The age of chivalry has its legend in the Centaurs and Cheiron. The
Hippo-centaurs are mounted savages: Cheiron is the true knight,
withstanding monsters in his own shape, saving Peleus from them, and
giving hospitality to the Argonauts. The mounted man was dragon to the
man on foot until he became the chevalier; then the demonic character
passed to the strategist who had no horse. It is curious enough to
find existing among the Mormons a murderous order calling themselves
Danites, or Destroying Angels, after the text of Gen. xlix. 17,
'Dan shall be a serpent by the way, an adder in the path, that biteth
the horse's heel that his rider shall fall backward.' The Ritter,
however, so far as his Dragon was concerned, was as one winged, and
every horse a Pegasus when it bore him to decide the day between the
adder and its victim. It is remarkable that the Mormons should have
carried from the East a cruel superstition to find even among the Red
Men, who are disappearing before the western march of Saxon strength,
more gentle fables.
Among the Mimacs, the aborigines of Nova Scotia, there is a legend
of a young hero named Keekwajoo, who, in seeking for a wife, is
befriended by a good sage named Glooscap, who warns him against
a powerful magician disguised as a beaver, and two demon sisters,
who will waylay him in the disguise of large weasels. The youth is
admonished to beat a certain drum as his canoe passes them, and he
is saved as Orpheus in passing Cerberus and Ulysses in sailing past
the Syrens. The weasels, hearing the music, aspire to wed the stars,
but find themselves in an indescribable nest at the top of a tall
white pine. [246]
The chevalier encounters also the Brutal Dragon, whose victim is
Woman. From immemorial time man's captive, unable to hold her own
against brute force, she is at the mercy of all who are insensible to
the refined and passive powers. The rock-bound Andromeda, the pursued
Leto, or whatever fair maid it may be that the Dragon-slayer rescues,
may have begun mythologically as emblem of the Dawn, whose swallower is
the Night Cloud; but in the end she symbolises a brighter dawn,--that
of civility and magnanimity among men.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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