Letters on demonology and witchcraft / [Sir Walter Scott].

  • Walter Scott
Date:
1841
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Letters on demonology and witchcraft / [Sir Walter Scott]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    106/344 (page 104)
    Odin and Thor, were well prepared, on abandoning their worship, to consider their former deities, of whom the}'- believed so much that was impious, in the light of evil demons. But there were some particulars of the Northern creed, in which it corresponded so exactly with that of the classics, as leaves room to doubt whether the original Asae, or Asiatics, the founders of the Scan- dinavian system, had, before their migration from Asia, derived them from some common source with those of the Greeks and Romans; or whether, on the other hand, the same proneness of the human mind to superstition has caused that similar ideas are adopted in different regions, as the same plants are found in distant coimtries, without the one, as far as can be discovered, having obtained the seed from the others. The classical fiction, for example, of the satyrs, and other subordinate deities of wood and wild, whose power is rather delusive than formidable, and whose supernatural pranks intimate rather a wish to inflict terror than to do hurt, was received among the northern people, and perhaps transferred by them to the Celtic tribes. It is an idea which seems common to many nations. The existence of a satyr, in the sylvan form, is even pretended to be proved by the evidence of Saint Anthony, to whom one is said to have appeared in the deseit. The Scottish Gael have an idea of the same kind, respect- ing a goblin called Ourisk, whose form is like that of Pan, and his attendants something between a man and a goat, the nether extremities being in the latter form. A species of cavern, or rather hole, in the rock, affords to the wildest retreat in the romantic neighbourhood of Loch Katrine, a name taken from classical superstition. It is not the least curious circumstance, that from this sylvan deity the modem nations of Europe have borrowed the degrading and unsuitable emblems of the goat’s visage and form, the