. Men have always been curious about the lodestone. The tale of the magnetic mountain to which ships built with iron bolts are drawn is found in Aristotle, Pliny, and Ptolemy, in the Arab geographies, in Chinese writings, and in the reports of explorers clear to the close of the mediæval period. Ogier the Dane in the Charlemagne cycle was wrecked on such a mountain and like Agib was spared for sensuous delights. In a twelfth-century poem, when the ship of Duke Ernst entered the Klebermeer, it was drawn to the rock called Magnes and found itself among “many a work of keels,” over which the masts rose like a tangled forest.

Ptolemy is the most definite of the early writers. “There are said to be ten islands,” he says, “forming a continuous group called Maniolai, from which ships with iron nails are said to be unable to move away, and hence they are built with wooden bolts. The inhabitants are reputed to be cannibals.” Dampier, Gemelli-Careri, and many others identify Maniolai with Manila, and assume that the magnetic islands were the Philippines; but Gerini, a sagacious editor of Ptolemy’s eastern geography, believes they were the Nicobars.

The River Sambation

Rising in a pious Jewish fable, first recited in Josephus, the River Sambation has flowed for eighteen centuries through the geography of legend. It separated the lost Ten Tribes from other Jews, or from the subjects of Prester John. Some said it was in Caucasia, others in Arabia; and from as far east as China and as far west as Ethiopia it was reported. Josephus placed it between Raphanea and a district of Agrippa’s kingdom; it was called the Sabbatic river because it ran only on Saturdays, its bed being dry the other six days of the week. Pliny had it, however, that on Saturdays the stream rested. Much was heard of it in the Middle Ages. Eldad Hadani, a ninth-century traveler, said it was in the land of Cush. It had little water, but sand and stones rolled restlessly down its bed with a noise “like the waves of the sea and a stormy wind”; on the Sabbath their tumult was stilled and flames surrounded the river so that none could pass.

The stream was in India, spice groves bordered it, and quantities of precious stones went down in its billowing sand to the sea; so said the letter of Prester John. It was fifty days’ journey inland from Aden, said the Jewish traveler Obadiah di Bertinoro, for thus Arab traders had told him. A Jewish geographer, Abraham Farissol, also of the fifteenth century, identified it with the Ganges. Abraham Yazel, a Jewish scholar of the next century, told of a bottle filled with its sand, and save on the Sabbath the sand was in motion. A Christian whom he quoted had seen the river in the dominions of the Grand Turk. It was from one to four miles broad, with plenty of water, but dangerous to navigate because of the rocks and sand that rolled along with the current: “ships which venture on it lose their way, and indeed no ship is yet known to have returned safely from this river.” An Arabian in Lisbon carried an hour-glass filled with this uneasy sand on Friday afternoons through a street of shops run by Jews who had professed Christianity. “Ye Jews,” he exclaimed, “shut up your shops, for now the Sabbath comes.” The last word from the Sambation was in 1847, when the governor of Aden told a messenger seeking aid for Jews of the Holy Land that there was a great Jewish kingdom forty stages inland, but that the river was not there; it was in China.

Magical Springs

Classic mythology peopled lakes, rivers, brooks, and springs with female divinities of a minor rank known as naiads, who were endowed with prophetic power and were able to inspire those who drank of these waters. The belief in the nymphs waned, but a belief in the singular properties of the waters long persisted. Many stories relate to the mental effects thereof. If you drink of a pool in the cave of the Clarian Apollo at Colophon, says Pliny, you will acquire powers of oracle; but you will not live long. Ctesias tells of an Indian fountain the waters of which, when drawn, coagulated like a cheese; if a little of this were triturated and the powder administered in a potion, anybody who drank of it would become delirious, rave all that day, and blab out whatever he had done. Therefore did the king use this water as the modern drug, scopolamin, has been used, to detect the guilt of persons accused. In Ethiopia, according to Diodorus, Semiramis discovered a small lake the sweet red waters of which impelled people who drank of them to confess their faults. Pliny recites that at the temple of the god Trophonius in Bœotia near the river Hercynnus are two fountains, one promoting remembrance and the other forgetfulness; one is called Mnemosyne, the other Lethe.

The Fountain of the Sun

The Fountain of the Sun was rediscovered by a modern traveler, Belzoni, in the oasis of Jupiter Ammon. He found that the ruins of the temple of Jupiter Ammon served as a basement for nearly a whole village, in the vicinity of which was this famous fountain in a deep well. According to old report it was warm at midnight and cold at noon. The fact is its temperature does not vary between night and day, and its apparent changes are due to the greater or less heat of the surrounding air, as the day advances or declines.

