ITS UNCANNY POWERS 111 



which was to prove hardly less ill-fated than that in 

 Mexico ; lastly, the crowning tragedy of the murder 

 of the Empress Elizabeth at Geneva ; all these 

 events are affirmed, with every detail of time and 

 place, to have been heralded or accompanied by the 

 appearance, under remarkable circumstances, of a 

 raven or ravens. 



The mysterious, the uncanny powers of the raven, 

 his means of avenging himself for a wrong, do not 

 cease with his life. The enchantress Medea, when 

 she is mixing a life-potion by which to restore, in 

 defiance of the Fates, her aged father to the bloom 

 of his youth, drops into the caldron, like the weird 

 sisters, first, the most potent herbs and simples of 

 her country, then, the bones and body of an owl, 

 then, some slices of wolf, and, last and best of all, 

 the head and beak of a raven who had seen nine 

 generations of men pass away. And so in the 

 remotest West, the medicine man, among the North 

 American Indians, is said, when he is peering into 

 the future, to carry on his back three raven-skins 

 with their tails fixed at right angles to his body, 

 while, on his head, he wears a split raven-skin, so 

 fastened as to let the huge and formidable beak 

 project from the forehead. In Sweden, it is the 

 current belief that the ravens which croak by night 



