as its exponents trained men skilled in the deep mysteries of nature, and admitted to a knowledge of those dexterous juggleries whereby natural phenomena were made to assume awful and threatening aspects in the eyes of the ignorant and superstitious multitude, in order the more securely to maintain that authority obtained by a reputation for supernatural power. Thus the magicians of Egypt, the astrologers of Chaldæa, the magi of Persia, the augurs of Etruria, Greece, and Rome, the Druids of Gaul and Britain, all diviners, exercised probably more real power than the kings and chiefs of their respective countries, who were commonly only the ministers of the will of the gods as interpreted by their priests. To treat of divination as a whole would be manifestly impossible; the subject is so vast that it would require volumes. I therefore purpose to take two branches only of this wide subject, believing that in their extensive range and singular affinities they present matter of especial interest to anthropologists, whilst the survival of one of them in our own country at the present day is a curious instance of the durability of superstition notwithstanding the advance of education and civilization. Among the Mendip Hills, in the old mining districts of Cornwall and Derbyshire, Rhabdomancy, or divination by the rod, still flourishes, and only last year a long correspondence took place in the Spectator and some other papers with regard to its use in various parts of England for the discovery of water, the operators being in almost all cases well-known dowsers from the West of England. One of these I have myself seen at work in the neighbourhood of Bath, and can testify that water was certainly found at the spot indicated by him, in consequence of the violent agitation of the hazel-rod he carried. These diviners always assert that the power of the rod is confined to very few, not one in a thousand being able to make use of it; and I certainly never heard that those who ridicule the practice have themselves been able to control the motions of the rod, which in many cases becomes so violently agitated as to break in the hands of the operator; but whether this is effected by sleight of hand, or whether there really exists some mysterious force in certain persons not possessed by mankind in general, I must leave to the judgment of psychologists. Reports have from time to time been given of wonders performed by this mysterious power, and there can be no doubt of the belief of Cornish and Mendip miners in its genuineness. They have been called upon to exercise it not only in England, but in some of the Colonies, and have generally done so successfully; nevertheless there are doubtless many pretenders to the art, some of whom, as the notorious Jacques Aylmar (1692), have been proved to have been impostors; but for particulars of these, and of the well-known case of Lady Milbanke, who convinced Doctor Hutton of the reality of the power by discovering a spring in his own garden, I must refer the curious to the pages of Notes and Queries, the Quarterly Review, 1853, Migne's Dictionary ("Sciences Occultes"), and the works of Pierre Lebrun, Baring Gould, and others; my object being not so much to analyze the possibility of the alleged power, as to trace the origin of a widespread belief. All writers who have treated of divination by the rod have assigned to it a very high antiquity. They generally trace its origin to the Scythians, and say that from them it passed into Assyria, Palestine, Greece, Etruria, Rome, and by another route through Russia and Germany to England. They identify the diviningrod with the miracle-working rod of Moses and Aaron, the Caduceus of Mercury, the wand of Circe and other magicians, and the lituus of Romulus and Numa Pompilius; and in all the wonders related of it may be traced some connection with one or other of these famous miracle-working wands, for the divining-rod was employed not only to discover water-springs and metals, but also to mark out boundaries, to discover corpses, and to bring to justice murderers and thieves. In the discovery of water its affinity was with the rod of Moses, who by striking the rock with the rod caused water to gush forth; but the remaining qualities assigned to it seem to have more especial reference to the Caduceus of Mercury, which was the golden rod of wealth, and was used to conduct souls to Hades; whilst Mercury in his character as Hermes was especially the god of boundaries and of thieves, having himself been a thief, even from the day of his birth, when he rose from his cradle to steal the cattle of Apollo. 