The Tree of the Sun

Best known of all trees was the Tree of the Sun. This grew in Persia, and Maundeville says of it: “Within those Deserts were the Trees of the Sun and of the Moon, that spoke to King Alexander and warned him of his Death. And Men say that the Folk that keep those Trees, and eat of the Fruit and of the Balm that groweth there live well four hundred Year or five hundred Year, by virtue of the Fruit and of the Balm.” Sir John said he would have gone toward the trees “full gladly,” but because of the wild beasts, serpents, and dragons “I trow that one hundred thousand Men of Arms might not pass the Deserts safely.” However, Marco Polo passed them safely, and gives one of his terse descriptions of the tree “called the tree of the sun and by Christians arbo secco, the dry or fruitless tree.” It looked like the chestnut, but its husks contained no fruit, and probably it was the Oriental plane tree. Here Alexander fought Darius.

Wonder-working Trees

Ctesias has a characteristic traveler’s account of the parebon, an Indian tree about the size of the olive, but with neither flowers nor fruit. It has, however, fifteen thick roots, which, like the diviner’s rod, will attract the precious metals. If a cubit’s length of root be taken, says the Cnidian, “it attracts lambs and birds, and with this root most kinds of birds are caught.” If you cast it into wine, it solidifies the liquor so that it can be held in your hand like a piece of wax.

The ancients had much to say of the properties of other trees and plants. It was thought that the laurel or bay tree was never struck by lightning, and so the peasants of the Pyrenees hold to this day; the Emperor Tiberius wore a laurel wreath during thunderstorms. The oak, planted near the walnut, would perish. The shadow of the walnut was injurious to men and productive of headache. The shadow of the elm was refreshing. The olive, if so much as licked by a she-goat, became barren. There was a moral feud between the vine and the cabbage, and between the vine and the radish, so that the latter was prescribed for drunkenness. The virtue of the mistletoe, says Pliny, was to resist all poisons and make fruitful any that used it. The cocoanut and the betel nut were powerful aphrodisiacs. The gum of the camphor tree bred impotency. The smell of the basil begat scorpions in the brains of men. Moly would neutralize sorcery. There was a plant called the eriphia with a hollow stem, inside of which was a beetle which kept ascending and descending its narrow home the while it bleated like a kid; this plant was beneficial to the voice.

The fable of the deadly upas, or poison tree of Macassar, Erasmus Darwin’s “hydra tree of death,” is modern. According to tradition, a putrid stream flows from the roots of the tree, which grows in Java, and the vapors thereof kill. Foersch, a Dutch physician who published a book in 1783, is mainly responsible for the ill repute of this tree. He declares that “not a tree nor blade of grass is to be found in the valley or surrounding mountains. Not a bird or beast, reptile or living thing lives in the vicinity.” He even asserts that “on one occasion sixteen hundred refugees encamped within fourteen miles of it, and all but three hundred died within two months.” Investigation has disproved all of this. The tree grows in a region where vegetation is luxuriant, men make a garment of its fiber and walk under its branches, and there birds roost. The venom known as Macassar poison with which Malays tip their arrows is, however, made from its gum.

There grows on the island of Hierro in the Canaries a remarkable tree, if one may credit Richard Hakluyt and others of his time. Hierro is six leagues in circuit and produces ample foodstuffs for its inhabitants and their flocks of goats, although no rain falls and no springs gush. There is, however, a great stone cistern standing at the foot of a tree with leaves like the olive’s. Clouds hover over the tree “and by means thereof,” says Hakluyt, “the leaves of the sayd tree continually drop water, very sweet, into the sayd cisterne, which cometh to the sayd tree from the clouds by attraction.”

The rain tree of Peru is described as tall, rich in leaves, and possessed of “the power of collecting the dampness of the atmosphere and condensing it into a continuous and copious supply of rain.” “In the dry season,” says a Spanish newspaper quoted in Walsh’s Handy Book of Curious Information, “when the rivers are low and heat great, the trees’ power of condensing seems at the highest and water falls in abundance from the leaves and oozes from the trunks. The water spreads around in veritable rivers. These rivers are canalized so as to regulate the course of the water.” This singular statement closes with an estimate that a Peruvian rain tree will yield nine gallons of water a day, and that 10,000 trees producing daily 385,000 liters of water can be grown on a square kilometer.

The Weather Bureau at Washington examined (1905) the facts as to the rain tree, and declared that such a tree never existed. The American consul-general at Callao reported (1911) that he could find no rain trees in Peru. Then the Department of Agriculture made a statement that the rain-tree legend was centuries old, but had no basis. In partial explanation thereof an English botanist said that cicada-swarms, settling upon trees, tap their juices, which fall on the ground.

