I think that this superstition may be traced in other forms:
(1) It is the belief of many countrymen that the hare changes its sex every year, being male the first year and female the next.[1] How can this extraordinary delusion be accounted for, except as a modification of that stouter paganism which attributed to witches the power of transforming themselves into the bodies of hares?
(2) There are many traditions of spectral hares, which haunt old buildings, and appear to partake of the nature of witches. Thus Bolingbroke Castle, in Lincolnshire, is or was haunted by a hare-spirit, which was often hunted with hounds without the slightest result.[2] In Cornwall, a maiden, who has been deceived and dies, haunts her deceiver in the guise of a white hare, sometimes saving his life, but in the end causing his death.[3] In Germany, too, there are many stories of spectral hares, especially of three-legged ones, "which", says Oberle, "is peculiarly noteworthy, because a three-legged ghost always points to some divinity".[4]
VI. Another relic of the hare's former divinity is the reputation which this animal has acquired in folk-medicine. "This much", says Cogan, in his Haven of Health, "will I say as to the commendation of the hare, and of the defence of the hunter's toyle, that no one beast, be it never so great, is profitable to so many and so divers uses in Physicke as the hare and partes thereof."[5] For examples of these medicinal virtues I must refer to Mr. W. G. Black's Folk-Medicine: a Chapter in the History of Culture.[6] And to the instances there collected by Mr. Black I may add a belief of the ancient Romans, that eating hare's flesh for
- ↑ Brand, Pop. Ant., iii, 38 1; Sir Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, iii, chap. 17; Elton, op. cit., p. 286.
- ↑ Allen's History of the County of Lincoln, 1834, vol. ii, p. 105; Notes and Queries, 4th Series, iii, 103.
- ↑ F.-L. Journal, i, 87.
- ↑ Oberle, op cit., p. 104.
- ↑ P. 118
- ↑ F.-L. S., 1883, pp. 154, 155.
