Unclean Powers (1): The Thunder God Turned Demon

From the sixteenth century tales have come down to us in which devastating storms are portrayed as the work of unclean spirits. In the 1570s, in certain places in Bohemia, the inhabitants watched their flight in rushing whirlwinds, and in one village it was told that the devil had entered into a love affair with a woman (a witch) and taught her to raise thunderstorms and hail; when the guilty woman was burned at the stake, the devils caught up her soul and carried it off in a whirlwind. In 1585 a peasant whose field had been beaten down by hail spoke of his misfortune thus: "May the Lord God punish whoever has sent the devils upon us with the hail!"¹

In popular oaths the devil is still given an elemental meaning. The Germans say: "Has the devil blown you here?", "Where has the devil brought you from?", "May the devil take you!", "Go to the devil!"; the French: "May the devil carry you off!"; the Russians: "Where has the devil carried you (or: led you)?", "May the devil take you!" Compare these with the oaths: "What storm has brought you here?", "What foul weather (or: what thunderstorm) has blown you here?", "Where has the hail brought you from?", "Go in the storm's name!", "Go in thunder's name!", "What wind has brought you here?" (see also vol. I, p. 317). Among the Slovaks: "Where has the parom (the thunder) carried you to?", "Where have you come from, parom?" The oath "to the devil!" is equivalent to the expressions "to the thunder!" and "may the thunder strike you!" Beside the blessing "God be with you" one hears in the people's mouth "the devil's weather!", "the thunder!" The names Teufelsgeld ("devil's money") and Donnersgeld ("thunder money"), meaning conjured money, are identical.²

To the devil is ascribed the swiftness of the whirlwind, or of the spirits of the Furious Host rushing along in the storm. Like the elves, the devil can suddenly appear and vanish, change into different shapes, and become now a giant of vast size, now a dwarf able to creep through a keyhole or into an empty nutshell. In medieval sagas heroes are carried home from far countries by the devil with extraordinary speed, and mostly through the spaces of the air. Thus King Charles in a single night galloped from the East to France on a devil that had turned itself into a horse.³ There is a well-known legend of a holy hermit whom the devil carried to Jerusalem or to Rome in a few hours.⁴ Other sagas allow the unclean spirit to be replaced by an angel, who points out a swift horse: a sign that originally what was meant here was not the evil demon of Christian teaching, but an elemental spirit created by paganism (the wind), or Wodan himself, carrying his favourite hero in the stormy flight of the clouds.⁵

As the representative of the lightly changing clouds and mists, the devil can turn into all those shapes in which the most ancient myth personified the storm clouds. In keeping with the epic names of the clouds as "walking" and of the winds as "wild", the devils wander about the world for ever and are marked by tireless, restless activity; in the regional dialect shatun means both "a vagrant" and "the devil".⁶ For the speed of their flight the clouds were likened to birds of prey, to a fleet-footed horse, to hounds and to wild goats; and for the greed with which they devour (that is, darken) the heavenly lights, to the wolf and the swine. All these animal forms are taken on by the Unclean One too. From the saga just mentioned it is plain that, like the witches, he can turn into a swift horse; in other tales, like Wodan and Donar, he rides out on a black horse or in a chariot. Condemned sinners are carried into the hellish abysses by black horses; Loki turned into a mare and gave birth to the eight-legged Sleipnir by the giant's stallion Svaðilfari. We may add that water spirits too are pictured as half, or sometimes wholly, horse-shaped, and that folk beliefs give the kobolds a horse's foot.

The devil often shows himself in the form of a dog and is even called der Hund, thus recalling the Greek Cerberus. As the hound of hell he guards the treasures hidden in the cloud-vaults, watches over the heavenly herds and takes part in the Wild Hunt, that poetic picture of the spring thunderstorm; and so he is also called Höllenhund and Höllenjäger, the hell-hound and the hunter of hell. Through the mythical kinship of the dead with the elemental spirits, the belief arose that he hunts the souls of the dead as a hound hunts fleeing game: "Has the bitch carried you here again?" (Old High German zôha, "bitch"). The image of the devil as a goat puts him in an especially close relation to Thor. At the festive gatherings of the witches Satan appears in the shape of a black goat, to which they pay divine honours; in conjurations the goat stands in for the ancient god. In Switzerland the people do not eat goats' feet, because the devil himself has such feet. This is usually explained from the myth of Thor's goats, with whose flesh he stilled his hunger, and which, gathering their bones, he raised to life again after they had been killed and eaten; and he was greatly angered when once the bone of a goat's leg turned out to be broken. Like Thor, the devil rides by night on a goat and cracks a whip, or swings a silver hammer in his right hand and holds lightning in his left. Of the transformation of the evil spirit into a swine and a wolf we have spoken above (vol. I, pp. 715, 732, 740, 781). The devil gladly takes the form of a black raven, a kite or an owl (vol. I, p. 529); the Germans call him Höllenrabe, the raven of hell, not only for the rapacity and black colour of this bird, but also especially because the raven was sacred to Odin, who travels in the thunder and the storms.⁷

Animal forms are given to the demons in addition to the hideous human forms in which they were pictured by the imagination of the primitive tribes. Endowed with the legs and ears of a goat, a cow or a horse, with horns and a tail, the devil comes close in outward appearance to the ancient fauns and satyrs and to our wood spirits (see vol. I, p. 715); he is as shaggy as the Schrat and the pilosi; his sharp claws and his wings are marks of the beast and the bird. According to the witness of a chronicle, the gods who live in the abysses are "black of appearance, winged, with tails, and they fly up to the sky".⁸ Like the elves, dwarfs and nixes, the devils love dancing and music (vol. I, pp. 331–4).⁹

The devil's mother

Beside the male demons, the traditions speak of she-devils, who in their character coincide with the cloud-wives, water-wives and forest-wives and maidens.¹⁰ The Little Russians have the saying: "Now I've lived to see the devil's mother!"¹¹ In folk tales the devil's grandmother, mother or sister sits in his dwelling, and in most cases she proves well-disposed to the wandering hero, hides him from her son and helps him in his need (with the same meaning the mother of the winds is also portrayed: see vol. I, p. 313); while the devil himself, coming home, smells human flesh, as the giants and dragons smell it. In the opinion of the Little Russians, if "the rain falls through the sun" (that is, while the sun is shining), then "the devil is beating his wife" or "marrying off his daughter". The Czechs say that the devil is beating his mother, or his sweetheart; the French: "the devil is beating his wife". In Germany, of quickly changing weather, now clear, now rainy and overcast, they say: "the devil is beating his grandmother"; in Switzerland: "the devil is beating his mother"; when thunder rolls while the sun is shining, the Germans say: "the devil is beating his mother until she pisses." A Polish-Ruthenian proverb holds that witches churn butter at the very time when the devil is thrashing his woman.

Plainly the devil appears here in the role of the thunderer: in the noise of the summer storm he beats his mother or his wife, that is, the cloud-nymph, and demands butter, that is, rain, from her (vol. I, pp. 665–7, and chapter XXVI). The cloud in whose depths the lightning is born was held to be its mother; the tales speak of the mother of thunder, Lithuanian Perkuno motë. On the other hand the same cloud-nymph, under another poetic view, was imagined as the sweetheart or wife of the storm-demon, with whom he unites through the phallus of lightning.¹²

A. N. Afanasyev, Poeticheskie vozzreniya slavyan na prirodu (Poetic Views of the Slavs on Nature), vol. III (Moscow, 1869), pp. 1–15.