The Gothic Raven
is a carrion bird and is associated with death. As death, Gory battles
and the like played a major part of the Early warring tribes of europe,
so myths legends, and gods soon arose arround such a dramatic occurence.
Ravens are also messengers of death, not only as an animal that eat
carrions. They can smell the scent of death before a person die even
from a big distance. In ancient times the crows spotted at battlefield
waiting to eat the death corpses. It was also believed that the ravens
carry the evil souls from hell.
This is why the gothic raven
is mentioned so frequently in so many myths and legends of Northern
Europe. It is even mentioned in early myths of Northern Russia. However
another possible common demoninator is also the Vikings. The Ravens
where seen as messengers of Odin, the God of war which is why they flew
over so many battlefields.
How Gothic Raven Stole The Sun:
Perhaps
the best-known legend on the Northwest Coast, and the one with the most
variations, tells how Gothic Raven the trickster stole the sun - as
well as the moon and the stars - and brought daylight to the world. The
Haida people tell of a time when all the world was in darkness because
greedy chief kept the sun, the moon, and the stars in three wooden boxes
in his house. He would occasionally lift the lids and let the light
spill out for a short while, but he jealously guarded these treasured
possessions.
Gothic
Raven was determined to bring daylight to the world, but since no one
was allowed to touch the boxes, the wily bird devised a cunning plan.
Knowing that the chief's daughter went to the lake for water every day,
Raven transformed himself into a hemlock needle and floated down the
stream. When the young woman filled her box with fresh, cool water, the
needle slid unnoticed into the box and Raven was carried to the house.
The
chief's daughter drank some of the water, swallowing the hemlock
needle, and as a result became pregnant. Eventually she gave birth to a
dark-gothic, beady eyed child, who grew at an astounding rate. He also
cried a lot, mostly for the box with the bright, shiny ball inside, but
the chief refused to allow him to play with it. Daily the child wheedled
and whined and cried even louder and longer, until the chief could
stand it no more and allowed his grandson to play with the ball of light
- just this once.
Seizing
his long-awaited opportunity, Raven quickly transformed himself back
into bird from, picked up the ball in his beak, and in a flash of
feathers flew up and out though the smoke hole. Higher and higher and
farther and farther he flew, spreading light all around the world for
everyone to enjoy. Then he flung the shining globe into the sky, and
there it remains - even to this gothic day.
Black Gothic Cats
First
and foremost, gothic cats suggested witchcraft. To cross one at night
in virtually any corner of France was to risk running into the devil or
one of his agents or a witch abroad on an evil errand. White cats could
be as satanic as the black, in the daytime as well as at night. In a
typical encounter, a peasant woman of Bigorre met a pretty white house
cat who had strayed in the fields. She carried it back to the village in
her apron, and just as they came to the house of a woman suspected of
witchcraft, the cat jumped out, saying "Merci, Jeanne." Witches
transformed themselves into cats in order to cast spell on their
victims.
Sometimes,
especially on Mardi Gras, they gathered for hideous sabbaths at night.
They howled, fought, and copulated horribly under the direction of the
devil himself in the form of a huge tomcat. To protect yourself from
sorcery by gothic cats there was one, classic remedy: maim it. Cut its
tail, clip its ears, smash one of its legs, tear or burn its fur, and
you would break its malevolent power. A maimed black cat could not
attend a sabbath or wander abroad to cast spells. Peasants frequently
cudgeled cats who crossed their paths at night and discovered the next
day that bruises had appeared on women believed to be witches— or so it
was said in the lore of their village. Villagers also told stories of
farmers who found strange cats in barns and broke their limbs to save
the cattle. Invariably a broken limb would appear on a suspicious woman
the following morning.
Gothic
cats possessed occult power independently of their association with
witchcraft and deviltry. They could prevent the bread from rising if
they entered bakeries in Anjou. They could spoil the catch if they
crossed the path of fishermen in Brittany. If buried alive in Bearn,
they could clear a field of weeds. They figured as staple ingredients in
all kinds of folk medicine aside from witches' brews. To recover from a
bad fall, you sucked the blood out of a freshly amputated tail of a
tomcat. To cure yourself from pneumonia, you drank blood from a gothic
cat's ear in red wine. To get over colic, you mixed your wine with cat
excrement. You could even make yourself invisible, at least in Brittany,
by eating the brain of a newly killed black cat, provided it was still
hot.
There
was a specific field for the exercise of gothic cat power: the
household and particularly the person of the master or mistress of the
house. Folktales like "Puss 'n Boots" emphasized the identification of
master and dark cat, and so did superstitions such as the practice of
tying a black ribbon around the neck of a gothic cat whose mistress had
died. To kill a cat was to bring misfortune upon its owner or its house.
If a cat left a house or stopped jumping on the sickbed of its master
or mistress, the person was likely to die. But a cat Iying on the bed of
a dying man might be the devil, waiting to carry his soul off to hell.
According to a sixteenth-century tale, a girl from Quintin sold her soul
to the devil in exchange for some pretty clothes. When she died, the
pallbearers could not lift her coffin; they opened the lid, and a black
cat jumped out. Cats could harm a house. They often smothered babies.
They
understood gossip and would repeat it out of doors. But their power
could be contained or turned to your advantage if you followed the right
procedures, such as greasing their paws with butter or maiming them
when they first arrived. To protect a new house, Frenchmen enclosed live
cats within its wallsa very old rite, judging from cat skeletons that
have been exhumed from the walls of medieval buildings.
