But there were some particulars of the Northern creed in which it
corresponded so exactly with that of the classics as leaves room to
doubt whether the original Asæ, or Asiatics, the founders of the
Scandinavian system, had, before their migration from Asia, derived them
from some common source with those of the Greeks and Romans; or whether,
on the other hand, the same proneness of the human mind to superstition
has caused that similar ideas are adopted in different regions, as the
same plants are found in distant countries without the one, as far as
can be discovered, having obtained the seed from the others.
The classical fiction, for example, of the satyrs and other subordinate
deities of wood and wild, whose power is rather delusive than
formidable, and whose supernatural pranks intimate rather a wish to
inflict terror than to do hurt, was received among the Northern people,
and perhaps transferred by them to the Celtic tribes. It is an idea
which seems common to many nations. The existence of a satyr, in the
silvan form, is even pretended to be proved by the evidence of Saint
Anthony, to whom one is said to have appeared in the desert. The
Scottish Gael have an idea of the same kind, respecting a goblin called
_Ourisk_, whose form is like that of Pan, and his attendants something
between a man and a goat, the nether extremities being in the latter
form. A species of cavern, or rather hole, in the rock, affords to the
wildest retreat in the romantic neighbourhood of Loch Katrine a name
taken from classical superstition. It is not the least curious
circumstance that from this silvan deity the modern nations of Europe
have borrowed the degrading and unsuitable emblems of the goat's visage
and form, the horns, hoofs, and tail, with which they have depicted the
author of evil when it pleased him to show himself on earth. So that the
alteration of a single word would render Pope's well-known line more
truly adapted to the fact, should we venture to read--
"And Pan to _Satan_ lends his heathen horn."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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