1 In the power assigned to the divining-rod of tracing boundaries we see its affinity not only with the rod of Mercury, and that of the older Egyptian Thoth or Hermes, who taught the Egyptians to measure their fields, but also with the lituus of Romulus, used by him to mark out the various regions of Rome, and which was afterwards laid up in the temple of Mars as a most precious relic. Plutarch says that Romulus was very religious and very clever in divination, and for this purpose made use of a lituus, which is a (bent) stick. This lituus was preserved as a sacred object, and no profane hands were allowed to touch it. This rod was found entire after the barbarians had pillaged and burnt the city, upon which Cicero remarks "What a consolation for the Romans to recover this rod; it was to them an earnest of the eternal duration of Rome!" Livy tells us that it was by this lituus that Numa was elected to succeed Romulus, but he fails to tell us by what signs the choice was determined, although the ceremony is thus described"Numa, wishing to consult the gods, as his predecessor had done, caused an augur to conduct him to a high citadel. There this augur, having in his right hand this bent stick, placed himself on the left of the prince. He observed the aspect of the town and of the country, prayed to the gods, and marking the east and the west, turned towards the east to have the south on his right hand, after which he took the lituus in his left hand, put his hand on the head of the prince, and made this prayer-Father Jupiter, if Justice demands that Numa Pompilius, whose head I touch, should be king of the Romans, suffer us to have evident signs of it in the 1 Lebrun. division I am about to make.'" 1 The likeness of the divining-rod to the wand of Circe is to be found in its use by magicians in their fancied metamorphoses of themselves and others into various animals. It may be supposed that with the numerous properties assigned to the divining-rod different forms. and different substances would be employed in its manufacture; thus we find that although the most general form was that of the letter Y, with the lower limb more or less elongated, the reason assigned for the form being that it is supposed that the hands convey some virtue to the rod, yet sometimes a straight. stick was employed, or one cut straight in the centre, with a branch at each end (), and sometimes the forked branch was cut close to the fork (V), whilst frequently several rods were used together. Hazel was the wood generally most esteemed, but the almond, the willow, the ash, or some fruit-bearing tree had each many advocates. Some argued that in searching for metals, rods of metal should be used, or that at least the wooden rod should be tipped with metal; and it was commonly believed that it would only turn for that particular object in the search for which it was employed; to ensure which result it should be first touched with that substance which it was expected to discover. In using them sometimes a prayer was said, or sometimes a cross was engraved on the rod. Lebrun describes four old divining-rods found in Paris, on which were inscribed the names of the three magi, Baltazar, Gaspar, and Melchior. In the laws of the Frisians after their conversion to Christianity, permission was given to use divining-rods in proving homicide, and the ceremony was performed in church before the altar. Two twigs, one marked with the sign of the cross, were covered with clean wool and laid upon the altar, or the holy reliques, and a prayer made that God would by a sign discover the guilty.3 1 Lebrun, tom. ii. p. 394. 2 Ibid. tom. ii. bk. vii. p. 635. In considering the origin of the supernatural qualities assigned to the divining-rod, we cannot fail to observe its obvious connection with the use of a rod or staff, either plain or variously ornamented, in all ages and in all countries, as a symbol of authority. The sceptre of modern monarchs has its prototypes in ancient Egypt, in Peru, and even among the relics of the unknown pre-historic cave-dwellers of France and Britain; for some archæologists believe that the stag's antlers perforated with one or more holes, and often engraved with various figures, which are sometimes found in the caves explored, are the sceptres or wands of office of those primitive people, although they are more probably identified with the arrow-straighteners still in use among the Eskimo. It seems to me not altogether improbable that the branching horns of the stag, used in former times as a token of the power possessed by the chief of a tribe, may have suggested the form of the divining-rod. Certain it is that horns of various kinds. were used in the very earliest times to symbolize power, and hence were frequently chosen to adorn the heads of gods. The figure most suggestive of the use of the horn as a symbol of dignity in Gaul and Britain is that dug up in Paris, and engraved in the Pictorial History of England. It represents a robed man, the head adorned with horns, which may be either single-branched stag's horns or forked sticks, and beneath is the inscription Cernunnos; the peculiarity in this figure is that the horns have upon them several rings strung upon a larger one. Now we are told by Philostrates that "The Indian Brahmins carry a staff and a ring by means of which they are able to do almost anything." 1 The images of Vishnu commonly represent him as twirling a ring on the finger of one hand, whilst on the cylinders of Babylon the forked and branched wands borne by priests or monarchs are frequently adorned with rings. In all magical ceremonies the first step was to draw a circle with the magic wand. The Assyrian goddess Hera, figured by Layard, bears in one 1 History of Magic, p. 220. L |