Australia has planted many so-called rain trees.

Ulloa, the Spanish astronomer, brought back to Europe a related story in 1736. He found at Quito, he said, a species of cane from thirty-five to fifty feet high and half a foot thick. Until the canes reach full size most of the tubes contain a quantity of water, and this rises and falls and is clear or turbid, according to the phases of the moon.

The Mandrake Myth

Legends of the mandrake are perhaps a legacy of the ancient dark white race whose gloomy imaginings and orgiastic practices survived to color the brighter religions of Greece and Rome, and emerged again in the witch-burnings of the Middle Ages. These legends are widespread, uniformly sinister, often obscene. Their basis may be in homeopathic magic—the belief that like cures like, and also may kill like; or it may be in the sea, where affinities with the pearl myth have been noted. It is possible that the mandrake of forbidding fable is just a stranded cowry, the shell which has been called the first deity.

The mandrake is a member of the potato family growing in Mediterranean countries. It is an emetic, a purgative, a narcotic poison. Usually its flesh-colored roots are forked, so that, like a transplanted carrot or parsnip, it resembles a miniature human figure. On this resemblance, and on its sleep-producing properties, men have thought that the legends were based, and in China, ginseng, which also has man-like roots, has inherited them. The possessor of the mandrake could win good luck for himself, bring bad luck to others, sway the passions, and even in some measure command the elements.

Hence the popular notions that the mandrake was an aphrodisiac, that it relieved barrenness and promoted pregnancy, as in the triangular episode in Genesis in which Jacob, Rachel, and Leah figured; it was known as the love-apple, and Venus was called Mandragorotis, while the Emperor Julian wrote Calixenes that he drank its juices as a love potion. Hence, also, the belief that it dripped blood when pulled from the earth and, as Homer says, emitted a deathly shriek fatal to the man who heard it; according to Josephus it was the custom in a certain Jewish village to use a dog to pull up the roots, the dog being killed by the shrieks that followed. Grimm describes this process, which consisted in Germany of loosening the soil about the root, tying the root to the dog’s tail, retreating to a safe distance down the wind, and then decoying the dog with a piece of bread. The dead canine was buried on the spot with religious honors, and the root “washed with wine, wrapped in silk, laid in a casket, bathed every Friday, and clothed in a little new white smock every new moon. If thus considerately treated, it acts as a familiar spirit, and every piece of coin laid by it at night doubles in the morning.”

Thus the mandrake legend entered its mediæval phase of devil worship. The root was used as a charm against nightmare, and against robbers, and to locate buried treasure. It was supposed to be a living creature “engendered,” as Thomas Newton says, “under the earth of the seed of some dead person put to death for murder,” or, as Grimm says, “growing up beneath the gallows from which a thief is suspended.” Heads were carved on the mandrakes and these elaborated images went by the names of manikin and erdman, or earth-man. As much as twenty-five ducats in gold was paid for them. They were often carried on the person in bottles, and bottle imps were credited with the magic powers of homunculi. But if a man died with one of these upon his person, the devil owned him forthwith. Joan of Arc was charged with carrying such an image about with her, but replied that she did not know what a mandrake was. Margaret Bouchey was hanged near Orléans in 1603 on the ground that she kept a living mandrake fiend, in form of a female ape.

Mandrake manikins were counterfeited from the root of a yam-like plant, which had been manipulated into a complete likeness of the human body. Sir Thomas Browne describes the process: “The roots which are carried about by imposters to deceive unfruitful women are made of the roots of canes, briony, and other plants; for in these, yet fresh and virent, they carve out the figures of men and women, first sticking therein the grains of barley or millet where they intend the hair should grow; then bury them in sand until the grains shoot forth their roots, which, at the longest, will happen in twenty days; they afterward clip and trim those tender strings in the fashion of beards and other hairy teguments. All which, like other impostures, once discovered, is easily effected, and in the root of white briony may be practiced every spring.”

A century ago mandrake images were still seen in French seaport towns, but now mandragora has lost its vogue even as a medicine. In Africa and the East, however, it is still used as a narcotic and anti-spasmodic, while ginseng, which is a surrogate, maintains its spell in China, where as much as four hundred dollars has been paid for an ounce of it.

