CURIOSITIES OF SUPERSTITIOX. 75 5 



life, and restores the peace of the original elements." The Parsees 

 worship in fire the purifying principle of Nature. Their millennium, 

 like that of the Nihilists, will he preceded by a general explosion, a 

 thorough actual cautery of earthly sores, and uncremated corpses will 

 have to await the day of that final world-purgatory. 



The vampire-superstition has been traced back to the earliest cent- 

 uries of the Christian era, when the Nature-worship of ancient Europe 

 had to yield to the dreary asceticism of the new creed, and the ancient 

 divinities and their retainers had to wander homeless in the North as 

 followers of the Wild Huntsman, and in the South as night-hags and 

 ghouls, like the Lamia of that weird and wonderful ballad, Goethe's 

 " Bride of Corinth," which his rival, Heine, calls the " lyrical master- 

 piece of European poetry." A citizen of Corinth, a recent convert, 

 betroths his daughter first to a young Athenian, and next to the 

 "bridegroom of the Church," i. e., shuts her up in a nunnery, where 

 they kill her with prayers and penances. Bridegroom number one 

 arrives unexpectedly one evening ; explanations are postponed to the 

 next day, and in the mean time the guest is consigned to a room for- 

 merly occupied by his lost bride. During the night her mother hears 

 stealthy footsteps and a whispered conversation, and, impelled by an 

 irresistible curiosity, she opens the door of the guest-chamber. A 

 vampire, caught in flagrante, confronts her, and she recognizes her 

 own daughter, who, instead of collapsing at the sign of the cross, 

 turns upon her with fierce reproaches, admits the fatal consequences 

 of her visit, mentions other victims, but finally suggests the remedy 

 a Grecian funeral-pile. Her body, she says, has to be removed from 

 the stifling cloister-vault, and cremated in due form, together with the 

 corpse of her lover : 



" When the stake-fires blend, 

 When the sparks ascend, 

 Shall our spirits join the ancient gods." 



In the mountains of Upper Austria the natives dread the boding 

 voice of the Klage, a spectral Cassandra who frequents the desolate 

 highlands of the Wiener Wald and the eastern Alps. He who meets 

 her meets his death ; her voice presages imminent misfortune, or 

 afflicts the hearer with chronic hypochondria, for the echo of her wail 

 will haunt the ear forever. A precisely analogous spook, the llorona 

 (from llorar, to weep or mourn), infests the Sierras of old Spain, while 

 La Pleureuse bemoans the sorrows of life on the French side of the 

 Pyrenees. This concomitance of highlands and pessimism seems 

 rather paradoxical ; but mountaineers are mostly autochthones (like 

 the Basques, Gaelic Scotch, Circassians, Ghebirs, and Druses), and 

 may have preserved the memory of a Juventus Mundi, which lingered 

 in their rocks, together with paganism and Ruskinian ideals. 



The belief in the malign influence of the mal-occhio, or evil-eye, is 



