ANCIENT TALES AND LEGENDS.

Otago Witness, Issue 1952, 23 July 1891, Page 36

ANCIENT TALES AND LEGENDS.

By Liseub.

THE DIVINING BOD.

The superstition — or whatever it may be called— attaching to the use of the divining rod is somewhat similar among the English, the French, the Mongols, and the natives of Central Africa. According to popular tradition it will when in the hands of an expert lead to the discovery of lost or stolen articles, trace thieves or murderers, locate likely places for wells or mines, and forecast future events. Sacred wands were common in ancient times, though there is no evidence that they were used for the same purposes as divining rods are now. We know the Germans and Scythians cast lots by means of wands, and Homer speaks of a lovely wand of wealth and riches which Apollo promised Hermes, to keep him ever unharmed ; and find a staff fortelling events in Hosea iv, 12 : "My people ask counsel at their stocks and their staff declareth unto them." In ancient art the "caduceus," or wand of Hermes, was usually entwined with serpents, but on one vase at least it is simply the forked twig of the modern water-finders, it may therefore have been from these magic wands that our divination rods have come. In England the divining rod has never been used to detect crime or give advice, its aid being only called in to find water and

minerals. We know it was used to detect criminals in Central Asia at the beginning of the eighteenth century, on the authority o£ travellers across that continent at that time. It is used nowadays by some African tribes for the same purpose. A missionary thus describes how a medicine man, with the aid of several young fellows, traced a thisf who had stolen some coin : —

The medicine man danced and sang an incantation. After a while the assistants, who held the twigs, had spasmodic twitchings of the arms and lega, whioh increased almost to convulsions. The sticks whirled and dragged the men round and round like mad, through bush and thorny shrub. At last, torn and bleeding, they came back to the assembly, whirled round, rushed down a path, and fell, panting and exhausted, in the hut of one of the chief's wives,

This violent action of the twigs has been noticed by people in England, and we have this in no less an authority than a civil engineer writing in The Times. This gentleman was asked to try the rod himself, and determined it should not twist in his hands. Twist it did, however, when he came above a hidden spring, in spite of all his efforts. A narrator in the Quarterly Review, in whom the editor had implicit confidence, mentions how, when a lady held the rod over a hidden well " it turned so quickly as to snap off short by her hand." The great authority for the history of the divining rod is a work published by M. Chevreuil, in Paris, in 1854. He studied the topic historically and found a work on the subject as far back as 1413, in which the writer stated the twig was regarded with awe by ignorant labouring men. Later writers thought its use was uncertain and unlawful. A traveller, of 1554 found that the miners of Macedonia did not use the wand in their operations, which seemed to surprise him considerably. About the middle of the seventeenth century a controversy raged among the learned as to the truth or otherwise of those who professed to be able to successfully use the rod. The cause of its action was explained in different ways, some attributing the force to natural means, others to the intervention of devils. " Le Brun wrote to Malebranche on July 8, 1689, to tell him that the wand only turned over what the holder had the • intention ' of discovering— if he were following a murderer the wand good naturedly refused to. distract him by turning over water. Malebranche replied that he had only heard of the wand turning over water and minerals. If it did so turn it must be by some such force as electricity ; but if that were the case it should turn over ooen water as well as that ||which was hidden. As it did not do that, it therefore could ;not be acted on by any natural force. II must then be acted on by a spirit or an impostor. As good spirits would not meddle in such matters, it followed that the cause of its movement must be the will of an impostor, or the influence of an evil spirit." In 1692 the divining rod was used to trace a murderer in Lyons. A vintner and his wife were found dead in their cellar, killed with a hedging knife, and the culprit could not be found. A man named Jacques Aymar, noted for his skill with the rod, was employed to run, him to earth. He took up a twig from the first wood that came to hand and was conducted to the cellar. So soon as he came to the spot where the murder had been committed the wand twisted rapidly, and led Aymar on the track of the culprit. He left the town by the bridge over the Rhone, followed the right bank of the river, stopped at several places where he asserted the* murderer had rested, and finally brought up at the prison of Beaucaire. He was admitted, looked over the prisoners, and finally picked out a hunchback, who, he said, had committed the crime. The hunchback was 19 years old, confessed the crime, and was broken on the wheel. After this Aymar went to Paris, and was made much of. The authorities employed him to hunt criminals, but he signally failed, and fell into all the traps laid to prove his genuineness. It would thus appear that the hunchback was either mad and confessed to the crime of murder in order to end his life, or that Aymar was only successful when in his native province. The divining rod has also been used for the same purpose as we now employ table- ; turning. Experts held it, questions were asked, and the wand answered by turning in different directions. In 3,700, a cure, near Toulouse, used the wand for this purpose, but it answered wrongly more often than right. Paramelle, who wrote in 1856, came to the conclusion that the wand turned in the hands of certain individuals of peculiar temperament, and that it is very much^a matter of chance whether there are or are not wells in the places indicated. On the whole, the evidence for the turning of the wand in the hands of experts is as good at'least as that of the turning of tables. If there were no such phenomena, it would be remarkable that the belief in them should be so widespread. Once introduced, says Andrew Lang in " Custom and Myth," these practices never die out among the peasantry, and now and again win the belief of the credulous among tbe educated class. One good word can be said for the divining rod, says < the same writer, and considering the opportunities it has had it has done less mischief than it might have been the cause of. It might have become in Europe what it has in Asia and Africa— a kind of ordeal, or method of searching out malefactors. But so far as is known the hunchback of Lyons was the only victim of the divining rod in Europe. It is somewhat strange that such a means of bringing suspected persons to trial should have been neglected when we consider that in rural England the monuments of a Bible suspended like a pendulum has been thought to indicate the guilty. The divining rod would have been much more successful, v/e should think, especially in the hands of an enemy. At the present day the belief in these divining rods still holds ground, and in Germany twigs are sometimes hidden under babies' cradles for good luck. "As well," says Andrew Lang, " try to pluck the comet out of the sky by the tail as to eradicate superstition from the mind of man."

— He : " I wae just about to remark something, but the thought has escaped me." She: " How I envy it t"