visible
form of some bird or beast. In discussing elsewhere the myth of Bishop
Hatto, we saw that the soul is sometimes represented in the form of a
rat or mouse; and in treating of werewolves we noticed the belief that
the spirits of dead ancestors, borne along in the night-wind, have
taken on the semblance of howling dogs or wolves. "Consistent with these
quaint ideas are ceremonies in vogue in China of bringing home in a cock
(live or artificial) the spirit of a man deceased in a distant place,
and of enticing into a sick man's coat the departing spirit which has
already left his body and so conveying it back." [167] In Castren's
great work on Finnish mythology, we find the story of the giant who
could not be killed because he kept his soul hidden in a twelve-headed
snake which he carried in a bag as he rode on horseback; only when the
secret was discovered and the snake carefully killed, did the giant
yield up his life. In this Finnish legend we have one of the thousand
phases of the story of the "Giant who had no Heart in his Body," but
whose heart was concealed, for safe keeping, in a duck's egg, or in a
pigeon, carefully disposed in some belfry at the world's end a million
miles away, or encased in a wellnigh infinite series of Chinese boxes.
[168] Since, in spite of all these precautions, the poor giant's heart
invariably came to grief, we need not wonder at the Karen superstition
that the soul is in danger when it quits the body on its excursions, as
exemplified in countless Indo-European stories of the accidental killing
of the weird mouse or pigeon which embodies the wandering spirit.
Conversely it is held that the detachment of the other self is fraught
with danger to the self which remains. In the philosophy of "wraiths"
and "fetches," the appearance of a double, like that which troubled
Mistress Affery in her waking dreams of Mr. Flintwinch, has been from
time out of mind a signal of alarm. "In New Zealand it is ominous to see
the figure of an absent person, for if it be shadowy and the face not
visible, his death may erelong be expected, but if the face be seen he
is dead already. A party of Maoris (one of whom told the story) were
seated round a fire in the open air, when there appeared, seen only by
two of them, the figure of a relative, left ill at home; they exclaimed,
the figure vanished, and on the return of the party it appeared that
the sick man had died about the time of the vision." [169] The bel