Precious Stones

Among minerals jade held a place as distinct as that of the mandrake among plants, but its associations were all auspicious. Its place is the highest among the precious stones, although it is not a precious stone at all. It is a substance to which heliolithic culture attached magical power and which it carried quite around the world before history began, Aryans, Kanakas, and red Indians holding it in equal regard. Axes and hatchets of jade or jadeite have been uncovered in the burial grounds of neolithic Europe, and there are jade celts, cylinders, and amulets bearing Greek, Babylonian, and Egyptian inscriptions. In a sense the civilization of China has been built up around this stone. Eighteen centuries before the Christian era the emperors of the Shang dynasty used it in the state ritual, paying homage to the east with a green jade tablet, to the south with a red tablet, to the west with a white tablet, and to the north with a black tablet. According to Confucius, “its sound, pure and sonorous, with its peculiarity of ceasing abruptly, is the emblem of music; its splendor resembles the sky, and its substance, drawn from mountain and stream, represents the earth.” An ancient caravan trade in this stone is commemorated by a portal in the Great Wall called the Jade Gate.

The Amazon stone which the Spaniards obtained from the South American Indians was jadeite. By them as well as by their conquerors it was thought to be a cure for diseases of the kidneys, hence its name of nephrite. A revived interest in jade followed American exploration. Historically it has been treasured as a cure for colic and for diseases of the spleen and loins; hung against the stomach, Galen believed it a remedy for cramps. It was a good-luck charm, and, fashioned into drinking cups, a detector of poisons, which foamed against the brim. It survives in art and symbolism after having passed out of magic and medicine.

Many of the old traditions about stones persist in popular belief, which holds certain kinds of gems and individual jewels as lucky or unlucky; and in fashion, which assigns to each month its appropriate birthstone. It was supposed that the garnet preserved health, that the ruby was a remedy for plague, that the turquoise protected from accident, that the eagle-stone would promote childbirth, that the emerald would prevent epilepsy, that the topaz would cure insanity, that lapis lazuli was a purgative, and bezoar antidotal. Jasper was a febrifuge and rock crystal quenched thirst. An amethyst would prevent intoxication, a bloodstone would confer the gift of prophecy, a chrysoprase would cure cupidity, a sapphire would defend against enchantments, an agate would avert a tempest, a carbuncle would give light in the dark, an opal would dispel despondency, an emerald would break if worn in the commerce of the sexes, and a diamond under a woman’s pillow would discover her incontinency.

In Christian symbolism, jasper signified the foundation of the church, emerald the freshness of piety, beryl the illumination of the divine spirit. Sapphires typified the heavenly-minded, chrysolite those who let their light shine in word and deed, chalcedony those who fast and pray in secret.

However vain the pagan jewel-lore from which Christian borrowings were made, the ideas it arrays are older than the conception of precious stones as mere adornment. These things were sought and worn at first as life-givers and luck-bringers, and not because they were beautiful. Justinus Kerner is of those writers who contend that primitive man was so attuned to nature that “even the spirit of the stone, now grown dull and sluggish, was capable of affecting him.” Only when persons are under the influence of magnetism, says this writer, are they susceptible to the inherent powers of precious stones; because that state was in a measure the normal state of early men they found greater medicinal virtue in gems than in roots and herbs.

The Wonders of Countries

The travelers of yesterday found marvel awaiting them in every land. The sun of India, Ctesias says, appears to be ten times larger than in other countries, and for four finger-breadths downward the surrounding seas are so hot that fish cannot come near the surface. It is so hot in Ormuz, says Maundeville, that “the Folk lie all naked in Rivers and Waters, Men and Women together, from nine o’clock of the Day till it be past the Noon.” In the Persian city of Susis, says Strabo, “lizards and serpents at midday in summer cannot cross the streets quick enough to prevent their being burnt to death midway by the heat.” Setting one thing against another, Diodorus says that in Scythia by the force of cold even brazen statues are burst asunder, while “in the utmost coasts of Egypt and the Troglodytes the sun is so scorching hot at midday that two standing together cannot see each other by reason of the thickness of the air.”

Ctesias speaks of a fountain in India which swims every year with liquid gold, and out of which are drawn a hundred earthen pitchers filled with the metal—melted ore, suggests Lassen. There is growing upon Mount Ida in Scandia, says Father Jerom Dandini, “a herb whose virtue is to gild the teeth of those animals that eat of it; one may believe, and with good reason, that this proceeds from the golden mines which are in that ground.” Herodotus reports the Thracians as saying that the country beyond the Ister (Danube) is possessed by bees, wherefore travelers cannot penetrate it; these may have been mosquitoes. At the altars of Mucius in the country of the Veii, and about Tusculum and in the Cimmerian Forest, says Pliny, there are places in which things that are pushed into the ground cannot be pulled out again.

Geographical marvel may be brought down almost to date with Humboldt’s report on the moving “stone of the eyes” in South America, which the natives believed to be both stone and animal; and with Irving’s account of the extinct thunderbolts which the plains Indians told him they sometimes used for arrow heads. So armed, a warrior was invincible, but he vanished if a thunderstorm arose during battle.